Search Engine Optimization, SEO, & Other Online Marketing Strategies » 2008 » August

5 Must-Read Books on Social Media Marketing

admin — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 04:10:07 +0000

We may be living in the fast-paced world of online marketing, but when it comes to reading, sometimes it helps to pamper ourselves and take things slow. While there are tons of ebooks out there about this industry, some of which I already wrote about in another post, there are also great old-fashioned paperbacks and hardcovers you should try to check out. Here are just some of the best out there on the topic of social media marketing:

1. The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly

Providing an easy to understand, yet comprehensive view of the social media marketing arena, The New Rules of Marketing and PR is one of those “must-have” books. Rich in examples, tips and tricks as well as “how-to” guidelines, it’s easy to get new marketing strategies up and running for your own business.

2. The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media

By examples and not by theory alone – this is the way Paul Gillin used his ideas in the book entitled The New Influencers. Using case studies, actual interviews, and then mixing in his own input, Gillin was able to explain what blogging, podcasting, as well as other social media can do for you, your client and ultimately, your business. Content is well-written, easy to read, and relatively interesting. If you’re involved in marketing or PR, this book is worth checking out.

3. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

This book written by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff gives a clear view of the groundswell phenomenon, how it affects your business, and proceeds to give ways on how you can harness it to your advantage. Using human scenarios combined with the numbers game, you are sure to find something in this book that you can utilize for your own business.

4. Plug Your Business! Marketing on MySpace, YouTube, blogs and podcasts, and other Web 2.0 Social Networks

Not all that’s thin are found wanting, and one such example is the book Plug Your Business. With well-written explanations, samples, scenarios, tips and suggestions solidly packed in a quick to read 156-page book, you can immediately put them into action and put your business in high gear.

5. Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules

No, there’s no typographical error in the title. Do It Wrong quickly is a refreshing take on the otherwise daunting topic of online marketing. It’s not about doing Internet marketing the wrong way, it’s about doing something (even if it might turn out to be wrong) rather than nothing at all. And given the quick moving environment of today’s online marketplace, you really just can’t afford to wait for the perfect timing. If you need the push to start your own business, then Do It Wrong quickly will show you the way.

Did I miss out on anything? Let me know.

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Study Your Competitors To Build Or Improve Your Sites

admin — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 15:50:22 +0000

I’ve said it before and I’m going to repeat it: monitoring competitors is an important part of any webmaster’s strategy. Not that you should invest all your time and resources in this activity; after all, you have to take care of your own business above all. But if you don’t know what your competitors do and how they achieve success, you may miss several learning opportunities.

Why am I writing about this topic once again? Because I feel this is an activity many webmasters neglect. But I know that just saying something is good doesn’t mean much; people want details. And this is what I’m going to give you today.

What should you analyse on a competitor’s site?

First of all, you must be able to determine how successful your competitor is, because this will influence all the rest. If your competitors are successful you’ll want to use their sites as models. If they aren’t, you’ll want to identify their mistakes and/or see if they are just about to achieve success.

I’ve already written a whole article on how to choose the competitors you’ll monitor and measure their level of success. Go read it if you still haven’t.

Now let’s see which aspects of a competing site you might study:

Design: This should be the easiest one. How does the site or blog look like? Cluttered? Clean? Sophisticated? Amateurish? If you’re studying a site that is popular despite having a cluttered, amateurish design, how can you explain its success? Maybe the niche is a less demanding one, or maybe the content is just too good to be ignored.
Technical stuff: How is the competing site built? Does it use html, php, asp, cgi or what? If it’s a blog, which platform is used? Is there any kind of plugin, extension or widget installed? How fast the pages load?
Content: How is it displayed? Is it superficial or thorough? Is it informative, helpful, entertaining? Is it divided among several pages or is it concentrated on a few ones?
Promotional efforts: These ones will also require visits to other sites in order to be detected. Do your competitors encourage visitors to recommend their sites to friends? If so, how do they do it? How often are your competitors linked by other people in their niche? Is their content usually voted for on social media sites? In case it is, do the votes look spontaneous or self-promotional? Have you ever found paid ads promoting a competing site? Where?
SEO methods: Can you spot any signs of conscious search engine optimisation? How do the pages’ titles look like? Do the images have descriptive alt tags? What meta tags are used on the pages’ code? Do the authors seem to worry about keyword density? Can any attempts of PageRank sculpting be detected?
Visitor activity: Can you find any evidences of visitor activity? Look for comments forms, guestbooks, forums, mailing lists… How do visitors behave? Do they look engaged? Are interaction opportunities taken by a small group of usual visitors? Or do they attract a larger audience?
Monetization techniques: How do the competing blog or site make money? What are the ad spots like? Text links? Banners? Contextual ads? Where are they placed? How many ads per page? If the site owner offers any type of service, how is it promoted?
Progress: This is easier when you study blogs, because they usually have archives. But some sites also contain lists of past updates. In any case, check the older material out and compare it to the current one. Has the webmaster or blogger made any visible progress? What has been changed for better (or for worse)?

