Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.
Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 4, 2007"
rustybrick in Search Forum Recap at December 4, 2007 10:13 PM Comments (0)
Link Buying
Location: Salon B
To buy or not to buy; that is the question in link building today.
Speakers:
Moderator: Detlev Johnson who fills in for Elisbath Osmeloski
Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOMoz
Jim Boykin, CEO, Webuildpages
John Lessnau, Founder, LinkAdage
Aaron Wall, Author, SEO Book
I'm sitting in the front row and I came in early but Lisa decided to sit next to me and she's taller so my head is in the way of the projector. There's a picture of a finger and it's pointing at my head with the question, "Should You Buy Text Links?" Just great.
I saw Matt Cutts in the audience. He's not on the panel this time. I think he is afraid. Then again, Michael Gray isn't on the panel either. I guess he really has nothing to fear.
First up is John Lessnau. He's the owner of LinkAdage and LinkXL and always gets asked, "should I buy links? What links? Will I get banned?"
But he narrows it down: if you buy links, what kind of links should you buy?
It depends - how old is your site? If you have an older site that has a lot of links, you can slip in a few extra links.
How many links do you have now? If you have tons, it's easier to slip in a few paid links.
Are you happy with your traffic? Some people buy links even though they're ranked high for the big search term. Don't take that risk.
What is your risk tolerance? There's a big risk/reward deal with buying text links. There's one site out there that ranks #1 for a competitive key word and they're buying all kinds of Russian, Chinese, etc. backlinks. (Interesting. Why can't the search engines identify them? He adds that this strategy doesn't always work for all sites.)
Do you get natural links? If you're getting tons of natural links, don't buy links. As people to link to you and change the anchor text that works for you a little better. If they like your site enough, maybe they'll listen.
Is your site under the radar? Are you selling toenail clippers and want to rank on the front page? You might be able to buy 5 links and get in the front page. But on the other hand, if you're in the competitive areas like Rx, casinos, mortgages, it will take harder.
Why buy links?
- It's the only realistic way to get decent links
- Shortcut to better natural rankings: if you're willing to take the risk, there can be great rewards (see next point)
- Instant gratification
- Hopelessness
- Keep up with the competition
- PR envy
What kind of links should you buy?
- Well, don't go to pages that has unrelated links that has an "Add URL" link added.
- Don't go to PR8 sites with contextual links that have descriptions.
- Do go to links that fit among the content.
- Here's a site that screwed up: PR7 and sells links at $100/month. The next week, it had more links and was a PR5.
LinkXL - purchases links in the existing content of websites related to your site that don't openly buy or sell links. Buyers and sellers win.
Cutting Boards R Us: create a strategy for buying links. Come up with a bunch of keywords that you want to rank for and start searching various sites that contain these keywords. e.g. Clean cutting board, cutting board tips, using a cutting board, large cutting board - if a person buys links already in content, you can rank better.
Why links in content: they're naturally relevant, they're the type of real links that created the web, they help search engines understand what your site is about, you're not listed in a large clump of paid links in the footer or sidebar of a website, and as such, you can sleep better at night.
Minimize your risks, buy relevant texts in existent content, and you'll be much better off.
Next up is Aaron Wall. Rather than talking about more links, you need to look at the economics of publishing. These are alternatives to buying links.
- Syndicate content on other sites since it builds authority, sends traffic, and flows PageRank
- Barter (give stuff away, discount for certain sectors - big in education)
- Buy competing websites
- Social interaction - if you speak at conferences, it's self-preferential. He says that people talk about you. I'm talking about you now, Aaron. I know you're happy. His bloggers guide to SEO got 50,000 views in the first week (and it just came out about a week ago. It rocks, btw.)
- Public relations campaign (pump your publicity)
Encouraging organic links -
- Justin Timberlake - cumulative advantage: groups tended to follow a herd mentality and each herd group would vote differently. From one group to the next, it kept changing.
- If you have a regular editoral voice in your marketplace, it makes more people want to trust you and follow. If you convert a few people over, that is a lot better.
- Show social proof
- Beautiful site design actually works
- Signs of credibility - about us, etc.
Directories:
Business.com
Work.com - submit a leading guide. Instead of paying recurring, you get free exposure, multiple deep links, and exposure on Work.com too.
The directory purge of 2007: Google killed many directories.
Buy in if:
- PR is where you expect it
- Cache dates are recent
- Listing quality are decent
Aaron likes niche directories, JoeAnt, and BOTW
- other small ones too (but he won't name them because he doesn't want Matt to kill them)
AdWords Ads for Linkbait
- Create industry-leading content for authoritative easy-to-link-at topics
- Buy AdWords for a wide basket of related keywords.
If you want to get clean links:
- Go directly to Google. Blog about new Google products and wait for someone to blog about your blog post.
- Use Google Checkout - designer portfolio, etc.
- Sponsor events and advertise
- Contests and award programs - even if prizes are virtual and have more value, if the right people seed the idea, it can be highly acclaimed. An example is the Web2.0 awards from SEOmoz. It got a ton of great links.
- Donate or give stuff away (widgets are big)
- Affiliate programs - the more people who see you, the better you're going to do
Dirty links
- Make sure they're hidden in the content or organic looking lists without any disclosure
- Run really dirty stuff through your affiliate program
Jim Boykin is up next. He doesn't have a presentation (thankfully, I don't really want to type from slides anymore) :)
What's already been said? Just about everything. But he reiterates:
- Don't buy links unless you're the Yahoo directory.
- Don't buy reviews unless you're reviewing Google products.
- You can't really get links for free. You have to work for it.
- Stay under the radar. Don't piss off Google.
Finally, Rand Fishkin is up and discusses how to buy links and get away with it.
Imagine an ideal link graph of the web: everyone likes everyone else's stuff and links to them.
What happens when paid links are into the equation? Everyone will link to the person who has money because they'll get paid for it.
From an engineering perspective, paid links equals worse results. The engines who have the most success against manipulation will win market share.
Paid Links Search Engines Catch:
- Brokers who don't cover their tracks - If it sticks out like a sore thumb, you're in trouble.
- Brokers who display their inventory
- Links that appear on the web in an unnatural way. If there's a surge in links all of the sudden during a particular month, a search engine will investigate.
Paid Links Search Engines Haven't Yet Caught:
- Direct one-to-one purchases
- Very smart link brokers that you don't know about. The less you know, the smarter they are.
- Any part of business relationship where links are a secondary part of the services.
A chat with Google Engineers on Paid Links - how do search engines (Google and Microsoft) feel about paid links?
- Matt Cutts: the toolbar update was intended to reduce visible PR based on sites selling links. Google DID NOT visibly reduce PR of all sites that they caught and Matt didn't want to give a percentage. Going forward, Google is likely to continue this practice of visibly showing some portion of sites where it feels the owners have violated link selling protocol.
- Paid link reporting by Matt Cutts: do it because it's in your best interest to see your competition receive lower rankings; do it because you want the web to be a better place and to make the jobs of the search engines easier; the argument of "honor among thieves" is a fallacy - nobody should legitimately believe that paid links make the web a better place (from a SE perspective); send reports through your Webmaster Central account for faster response times.
- Potential penalties for link buyers and sellers: PR might be a penalty, but there's more - removing athe ability of links to pass value, but don't show anything visibly; remove the ability of the links tp pass value and downgrade the visible PR in the toolbar; remove the ability of the links to pass value AND penalize the rankings of the sites/pages being linked to AND/OR the site(s) selling links; remove the ability of the links to pass value AND remove the offending site(s) from the index.
Eydan Seidman from Microsoft also shared his wealth:
- The vast majority of paid links are not beneficial to the user experience. The most recent example was someone advertising mortgatges on the Wisconsin Dells website (which is a water park). The response from the site owner was "someone looking at the Wisconsin Dells page has very broad intent."
Philosophically: it's to try to devalue things that matter to our customer. Live does things manually and algorithmically.
Publicity: Microsoft doesn't speak often on paid links. They're keeping quiet. They are developing channels, however, to do so. (You should sign up to Microsoft's Webmaster Tools because it has extra competitive intelligence that helps.)
A solution to the issue of paid links:
- What is a way of doing paid links that the SEs are okay with? Editorial reviews (Yahoo directory - people review the site and if they like it, it will be included). If every site passes the review, then it's not quality.
A Marketplace for Site OWners who wnat to link and buyers who want reviews to connect - here's a process:
1. The buyer submits a page that needs to be reviewed
2. Interested parties take a look.
3. The reviewers write about the page - if it's good, use a nofollow. If it's great, take the nofollow off, and if you don't like the content, don't write about the site but we'll still pay you.
Search Industry Entrepreneurs, Start Your Engines!!!!!!!!
Tamar Weinberg in WebmasterWorld PubCon 2007 Las Vegas at December 4, 2007 8:20 PM Comments (6)
Content Creation - Cranking it Out
Location: Salon C
Constant content creation is the fuel for your website. Whether you live 'n die off search engine referrals or natural type-in traffic you understand the need for minty fresh content.
This panel of content gurus will look at how to keep the creativity flowing and managing the content process.
Speakers:
Robin Liss, Founder and President, Camcorderinfo.com
Ted Ulle, Partner, The MEWS Group
Rae Hoffman, Principal, Sugarrae Internet Consulting
First up is Ted, aka tedster on WebmasterWorld. He tackles the question: Does ALL your content fit?
