The economy is in a rut because of Big Risk – beyond just the subprime housing market.

First, it was Big Finance – AIG and company. Second it was Big Media – the NYTimes and friends. Third, it was Big Auto – GM and gang. It’s quite plausible that the next victims will be Big Advertising – WPP et al.

What’s the relation?

-> Each of them has profited from heaping risk on their customers … when they should have been the ones taking risks.

The Web learned this lesson starting in 2001 on to 2003:

The Dot Com Bubble and Burst happened because:

• Dot-coms’ business plans stated: (i) Get lots of users (then aka “eyeballs”) (ii) Sell ads on a Cost-Per-1000-impressions (CPM) basis
• Humans don’t like interruption advertising – like CPM ads – and they ignored most of these CPM banner-ads
• The measurably poor Return-On-Investment (ROI) led advertisers to stop buying these ads
• As a result, the dot-coms’ business plans broke. And the dot coms went broke.

Since 2003, however, companies operating on the web learned the lesson of risk distribution.

They measured the risks of buying ads, compared them to their ROI and priced the ads accordingly. This was done largely by virtue of the widespread adoption of web analytics software, which enabled advertisers to precisely measure their Return On Ad Spend (ROAS, an ad-centric version of ROI).

Thus a transparent market developed where both parties went in with their eyes wide open, making precise cost-benefit analyses.

One company in particular learned the lesson and applied it thoroughly: Google.

This transparent market led Google to shift from selling banner ads on a flat-CPM basis – where all the risk remains on advertisers’ shoulders – to selling their now famous cost-per-click (CPC) ads. With CPC, advertisers only pay for clicks they get, which shifts some of the risk away from the advertiser and sends it over to the media publisher (Google, in this case).

Furthermore, rather than dealing only with advertisers who could afford a “minimum-spend” in the tens-of-thousands of dollars – a common practice in Big Media – Google opened its doors to anyone with $5 to open an account and a few cents more to spend on ads. This obviously makes trying out the ads a lower-risk proposition than news-media advertising.

If that weren’t enough, Google combined this with a simple math formula that rewards the most efficient advertisers – those who can generate the highest ROAS and are thus able to pay Google more for advertising.

Unsatisfied, Google has continued to help its advertisers become more efficient, by offering advertisers:

1. Decent quality web analytics for free,
2. An ad platform that lets them test one version of an ad against another to see which performs better,
3. Programming goodies (APIs) that let third parties write ROAS-maximizing-software (facilitated by the trend making data a commodity),
4. Fancy testing software to improve the selling efficiency of their [the advertisers'] own websites,
5. Numerous filters and targeting mechanisms to only buy those ads that work for the advertiser.

Of course, we all know that by empowering its advertisers to cut the fat in their advertising programs, Google has gone near to the edge of bankruptcy become the world’s first $100 Billion Brand. That should tell you something about building a brand with word-of-mouth vs branding via advertising [your own wares], ironically enough…

But this hasn’t just been Google’s story – most of the web economy as a whole has integrated this risk-distribution lesson as a fundamental operating principle.

Others took this redistribution of risk even further with the cost-per-action (CPA) model, where advertisers only pay for a specified result. Thus the majority of the Internet Retailer 500 – the web’s largest ecommerce operations – now pay commissions to CPA publishers who refer them sales.

This is particularly profitable to expert media publishers who test their advertisers’ efficiency against each other to maximize their net yield. Numerous pieces of software and companies have emerged to facilitate this. Read this for more on Yield Optimization.

Now let’s compare that to housing, finance, news media, cars and non-search advertising… The NYSE dropped 7000 points over the past 2 years.

Big Finance pushed credit in varying forms and descriptions at consumers who could ill afford it. The loan sharks who offer “cash advances” and “payday loans” continue this practice as we speak.

It’s clear therefore that TARP is a bailout for the wrong people, unfortunately. It deals with the symptoms – the failure of risk made Big by centralization in a handful of large companies.

The problem, however, was that the risk was made Big by having it aggregated amongst a few financial companies.

In other words, the risk for the economy as a whole was terrible because it was poorly distributed. Half of the problem lay with those who couldn’t afford the debt, while the other half lay with the centralizing, the aggregation of this risk in Big Finance.

Additionally, Big Finance has been resistant to innovation, which is perhaps the worst risk you could possibly take!

For one obvious example, peer-to-peer lending of the type covered regularly on Jim Bruene’s NetBanker, hasn’t quite been welcomed by Big Finance. Why haven’t any of the big banks adopted Prosper.com’s technology and offered to facilitate their customers’ investments in other people’s loans for a simple monthly fee?

There’d be a wider distribution of risk, fewer [opportunities for institutional] crooks, and smart financial management generally.

Big Media forced advertisers to take all the risk upon themselves, for decades.

Via Recovering Journalist

Perhaps ironically, traditional ad agencies priced their services partly on the size of the ad spend, or “media buy,” that their clients made. Yet they never optimized this spend by tying it to sales metrics, because then advertisers might cut the ad spend that was just “fat” and not producing revenue!

For why this thinking is short-sighted, see Google for what advertisers do when they successfully cut unproductive advertising dollars…

The most successful segment of offline advertising today is direct response advertising. Direct response advertisers built their own measurement, testing and segmentation tools. Gurus like Clayton Makepeace, Michel Fortin, and Gary Bencivenga and hugely successful companies like Agora Publishing have grown by measuring their risks and optimizing them.

