If your company is like most micro cap companies, you likely struggle with a lack of shareholders and liquidity in your stock. There are several ways to get more people to look at your company and I will go through 5 of them here but there are two basic ways to solve your problem:

1. Hire a gaggle of promoters (if you can afford it); this is a fast solution
2. Go about it the old fashioned way which takes longer but is much more effective over time and will yield long term results

Building a shareholder base and ultimately liquidity is a function of “building a buzz” about your company. In order to do this, you have to look at your company not the way you normally do (from inside your company) but from an investor and trader’s standpoint. Based on my experience, here are some things that investors are looking for:

News

All investors and traders like news releases especially if the news is dealing with growth, revenues, profits or a forward looking event. There are ways to get your news releases seen by more people too. It is called optimization. The biggest complaint I hear from investors and traders is that the company they have an interest in does not put out news often enough or leaves them hanging with a lack of detail in the news that they do put out.

Website

“Their website sucks” is the term I hear often from investors and traders regarding micro cap companies. It behooves all companies to have an up to date and complete website. The investor relations section of your company’s site is very important and should answer all questions about your company. Websites are not complex and difficult anymore and updates should be able to be completed by your people and not a webmaster that you can or cannot get a hold of. Another thing I like to see is a CEO or Management blog that updates investors frequently. Your investors will feel valued if you keep them informed. A happy investor is your best salesperson.

Social Media

I have seen just in the last few months how important a presence on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn is. If you still think this is a fad, then you are getting left behind. Email is still an effective way of reaching an audience but you can potentially reach many more investors with a quality social media platform presence. There is a right and wrong way of doing it and getting some help will pay huge dividends.

Multimedia

Does your company have videos or slide presentations about your company, its products or services? If you don’t you are missing an audience of hundreds of millions of people that watch videos at sites like YouTube and people that like viewing presentations at sites like SlideShare. Creating videos and slide presentations and hosting them at high traffic sites is a great way to engage potential investors.

Public Relations

Most people think of a micro cap company as needing only investor relations… Well, in this day and age, good public relations can yield great benefits. Many investors lie outside of the email lists, message boards and chat rooms. Getting good “PR” opportunities like interviews, especially video interviews on high traffic websites or on actual television shows can do wonders for your company. There are two ways to make this happen: Get lucky and be discovered by a high traffic PR related site or… Go work at it and introduce yourself to PR sites or better even yet, hire a PR entity or agency to do it for you.

Finally…

The biggest drawback to all of the above methods is the time it takes to get these items to start yielding an increasing shareholder base. Often times, it is 2-3 months before you see anything. I have engaged lots of micro cap companies in our longer term programs and even though they understand the time it takes to work, they often give up within 2-3 weeks because they are not seeing the increase in stock volume. But, those that have stuck with it have been very successful and their stocks trade on their own without the help of stock promotion. It all depends on your objective and your timeline with regard to the direction you want to take your company.

What do you pay to be on page 1 of Google? After all, for most business sites, it’s the only way to get there right? So, many businesses pay for page one results and they find their site with 10-15 other sites in the paid advertising section at the top of the page and in the column on the right.

If you think paid results on page one is such a good deal look at this:

The "Golden Triangle" is the place to be... few care about the paid ads on the right so why are you paying to be there?

What this image essentially shows you is that eye tracking software and mouse clicks in many studies show that Internet searchers concentrate their efforts on the top and to the left side of the page. Little attention is paid to the ads on the right side of the page than many are paying for. The reason is that the ads are “catch all” types. For example, I live in Crumpler, NC, a very small town. I did a Google search on Crumpler and was dumbfounded at how many of the paid ads were selling “Crumplers” for a nice discount…

We got to page one on Google using organic marketing that didn’t cost a dime. As I wrote in yesterday’s blog, it does take a time investment though.

Here are the search terms HotStockChat.com ranks for:

“Hot Stocks” – We are on page ONE with 48,000,000 results listed.

“Hot Penny Stocks” –We have 2 results on page one; 1,530,000 results listed.

“Penny Stock Promotion” – We are the second result on page one out of 1,670,000 results.

“Stock Promotion” – We are the number one result on page one out of 133,000 results.