The only way to achieve that is to make your workflow support your priorities. You're aiming for a simple and seamless experience for the end user. Simplicity is actually a discipline and it's not easy - "I would have written you a shorter letter but I didn't have the time."
Always keep your business purpose of your venture #1. How are you going to do that? He presents a workflow:
1. Web strategy first (SEO)
2. Immediately after that is content. You'll have rough ideas.
- Back end and metrics, information architecture
3. Content - full copy at least for the launch version.
- Only now do you go to the graphic design people - web edit in HTML. Some people put emphasis on graphic design way too early in the process. Don't do that.
4. Edit your content again in HTML. It's going to look different on a web page.
Through this whole process, we want to document every decision we make. That's a pain but you want to do that on a site of any size because it will come back and get you.
Menu and navigation: this is part of the architecture process.
- Menu labels ARE your content. They tell people what you are & what you can do.
- Single words or longer phrases. A website is not an application so consider longer phrases that are descriptive. If they are, you can tell a story and communicate what you have to offer.
- Another thing is that if you have too many choices, your visitors will not make a choice at all. Never more than 7 choices at one level of importance. He prefers 5 or 6. This is actually something Ted has tested heavily.
Final Web Edit:
- Content interacts with layout. Look at this.
- Consider CSS in typesetting for the web. You can kill good content with bad layout.
- You can boost weak content with good layout.
- Most people on the web have never learned about print typography, but you should. (Recommended: Robert Bringhurst Elements of Typographic Style.) Your web page is not a print page but it does have similarities.
Where do "Seams" come from?
We want a seamless experience. Seams = someone showing off. It works against your business purposes.
Some of these "showing off" culprits are:
- Graphic design and eye candy
- Fancy Programming Features (I think about Digg's shout feature here)
- IT people shouldn't write copy. Do the search results make sense? (Think about that. Do they make sense to the average user? Do your error message communicate clearly? Usually web editors are so enmeshed in their website that they are blind to these kinds of errors. What about auto-responders?) These are a big part of your user experience.
Code Geeks should not write copy.
Example: Yahoo Directory.
Last week, Ted went to the Yahoo directory to pay for the website to be reviewed. The first thing he did was that he filled out the interactive form. But he forgot to fill out a drop down box with regards to payment. Yahoo's error message was "Invalid Payment Instrument Data." In other words, "what are you telling me?"
Example: Six figure video investment
Their programmer wrote "Open Demo" for a video that should be watched. He's thinking like a geek, not like an average user.
Example: PHP/MYSQL menu
"Search produced no results" even if you clicked on a menu link.
Despite all your planning, know that your data queries can be slow, your copy breaks the template, your SEO mangles the message, the CMS mangles just about everything, and things WILL go wrong. This is the process.
When things go wrong, thou shall not Kludge: It's better to fix it late than never (better late than lousy!) Expect to make tradeoffs, and keep your priorities straight. How do you do that? Well, if you heard what he said in the beginning (and I blogged this!), you know that you've DOCUMENTED this.
That avoids building the Frankensite.
Robin Liss is next. I met her on the shuttle bus this morning. She's very nice! She reviews cool stuff (reviewed.com) and doesn't get to keep it. (So sad.)
Her presentation is entitled High Value Content Production Workflow Strategies - in other words, a guide to creating content for non-spammers.
Here's how we make our content: just like a car maker, you manufacture a product. What lessons can we learn from traditional manufacturing in the ways that cars are made?
Key lessons:
- You can't build a car without blueprints.
- Mr. Ford's assembly line rocks.
- Good tools save money
- Specialization = economic efficiency
- Bottlenecks must be destroyed
- Quality control everywhere
- Measure everything
Design your final product with care - audience, purpose, topic area (this is the critical one), article structure (standardized or open), what does the 1st draft producer need (products, tickets, facts), what supplemental content is necessary (videos, photos, links), how frequent, length, what voice, objectivity vs. subjectivity, deadline and delivery schedule. Answer these questions for individual content pieces, site sections, or entire sites.
Writing the article or filming the video is only the first step of content production. Make sure to budget time and money for the rest of the process.
Mr. Ford's assembly line rocks: more information -
For the Content Creation, we assign the article - then people get materials, then they create first draft, we create supplemental content, they get feedback, they create a second draft, and then there's a second edit, and then you're Producing the content - CMS load and HTMLize, copy edit, SEO edit, final edit, take live, marketing, revision and update.
This is a content pipeline. We want a constant flow.
Ask: who takes what responsibility? How much time does each step take? What steps do you need or not need dependent on content type? What can you outsource (copy-editing)? What about in-house? If you understand it for 1, it can scale to 2 or 20 people.
A modified pipeline: blog.
Assignment > Materials and information acquisition > 1st draft creation > take live > Marketing > Revise and Update. That's why blogs are such an efficient form of content. Blogs, however, are weak. Some pieces are longer form. There's no outside quality control. You can certainly add editing steps but many argue that this is what defines blogs (no outside editing).
So she shows a modified pipeline where there are 2 people involved: 1 person writes and 1 person edits. This has built-in quality control. Even the best writers have to have their work edited and it's best to have as much editing as possible. It may be necessary to go into more than 2 edits, especially with less experienced writers.
It may be efficient to add a 3rd person in the CMS load and HTMLizing. The point is specialization: focusing on the core tasks.
She has a digital camera site and 6-10 people are involved: editor in chief, managing editor, writer, product photographer, product tester, and copy editor. This is not a cheap model at all. You can use part-time contributors to save you money.
There are many quality controls in this process and it's highly efficient because it uses specialization. You can't have a writer test a camera when the writer is not familiar with the camera.
This group produces about 525,000 words a year - about 1 novel a month.
CMS tools:
- Look for WYSIWYG editors that work (FCK editors) to save production time and money
- Dreamweaver
- Plone
- MovableType
- Own your CMS
- Investing money in your CMS will reduce editorial costs long-term
Workflow Management Tools
- Google Calendar
- Lots of spreadsheets
Finding the right writer for the right task:
- Short form vs. long term. Bloggers may not be able to write technical articles.
- Journalist or Opinionated.
- Edgy vs. straight
- Switching tasks takes time. 15 minutes of productivity are lost when you switch tasks.
- When doing large products, different parts of the article might go to different people.
Production and editing specialization
- Find an online copy editor to pay per word
- Find a basic HTML guru
- Hire a part time or full time editor to improve your quality and manage workflow.
Look at your pipeline: analyze to reduce bottlenecks.
- Time in minutes, hours, or days that each step takes in the workflow process.
- Constantly track these times and look to improve them
- Create an "article flow" or "article patter" by reducing bottlenecks.
- Ways to create an event flow; add more staff to a bottlenecked area, outsource, have staff to do double duty, reduce staff time spent on over-producing areas, make sure that there are articles in every step of the pipeline (track it with Excel and Google Calendar), give deadlines not for just when the article is finished but for every part of the pipeline.
Quality Control:
- Our reviews are syndicated on WashingtonPost so we can't mess up.
- Error free content = credibility
- Watch out for grammatical, factual, and analytical errors
- In our pipeline, at least 6 quality control edits are made to an article. You might need more or less.
- More eyes = less errors: a great thing to do is to print things out.
- User comments can be a great way to find errors, but don't let out too many or you'll lose credibility.
Measure everything
- Process
- The time each step takes
- Word count
- When people hit deadlines or miss them
- Average number of articles produced by day, week, and month
- When content gets high traffic
Final tips:
When hiring contributors, make sure you own all rights to the content. Sign release forms that you own all rights, international or domestic.
Put plagiarism clauses in contracts.
Be specific as possible.
You get what you pay for. Cheap original content will cost money in the long term in editing and correction.
Try your best to be original in your content and produce when others aren't.
Blogs are a great way to toe into original content production.
Focus on quality!
[Rae looks a bit confused. She must be nervous that she's up next.]
Rae finally comes up since Robin spoke forever and I only blogged half of what she spoke about. No, I'm serious.
Okay, so Rae speaks a mile a minute. And I thought Robin was bad. I guess I'm totally wrong on that. At least Rae has accompanying slides.
We produce content and try to produce the best content. The goal is to be better than the competitors and have returning visitors. Content is the single most effecitve way to differentiate your site from the masses, develop traffic, and develop good inbound links that will propel your site to the top of the search engines and keep it there.
It can develop links, other traffic referrals and website citations, increase feed counts, mentions in traditional and social media, develop partnerships with affiliate and advertisers, and positions your site as an authority.
There are three ways to get content developed for your website:
- Freelancing (pros: cheapest, no commitment, use as needed; cons: trial and error for quality, availability issues, no commitment)
- Full-time remote writers (pros: no overhead costs, dedicated, more skills for less money; cons: distance management, training barriers, and just a paycheck)
- Full time in house (pros: easier to manage, easier to train, dedicated; cons: overhead costs, more expensive, must have long-term needs)
Rae continues apologizing for speaking so much. I don't forgive you, Rae. My fingers hurt.