If you know what a Bowflex is, you’ve seen direct response advertising. The fact that it’s still around today speaks to the efficiency of its creators marketing risks.

Of course, advertisers tried to shift the marketing market’s risk balance and transparency by experimenting with different formats and styles. That’s how viral marketing campaigns, publicity stunts and others arose.

Those experiments tried to shift the risk. They sometimes succeeded, but not on a scale large enough to affect the media market. That’s why ad dollars fled to the web when the web brought media-measurement to the masses.

The news media need to understand that their ad divisions are in the sales business.

Their purpose is not to sell exposure but to sell sales. Web 1.0 was about exposure to eyeballs, and look where that got the dot-com soap-bubbles.

The news media’s ad arms need to adopt more risk in the ads they publish, whereby they’re paid for performance. They need to build inhouse direct response teams and test ads aggressively. For one obvious example, I was browsing a travel section on a Big Media site that was super enthusiastic about a given destination. But rather than show affiliate ads for travel packages, I was shown credit cards ads.

Otherwise, Big Media will keep rotating crappy ads from free credit score sites that amount to Virtual Blight, because those ads lead visitors to landing pages for scams…

Big Media has also bet against innovation.

Various newspapers are cutting their budgets for investigative journalism. Yet that’s the very core of innovation in news. That’s like Big Pharma saying that they’re going to stop doing R&D and just copy each other’s most popular drugs. Oh wait a sec…

From an internet marketing perspective, the existence of linkbait shows that people love feature length investigative reporting. And as Cosmopolitan magazine’s monthly “101 Ways to Have a Romantic Sundown Date” articles show, people will pay for it. As I wrote here:

I wouldn’t pay for the P.o.S. newspaper handed to me free in the subway bc the content is all wire stories + ads, and the wire content reads like it was written by a soulless monkey. It’s 100% generic.

My family still subscribes to a print newspaper, and I get much greater satisfaction reading it than the metro paper. It’s the difference between a full meal and swallowing a Hershey’s kiss.

The path to saving newspapers’ subscription business is more journalism, not less. More soul, less wire crap. More research, less rehash.

Big Auto sinned by pushing risk to the environment and trying to fight the ecological culture that has become mainstream in today’s America. GM are known for trucks and SUVs. Honda is known for the Civic and hybrids. You tell me who bet on the past and who bet on change and R&D.

Additionally, regulators failed by letting Big Auto get to the sizes they did. Detroit became a [3-]company town. The result has been homes selling for under $10,000. [Source] This is similar to the centralization of risk in Big Finance’s case.

As an aside, I’d like to note that new laws need to be made for situations like this. While the current recession is terrible, imagine what might happen if Wal-Mart went bankrupt tomorrow. These obese firms are a risk to the whole economy.

There need to be caps on the percentage of a population that can be employed in any given industry. This will minimize the risk of any company’s failure, as well as encourage competition and thus, innovation. By the number of mom-n-pop shops that Wal-Mart has destroyed, it’s clear that mega-corporations do more to hurt the economy than to help.

History shows that betting against change is a sucker’s bet.

You can flip a fair coin 100 times and get 100 heads in a row, but keep flipping and you will eventually get tails. Here’s hoping the economy learns that lesson, and changes to better distribute risk. Following the lead of the internet marketing industry would be a good start.
photo credit: Steve Montgomery

Gab Goldenberg is an SEO professional. He wrote this on his own behalf and on behalf of PromotionalCodes.org.uk, a CPA site known for using voucher codes to drive incremental revenue to its advertising partners, such as Apple Computers.

Gab is on the agenda to speak at the next Search Marketing Expo, in Seattle.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

After Taking 3500 Point Olympic Dive, Web Says: “Follow My Lead!”

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The following is a guest post by a friend of mine, he’s a screen writer by trade and not an internet marketer. But I have exposed him to enough of the SEO world that it’s made a difference … mg

So I was at a Hollywood party tonight.  A good buddy of mine is finally tucking his tail between his legs and fleeing back for his home state, because he’s had enough of L.A. (for now at least).

Now, this guy has a very pervasive personality and makes regular posts on his Facebook wall, so I suggested he try out Twitter as I believed he could create quite a following for himself.  I further pointed out that by utilizing the Facebook Twitter app, he could consolidate his content by having his Twitter feed also appear on his Facebook wall.

He was excited, he was enthused, yet he never showed up on Twitter.  I finally asked why and received the response, “My other friends say Twitter is dead.”

…

I’m going to do that again.

…

So I’m at his going away party tonight and out of the blue he drunkenly drags this other guy up to me and says, “Tell him.  This is the guy.  Tell him!”

And this new son of a bitch looks at me and smirks, “Twitter is Facebook without pictures and fewer features.  And only 80 characters?  90?”  Then does this, “Who the fuck would be dumb enough to use that?!” kind of shrug.

I wanted to tell him, “Because your Facebook wall is never going to expand beyond your list of IRL friends unless you find celebrity in another medium and your fans seek you out.  With Twitter, you have the capability of building a following based solely on the quality of your content and comprised not of friends, but of fans from the ground up.  You will not transform yourself into a brand on Facebook, but you can on Twitter and carry that brand into other mediums.”