You can always expand the list above by including other aspects that might be particularly important in your niche. Conversely, you can exclude aspects that you don’t deem to be so relevant, although I believe that none of the things mentioned in this article should be ignored.

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Should Webmasters Fake it ’til They Make it?

admin — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:10:31 +0000

Some webmasters and bloggers believe that appearances count a lot when you want to win some credibility on the Internet. They claim that if you aren’t that successful yet, you should pretend you are, until everyone believes you. Eventually, actual success will follow. In other words, this is the old “fake it til you make it” scheme applied to Internet marketing.

Should you apply this principle to your activities as a webmaster or blogger? I’m not totally sure that I can give a positive answer to this question. But I’m going to save my objections for last. Now I’m going to show you a few situations when you might consider doing some make-believing, if you really must.

When could you fake it till you make it?

Suppose you still don’t have much practical experience in a given subject, but you’re a good researcher and find it easy to compile data about that. So you feel you’re ready to build a great site or blog about the topic and possibly make money from it. The problem: many people hate it when someone without first-hand experience on a field writes about it. What can you do then? Exactly: you’ll fake it till you make it, i. e., you’ll use your research skills as substitutes for experience, at least for the time being.
Forum owners often inflate member and post counts as a way to encourage more people to join their forums. The reasoning behind this is that no one will join an empty place, so you play a little trick to get the bandwagon effect to work. Several bloggers inflate subscriber and/or comment numbers for similar reasons.
Bloggers and webmasters may avoid the loss of direct ad sales by temporarily filling their own unsold inventory.
Some service providers offer their services for free — or for discounted fees — when they are starting out. They ask for testimonials in return. Said testimonials will hopefully generate more business in the future, thus resulting in profit and compensating the initial financial losses.

The biggest disadvantage of faking it till making it

Ethical issues are the number one reason why you should be extremely careful when you pretend to be more successful than you really are.

Do you like to be misled? Of course not. Why should your visitors like it then?

Even if you don’t care much for ethics, keep in mind that you can always be unmasked. I myself have written an article containing basic tips to help people measure a site or blog’s success. Anyone can read that article because it’s available for free. There are certainly other articles like that on the Internet. People are getting smarter and smarter anyway.

Are you willing to risk your reputation just to make some quick money?

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3 Useful AdSense Plugins for WordPress

admin — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:52:17 +0000

A lot of bloggers use several ad services for their site, and sometimes, managing all of them can get pretty messy. Thanks to the awesome developer community, there are a number of available plugins for WordPress that can turn your dashboard into a control panel, to customize and control your ads from most of the leading publishers. You also get the ability to insert them inside posts themselves, which help tremendously in increasing the click rate. Listed below are just some of best plugins in this category.

1. AdSense Manager

Easy to install and use, the AdSense Manager comes with an extensive instruction on the process of installation, making it a breeze to have it up and running. It generates code automatically and allows positioning with the use of Widgets, within templates, or inside individual posts. You can do on-the-fly changes on your ads: change the color, size, layout and even the ad’s position and see the results with a single button click.

The latest version of the AdSense Manager released on April 2008 is compatible with WordPress versions 2.5 and higher. The plugin allows for managing AdSense ads on your blog. It supports ads from AdSense, AdBrite, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Commission Junction, CrispAds, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN and WidgetBucks. Take note, however, that not all available ad networks support the Ad Format/Dimension feature of AdSense Manager.

2. All in One Adsense and YPN

We all know how hard it is to insert your ad code in your every blog post. And if we are talking about hundreds or even thousands of posts, it turns into a gargantuan task. But with All in One Adsense and YPN, inserting an ad in each and every single one of your post is a cinch. It doesn’t matter if you have millions of posts. With this plugin, your ad is inserted automatically in every single one of your blog posts.

How the ad is displayed is customizable as well: you can specify the color as well as the position of the ad. And for an even higher degree of control, advanced can incorporate html and even CSS codes in your ads. The latest update of the All in One Adsense and YPN plugin was released August, 2008. The plugin is compatible up to WordPress 2.6.