Where do you find them:
Freelancers: elance.com, writerfind.com, gofreelance.com, guru.com, freelancerspace.com, seo-writer.com (it's not that spammy)
Full-time remotes: craigslist, jobs.problogger.net, SEOmoz, local papers, local job boards, tjobs.com
Fullt time inhouse: local papers, job boards, monster, craigslist, Careerbuilder, workopolis.com
Knowing what to look for in a content developer will depend on the type of content you plan to develop and what type of industry you work in. Keep in mind: good organization skills, able to work independently, able to follow instructions, able to think for themselves, good language skills, good writing skills, ability to hit deadlines, basic HTML skills, the right writing tone for your site, a good sense of humor (especially important for linkbait), expertise in the area you need a writer for or the ability to learn quickly, journalism specific skills, for video content: someone who is personable and not afraid to be on camera, and basic promotional skills.
Training content developers: having someone who can write awesome content is only a part of the equation. People need to know that your content exists to talk about it. Train your writers to promote their own work as much as possible.
- develop media lists for the topic area your writer is wroking on for them to be able to push their BEST pieces to
- encourage your writers to be active in the community by interacting on forums, blogs, etc.
- teach writers about social media and become involved in them. They need to know who they're writing for (not to lead the social media campaign).
- explain to your writers how they can take angles on pieces to receive traffic and citations from big sites that they may not normally appeal to with their straight niche writing.
- pitch to traditional news outlets to get exposure for your site with a byline that includes your site information in addition to citations in the form of links if they also publish online.
- train your writers to link out when it makes sense and follow up with notifications to companies who are linked to
- explain to your writers how to use Google news alerts to stay abreast of important happenings in the sector so that they can write about them and to alert other reporters about existing topics making news. (Rae mentions that she has an alert for "sugarrae" so she can monitor her brand. That's why I added this to this coverage post. I figure Rae should see the commentary we say about her. Hi Rae!)
[Lisa whispers in my ear, "I don't know anyone who speaks as fast as she does."]
Tamar Weinberg in WebmasterWorld PubCon 2007 Las Vegas at December 4, 2007 8:01 PM Comments (0)
Jaan Janes - SVP, Business Development, Pulse 360
Talks about Pulse 360 and what they do. Relvancy - Shows some good examples that his company does and some bad ones by Google.
Relevancy: Do your ads even matter? Alot of sites have unreasonable amount of ads and this hurts other sites. Sites have too many banners, buttons, widgets and so on - its just clutter
Sponsored Link Tips
1. Show the ads - usatoday, wallstreet journal, msnbc examples - clean design
2. Focus on the Audience first - Many advertisers will start blind and then learn to focus on certain audiences. Advertisers go on audience and general topics - they dont do 1:1, more Category level for a given topic.
3. Dont be afraid to try different colors - try colors and tinker with things. He encourages you to experiment
4. Try different placements and ad types - Move the placement around and see the shapes/sizes as well
5. Bottom of the page = bottom of the barrel. Please dont run sponsored linkes 4,567,890 pixels down the page!
Plugs a new Vertical Adnetwork.
Aaron Wall - Seo Book
Optimization vs Overkill
- Depending on format it can be useless to the user.
- build authority and monetize backfill content
- dont float ads left at top in content area
- site has to sel itself
- if too aggressive the ads cost you links
- perception of quality during se reviews
- navigation needs to be useful
Short Tail Sites
- few spots up in the organic rankings can make a diff in earnings
- infest in SEO
- make site easy to link to
- site design
- wait to monetize
- supporting featured content
Long Tail Sites
- Keep core pages clean
- blog readers dont click many ads
- use ad channels to determine where the $ is
- site structure
- link equity push at top earning sections
- less link equity at lower earning sections
- deep link internally on popular articles
- remove ads from exceptionally poor performers - when they rebound then put them back.
- if you do link bait - dont be afraid to add links to some of your better pages after the wave of traffic is over
On Page Optimization tools
- analytics are your firned
- ensure to mix up keyword usage
- longer pages match many keywords
- use a bariety of terms
- www.quintura.com
- goolge adwords has a tool that gives you what a page is relevant to
- tools.seobook.com/yahoo-keywords/
Advanced Tips
- Ad filtering
- members can turn ads off
- date based ad inclusion
- Link Building
- buy a few links pointing at the best earning pages
- syndicate contetn and deep link to best pages
- Own the best keywords
- create a second page to get a double listing
- create authoritative documents or
- spin out sites
- Create your own product
Plug for Seo Book
Matthew Daimler - founder/CEO of Seatguru.com
Airline seating
Shows 2001 Page with google Adsense on the page. Google adsense did 100-200 a day rather then the 100-200 a month that the old ads were doing.
Targeted:
"View Bids" tool to understand what the CPC buyers wanted and try to add content or keywords around those.
1. Networks use content of page to show ads
2. Only 1 Google Ad per page allowed, no wide skyscraper (yet)
Impressions over last 5 years
1 Wide Sky - shows some spikes
2004-2006 - a new design comes into play. New navigation and more content for the contextual advertising. The goal was to get the ads they wanted to show up on the site.
Goals:
1. Get keyword repetition
2. Google wide sky visible in 800x600 resolution
3. Google ad location right in the heart of website activity
Challenge: site was built around 1 Google ad per page. Design used all tables and thus had a poor keyword density.
1 Wide Sky, 1 Sky, 1 Half Banner - Sept 2004 - impressions goes WAY up. When they tripled the impressions the click-thru rate dropped by a lot. The eCPM dropped a lot as well. They saw a 80% drop.
Thoughts on Supply and Delivery
Shows list of 8 Advertisers and CPC.
Level 1 Publisher gets Level 1 Advertiser
Level 2 gets the middle and Level 3 gets the bottom
With more ad units it changed. The Levels each drop with Level 3 getting a lot of PSA's.
Diversification Required
- Added direct advertiser to replace some of the Google ad blocks. They went directly to the top advertisers and signed some of them up - and some even showed up twice (once in Google and once in Direct).
Adsense & Overall Daily Revenue
- Chart shows that less Google Ads and being more diverse shows site revenue up.
There is a downside - Adsense impressions and revenue dropped. They went too far one way and had too much direct advertising.
To fix this they did a redesign in 2006.
Goals:
Moved to CSS
New features, new menu, more content
Used more popular Google ad types (med rectangle)
Made sure at least 1 full ad was in 800x600
Made sure wide sky was seen in a 1024x768
Tried link units, integrated into Nav - had no success and never went back
Shows chart of Adsense Impressions
- Result was a spike of 5x of impressions.
- Click-thru rate did drop 20-30%
- eCPM dropped but not a lot
As a small publisher they didnt have time to test and further optimize. Only used Google for 5 years and never tried any other network. Didnt get to change shapes, colors, and other different types. Ad Products - didnt get to test different types of products either.
PubMatic - it brings different ad networks together and optimizes it for you
Q&A
Q:Is there a type of ad for a type of content? Affiliate deals or Adsense work better on certain types of sites?
Matthew - Talks about different types and how forums are hard to monetize. Look at the site and think like a user. If you were a user would this type of ad or an ad here annoy you?
Aaron - For informational sites he likes to have ads visible at the top of the site in navigation and at the end of content so that a user has something to do.
Q:When you started your direct ads, was there software you used?
Matthew - to validate data you can run surveys and such. The advertisers were using 3rd Party software and that was taken into account. Doubleclick "lost" 15-20% of traffic and was taken into account for pricing. Billing the client is a lot of work and hassle. They used a 2x multiple of the eCPM as a pricing model. With the loss of Doubleclick, getting the client to pay, and other hassles, its not as much as you would think.
Detlev jokes that he must of had a full time employee then. Matthew laughs.
Q: What does the panel think about MFA theory, and if going from 3 banners to 2 is good.
Matthew - saw difference when they ran 2 or 3 ads. Google still fills the ads in the order that they were processed. So if you have a bad location ad render first, the highest paying clicks are being lost. If you have a MFA that gets the traffic and gets the clicks - Google is going to want to be there and will serve the highest paying ads.
Q: Different niches get different click-thru? For a site with more new users get higher CTR then one with repeat visitors?
Aaron: Some of his sites show one thing and others show another. It just depends on the site
Matthew: One ad was up for 2 years and had the same CTR the entire time. He also thinks that sites with less web savvy users will get a higher CTR on ads.
Contributed by Dave R.
rustybrick in WebmasterWorld PubCon 2007 Las Vegas at December 4, 2007 7:43 PM Comments (1)
Todd Malicoat - stuntdubl.com - Hook Combinations for Successful Linkbaiting
Shows a photo of B-Real of Cypress Hill (I am able to call it out before anyone - all those years of listening to Cypress Hill payoff)
95 Thesis - Cluetrain.com
Read it
Markets are conversations
it is social media b4 there was social media
some Linkbait will bomb (Todd is rolling and zipping through slides)
2 Step Process
1. Target distribution channel - get people's attention
2. Target (link markets) webmasters - keep their attention
Distribution Channels
blogs
email
Hooks
news hook
attack hook
resource hook
sex hook
picture/video hook
incentive hook
resource hook
contrary hook
humor hook
ego hook
How to combine these? - the 1 + 2 Punch
Example: Interview = Ego Hook + Resource Hook - an example by Graywolf
Example: Humor + Picture + Resource = icanhascheezburger.com and LOLcatz.com
Editoriasl = Attack or Contrary Hook + News Hook = Bill O'Reily and Stephan Colbert (real life)
Has a list of link types but my fingers cant keep up. Check out the presentation
Digg Tips
- know the audience
- submit crazy titles
- stretch relevancy - a new twist on an old topic is the only way to get an old topic some newy eyballs
- 8 diseases that give you super human power - great example of an extreme linkbait
How long would it take to beg for 1500+ links????