I didn’t of course.  The douche-bag was obviously beyond all hope, and… well… I’m an asshole and already had someone more interesting to talk to, but it occurred to me that I had been corrupted.  The few small steps I’ve ventured into your industry from my own has left me shaking my head at these moron Hollywood sheep people who think they’re on the cutting edge, because they use Facebook.

Sincerely, thank you.

-A-

Follow Cocles on Twitter

Check out his WoW Lore blog at Loregy.com

Find him on LinkedIn

Swoon over his Calvin Klein Ad

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The Corrupted Screenwriter

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Hi there. I suppose since this is a guest post, I should start with a little introduction. I’m Tim Woodin, and I’m going to talk about how to use social media to make money.

Firstly though, let me give you a bit of background info. About five years ago, I created a course on copywriting. I set up a simple website with a sales page, a blog, and not a lot else. Most of the marketing was done offline through classified ads in niche publications, and I made a tidy sum of money. Fast forward about two years or so, and I started playing around with social media. I learned new ways to drive traffic, how to filter out the good and lose the bad, and so on. Since then, I’ve created several other products, and bought licences to many others. Today, I run a very successful business, and over the past five years, I’ve made a little over £7,000,000 online, with about 85% of that being profit.
So that’s why you should listen to what I’ve got to say. And now I’ll get on with saying it.

Why I’m a Millionaire and You’re Not

When you get right down to it, making money isn’t that hard. The formula runs something like this:

• Create a product, with low manufacturing and distribution costs, but high perceived value
• Write great sales copy, or get some written for you. Then create a site, put the copy up, and hook up PayPal
• Drive lots of targeted traffic to it, and either get the products shipped by a fulfillment house, or do it yourself
• Lather, rinse, repeat

It really is that simple. However, there are a few common pitfalls:

1. People don’t know or can’t be arsed to create an awesome product that matches those criteria
2. They can’t write great copy, or they think they can but they can’t, and
3. They don’t know how to drive traffic

With that in mind, I thought I’d take some time to show you how social media can solve each of those problems.

Creating a Product With Social Media

There’s a wonderful thing about social media. The key to it is in the name: social. All social media is, is content that people share because it’s interesting or useful. And that gives you the key to just about everything you need to know.
If you’re stuck for how to create a product, there’s a simple way to get some inspiration, which we’re going to walk through now step by step.
Firstly, think for a minute about what you do for a living, what your hobbies are and what you’re passionate about. These are the things you’ll find it easiest to write on, because a. you probably know quite a lot about them, and b. you’d probably find it fairly easy to create a product around them once you know what to do. There’s also a third advantage, but we’ll come to that in a minute.
Next, write down a list of those things, and any seminars you’ve attended, or courses you’ve bought, or websites that you visit in relation to them. Next, write down any products or items you’ve bought that are connected to them. Once you’ve got that done, you’ll know where you’ve spent your money for those things, and where other people are likely spending their hard earned cash too.
Finally for this bit, next to each of those things, write down why you paid for each particular item. What gap did it fill, what knowledge did it give you? How did it help you? Now you know why people buy.

Writing Great Copy With Social Media

So, you know what people spend their money on, so you can create a product. I won’t go into that here, but I will be doing a guest blog on it in a few days, so follow my twitter feed for updates. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to get some killer copy down, to get people to buy.
This is slightly more tricky, as there’s a definate art to writing great copy, and whilst you can learn a lot from guys like Copyblogger and Michel Fortin, there is a factor of practise involved in writing great copy. The simple truth is it takes time, and the more you write, the better you’ll become at it.
That said, if you can write good copy already, here’s how to find the hooks that your audience will respond to.
Firstly, go check out Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, and any similar sites for the industry you’ve picked (so for instance if you’re creating a webdev product, you’d go to DZone). There you’ll be able to see what content communities, both broad and niche are responding to. Look at what’s going hot, and analyse why. What’s the tone of those pieces? Who are they angling at? What about them does the community love?
After you’ve done that, you’ll know what the hot topics are. You can then reference them in your sales copy, to show that you know what you’re talking about. You get the “in jokes”, you know the players… You’re not just someone out to scam them. That builds trust.
When you’ve got the copy done (or you’ve gotten someone to do it for you), all that’s left is to drive traffic. So let’s look at that.

Driving Great Traffic With Social Media

There’s no doubt hitting the homepage of Digg is nice for links, and good boost for your ego, and pain for your serve, and potentially good for your branding too, but it doesn’t make any sales as a general rule. So what traffic does?
There’s an old saying, “Don’t send vegetarians to a steak convention”, and it’s true of just about any method of marketing. You can send a million people to a sales letter, but if they’re the wrong people, it doesn’t matter. So what qualifies the right people, and how do you get to them?
Well, they have to be passionately pro whatever it is you’re selling. They also need to have a proven track record of spending money on similar products. Finally, they need to believe there’s enough value in products like yours to justify whatever price you’re going to ask. The last of these is taken care of in the sales copy, but the first two come down to understanding your audience and where they hang out.
There’s a reason most social media traffic is rubbish for generating sales, and it’s this: people using social media sites are looking for entertainment or information, not products. They’re in window-shopping mode – not planning to actually buy, but just looking to see what’s there.
What you need to do is get them interested at that point. This is where running a blog or newsletter helps. If you can offer them something for free, in exchange for an email address or an RSS subscription, you’re half way there, because you’ve now got a way to get in contact with them again. So find or create something you can give away for free to get that line of communication and start building a list. Getting traffic for that is easy – the blog allows you to create linkbait, go for search engine traffic, paid search traffic, standard social media stuff… That’s all been covered before. Then once you’ve got them, every now and then, remind them you have a product that will give them the next level of information.
You’ve now got social media traffic coming in, and hanging around. But look beyond Digg and Reddit and so on, and turn to Facebook and MySpace, as well as industry-related forums. If you spend time building presence here, you can gain a following in the industry too. Again, this takes some time, but you should be able to build a reasonable base of people who follow you within a month or so. Then, again over time, get them onto the blog, and remind them that you have a product. Once again, being seen as genuine is key to this. If people suspect you’re just after their money, they’ll lambast you and that’ll be the end of it. Creating fake personas can be useful for this, as if you get caught, you can burn the persona, no harm done.
Finally, keep driving more traffic, and investing a small amount of the profit back into marketing purposes. Scale up, and enjoy the rewards.