“Penny Stocks and Social Media” – We are the second result on page one out of 2,480,000 results.

“Penny Stocks and Investor Relations” – We are the third result on page one out of 3,340,000 results.

The pages on our site have an opportunity to score in Google and other search engines. But what makes it even better for us is that we create daily content that has the opportunity to be on page one of Google as well. Hence the need to use a Content Management Website as I expounded on in the blog yesterday.

Create content, optimize it to get found is the simple strategy we use. Organic marketing is the new, big thing. Its time to get off the paid advertising and pay-per-click crack.

Do you want to be on page one of Google?

I have been preaching the value of search marketing for years now and it still falls on deaf ears which happens to make up about 98% of the marketplace with regard to micro cap stocks. Those few companies that have gotten onboard with search marketing are seeing substantial increases in traffic.

The way I do search marketing is organically, Pay-per-click or advertising is not organic and all of your juice will disappear as soon as your credit card is declined or you run out of money. Organic marketing (essentially link building) lasts for months and years and will pay dividends over long periods of time.

I have obtained business leads from blogs I wrote as much as 2 or 3 years ago.

Search marketing takes time and skill though and that is what turns most everyone off in the instant gratification world of micro cap stocks.

If you do want to work at it, here are three things you can do to get started:

1.    Get off the old html based site and use a Content Management System (CMS). I have created numerous websites and I have found a great combination with WordPress and the Thesis Theme. The Thesis Theme is highly customizable and the search engine optimization (SEO) parameters are built right in. All you have to do is fill in the blanks. There are other CMS options that work fine too including Joomla, Drupal and others.

2.    Optimize your website. Use HubSpot’s Website Grader to check the score for your site. There are also many other free services that are available on the Internet to help you with optimizing your site. With the Website Grader you can see where your site is deficient and what you need to do to improve your site from a marketing standpoint.

3.    Write Blogs about something else besides your client company or your company. The me, me, me blog is the best way to not get your blogs read and shared. You need to figure out something else that is of value that you can deliver to readers. It can be text or multimedia but it has to be of value… Most blogs on stock promo site are nothing more than copy/pasted client news releases. There is nothing wrong with that but if that is all you are doing, visitors will be few and far between.

I have covered three ways to get more traffic to your site. There are many more ways and we will continue to publish them here.

Finally there is a ton of information on the Internet regarding search marketing. I “studied” under HubSpot for a couple of years and learned a great deal from attaining qualifications there as well as learning on my own. It is not rocket science but it does take some time and work but it is well worth it.

If you are not interested in learning search marketing, we can do it for you or help you. Or, maybe you want a new website that gets traffic and engagement so you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars getting email signer-uppers anymore…

Are you looking for the next hot stock in the micro caps? Maybe you like to play sub pennies that are going double, triple or even grow 10 times in value in just a few days?

The only way you are going to find these stocks are by looking for them. You also must be willing to learn some simple technical analysis (T/A). I am a firm believer that using some simple T/A will go a long way to finding the next big gainer that will fatten your account.

I am using StockFetcher now and it is really one of the best T/A tools on the Internet for finding stocks. There are many stock screening applications on the net but few of them work well with really low priced stocks. StockFetcher even works on sub pennies where you get your biggest moves and biggest bang for the buck.

Here is my StockFetcher screening criteria for this morning’s scans:

Show stocks where the close is between .001 and .50
and average volume(10) is above 100000
Close has been increasing for 3 days

So what does this say? Obviously the first filter is closing price, the second filter is that I want to weed out all low volume stocks and the key is the last one which is a stock rising for 3 straight days. This filter returned 44 results which I quickly went through and picked out a couple of really good ones.

I have many filters in my StockFetcher application but this is the one that does the best and it certainly does not have any fancy T/A variables.

The sort of trading I do is based only on chart formations with no regard whatsoever for fundamentals, message board or chat room chatter.

Here is an annotated chart of why I like ANWM:

As you can see, this is a really nice chart which has obviously bottomed short term and moved sideways for a few days and is now in an uptrend. There has to be some reason why people are buying the stock. I do not try to figure out why others are doing what they are doing. I prefer not to clutter my mind with too many pieces of information. Good traders make decisions quickly and have an exit strategy.