- shows yahoo results with a post Todd wrote that has 1500 links
In the end
- be real
- 2 step process
- know the hooks
- understand the audience
Andy Hagans - Domaindev.com - he is from Texas and proud
Link Bating to make Money
Rule #1
Know Thy Community
- lingo, attitude, etc. unique to each community
- Act as a normal user for a while before submitting content
How to Bait digg users
- Digg users are very sensitive to anything that even smells spammy or seo
- Most things he submits doesnt even have ads at all on it and things still get killed
How to bait Reddit Users
- Target: Politica junkies
- Topics: environment, conspiracy theories, etc.
- Tasers - seems to be a story everyday about Tasers
Delicious Users
- Target: librarians and info junkies
- Resource hook works wonders 101 xyz....
- The easiest to manually spam
Stumble Users
- target: im bored, waste my time
- make it pretty! Pics above the fold, formatting, etc - all above the fold.
Ummmm @##@# - battery is dead.
Contributed by Dave R.
rustybrick in WebmasterWorld PubCon 2007 Las Vegas at December 4, 2007 7:42 PM Comments (1)
Chris - Moderator
Founder of DMOZ
Jim Boykin - We Build Pages
The presentation isnt flashy and until the other day there wasnt even a presentation *some chuckles*
The Questions:
What link building methods have changed?
- Link Trades - c'mon this is Pubcon
- Submitting to 100's of directories
- 3 way linking
- Buying PR8 and 9 - they are all block
- Link Brokers - Ill leave that to you
- Linking sites together - Google knows its all you
- Paid blog reviews - we all know how Matt feels about this
What always has worked:
Write the most amazing content, or have the most incredible pictures.... moved the screen.
Day 1
Directories - a few old good ones and industry related
Day 2
Talk on some blogs - maybe you will get some
Day 3
..was too fast...
Day 4-20
Write great linkbait articles, create free tools and widgets and more
short coming of LinkBait
- hard to get links to pages you are targeting
- hard to get links using phrases you're targeting
Day 21 - 31
Analyze your competitor's links using free tools, WBP's tools or by hand (yahoo)
Way to check
linkdomain: comp1.com
linkdomain: comp2.com
linkdomain: comp3.com
- linkdomain: yourdomain.com
Day 32 to 1000
Google/Yahoo searches to find related web pages
Contact the owner of the page and request a link via email/phone
If you contact them via email, prove you are human
Then tell them why they should link to your site and possibly rec'd how they should
What will be the value of a link be?
- How old is the site?
- How many and what kind of backlinks?
- How trusted is the site? How many .edu/.gov's does it have
- How interlinked to the main site is the page that the link is coming from?
- Do other sites link to the page you are getting a link on?
- Who else does that page link to?
- will the link be in the body
- will the link be part of content
- What do you have to do to get it? do you have to build content?
Who to link out to?
- .edu, .gov's and other sites that dont rank above you
Greg Hartnett - CEO - Best of the Web
Link Building via Directories
Q: Isnt a directory just a paid link?
A: No way
- Pay for placement
- Successful transcation results in a link
- Directory Submission
- Successful transcation results in a review
Q: How can I tell a good from a bad directory?
A: Common sense
- Good
- have a history
- contain great resources
- have populated categories
- are designed for the user
- add lots of sites on their own - not paid submits
- Is it a lobor of love? Does it feel good to you?
Q: What kind of traffic can I expect?
A: Have you heard of the Digg effect?
- minimal volume
- targeted
- converting
Q: Can I list my site multiple times?
A: Yes
- One site one listing in some cases
- some allow deep links - if it makes sense then why not?
- Relevant content for the category
- CNN is listed 745 times in DMOZ
Q: Is the Yahoo Directory worth it?
A: yes
- Even at the price
Q: Is the ODP corrupt?
A: No
- not as a company
- the few dont represent the overall value of the project (bribes, anti-competitive, and so on)
Q: Which directories are considered most trustworth?
A: Yahoo, DMOZ, BOTW, Business.com
Q: How can I get into DMOZ?
A: prayer?
- read the guidelines
- find the most relevant category
- properly title and describe your listing (should be title of your site)
- submit and move on or...
- become an editor
Q: How can I ensure my site gest listed if I go and pay for one of these review fees?
A: You cant
Q: Where can I submit my Blog?
A: Yahoo and Dmoz, BOTW has blog directory, Search Engine Journal "20 places to submt your blog", Top Rank Blog "Top places to submit your RSS"
Rae Hoffman - Sugarrae
Delegating Link Development
I talk fast, it has alot of wording - it will be available on the site and then appologizes *Thanks Rae*
Outsourcing Link development takes on many forms
- has a long list
The problem with outsourcing is that a good firm can do good but a bad firm can do ALOT of bad. If you dont know anyone, take a look at the conference list of vendors and see who keeps showing up as they must be making people happy and money.
Check a outsourcing company's own links - Are they marketing theirselves or just all talk?
You are who you hire.
A list of potential questions: *she goes over it quickly*
Rae is not a fan of outsourcing - and prefers to hire inhouse.
Providing that you hire the right people and monitor their progress.
A list of potential questions for finding a future link developer *again, goes over quickly*
You will need to create training documents if you bring them in house. Another list that she goes over quickly *Rae talks faster then I can type*
The best thing you can do is train them to be marketers, think for themselves and get traffic and links and not just send emails.
Factors for going inhouse or outsourcing - another quick list
Rodger Montii - martinibuster
Likes Rae's thoughts on Outsourcing.
When having a team he has them bcc him on each email they send out. A team in India and the team in the US both do this.
Isnt a fan of giving control to a group you dont know that well.
Advertising/Link Buys
- banners as long as its a link
Newsletters
- some get emailed and many are archived and live on the site. You pay for the email but keep the link
Paid Links - a huge fan. How else are you going to get the anchor text you need. When you just ask your success rate goes down. Blogs - go to a directory of blogs and start there. Look for a blog with a Google adsense unit about 1/2 way down the site - it shows they want to monitize the site. Contact them and see if they are open to advertising. You can get run of site links pretty cheaply.
What you should look for when buying a link:
- relevance
- no mention of Pagerank - site could be above the radar
- No ads for non-relevant sites
- year long purchase. 200$ looks better then saying $15 a month
Search Queries
"advertise with us keyword -cpm
Search: "rate card" -cpm advertisint"
allintitle:"sponsors" -cpm site:.org keyword (this is done on Yahoo.com)
Buy websites
- inactive sites
- search "temporarily down for maintenance"
- Search allintitle: "site is offline"
- under-performing websites
- You can do a copyright 2004 or something similar to find sites that havent been updated
Things to look for:
- archived links
- ideal if dedicated to a niche
- search: "site of the monht" + keyword
- Site of the day and week, too
Sponsorships
- industry associations
- charity groups
- concentrate on .org
- search: keyword sponsors site:.org
- research competitor backlins in yahoo: linkdomain:example.com site:.org
- .edu job fairs
YouTube
- Videos can have links
- if it gains popularity it can get some traffic and pass it along to you
- Put URL first to help get click throughs
Software
- b2bsoftware section on BOTW
Charity Site Design
- from time to time he does it. They are however quite demanding. Might be some work but you can get some links.
Some moderator lead questions that gets Rae going and Greg talking. Both jump around and talk to fast - you have to be here :)
Conversation moves to what is changed from 1999-2002 and now? Greg talks about links exchanges and having your sites all link to eachother and makes reference to Jim's slides and presentation.
Martinibuster says that buying trust is part of it now.
Contributed by Dave R.
rustybrick in WebmasterWorld PubCon 2007 Las Vegas at December 4, 2007 7:41 PM Comments (1)
Social Media is hot in 2007 and should continue in 08.
Rand is up first.
Social Media Marketing Essentials - he has 2 presentations.
socail Media 101 (pure basics) - 60 websites worth watching (more advanced)
Rand takes a vote - small group pics 101, 98% pick advanced.
60 websites worth watching (other one will be available on the site) in order of importance.
flickr.com - live link on photos
deviantart.com - comments, live links
care2.com - group billboards
dfinitive.com - social bookmarking site
adultswim.com - message board
fanpop.com - profiles have links
sphinn - live links
tweako - socail bookmarking
mixx.com - fantastic site
bloggoggle - not a bad site even if you havent heard of it
couchsurfing - profiles have links
comagz.com - has some spam (reads off some of the live links) only one of the group like this (as of now)
ballhype.com - sports based digg like
qoolsqool - andy hagans (thanks) as some were taken from andy's presentation
buzzflash.net
chipin.com
scoreguru.com - like ball hype
blogs4god.com - religious
dnhour.com - profile link
hugg.com - green community
sk-rt.com - profile links
memeorlame.com - getting more popular
showhype.com - pop celebrity
photographyvoter.com - photos
pixelgroovy.com
plugim.com - pretty popular
smallbusinessbrief.com -
babblz.com -
videosift.com
23hq.com
20 domains with strong profile rankings
digg.com -
stumbleupon.com
myspace.com - bands and groups do well
wikipedia.org - profile pages if you do alot of edits on the wiki
mybloglog.com - very strong as of late
technorati.com - tag pages do well
slideshare.net - rising star
youtube.com - channel and profiles
amazon.com - rate things and your profile could do well
deviantart.com
linkedin.com
bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com - very strong
del.icio.us
epinions.com
yelp.com
last.fm
imdb.com -
blogger.com
tribe.net
stylehive.com
12 Sites (that you're probably not using yet)
Fark.com
slashdot.com
picks.yahoo.com - site of the day
hacker news - news.ycombinator.com - everyone should be reading it. Its for web folks and should be read
adobe showcase
askmen.com site of the day
cssbeauty.com and cssvault.com
newsvine.com - good source
meneame.net - spanish language and lots of traffic
boingboing.net
techmeme.com - great traffic if you can get on it
shameless plug - they sell things at seomoz
Graywolf - How to go beyond the single Digg, Delicious, and Reddit
Think long term - dont go for the single event.