Everyone Starts Somewhere

The key to all this is to start small and leverage. Sure, I now do one product launch a month, and make 6 figures a time from it, but there was a time when all I wanted was to make £100 a month. Aim small, hit the target, and then raise the bar. Don’t think you’re going to be able to do a million in sales tomorrow, because you won’t. Nothing is going to change that. But to be able to do a million in sales over a year? That’s perfectly doable.
If you want to follow me and the series of guest posts I’m doing at the moment, subscribe to my twitter feed, where I’ll be sharing thoughts and tips on business, and I’ll keep you updated.
Until next time, have a great day!
Tim Woodin

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Who Else Wants to Make Money from Social Media?

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or

“How To Be Creative In 4 Steps”

Ever pay attention to the affiliate network ads that pervade the blogs-on-blogging-and-marketing blogosphere? If you have, then you know that they’re all interchangeable. Every network promises you “better payouts and unique offers.”

The web is awash in generics, and so is the economy. Everyone understands the concept of a “unique value proposition” – because generic writing has repeated it ad nauseam – yet only a tiny minority apply it. One of the ironies of this is that a slew of images depicting a single red character amongst acres of grey characters have found their way onto innumerable blogs. A picture representing standing out has become generic.

That’s the problem I’d like to help you solve. How can you be creative amongst a ruckusof people trying to stand out? How can you sing in the din of the falling raindrops?

Source: Archaeoastronomy Ancient Science

First, you’ll need to do research to get inspired. You’re looking to discover and identify problems.

As it concerns blogging, your research begins by finding out what others in your field are writing about.

Start by identifying who the thought leaders are in your niche and go catalog their categories. Excel will probably come in handy if you want to do this thoroughly, though an informal approach is just fine too.

What you’re looking for mostly is overlap in topics. The more others have covered it, the less you should consider it as a viable topic to address, because you’ll have to work harder to say something new/original, and even then you’ll only stand out marginally.

Next, go through these leaders’ category archives and read as much as you can. This will both teach you a lot in a very short amount of time, as well as give you an idea of what particular subjects within a broad category have been covered.

If you’re pressed for time, you can copy-paste the titles in the archives into an excel file. Then, make note of what keywords or ideas repeat the most often and you’ll have a fair idea of where their focus is.

As a kid in grade school, I recall asking the other kids what topic they were going to write about amongst the list our teacher had given us. It wasn’t that their choices were particularly fascinating for the insights they gave on the neurochemical functioning of their brains (we’d already done neurochemistry in grade 3), but rather just a way of making sure I picked one of those options that few others were doing.

As it concerns businesspeople outside of blogging, you need to start by looking at your competitor’s products and catalog their features and benefits. This information should be readily available from their website and other marketing materials like brochures.

If you create a product-comparison chart, this will help you visualize things and better understand what you’re up against. Similarly to blogging, look for the overlap in features.

In the soda world, Jones Soda came along and changed the game. They saw competitors whose marketing style was “Big Ad Agency Generic” and decided to incorporate their customers’ pictures on their labels. They saw flavours that could not be differentiated (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnzJQ6ZsZSQ) and came up with flavours that fit better in a pack of Jelly Bellies than in a soda vending machine. Which is fortunate for them, since they didn’t go the usual route in distributing their soda but rather started by bringing it to skater parks, tattoo parlours and other non-mainstream places.

This brings me to the next aspect of research: finding pockets of customer dissatisfaction.

There are a number of ways of doing this, but the one I’d like to highlight is searching. If you know what keywords to use, search engines can share a wealth of consumer complaints. In effect, these sites are business plans waiting to happen.

That previous paragraph has a few keywords you can try out, like “dissatisfaction.” Better yet, use variants that people are more likely to use in describing their own experiences, like “I’m dissatisfied with my bank.”

More commonly used synonyms and expressions of frustration are likely to work even better. Searching for “I hate AOL” returned this result : http://forums.techguy.org/reviews/251607-why-you-hate-aol.html
“XYZ sucks” is another popular format, speaking from personal experience as someone who’s ranked #1 for “Google sucks.” Some other keywords of interest are complaint, rip-off, frustration and anything you can think of that expresses these ideas.

A tip to make this very current for the blogosphere and help you discover memes as they develop is to follow Twitter’s hot keywords, in the footer of its search.twitter.com subdomain.

For example, as I was writing this post, Motrin released some ads that offended some mothers by suggesting they were fashion victims – literally. The ads said that they were hurting themselves to carry their babies in stylish slings. If you wanted, you could run ads for your own brand of pain-relief as the mom-respectful brand. This is what my friend Susan Gunelius of Key Splash Creative would refer to as oppositional branding or differentiation.