If I were trading ANWM, I would wait until the stock came down to the bottom of the uptrend channel and pick it up there. If it moved back up, I would hold. If it closed below the uptrend channel, I would sell. If it broke above the uptrend channel, this would likely signify a blow up and I would start exiting a little at a time and keep a small amount of my original principle which would likely be virtually free shares because I have locked in my profit by selling on the way up.

This may all sound simplistic or even simple minded but it has worked really well for me for over 10 years.

If you have a stock promotion business, a private or public company, is it important for your company’s website to be visible? Let’s use stock promotion as a case study here but first, before we get to being number one, let’s cover the context of what this is about…

What is search marketing or search engine marketing? (Also known as SEM) hint: This determines who makes money and who doesn’t.

One undeniable fact is that by in large, those making the most money in stock promotion can be found on the first page of Google for their desired search terms and keywords.

One site that consistently finds itself on page one of Google is OTC Picks. The people running this site certainly know what they are doing. They also score 99 out of 100 on HubSpot’s Website Grader and OTC Picks has thousands of inbound links from other sites.

“Penny stock newsletter” has 1.7 million results on Google and OTC Picks is at #7 on PAGE ONE today. Given 1.7 million results, which is very competitive, being on page one is a huge accomplishment.

Now since you can’t hire a promoter to get you to page one of Google, let’s get a definition of Search Marketing…

From Wikipedia: Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of search engine optimization, paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.

This means that if you want to get your stock promo business on page one for competitive search terms you have to do a few things over a period of time:

• Ensure your site is onsite SEO perfect
• Use search terms in the text of your page titles, blog titles and descriptions
• Use news releases and make sure your search terms are in headlines and body of news release and for Pete’s sake, use anchor text links back to your site
• Market, Market, Market – if you do not know how to market your company or site, then there are numerous resources on the net to show you how. Or, you could hire a professional
• You can use paid advertising but it is expensive

Do we do what we preach here?

Of course… HotStockChat.com has an Alexa Ranking of 584K out of about 225 MILLION sites on the Internet; our number improves every day too.

How about Google? We rank very well for two search terms which are competitive:

“Penny Stock Promotion” = 240,000 results on Google. HotStockChat.com is #4

“Stock Promotion” = 12.1 MILLION results (very competitive); HotStockChat.com is #9 (on the first page)

Am I blowing our horn? Yes, in a manner of speaking I am but… What good would it do to tell you how to do it if we can’t do it ourselves?

Also- our results have been done organically. That means no paid advertising to make our way onto page one of Google or have such a great Alexa Ranking etc.

Are you interested in getting on page one?

Stock promotion often affords traders an opportunity to make a quick buck on a short-term play. Stock promotion in the micro caps is inherently very short term yet many traders because of EMOTION treat the quick trade like a lifetime investment.

The language in promotional pieces put out by stock promoters and other entities often promise an incredible opportunity to get wealthy on a particular stock. The stock may be trading at .10 but the promo pieces are making a case for a $2 stock. Then they give you all the reasons why.

The problem comes in when novice traders believe the outlandish price targets and other things written into promo pieces. This is especially a problem when a stock performs for a few days or a few weeks instead of one day. Many novice traders begin to drink the “kool aid” and get sucked into buying more and more shares as the stock advances.

How do I know this? It happened to me a fair amount of times. I too have been a bag holder on many occasions. When it comes right down to it, the best lessons are the ones learned firsthand.

Here are a few of the guidelines I use and which have served me well:

1. Never marry a stock. What goes up will come down and usually will come down so fast you will not be able to get out. You will join many other bagholders…
2. Trade OTCBB and Pink Sheet stocks. I would suggest getting out of at least a good portion of your position in the first day IF IN PROFIT. If you are not in profit, something is wrong and get out of all of it and find another play.
3. With the exception of very, very few stocks, it takes trading many stocks over a period of time and being right at least 30% of the time to make a significant amount of money in the micro caps. Trying to get wealthy on one stock will usually have the opposite effect.
4. Develop a system for trading and follow the rules. Every time I lost a significant amount of money is because I let emotion take over.

There is nothing wrong with penny stock promos… just remember that the promo is usually only for a day and with only a few exceptions, the stock will play out in one day.