3. WhyDoWork Adsense

Used to be known as Shylock AdSense, the WhyDoWork AdSense plugin can show different AdSense ads whenever they reach a certain “age.” For example, a newly created post will have a small banner ad placed at the bottom so that it wouldn’t annoy your regular readers. After a set period of time, this small banner will be replaced with a much bigger one and this time, it will be placed at the start of the article – all of this, done automatically. This way, visitors who found your site through the search engine will be seeing a more aggressive ad incorporated in your article (pretty smart). The plugin was last updated Oct 2007 and is compatible with WordPress 2.5.

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Google Suggest Goes Universal

admin — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:55:06 +0000

Just look at what’s been recently published on the Official Google Blog:

Today we’re excited because Google Suggest will be “graduating” from Labs and available by default on the Google.com homepage. Over the next week, we’ll be rolling this out so that more and more of you will start seeing a list of query suggestions when you start typing into the search box.

So, the Google staff claims to be excited about this news. Now should we be excited about it as well? I’m going to share with you some random thoughts (and predictions) on this subject:

This will affect the SEO and the PPC markets for sure. If you offer search engine optimisation and/or marketing services, get ready for a whole new bunch of trial-and-error experiments. The same goes for those who do SEO and PPC marketing only for their own sites.
Will Google users become lazier? If so, many obscure long tail keywords may turn even more obscure, for web surfers might forget them in favour of the ones suggested by Google. That doesn’t mean that such terms will completely vanish though. There will always be someone dissatisfied with Google suggestions and/or independent enough to ignore them and type their own desired keywords.
If you have pages that are optimised for misspelled terms, prepare yourself for a probable decrease in traffic. Terms suggested by Google don’t contain typos.
Some users might not find the new feature as convenient as Google expects. There are searchers who get annoyed at auto-completion, scrollable boxes and anything else that changes as they type.

This is too recent, so no one can say for sure what’s going to happen. Searchers’ behaviour will certainly change, but nobody knows to what extent. I can’t even tell how my own behaviour will be affected — unless I activate Google Suggest from Google Labs right away, something I’m not sure I’ll do.

As time goes by and I manage to compile more information about Google Suggest’s impact on Internet users, I’ll write more articles to keep you all updated on this subject.

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You’ll Sell More Ads If You Avoid This Mistake

admin — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:33:13 +0000

Direct ad sales are among the best monetization methods that a blogger or webmaster can use. However, I’ve seen a certain mistake being made by numerous site owners. They don’t seem to realise how harmful this can be to their monetization strategy. But I won’t let you become one of them. I’m going to draw your attention to this problem and teach you some simple solutions to this.

What’s the main mistake made by webmasters and bloggers who sell ads on their pages?

No one will be getting too many interested advertisers while their site or blog isn’t popular. It’s only natural. Most advertisers are interested in either branding or direct traffic. The exception to this rule are link builders seeking for favourable Google rankings, but they’re out of this article’s scope. So let’s go on analysing only the typical ad buyer.

Suppose I’m searching for blogs where I could place ads to promote a new site of mine. Your four-month-old blog happens to belong to my niche and I find it after some googling. I like its header and its overall design. I also notice that the top article’s title look very appealing. But before I proceed to check the content’s quality, my eyes instinctively look for ads. After all, I need to know where and how my banner will be displayed if I buy a spot. Much to my surprise, all I see is a group of four buttons that read “Advertise Here.”

Do you know what I think about it? “Hasn’t anyone bought any of these ad spots yet? Why? Should I really buy any ads here? Maybe it’s not a good place for advertisers.” Oh, I’ve omitted my thoughts about lack of professionalism.

Why displaying several “advertise here” buttons is a mistake?

As an advertiser, all I need to see is one or two links to your “advertise here” page. One of them should be an easily findable text link and the other one can be an unsold button. Show me more than this and you’ll probably make me lose interest in your ad spots.

This is amateurish, people. You don’t want to let potential advertisers notice that you have sold few or no ads. You want your pages to look reasonably attractive to ad buyers. Having unsold inventory is normal and understandable, but there’s no reason to make it too obvious. Otherwise, your site or blog will look more suspicious and less reliable than it could. A prospect advertiser could think that your site is a total failure, or that your traffic numbers (in case you mention them) are fake, or that previous advertisers may have had negative experiences with you, or that you’re so desperate for money that you need to beg for advertisers…

How to fill your unsold ad inventory

Now you must be wondering how you can fill those unsold ad spots until real advertisers show up. Here are some suggestions:

Exchange banners with friends. But let them know that this is a temporary offer and that their banners will be replaced by advertiser ones as soon as you sell some spots.
Promote other sites and blogs of yours, as long as they relate to the same niche.
Use affiliate ads. If they do well, mention this fact to potential advertisers. This way you’ll prove that ads displayed on your pages do convert.