What I’m describing here is the practice of footprinting. In short, it describes the practice of analyzing similar websites to identify common phrases they use, which don’t necessarily describe their content.

Have a look at My 3 Cents for an example of one such review site that could be helpful. Looking it over, the phrase “write a review” stands out as something that they’re likely trying to rank for, and which other review sites would also feature information on. Rating sites are going after the same game…

Analyzing The Data To Identify The Problem

Finding and understanding problems is step 1, researching the principles to solve the problem is step 2. That’s a good start.

Now, you need to analyze the data. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

a) What assumption underlies the competition’s way of doing things?

A complaint I read about some bank’s crummy customer service had a life-long customer asking them to let him off for his first ever late fee, an accident.

That bank assumed a number of things. First, the customer should call customer service to clarify problems. That’s a pretty reactive attitude. Perhaps calling customers to see if things are OK when they’re late on a payment would be a non-abrasive way of getting money repaid quickly while maintaining friendly relations.

Second, the Bank assumed that the customer acted irresponsibly. In a court of law, they could make the point that he should have checked the online bill he’d opted into. In the court of free-market economics, the customer is always right and that bank just lost a client.

Third, the bank assumed that punishing late payment was more effective than rewarding timely payment. Over the years this customer had paid promptly, was he ever rewarded for it?

Fourth, the bank assumed that such a late fee would not encourage the customer to leave for another bank. Oops.

b) Why does the current market have the features it has? If the reason is “that’s how it’s been since the 1920s,” then you’re onto an opportunity. If the reason is that the barriers to entry require a 10-person corporate legal team, move on. Another way to phrase this is: What has changed in the market since our competitors’ products first developed?

And from UC Davis’ critical thinking page:

1. What is the purpose, goal, or point?
2. What is the problem or issue being solved or described?
3. On what data or evidence is the decision / definition / problem based?
4. What inferences are being made from what kind of data, and are these inferences legitimate?
5. What is the solution, outcome, or resolution of the problem or issue?
6. What are the short-term and long-term implications of the solution / consquences of the outcome?
7. What are the biases or assumptions behind the inferences, selection or collection of data, or framing of the problem / experiment?
8. What are the basic concepts or terms being used? How do these definitions affect the framing / understanding of the problem?
9. What point of view is being expressed? What political / ideological / paradigmatic considerations inform or govern or limit point of view?
10. How would someone from a related but different discipline look at the problem / solution / issue, and could an interdisciplinary approach improve the analysis / discussion / evaluation?

What Are The Rules In This Area?

Source: George Bannister

Once you’ve identified the problem, you need to figure out what rule to apply to the problem. Generally speaking, this means you’ll have to learn about what others have done and the lessons – the core principles – they’ve derived from their experience. I’m talking about studying using case studies.

You’ve addressed this in part by finding out how others in your niche have answered the problem you’re considering. Now it’s time to go beyond that and look for more obviously formatted case studies or self-help business books. The following resources (plus your favourite library and bookstore) can get you started:

Business ethics case studies
Many categories of case studies
Free business case studies
Case studies at Case Place
Acadia Case studies
Case studies hub with links to several resources
Asian Case Studies
http://blogsearch.google.ca/blogsearch?q=business+case+studies.

Personally, I also recommend the following books for helping you think better and become a better problem solver:

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens (adaptation of 7 Habits of Highly Effective Adults – it’s easier to read and shares the same lessons).
The 4 Hour Workweek

Let’s make up an example to illustrate. Competitive research on dissatisfaction reveals that in the niche you’re considering, the potential competition often pay suppliers late. Your reading on business helps you identify the problem as a cash-flow issue. At that point, you can either rely on cash-flow management principles you’ve learnt from past reading, or research the area now.

How The Rules Apply

It’s up to you, really, so long as it solves the problems you found and thus differentiates you from the competition.

I’d love to hear your reactions and thoughts on this in the comments!

Gab Goldenberg writes a search marketing blog and has plenty of good reasons for you to add his SEO blog’s RSS feed to your reader. He’s hoping to launch Original Monetization, a platform for offering webmasters new tools to make money, soon.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Singing In The Rain

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The following is a Guest Post from Joe Hall.

The internet is changing the real estate industry on a daily basis. And, not surprisingly, it’s the Web 2.0 innovators that are leading the revolution. Of course this isn’t the first time that new media gurus have redefined an industry. However, this time around old school brands are being left in the dust, while innovative startups are reaping all the benefits.

New evidence is starting to come to light that Web 2.0 sites like Zillow.com and Trulia.com are gaining more traction and market share then nationally franchised brand named sites. To get a better understanding of why these sites are doing so well, lets take a look at four sites in particular. On the Web 2.0 side we are going to discuss Trulia.com and Zillow.com on the brand name side we will take a look at RE/MAX and Century 21.