Target your story to each niche - target sites.
digg : how to paint the digg logo on your wall
propeller: what does the color of your walls say about your personality
lifehacker: how to paint your living room in a weekend
hugg: how to pick environmental paint
Use calendar and current events
Tax time
spring time
back to school
Fall: save money on heating bill
Winter: last minute tax saving
*shows slide of 120k visits to a brand new site in the last 2 months*
*shows blog subscribers over a long term - it trends upwards*
Its about building an audience that doesnt rely on the engines
Steady link growth - read the google patent.
Links to deep portions of the site, you can get different stories linked
increased brand awareness (takes 7-8 times b4 they will remember it)
Building an audience that knows how to use social media - they in the end will do the work for you
Join the community for the long haul - be involved
Link to other blogs - dont be shy to let them know you are sending them traffic.
10 Tips
- eye catching titles
- above the fold, images
- short easy to read, easy to scan content
- dont make the page deadends
- dont be a grinch - share the links
- be topical and watch trends
- solve someone's problem
- use buttons and widgets to encourage voting
- minimize advertising and go for the links
- everyone loves top 10 lists - break some rules and make yours go to 11
Neil Patel - Dark side of social Media
1. Paying for votes - whenever he has used the pay sites, they have worked
2. social media rings - email lists and have friends vote
- bigger the ring the better
- join multiple rings
- dont vote right away
- donte vote on everything
- dont abuse the ring
- use hxxp instead of http - helps block the referral
3. social media apps
- add friends
- vote on stories
- have a developer build you an app
4. Forced Actions
- use iframes to vote/add a friend/subscribe to something
5. the dark side
- you will think of the best stuff. think within your head. think shady and it will come out sooner or later (gets a lot of laughs)
6. Light reading
- 10e20.com
- brentcsutoras.com
- seomoz.org/blog
has some more but takes it down too quickly
Cameron Olthuis
Common forms of linkbait
Remakable content of feature on your website that compes other peaople to link to it from other websites
Informational
controversial - Jason Calicanis
humor
news - be the first to break a story
tools - calculators, widgets
Benefits of Linkbait
links
link profile
traffic
branding
bookmarks
media publicity
Case Study
Sobercircle.com
First thing to do: research. Look through social media sites and see what others have liked. You can use Digg and Del.icio.us to see what each audience will like.
Del.icio.us gives you other related tags and can help expand your idea. You will also see what has been popluar.
Brainstorm - Try and get as many ideas as you can. The more the better - you will whittle it down over time.
Create the content
- Keep it simple. Most of the people are channel surfing.
- format lists, make it scanable, use images and vidoes.
- *shows example* Used a little known drug and talked about it. Slide shows 1001 Diggs and a video, image, and a fair amount of content.
After content, you need to seed. Submit the site and pick the topics and tags.
- Use a Power Account
- Good titles & descriptions - a good/bad title can make or break you
- proper category & tags - dont go with what is popluar, go with where it belongs
- targeted sites
Results:
1000 diggs
150 comments
800 links
Wikipedia link
read/write web found the page and gave it exposure
Takeaways
- Research your audience
- Content should appeal
- Power account
- TEst test test
- Write good titles and descriptions
- Keep your server up!!!!!
Q & A
How much traffic can you expect? What type of servers?
Cam: 5-25k vistors from reddit. Digg can do 100k+.
Gray: Call your hosting provider before hand
Rand: for images use flickr and other sources. If your page uses a DB, make the page static and it will help you. The Database could really hurt you so just make it static.
Neil: CPU somewhat matters, its the memory. Have 4GB of memory and use Memcache.
What amount of time from when we contact you to the spike.
Cam: 30 days. It takes research and time.
Rand: Its usually the client holding things up. Estimates it at 30 as well.
One question leads into alot of talking and jumping around.
How effective are these strategies BtoB? (Credit Card Processing specific)
Gray: pull it back a bit for the consumer level. Suggests making a video of trying to use a fake credit card and show what happens
Rand: Gives idea for reddit and digg about Credit Card Processing. Suggests that you leverage your data stream for content.
How do you get access to power users?
Rand: the power users are for sale. Find the users and freind them.
Gray: Vote on their stories early so they see you. Really pay attention to stories they are interested in.
What is your estimation of conversion rates compared to PPC/Organic traffic? Or how does it compare on a ROI metric?
Gray: Social media for sales is different then going for links. Most people arent going to Digg and thinking "what can I buy today"
Cam: Most ROI is from links, you usually have super low conversion rates for sales. It has to be very targeted. If looking for sales, look outside the social media sites. Suggests looking at the Blender company who does the viral videos of them blending products
Rand: Your conversion is how many recall my brand, how many sign up for RSS, how many become repeat visitors, how many link? The first goal isnt to monitize, it is links.
Neil: first figure out what your overall goal.
What are some other measures of success?
Rand: Hard core tracking. Track your brand name in the results. Blog Search in Google reports accurate links, or use Yahoo Link. Watch your referring stats, where did it come from? watch your repeat visitors.
Neil: Track your PR. Watch magazines, web sites, and other press contacts. Rand suggests using Google/Yahoo news to see how often your brand was mentioned.
How many man hours goes into an idea?
Neil: as little as possible (gets laughs) The hardest part is the idea
Rand: As little as a day, as long as 60 days (it took Jane 60 days to put together the Web 2.0 awards and get the votes)
Gray: 2 Sides: Maintaining the Power Account and then creating the content/idea.
Cam: No cookie cutter approach.
Contributed by Dave R.
rustybrick in WebmasterWorld PubCon 2007 Las Vegas at December 4, 2007 7:39 PM Comments (0)
Speakers:
Gary Price – (This presentation was taken directly from a url provided at the conference)
Defining local is key
Will they be used by the masses or are we in a "geek only" mindset
A Historical Perspective
What We're Up to at Ask.com
Ziya Genceren
When many think about local search they think of YellowPages but that’s a very limited way of thinking. You should define local search as any query that involves location or geographic property. For example what is the name of the Fountain across the street from the Chicago Hilton.
Local search has basically 2 touch points to mapping. A map is a canvas and a rich mapping platform is important. It can be done on the fly or in a custom way. An advanced mapping platform allows the users to get much more information out of you like what Microsoft has done with 3d mapping. He also gave us an example of how he brought up the fountain from across the street here at the Chicago Hilton and how that was the fountain that was used in the tv show “Married with Children” Microsoft has the ability to go out and pull geo information from the web which is then tied back to the photo.
Ian White
To API or to not API?
Ajax, tiles, rendering factory. Their then cached and made available on demand.
How free is free though? Free API’s virtually have no cost like with Google and its free up to 15,000 geocodes per day. With paid solutions however you get additional functionality that is baked in as well.
Service-based businesses
No (meaningful) business address: cellphone + automobile – I come to you (nanny, plumber etc)
Defining multiple service area
Multiple ‘offices’
‘We serve Colorado’
A cold ware service-based business search
How to deescalate from MAD
For local search Ian says that IP targeting sucks. For national targeting it works pretty accurately.
Jeremy Kreitler
Online maps are a central part of how users search today. Over 60% of the internet audience is performing local specific queries. 41% of local searches are within a user’s home location. Maps have a 88% reach on the internet in the US 3rd after search and email.
Maps offer a geographic and visual way to organize different information. It allows you to organize information from across the web into a visual format. Local searches are growing as a portion of overall web searches. Local is extending beyond business lookup including social media, local news and more.
Jim Schoonmaker
Map platform lack benefits to advertisers
Many features to the user experience
Street Imagery
Satellite Imagery
Directions
Maps
And Adwords do not meet their needs. While the new search environment may suit some of the needs its not meeting the advertisers needs, particularly the smaller ones.
Now small businesses want people to be the interiors of their stores, restaurants, museums, dentists etc with Everyscape offers.
Contributed by: Justin Davy is a search engine marketing specialist for the E.W. Scripps Company and a guest writer for SER.
rustybrick in Search Engine Strategies 2007 Chicago at December 4, 2007 6:00 PM Comments (2)
Instead of covering Keyword Optimization, I decided to cover Reputation Monitoring and Mangaement, which follows.
Reputation Monitoring and Management
Location: Salon A
If you are not talking with your customer base your customer base will be talking about you. This session will look at ways to monitor, manage, and influence your reputation within the blogosphere and press.