Of course, following my advice isn’t a guarantee that you’ll attract lots of advertisers all of a sudden. But I do guarantee that if you make the mistake mentioned above, you’ll lose ad sales. Don’t let that happen to you. You just never know when your site will be found by a prospect advertiser.

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Use Google Webmaster Tools to Get the Best of Your Website

admin — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 01:51:00 +0000

Everyone at some point or the other has been fascinated by how Google views their sites and decides the rankings. While one can only assume based on a few factors, Google Webmaster tools are the only solution with any to that effect. The tools help in diagnosing the errors if any on your site, in increasing its visibility in terms of rankings and also let the owner make preferences with regard to how his/her website is listed. It is a treasure house of tools indeed.

The first and foremost thing one requires to use Google webmaster tools is an active Google account. Once that’s done, the rest is almost done as well.

Once the Google webmaster tools page has loaded, when prompted, enter the URL of your site. Google asks you to verify whether you have control of the aforementioned site. This can be established either by loading an html file of the name as specified by Google onto your website or by including a META tag on the home page’s header. This way, Google makes sure you view all data with respect to your website and that only you are able to access it.

After the website has been verified to be yours, Google takes a few days to collect stats before you can see the profile of your website. The overview screen contains various details that could help you improvise upon your website, with Google’s help. There are various services and statistics on offer here on this page.

Diagnostics elaborates upon 404 errors encountered by Google when it crawls your site. Statistics has innumerable reports that you can access to have an idea about the traffic to your website. Top Queries shows the search queries that showed your website in the results. Googlebot shows anchor text and inbound links to your site as well. Crawling Stats report elaborates upon the Page Rank of your website and this helps assuage the popularity of specific pages on your website. The Index Stats are similar to advanced Google queries. Subscriber Stats assesses your feed management system and is a good alternative to RSS. The link reports on Google Webmaster tools provide an overview of links by page and by domain. Google Sitemaps uploads, manages and catalogues XML files and is one of the most important and complicated tools offered by Google Webmaster.

In addition to all these, the tools area of Google Webmaster houses tools to analyze robots.txt, to manage site verification, setting crawl rate and preferred domain. It also provides fun tools like the enhanced image search which brings you to prominence in image search results.

Regularly using Google Webmaster tools is sure to enhance knowledge about your own site, about how Google works and also how to use the two to optimize your site. Knowledge after all is power, and using it well is in your hands.

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How to Identify Competitors Worth Spying on

admin — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 01:27:23 +0000

As briefly mentioned in my Statbrain review, many webmasters include competition monitoring in their overall strategy. I believe you’ll have a lot to gain if you do it too. Now, how can you identify sites and blogs that are truly worthy of your precious time?

Choosing the type of competitor you want to spy on

First of all, let me make one thing very clear: I’m not proposing that you engage in illegal activities. “Spy on” is just a fancy term in our case. I’m sure you get the idea.

That being said, let’s see the three types of competitor that you could/should be interested in:

1. Successful: For more than obvious reasons.

2. Intermediate level: Because you’ll find it easier to relate to them, since they probably don’t have as many financial resources as the most successful ones. Yet, they may be well on their way to achieve huge popularity. Keeping one eye on sites that could be in a transitional period will teach will a lot.

3. Beginners and/or little-known: Just because a site isn’t popular, doesn’t mean you can’t learn anything from it. At the very least you may be able to spot several mistakes that you should avoid. And who said that those obscure webmasters will never become famous someday? You can witness the beginning of a fantastic story.

Numbers and data that can guide your competition monitoring efforts

How do you determine how successful — or not so successful — a site is? Well, I guess you must be able to tell which the main sites of your niche are. You don’t have to think too much about them; you just know that they are famous. But what about those sites that are just moderately popular? And how do you spot those webmasters and bloggers who pretend to be much more important than they really are?

There are several things you can verify in order to measure a site or blog’s success. Note that many — if not all — of these pieces of data can be manipulated. So, don’t rely too much on them.