Zillow is a Web 2.0 web site that provides its visitors with tools and information on the real estate industry along with general real estate search. Founded by the same folks that brought us Expedia.com. It garnered much attention when they briefly snagged Vanessa Fox from the ranks of Google a little over a year ago. However, its not the people alone that has made Zillow a popular place for consumers. Zillow has successfully combined social networking and a wiki style portal with up to date real estate listings and market information. Zillow’s “Discussions” is a forum where consumers can engage with other consumers and real estate professionals on a wide variety of real estate topics. This type of engagement is popular in real estate because it gives the consumer the ability to gather information while keeping a comfortable level of anonymity. For most home buyers anonymity is extremely important in the early stages of real estate search. Social engagement is not the only thing that Zillow is succeeding at. Zillow’s “Real Estate Guide” is a wiki style information portal that is chalk full of articles for all areas of real estate. Offering a resource like this gives Zillow market authenticity and makes content ripe for linkbait. But the truly ingenious aspects of adding a wiki is that all the content is free. While Zillow’s users benefit from collectively creating this content, Zillow reaps the benefits of free original content that is constantly fresh.

Zillow is not the only Web 2.0 company trying to make a go at real estate. Trulia.com combines real estate search with social engagement tools as well. Trulia Voices is an area where homebuyers can ask questions about a specific area or topic. Real estate professionals that specialize in that area then have the ability to respond. This once again is another example of social engagement that is extremely popular. One thing that Trulia has got going that Zillow seems not to have mastered yet, is a very polished understanding of SEO. Trulia is ranking pretty well for highly competitive real estate search terms. While their SEO tactics are extremely aggressive to say the least, in my opinion they do provide engaging content that warrants relevant rankings. And it appears that others are taking notice. Just last month Trulia secured another $15 million in venture capital, that’s comparable to the $15 million that power house startup Twitter landed at the end of April.

We already know that RE/MAX is dominating in the area of brand recognition in web search volume. So its no surprise that remax.com is ranking as the top name brand real estate site. Century 21 comes in second and in the same token is placed as the second most visited name brand real estate site. However both sites are still falling short of these Web 2.0 wonders. Why? You ask? Well in my opinion the two big reasons that these sites aren’t doing as well, is their complete lack of social engagement and their limited understanding/dedication to SEO.

Take a look at remax.com. Here we see a typical real estate search tool. However, when one performs a search they are redirected off their site to a locally owned franchise site. This is great for the local franchise but it means that remax.com has significantly less control over their brand, because each locally owned brokerage depends on a different 3rd party developer for web services. The result is that remax.com’s search tool provides some times unreliable ambiguous results. As for social engagement, the only thing that comes remotely close is a directory of sales associates’ contact information. It appears from my view that the biggest thing RE/MAX has going for it on the internet is name recognition.

Century21.com has put much more time into their search tool. They have been successful at integrating mapping features via Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. And it is safe to assume that their index of listings is significantly larger because they combine all of the listings under their parent company Realogy, who also owns Coldwell Banker, ERA, and Sotheby’s. However, once again they have absolutely no social engagement features besides their directory of sales associates.

So, we have seen that social engagement can be very powerful when it comes to real estate sites. Then, one might ask, why isn’t big name brands like Century 21 and RE/MAX integrating social elements into their systems? Maybe they don’t think they need to. Century 21 for example syndicates all of it’s listing data to a handful of different sites, such as Trulia, Zillow, Yahoo Real Estate, Google Housing Search, and others. With this method Century 21 is letting these sites do all the marketing for them. However, at the same time, this method does little to enable their sales associates to build relationships with homebuyers.

In my opinion to build a strong base of support on the internet that will transfer into offline growth, brand name real estate companies such as RE/MAX and Cenury 21 need to integrate social elements into their preexisting systems that allow for the homebuyer to establish a relationship with their sales associates. Otherwise these companies run the risk of being passed over by a market of consumers that are becoming increasingly more social online.

Learn more about Joe Hall: Follow Joe’s Blog or Joe’s Tweets.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Why Old School Real Estate Brands are Losing to New Web 2.0 Innovators

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The following is a Guest Post from Amber Benedict.

A client of mine emailed me in a panic, saying two of their affiliate PPC sites have been “tagged” by Google Adwords for violation of the Google double serving policy. “Tagged” meaning that Google is planning to take down my clients’ paid ads for violation of the policy.  The Google double ad serving policy, according to my Google rep, states that, “Any client that offers the same products or services at similar price points as other advertisers without significant differentiation in terms of website content may run into this policy.”

Google also states that it’s important to note that they’re not shutting down an advertisers account per say, advertisers are simply entering a ‘pre-auction’ with other advertisers who are selling or offering the same products at the same selling price.  The affiliate or re-seller who wins the pre-auction will show in the final auction and actually appear on the search engine results page.   This way search results will provide more unique offers for users.

How do you win the pre-auction you may ask? You got it – bid higher! In order to win the pre-auction, Google chooses the advertiser with the best combined quality score and bid for the final auction.

Another interesting point is that if you don’t want to participate in this pre-auction and essentially compete with your own affiliate advertisers, you can simply add products that differentiate yourself from your affiliates. Note that just by adding content that Google can simply find elsewhere will not be sufficient.

If you are affected by this policy, you will be notified by Google or your account rep. Good luck!

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Are You in Violation of Google’s Double Serving Policy? You Just Might Be!

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The following is a Guest Post from Everett Sizemore.

The ethics of paid links aside (we all know how Michael Gray feels about that already) the best paid links don’t usually come from a network or broker, and aren’t generally thought of as ‘paid links’ in the first place – though they are. In fact, they don’t even come from someone who knows what a nofollow tag is, or why selling links is against Google’s guidelines. And regardless of the fact that they are paid, Google doesn’t seem to mind them so long as they are on-topic and coming from a reputable website. As the title suggests, this “link buy” comes in the form of sponsoring an event or website. The trick is to find sponsorship opportunities that are in your corner of the web (read: on-topic).