Moderator: Todd Friesen
Speakers:
Geoff Livingston, CEO, Author of "Now is Gone", Livingston Communications
Cameron Olthuis, CEO, Factive Media
Andy Beal, Internet Marketing Consultant, Marketing Pilgrim LLC
Ted Murphy, Founder / CEO, IZEA
Todd announces the session. He says that this session overlaps with lunch and people are still trickling in. Ted Murphy isn't even here yet.
Cameron Olthuis is first. He talks about reputation management and why you should do it: stop the negative, spread the good, and improve your products and services. Give people tools to run with the buzz and keep it going. Pay attention to the constructive criticism and feedback and use that to better your product.
Monitor:
- brand names
- product names
- URLs
- Competitors - ex. Goodyear tires on how they treated the union. Other tire companies came out with rebuttals saying "we don't do that kind of stuff."
- Forward facing figures - ex. Chris Winfield (who is sitting next to me) was interviewed in Search Marketing Magazine and attended an interview of a key Goldman Sachs person. Chris Googled the guy's name and all the results on the top #10 were pretty negative.
- Industry - major breakthroughs, opportunities to take advantage of
Where should you monitor?
- Search engines (Google, etc.) - if people are going to see negative things about you and not about your competitors, chances are they are not going to go with you.
- Google news
- Blogs - catch things as they happen
- Social media sites
Your Google Top #10 -
Comcast has a negative YouTube video of them in the top #10 about the Comcast technician who was on hold with Comcast and ended up waiting so long that he fell asleep on the customer's couch. Maybe you should think twice about that since that's an obviously negative customer service review.
What can you do:
- rank positive results from trusted domains
- try to resolve issues. Reach out to bloggers and ask them to correct the post.
- be honest and genuine. If treat them negatively, you will be called out.
- be proactive. Catch things as they happen instantly. If Comcast could've caught that video immediately and worked with the customer, it wouldn't be ranked so well with over 1 million views.
Social Media Profiles
- MySpace
- YouTube - Google Universal search now puts these in the SERPs. Throw links at good videos to keep bad links out.
- Flickr - has a lot of authority.
- Delicious
- Digg
Takeaways
- monitor the right things
- watch what people are saying
- monitor the right places
- putting out the fires early
- help spread the positive
- take control of the Google top 10
- social media profiles have huge authority
Next up is Andy Beal who has written a wonderful book that will be coming out soon on Reputation Management. You should buy it. I think I will. The book is called Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online (out February 08).
He's going to give you some practical tools for monitoring your business (that are mostly free!)
For the record, Andy is from England and now lives in North Carolina and his accent is somewhere over the mid-Atlantic trying to find out what direction to go.
What should you track? Products, company, competitors, recalls, scandals, industry, keywords, patents, executives, etc.
Industry tracking:
- moreover.com/categories/category_list_rss.html - say you really want to keep track of what's going on in your industry. Moreover allows you to follow everything in the industry such as trends and developments.
- mainstream news (news.google.com)
- news buzz (Digg). labs.digg.com/diggspy
- blog posts (Technorati). If you cover Google News and Technorati, you get about 90% of what's out there.
- blog posts (blogsearch.google.com)
- blog comments (co.mments.com)
- blog conversations (blogpulse.com/conversation)
- blog trends (blogpulse.com/trends)
- bookmarks (del.icio.us/popular)
- photos (Flickr)
- videos (video.google.com)
- tags (keotag.com)
- forum posts (boardtracker.com)
- changing information (wikipedia, profile pages)
- customer reviews (epinions.com)
- new product opportunities (amazon.com/tag/iphone)
- search queries (google.com/trends)
- email updates (google.com/alerts)
- the untrackable (copernic.com - $50 for a onetime fee and you can track any changes to a page)
Next up is Geoff Livingston who wrote a book called Now is Gone.
He polls the audience and asks how many people work for small companies and large companies. There's a mix of both in the audience.
Message Control is Gone: the reality is that social media has destroyed the ability for organizations to control messages. Price recently had a big whoop where he tried to change the message (tinyurl.com/2g4dwz). He's trying to shut down sites that are not promoting him well. Instead, it united fan sites against his message. Old companies are finding themselves at a loss about how to handle themselves in these situations. People really need to show who they are and what they're about. Negative comments are going to happen particularly if you're in a consumer business. Old techniques are losing strength. Searches yield all results. This is a new era of WOMM. Dell knows that they have 23% negative comments and now they're happy about it.
Remember this? George Allen introduces Macaca - he wanted to be president in 2009. As a result of his comments, this country's entire political balance shifted from a republican controlled congress to a democratic controlled congress.
Marketing is about participation. Word of mouth marketing is not about SEO. SEO is great and it's the new advertising. The reality is that if you don't have substance to back up your ads, people are going to run away. Media outlets, speaking organizations, blogs are subject to the community. You need to be a part of the community, not just an entity talking to the community.
The Buzz Bin is the name of Geoff's blog, but it's also the name of an Viacom product. Geoff is ranked above Viacom's spots (and even Wikipedia). For marketing, you need to know SEO and social media. Nothing is going away. There's always going to be a NYTimes.
Monitoring: monitor your activities and a few tools are emerging: Radian6, BuzzLogic, cymfony, etc. Google Alerts and Technorati are good.
Responding to Criticism:
- Online communications requires a 24/7 crisis PR approach. Reputation management is very similar to crisis communication. You have to be reactive, factual, and transparent. Most importantly, give up control of the message but know you can respond. Dell has really addressed concerns but still gets egg in their face. Even lately, Apple has been in the hotseat for reputation management - because Steve doesn't talk, says Geoff.
Popcorn's diacetyl crisis: tinyurl.com/yp8gj6
Dell Hell: tinyurl.com/2vxd7s
How do you do this? Comment.
Remember, companies are led by people and people make mistakes. Acknowledge your wrongs and the steps taken to correct the problem. People who admit their wrongs fare much better (in terms of following) than those who don't.
Publish a co-joining statement. Do it on your website if you don't have a blog. For example, Steve Jobs did that with the $200 discount on iPhones. Make sure your side of the story is clearly communicated.
Don't apologize and then repeat the errors. Nobody likes Facebook because they're doing the same thing and screwing people over.
If someone is complaining and you can't do anything about it, acknowledge what they said and make them feel like you heard them (empathy!). If they know that you cared enough, you'll feel better. (I feel like Digg should take note of my rants on my very nice and beautiful mostly Digg-themed blog.)
Little guys matter.
Consider the source: trolls will be trolls. Some things just don't require commenting.
Tamar Weinberg in WebmasterWorld PubCon 2007 Las Vegas at December 4, 2007 5:28 PM Comments (3)
I have very sporadic Internet. I am sorry this is late. I'll do the best I can. :)
Monetizing Social Media Traffic
Location: Salon A
Social media traffic is decidedly different from search traffic, newsletter traffic, or general link traffic. Knowing how to capitalize on this potentially huge traffic influx is critical for social media players. This session will look at ways that social media outlets can be monetized.
Moderator: Rand Fishkin
Speakers:
Vanessa Fox, Features Editor, Search Engine Land, Entrepreneur in Residence, Ignition Partners,
Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service
Alexander Barbara, CEO, ReidBrown Enterprises, Inc.
Laura Fitton, Principal, Pistachio Consulting
Rand introduces the session and says that it is necessary at times to monetize our social media efforts.
Up first is Vanessa Fox who owes me an email address. I will never let you live it down, Vanessa.
Generally speaking, page views don't mean that much unless you're setting up a CPM ad model. In Social Media, you worry a lot about pageviews but many people leave. Don't lose sight of the other things that you can be doing.
She shows her analytics (September 6, 2007) where she sees a surge in traffic. But these people all abandoned the site. September 6, 2007 was the day that Vanessa Hudgens had nude results on the internet. Vanessa Fox ranked #1 for "vanessa nude" and people didn't visit the site to see poor ol' Vanessa fox. On that day, visitors spent 2 seconds on the site, and the abandon rate was 96%. (She said she should have monetized it somehow but now regrets that she hasn't.)
If you have viral piece of material, you need to have backup material that keeps people there. Make sure that the viral piee of content is interesting to the types of users that you're trying to attract to the users to the site. You want people who are going to stay, go to other pages of your site, and convert. Make it really easy for the visitors to see what you have to offer: turn your visitors into customers.
Think about what your goals are: social media visitors don't convert as highly as search visitors. Search visitors are actively seeking out that content.
Example: Flixter - when you register, you see quiz material, a brief FAQ, and some viral information (reviews, most wanted info, etc.)
Provide ways to navigate the site. Zillow had a CPM network. They had a piece of "Famous Unique Homes" - the navigation bar, however, didn't have much information. Use that space to keep people hooked in.
Michael Gray is up next.
Social media for sales and conversion: understand the space. It's an advanced tactic. Sales should only be part of the vision, not the entire vision.
What types of products work?
- Products (physical and virtual)
- Consumer goods (almost always better than B2B)
- Impulse purchases
- Low or "door buster" prices. People are always sensitive to prices. Technology related items generally do better.
Example: thisnext -
They had a gift guide for a spa. If you click on items, you could get more information and they had affiliate links to make sales.
Example: techiediva -
What people were buying as gifts for the holidays.
You can see how to get a particular look for less with a direct link.
Pitfalls: watch out!