Now that I’ve written my little alert, I’m going to show you what you should be checking out, in no particular order:

Publicly available stats: Does your competitor link to an external stat provider? Great! As flawed as such services may be, they are still a good source of information on a site’s traffic.
Advertisers pages: “Advertise here” pages often contain traffic numbers and other relevant data, so they are the first or second thing you should verify. Just remember that the info on them may not be totally accurate, since they are designed to impress potential advertisers.
Subscribe numbers: Very important for blogs, although it depends on the niche. The less tech-savvy readers, the less RSS subscribers a blog should have.
Comments: Does the blog or site gets comments on a regular basis? Or only once in a blue moon? Some successful blogs rarely get any comments, due to their content and audience’s nature. Still, a large amount of quality comments use to be a good sign.
Forum members: If the competitor you’re evaluating offers a forum on their site and/or if it’s a forum itself, take a look at the amount of members it has. Also pay attention to the forum’s activity level. See if the posts are always written by the same members or if there’s variety.
Traffic analysis tools: See what Alexa, Compete and similar tools can tell you about your competitor.
Google rankings: Does your competitor rank well for search terms that you’re interested in? Then it’s mandatory that you concentrate your spying efforts on it.
Social media votes: How often does your competitor get spontaneous votes, reviews or links on sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Mixx? By “spontaneous” I mean activity that isn’t self-promotional.

In case you have more ideas on how to evaluate competitors that could be added to your “to-spy list,” share them in the comment form.

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Expression Engine, for the not so Typical Website

admin — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:03:17 +0000

If we go back and remember the early days of blogging, web logs were primarily considered as online journals which we could share with our friends. It has come a long way today, but it has essentially retained the classic layout that still fits the original purpose – sequential posts with the most recent on top in a wide column, and a narrower column or two for navigation. Of course, this simple layout will not work with all types of content, and if your needs are more specialized than what the typical blogging platform can offer, you may want to consider using Expression Engine.

The one great thing about Expression Engine is the amount of customization it offers. You can create a template for each of the pages on your website, or create custom fields to fit your content. For example, if you plan to make a site that features vegetarian recipes, you can make a text field for the recipe name, estimated time to prepare, ingredients, and procedure. In short, the platform adapts to your needs, instead of you bending over backwards to make a platform work in your favor – all without having to code in PHP!

Aside from the flexibility, EE also has a good reputation in terms of security, and long-time users have are generally satisfied with the fast and responsive support they provide. Other features include direct database query capability, a photo gallery, built-in mailing lists, a wiki module, email-a-friend, search tools and user-notifications of comments.

One downside to Expression Engine, though is the lack of an integrated WYSIWYG editor. That’s pretty basic to miss out on and while I personally can live with that, it may be unacceptable to people not used to seeing code. It’s also easy to get lost inside the Control Panel, but there are helpful manuals to get you going and some short video tutorials for the not-so-patient among us (I’m raising my hand).

You can try Expression Engine for free with their downloadable Core version, but it will not come with some of the advanced features. For the full feature set, there’s a Personal and Commercial license available for $99.95 and $249.95, respectively, and they also come with technical support. Is it worth it? That all depends on what you’ll use it for.

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Discounted Links: Can They Give You Any Google Love?

admin — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:05:34 +0000

I have previously written about the backlinks that really matter for Google: the ones which come from authority sites. However, many, many webmasters and bloggers claim that one should get all the backlinks they can, no matter where they come from. In their opinion, Google won’t ignore discounted links even when they aren’t as valuable as the authority ones.

What are discounted links anyway?

There are three basic ways to look at it:

1. A discounted link would be one that comes from dubious sources, i. e., obscure pages that don’t have a strong reputation among Internet users.

2. Links from pages that contain duplicate content are discounted for sure.

3. All links coming from sites that don’t relate to yours might be classified as discounted, even when those link sources are reputable ones.

Who uses discounted links for link building?

They are mainly used by Internet marketers, webmasters, bloggers and SEOs who believe that quantity is as important as quality when you want to build backlinks. Some of these professionals will spend more time building links than working on on-page optimisation. Others try to find a balance among discounted backlink hunting, content creation, on-site optimisation, title writing etc.

But do you know what? All of us use discounted links in some way, even if we don’t like them and/or don’t realise we are doing it. This happens because we don’t have total control over the sites and blogs who link back to ours. When people want to link to our pages for any reason, they obviously won’t stop and ponder about how much link juice they will pass (or not). This is our problem, not theirs. So, among all these spontaneous backlinks that our sites get, there will certainly be several discounted ones.

Should discounted links be part of your link building campaign?

The only person who can answer this question is… you. It depends on what you think and want, really.

Personally, I still prefer a few strong links over a thousand discounted ones. But this is just my opinion. You may not agree with me. You may think that a thousand discounted backlinks are much better than no links at all — which makes sense, by the way.

If you do choose the “quantity over quality” route, at least try to get as many relevant links as possible. Avoid sites that have nothing to do with your pages’ topics. Unless said sites enjoy a very good reputation, of course. A strong backlink, even when come from an unrelated site, will always be precious in Google’s eyes.

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