Here are five search queries to help you find such links:

Yahoo (links lead to real examples)
linkdomain:yourcompetitorsdomain.com sponsor
linkdomain:yourcompetitorsdomain.com sponsors

Google (links lead to real examples)
keyword inurl:sponsors
keyword inurl:sponsor
keyword intitle:sponsors

As always with link building, be on the look out for redirects, nofollow tags, etcetera… But you’d be surprised at how few PR7 and PR8 web pages out there list links to sponsors using normal hrefs.

I’m sure by now you get the point. Try switching “sponsor” with “advertise” and see if the site has advertising that doesn’t use redirects, tracking links or nofollow tags. You might be thinking that it is easy for Google to see if the word “sponsor” or “advertise” is in the URL, Title or even somewhere on the page – and you would be correct. However, I have not found this to have a negative effect on the quality of that link so long as it is on-topic and the link involves two reputable sites. I’ve studied competitor’s incoming links enough to know that some of them are competitive in the SERPS for certain keywords largely because of a few well-placed sponsorship logo-links with good Alt text pointing to the right page.

But why stop there? As many of you probably know already, the physical location of a website plays a role in your local rankings just as a topical site plays a role in your rankings for those topics in the traditional SERPS. If, for instance, I had a Denver home construction business, I would want to get links from Denver websites, and from construction websites – preferably both. How might some of these queries look?

First, let’s find some sponsorship opportunities on websites here in Denver, Colorado with some decent page rank and SEO-friendly links by using Google Maps (Denver, Colorado sponsors). You may notice that those results are less than stellar. That’s because Google assumes we’re looking for a ’sponsor’ businesses in their Google Local database. BUT, if you select “Show Search Options” and then “Show Mapped Web Pages“ and re-apply the search, you’ll see a number of opportunities, including this one: http://www.builtgreen.org/directory/sponsors.aspx . That’s a nice PR-4 page. I wonder how much one would have to donate in order to become a sponsor?

eCommerce Sites
If you have a product to sell, the best way to pay for links without actually “paying” for them is to send out samples. I’ll let you use your imagination here on finding the appropriate sites, but you might want to start by finding out who has reviewed your competitor’s products. And don’t just focus on small blogs. I’ve managed to get reviews in major national magazines and newspapers, as well as some of those annoying websites that you see ‘about‘ every topic in the search results. Even reporters and bloggers for major magazines like free stuff. The trick is to make contact first and not ask for the link. Nine times out of ten they’ll link to you anyway, so don’t push your luck by making it obvious what you’re after.

Socialize with Everett: http://twitter.com/balibones

Advertisement: Efficiently manage your SEO and Social Media campaigns with Raven’s powerful suite of Internet Marketing Tools

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Five Search Queries to Find Sponsorship Link Opportunities

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The following is a Guest Post from Michael Martin.

When performing SEO its best to first implement the KISS strategy, Keep It Simple S…..

Forget about the old school keyword density equations, being completely W3C compliant, creating X amount of content, pages or acquiring X amount of links.

KISS SEO would include, but not limited to:

• Unique TITLE tag for each page that includes your page’s targetted keyword(s) plus the benefit followed by Company/Site name.

 

• Unique META Description tag for each page that should be used to enforce the page’s usefulness and be the marketing pitch to the visitor.

 

• A CSS styled H1 tag centered around the page’s main keyword(s) focus – as a side note when I spoke with Matt Cutts at SMX Advanced he said Google doesn’t weigh the H1 tag any heavier than an H2 or H4, but it shouldn’t be used more than once.

 

• Content that is both informative, unique, and useful by fulfilling a need of your target audience.

 

• URLs in a non-dynamic descriptive format.

 

• A flat site structure with breadcrumb links.

 

• Absolute internal linking.

 

• An html user friendly site map plus the backup parachute of a sitemap.xml file.

 

• Robots.txt file blocking any duplicate content (print pages, etc).

 

• Using 301 sever side redirects to consolidate similar pages and domain changes, including canocalization such as www vs non-www.

SEO can be boiled down to simply good organization of your site’s code and assets plus acquiring quality links natuarally via useful interesting content.

If this were Gene Simmon’s KISS SEO then it would be keyword heavy toward the ASSets.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

KISS SEO

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The following is a Guest Post from Brandy Eddings.

Last school year while at recess my daughter approached a group of boys playing kickball. She asked if she could join, the boy holding the ball told her “only boys can play”. My daughter’s response was “then why are they letting you play” she grabbed the ball and ran onto the field and no one else opposed her joining and the game went on. Her teacher told me that now all the games at recess are now co-ed and they have never had that happen in the years she has taught at that school. Without realizing it she used determination and humor to change the culture of the school.

I get that Blogher is about supporting female bloggers but creating a double standard of not even allowing male speakers at their conferences goes a little too far. Now I’m not against women supporting other women but shouldn’t the focus be people supporting people. We should be striving to fade the line drawn between the sexes not making it bolder.

As a woman in business I face sexism more often then I even like to admit to myself. However, I do make the choice to face it, deal with it and hope to change it one small step at a time. Women in business simply could not succeed if we avoided all men altogether. Even the notion of that is just ridiculous. The online world is still in its infant stages, our present actions and decisions will determine the future of the online culture, even if we don’t realize it yet. Exclusion is discrimination no matter what type of spin you try to put on it.