- Be clear about your offer, especially restrictions and quantities.
- Anticipate the demand and have the right number of stock.
- The worst thing you can do is fail to deliver your product. Microsoft had a free USB key last year and hundreds of thousands of people signed up - many were pissed when they didn't get it.
- Monitor what people are saying about you and do damage control.
Manage expectations for long terms of success:
- Decide if a hybrid or dedicated delivery channel is optimal. Decide what is right for your audience.
- Let people get the content every way they want: email, RSS, SMS, whatever.
- Use trends and current events in terms of offerings.
Alternative Content: Video
- Will it blend? iPhone
- eBook - a guy used a sexy woman and sold many books
- Diet.com - 15-minute boot camp workout: if you can see people losing the weight, you'd be more compelled to buy.
Alternative content: podcasts
- Drop links in your podcasts.
- Ricky's Picks (Disney podcast)
Alternative content: Twitter
- CarnivalCruise
- JetBlue
- SouthwestAir
Next up is Alexander Barbara. He marketed a site and put it on Digg. It's not a typical type of site that goes on Digg. It's a health and wellness blog written by a female blogger and doesn't always fare well on Digg.
Some stats:
- Submitted one at Wednesday at 3PM - Took 38 Diggs to hit the homepage - 7:30PM - 825 - 13,876 visits on Day #1, 28,661 in 5 days
- Submitted one at Monday at 11AM - took 57 Diggs to hit the homepage - 6:30PM - 750 - 12,316 on Day #1, 19,461 in 5 days
Can your site handle the traffic? If you have a new site, you get a few dozen sites a day. You have to realize that you're getting a few dozen hits per second with the Digg effect. Be careful as some webhosts may interpret this as a DDOS attack and shut your site down.
If you don't know if your site can handle it, redirect some traffic to a few other sources. Use mod_rewrite or a temporary 302 redirect to a static page. You can also use the Google Cache (make the site live a week before and then use a 302 redirect) or Coral Cache.
What about the quality of the traffic? He shows a CTR of the number of ads - it was 14x higher on day 5 than day 1. It proves that Digg users are banner blind (yes, we are). Pull the ads off of your page when you submit to Digg and restore them a few days later.
The RSS subscriber numbers also went up pretty well. People subscribe during the Digg effect but then they unsubscribe. It's a unique behavior that's typical of Digg folk and we've seen this on many blog examples.
Monetizing the traffic:
- Monetize directly: targeted offers, AdSense, CPM based model
- Monetize indirectly: subscribers, links, branding
What we learned:
- Understand your audience: target your content that appeals to your site visitors and the Digg audience. That's why lists work rather well.
- Choose wisely. How do you want to monetize that traffic?
- Be prepared for the traffic.
Last up is Laura Fitton who I met via Twitter. She's a Pistachio.
Basically, she gives her history. Before she was Pistachio, she was a homebound mother of two kids under the age of 2. In March, she started blogging and connected via social networks and it helped her becasue now people are coming to her for consulting gigs.
This is how she built her brand and her company by using social media.
- Ads are ailing. A lot of people make money by helping people sell. But now it's better to make more money to help people buy.
- What you hear is a lot more important. Markets are conversations. Conversations suck if you don't listen. But what if they're out there saying that "my company sucks!"? If they're saying something like "Dell sucks," then Dell needs to know and Dell needs to fix it. Set up Google Alerts to learn what people are saying and engage them.
What is social media and how can it turn into value? We know it drives traffic. Some people might be around to see, but if you get engaged on a social network, you bring a lot more people who are interested in buying. She has a Twitter account with 800 followers over 2 months. (Meanwhile, I have had my account since December '06 and I have a little over 300 followers.)
SOcial media makes money? What I see is that social media builds value. You want to build lasting value. SOcial media builds business. What value does your business bring to the world and how can you enhance it in social media? Even if you're on a CPM model, you want people to be engaged and tell you what they want: that will make you serve them better. You're not trying to trick them or sell them.
"You've already won me over." ~ Alanis Morrissette
If you get a quick surge and it pays quick bucks, it's great, but then it's over. But you need to teach a man to fish and build something of lasting value.
Social media is all about knowledge. How do you know what you know? What are your sources? Are they credible? Knowledge is socially mediated. Markets are socially mediated.
Tricks, tips, and shortcuts? No, there are none. Here's why: gaming won't pay. In social media, your customers write the rules. You can win the battle and lose the war.
Facebook Beacon: the poster child of social media completely screwed people over. The Beacon is a warning. They had a system that told your friends what you just bought. They alienated privacy groups and pissed off mainstream media, bloggers, pundits, Charlene Li from Forrester (when her coffee table showed up on Facebook), and their channel partners. It's really important that you should be careful that you're not violating your own Terms of Service. (Overstock, for example, had violated their terms by showing these bought items on Facebook, and now they're going to get sued.)
How do you do it right? Focus on what really matters and what really lasts. Focus on listening. Figure out ways to make yourself useful. Help others. It has worked for Laura (and has worked for Dell, too; Forrester has the data, she says).
Obviously, you want to connect because your conversions will go through the roof.
Why didn't Perl die? When people wake up every morning and they love something and they love each other in the context of something, they're going to keep building it. The passion of one man for the project will not go away. Digg traffic might go away, but building actual communities and relationships around what your value is is going to last.
Seize control. If you're worried that your CEO shouldn't blog, bear in mind that other people already think you suck - rectify that perception. Get out there, try, fail, fix it, try again. Walmart did the same thing with their American Camping blog - they admitted that they messed up and blogged instead. Go out there, don't be afraid to fail.
Resources;
- Cluetrain manifesto
- Naked conversations
- Tipping point and Made to Stick
- Marketing to the social Web
- Geoff Livingston's book, Now is Gone
- Another book (I'll try to list it later).
Tamar Weinberg in WebmasterWorld PubCon 2007 Las Vegas at December 4, 2007 5:26 PM Comments (0)
Moderator: Christine Churchill. Will talk about copywriting secrets.
Better qualified traffic if better ads.
Things to remember is competitors have same problem, 25 words or less. Harder to be concise when you have less room. Takes creativity and thought to make good ads. Find a way to differentiate b/w your ad and all the others.
Optimizing you PPC campaign:
- Writing a good ad: think about the purpose, what is the ad supposed to be doing. Grab the visitor attention, make it stand out, if you look at your ads, if everyone is using DKI, don’t do it if you want your ad to look different! Think of the ad title as the ad to the ad to grab attention, get keywords in there to make it an attention grabber.
- Differentiate your ad. What differentiates your company from all the other companies? Why should I pick your company? Questions to ask yourself before writing the ads, why are you different. If you can put that down everything else will be easier. Put that on your ad and landing pages.
- Provide an incentive to click: capture their attention: special pricing, limited time offer, up to 50% off etc. work into your ad.
- Create a sense of urgency: if ppl think they can only get something for a limited time, they will buy right now: today only!
- Use keywords in your title! If showing up in title, tends to get higher conversion rates, higher CTRs, makes ads more visible b/c gets bolding effect, draws the eye.
- Talk about benefits of product: look at features. Turn into benefit, i.e save time! Get into users mind, if you can save them time and money will be more inclined to click on your ad.
- Call to action: sounds so fundamental, but a lot of ads don’t have them. It will help quite a bit.
- Brand names: instill a sense of confidence in the searcher. Increases CTRs for well-known brands.
- Avoid being self-centered in ad. Remember the what’s in it for me principal, why the user should by from me.
- Pre-qualify visitors. Putting a price in your ad can pre-qualify, will screen out ppl who wont pay that price, i.e. luxury vs. cheap hotels. Way to discriminate ad. The one down side is reducing CTR because might be scaring away ppl who might otherwise click on your ad. It does scare away the freebie hunters.
- Be seasonal: conveys freshness, being up to date, festive messages.
- Use psychology: ad humor, works well. Attracts attention. Test it out. If all advertisers are doing, may not want to.
- AB Testing. Small subtle differences can make huge performance differences so worth testing out different ad copy, landing page combinations. Play with display URLs, normally shorter are better b/c more memorable, stick in some keywords, great branding opportunity. Tends to work better in our testing. Shorter, concise seems to be the best.
Credibility factors: normally engines don’t like superlatives but if you won an award for BEST or NUMBER 1, can use it in the ad. Exception to the rule. Must substantiate on landing page. They could turn an ad off then you have to call Google etc. and explain we really are number 1, and then they will turn it back on.
DKI – all the ads are looking alike. Look at what the landscape is for your ad, if all looking identical do something to make your ad more unique.
Avoid Hype – read ads out loud to see how they sound, gives an extra edge on if its good or not. Good copy can improve ad performance. Different techniques work in different niches, work better in some industries than others. Test everything. If you only a little time, spend it on the title.
Mona Elesseily is next speaker:
Page Zero Media, director of marketing strategy.
Written couple books on yahoo, have obsession with yahoo, but also love other search engines. In my opinion key to successful campaigns is understanding the difference b/w the search engines. Hopefully with an understanding of the diff features you will be able to capitalize.
Will be going over ad copy, match typing, effective ad distributions – works when it comes to Yahoo, trademarking, case studies.
Lets start with ad copy.