You don’t have to be anti-man to be pro-woman.  ~Jane Galvin Lewis

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Blogher, Pro-Woman or Anti-Man?

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The following is a Guest Post from Melanie Nathan.

There is a harsh wind blowing through our industry. We all feel it. and if we don’t, perhaps we’ve got our heads in the sand. The truth is SEO’s are, for the most part, loathed.

As a transparent and somewhat public SEO I personally receive at least one piece of hate mail per week. Whether it’s via email, a private message, a stumbleupon review etc; even though I’m an ethical marketer, people always seem to have a problem with what I say or do.

Most recently:

“Good job hurting the internet. Well done.”

“How does it feel to be evil?”

“I would love for at least one fucking “SEO professional” to say “content is king”, “don’t sell out by trying to trick people/systems to give you backlinks” or “focus on providing a good user-experience”.”

“DIAF SEO bitch!!”

I’m no crybaby and I can take criticism just fine but if some of these people knew anything about me they would know that I don’t spam social media sites, I don’t optimize for irrelevant terms, I don’t promote content that is crap and I never forget the end user. The problem is that they seem to make no distinction between “valuable marketing services” and “nefarious, unethical practices”. To them, it’s all the same.

What exactly is so bad about SEO?

I can tell you that there is a lot of misinformation out there. In fact, there’s an abundance of misinformation, exaggeration, and outright lies being spread. Some of the more common ones are:

All SEO’s…

- devalue the search results
- are scammers/spammers
- steal pagerank and links
- don’t care where their traffic or links come from
- overpromise and underdeliver
- will do anything to be #1

No one disputes that there are some very bad apples in the SEO bunch (in which industry is the fruit totally fresh?) but people need to know that there ARE reputable SEO’s out there who actually ADD value to the search results and CAN help online businesses achieve measurable success. This is because most public SEO’s are in it for the long haul and the main way to long term search engine success is through a SE friendly website which publishes superior content and attracts natural links through the right promotion.

Pissing off the search engines or social media communities by using nefarious practices or trying to trick them isn’t on the agenda of most transparent SEO’s. Why? The majority of us have clients to think of and it’s simply not in their best interests. We’re out to impress our customers with tangible results, not damage their (and our) reputations by bringing in the wrong type of traffic etc. An ethical SEO isn’t out to game the system. We’re about helping search engines understand what content is about, improving the overall user experience and helping people get the information they need. How exactly does it benefit us by having our clients, or even our own sites, penalized or worse yet banned from the SE’s? Isn’t it apparent that if we actually did what we are being accused of we would be doing more damage than good?

SEO’s have a responsibility to inform.

I recently, well, “conversed”, with one of my haters over a page I submitted to stumbleupon. It was about how to gain a backlink from apple.com by creating an app. for their iphone. Among other things, his main argument was that my submission:

“Never actually focused on the application, or content, it just said write app, receive awesome backlink”.

Excuse me? My great lead on how to get a link from Apple.com was worthless spammy crap, because I didn’t go into details about *which* application you should write?

I won’t get in-depth (lest I get feisty again), but I defended the industry to the best of my ability and in the end he recanted his scathing public review and instead re-reviewed me as “engaging”. Although I considered it a small victory for SEO’s everywhere, this is the type of attitude I seem to be dealing with all the time now and there needs to be more emphasis on correcting the misinformation.

Some people have become so focused on proving what they think they know about the SEO industry that they’re completely missing out on any benefit it has to offer.

And in the long run, this attitude isn’t helping the online business owner either, unless they’re prepared to pass up FREE organic traffic in favor of expensive ad campaigns and advertising.

SEO’s must combat misinformation.

A person who truly understands the value of an SEO’s service is extremely rare and this makes our job harder than it should be. It’s frustrating having to first convince someone that a) SEO is real, b) you know your stuff and c) there’s actual benefit to them being listed for the products they sell or the service they offer.

This is the general misconception. That SEO isn’t needed. That it’s a scam. That you’ll do fine without it. Ranking is easy! Think so? Try hitting a competitive #1 spot without using some aspect of it (for something other than your domain name). Believe it or not folks, just because you have a pretty website all about jelly beans, does in NO way guarantee you a top 10 spot, in any search engine, for jelly bean related terms.

Defending the SEO industry’s bad reputation doesn’t exactly qualify as “good times” for any of us but it’s a battle we should all keep fighting. Especially if you’ve personally experienced, what really good SEO can do, for an online business.

Lastly, to all you SEO hater’s out there, why not focus your scathing blog posts, reviews and hate mail towards people in the industry who really *do* devalue the internet? I’ll do the same minus the scathing and hating of course.

And for Pete’s sake, please accept that there’s a big difference between ‘valuable marketing services’ and ‘nefarious, ethically challenged cheaters’.

Peace.

P.S. tee hee how *stoked* am I to be the first guest poster here like EVAR?!

Melanie Nathan is Director of SEO, SEM and SMM for Statusfirm, a Canada Internet video company. Follow her on twitter and plurk to learn more about her.

Advertisement: Efficiently manage your SEO and Social Media campaigns with Raven’s powerful suite of Internet Marketing Tools

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

SEO Haters: Misconceptions and Misinformation

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