One of the most imp ways to make an impact with PPC and get rankings in the search results is ad copy. Diff b/w engines to uncover opportunities:
Yahoo – there are 40 characters as opposed to 25 in Google, so make use of extra 15 characters. Use extra characters in the headline to include a feature or benefit of other product or to include a company name. The company name makes the most sense if you have brand recognition. With Capital One, we included the name in the headline.
The second difference is the description in yahoo is not divided into two 35 character lines, its all together so advertisers can avoid some of the choppiness or abruptness. The engines skew slightly different so it’s important to tailor ad copy. As an example, we were advertising on Chicago tourist attractions. It was such a broad ad, write an individual ad for each attraction, museums, tours etc.
I have some very basic information, seems like most of you are already advertisers: match types are very different, I want to review a bit more.
Exact match, phrase match, broad match, negative match. Don’t think I need to go over these, we are all comfortable with that.
In yahoo there are 2 match types, standard and advanced. There also excluded terms which are not a match type.
Standard match - equivalent of exact match in Google: includes A and THE and OF.
Advanced match display ads for broader range of searches. Keyword phrases do not to be in account to trigger advertising. Basically, the match types in yahoo are much broader in scope than in Google.
Something called match driver – matches root terms and derivatives: misspellings, plurals, variations of root terms.
Yahoos exact match is broader in scope.
On match driver you want to be aware that yahoo incorporates match driver technology so advertisers cant opt of out match driver.
Advanced match is the default match type.
Google has expanded broad match.
Ad distribution tips:
In Yahoo, keywords don’t always trigger ads so you want to ad relevant keywords and synonyms.
Google trademark policy:
Google is most lenient with TM, yahoo only in specific cases advertisers can use TMs.
May want to concentrate on non-trade mark terms to save time and aggravation. Yahoo seems strict in comparison but not as strict as it may seem.
Once you understand the differences b/w the search engines and incorporate them you will see overall improvements in your results.
Andrew Beckman – President of the Search Ad Network
Denver based SEM firm. Started a decade ago. Different world. Focus today is the tools we use as an SEM firm and how we utilize it to maximize PPC campaigns. Use this presentation as a guide to learn more about tools.
Basic tools:
Have a thorough keyword list – Trellian, Wordtracker is a great start. Seed list and expand. Better to have a large list and shrink it down.
Look at misspelled keywords. Great way to get low CPC ads. Travel without L gets tons of traffic. Some misspellings are gold mines.
Google’s keyword suggestion tool. Can put in URL and they will spider and spit out keywords. The advertiser competition barometer is a good indicator.
How has web analytics and who looks at it consistently? This is the backbone of every online marketing campaign. Track keywords that are causing sales. Need to parse PPC from SEO traffic. Shows demo of analytics software to do this.
With analytics tools, use overlay report. You can tag certain marketing campaigns, give it a name, and when users come to your site you can see where are they clocking when they arrive. This will allow you to start shifting the components of your site and make sure users are seeing more pages, spending more time on your site etc.
Multivariate landing page tool: this is where PPC will allow you to differentiate yourself and tag specific components of the landing page and start shifting around the component of the page and basically give us different conversion percentages. Need to convert web page into a sale. Get IT ppl involved with this, important component in the industry.
MSN Ad Labs
Search funnel – put in a keyword phrase to see where ppl have searched before and after to help build out keyword list.
Seasonality forecast tool
Google Trends tool – different cities have different metrics, etc.
You’d be surprised with diff info getting from these tools.
Some free info tools:
Compete.com – how we are ranking against our competitors and how many visitors coming to different sites. i.e. Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity. Gives trends.
Alexa is another good tool, page views of competitors, see how you are doing against comp, may give you some good ideas.
SpyFu – reveals what comp is bidding on, CPC expect from diff keywords. Great website. Can really start forecasting budgets as see what competitors are bidding on to cover all your bases. Can see related terms etc. A lot of the data is free.
Q&A Portion.
Q: How good is the CTC on misspelled terms – I go straight to the “did you mean” spelling before looking at ads!
A: We started to write misspelled words in our ad copy and that give us a little boost at the fraction of the cost. I optimized a page with a misspelled world and got some traffic as well from that.
Q; Bidding on generic keywords or single words like ball instead of baseball, what effect would that have on campaign?
A: A single keyword will kill your budget and I don’t know anyone who does that. It will have a very low CTR. Need to go much further, i.e. geo targeting, day-part, etc.
Q: How do I shape and track a long tail keyword list in a very competitive industry? Is there a method to tailoring the campaign within an industry?
A: I don’t know if there are any shortcuts…look at advanced targeting. Go into the analytics to see all variations of keyword phrases. Even with misspellings. Play with all tools available.
Contributed by Avi Wilensky is a search engine marketing specialist and owner of Promediacorp.
rustybrick in WebmasterWorld PubCon 2007 Las Vegas at December 4, 2007 4:31 PM Comments (0)
Moderated by Anne Kennedy from Beyond Ink, who introduces the topic and panelists. She asks how many are actually using social media tools, and a fair amount of the nicely filled room raises their hands.
First speaker is Todd Parsons from BuzzLogic. BuzzLogic is an on-demand platform for social media marketing. They help identify influencers leading conversations on certain topics, and can also engage them. Blogging is hardly dead…65 Million Americans read blogs. Of them 60% are going to a blog explicitly to get an opinion. 65% of “online power shopper” always read user generated content (UGC) like reviews and spend an average of 10 minutes engaging with the UGC before they buy. 3.5 billion brand-related conversations are occurring per day. He gives an example of the linking behavior and dialogue that was fueled online by people talking about the recent news that the Toyota Prius could not pass the state of Georgia emissions testing.
Linking “gets a bit of a bad rap these days.” He feels this is wrong. He distinguishes between editorial and acquired links. Acquired links are engineered by marketers to gain search engine exposure. Editorial links are the organic result of producing great content, but harder to control. These types of links are rooted in trust. He states that search engines are getting much smarter at sniffing out manipulation. He talks about SE’s targeting bloggers associated with Pay per Post and devaluing their outbound links.
Social media tools (voting, comments, reviews, rankings) make it easier to foster SEO through authentic means., New technologies make is possible to locate important linking hubs. He was going to go into another case study but ran out of time.
Next up is Adam Lavelle from iCrossing. he says he has 5 minutes and 35 slides so bear with him. He goes through some illustrative slides that show how we are social animals that create connections. Content is the fuel that we sue to connect to each other. We have great devices to capture content, incredible software to shape it, and more ways to share and distribute it than ever before. What makes it social is out personal networks. LinkedIn, buddy lists, contact lists in Outlook, etc.
What does this mean for clients? Within three years 70% of the content online will be UGC. He quotes Clive Thompson who claims that Google is a reputation management system rather than a search engine. He shows the search “using post it notes” and how UCG has come to the top. Listen and be useful – this is all you need to do. Many opportunities exist to leverage social media ( a cool slide depicting these).
He shows a tool that they developed at iCrossing which maps links and sites that talk about 3M. This is a map that shows a clear ownership of the conversation about 3M by the actual brand. But if you look at the buzz/links/weight of the content around Post-It notes, 3M does not own that. Shows examples of other sites that are really dominating the talk about that brand, and ironically YouTube is near the top since so many people with time on their hands have uploaded videos of post-it note art. He then goes over another case study about Symantec, which indicates success in tracking this kind of information. He actually got through all 35 slides in 5 minutes!
Next up is Jennifer Laycock, from Search Engine Guide. She will be getting more specific and give examples from one social networking platform – Flickr. “Flickr – Say it with a Picture.” Why use it?> What you need to ask is why it will impact positively. She shows an example of some plain text content and how it get’s more interesting through the addition of a picture. Walt Disney said that pictures are the universally most understood medium. (something like that). She then shows a Yahoo! image search with a ton of Flickr results in the top page.
Another benefit of Flickr is the community. these people are very engaged since they actually add pictures to the site instead of just engaging in conversation. Shows a group example “Edible Gardening” and leads to the link at the bottom “Discuss.” She shows a person that came to the specific topical forum to get information.. Two ways to “play:” one is that you can be the person that has the knowledge to appear as an expert, but you can also encourage brand evangelists to speak. Another benefit of Flickr is links, both direct and indirect. She shows an example of the profile “Bento Yum” and how she drives traffic to the Bento Yum blog from there . Use the 80/20 rule, and don’t always use the site to build links.
Recommends that if you are going to use Flickr in this manner, you should learn about: tagging and adding notes, finding and joining communities, geo-tagging images, subs cribbing to RSS feeds, using Flickr widgets, creative Commons Licenses. these are all ways to get on other people’s radars.
Tamera Kremer from Wildfire Strategic Marketing. She will discuss Del.icio.us and how to leverage it. Del.icio.us is one of the most popular social bookmarking tools out there, and you can use it to share as well as vote on topics’ popularity (folksonomy). The ability to tag the articles: can be tagged as an individually relevant, or group them by “wishlist.” you can browse other users tags by keyword, and you can share your links with other users in your network. What really gets interesting and gets to the whole folksonomy is that you can add comments/descriptions.
She goes through a brief case study for a B2B client. It did not take off right away…was slow growth. The problem was that many people didn’t understand how to use it effectively, so they developed a “quick start guide” for the client’s employees, who would be helping with creating content to support this tactic. once developed, the participation increased tenfold. They learned that you have to limit the number of keywords, which made the tag cloud
