Marketing and all things related

In my continuing efforts to point you in the direction of great online marketing resources, I thought that I'd point you to the site of GSINC, a UK-based SEO firm, that has put together a nice series of video tutorials on google and title tags.

The videos are a little more "nitty gritty" than you might be used to but I think they're a solid introduction to some more obscure topics. Also, I'd encourage you to think about how you could do something similar for your customers and community. 

Unique and valuable content is the best form of "link bait" and is a great tool for attracting traffic and new business.

Allow me to paraphrase and answer (ok, basically butcher) the old zen koan: 

If you have a website and no one visits it, it doesn't make a sound.

And it certainly doesn't help your brand, increase your customer list, or, gasp, make you any money. 

Traditional SEO is still a great tactic for driving traffic to your website and one of the mainstays of basic SEO is the importance of getting high-quality inbound links in any way you can (begging, borrowing, stealing, and buying being the most popular techniques).  

For those of you new to the game, TextLinkBrokers just released a Beginner's Guide to Buying Links that you might find useful.

There is no debating the fact that Google is the 800-lb. gorilla in the online search space. But as we all spend more time and money online, the race is on to build better personalized recommendation engines. Pandora, Amazon, Netflix, iLike, Findory and others are leading the charge to replace traditional search because of its flaws.

Traditional search doesn't necessarily turn up the best product or the right service. It turns up popular ones (based on inbound links, etc.) or those that have done well SEOing their website. Recommendation systems, on the other hand, help us find things that fit us.

As marketers, we must ask ourselves. If we had to rely solely on our customers recommending our product or service for marketing, how would our busines do? Would it flourish? Or suffer?  

Aaron Wall of SEO Book wrote recently about how the ROI of influencing people (social media, viral efforts, etc.) is becoming more effective than influencing machines (traditional SEO). His point is simply that as search engines become increasingly intelligent and effective at avoiding traditional SEO techniques you will get much lower return on your investment of time/energy/money in that area.

Instead, he proposes, one should participate in what he calls the "active web" of blogs, forums, tagging, social bookmarking, social networking, creating link bait and viral marketing. I think that Aaron might be on to something and so do others.

One of the leading thinkers around marketing with social capital or community marketing is Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency. You might enjoy checking out her "Pinko Marketing" manifesto or the related Pinko Marketing wiki.

A few days ago, I asked if you were a gamer, as in someone who "games the system."

Today, I ran across a detailed example of gaming a system, this time using social media. Niall Kennedy, a "syndication geek" from the Bay Area, wrote a great post entitled The Spam Farms of the Social Web.

In it, he examines how a certain website used digg, purchased links, del.icio.us, Newsvine, Reddit, and a Wordpress blog to drive lots of traffic towards its ads and affiliate links. It really is a brilliant piece of research and a blueprint for how to do it.

By the time you read the post, some of the services will probably have implemented changes to try and stop some of these abuses. But not all of them will because they can't. Eliminating everthing that this "gamer" did would cripple the services.

 

Like most quant jocks, I like online marketing because of how measurable it is. However, it just drives me crazy to know how much data there is out there that I can't see. Thus I love it when I run across a tool that pulls back the curtain on some of that hidden data.

SpyFu does just that on the "secrets" of pay per click (PPC) advertising (i.e. it shows costs, clicks, advertisers and traffic). It is the evolution of a similar service called Googspy and offers 20x as much data. The site is powered by an application called Velocityscape Web Scraper Plus+, which constantly extracts data from search engines, Alexa, Dmoz, and other sources.

SpyFu is incredibly useful for competitive research and I encourage you to head over and check it out. Before you go though I should warn you that it is pretty addictive. 

 

Okay, so this headline is not really true. But Britney Spears does appear nude on the cover of the August issue of Harper's Bazaar magazine. She is also featured nude on an inside photo spread. Yes, Britney is six months pregnant, but Demi Moore pulled the same stunt for Vanity Fair in 1991. Oh, and her hair is now black, but Britney fans must know that already. Now why would Marketing Blurb cover this story, you ask? Well, we want to prove a point about keywords and search engine optimization. We can make this gratuitous post about Britney Spears nude, and increase the number of visitors to our blog. This is not a so-called black hat SEO technique, because our post is simple, accurate, written by a live human, and not connected to a link farm for nude celebrities. Oh, and this Britney Spears nude keyword-rich entry on Marketing Blurb does not violate any search engine terms of service. Harper’s Bazaar will sell more August issues, certainly. Oh, and if you found this post and are puzzled—this is a marketing blog. We write about this stuff everyday. If you are a first time visitor, return, and bring your friends. Photo Credit: Reuters

Marketing Blurb already alerted readers that Google will likely enter the arena to sell television advertising. And it only makes sense, of course, that Google should prepare a television search engine. According to The Business Online, Google is prepping a TV-based interface that will allow users to search for broadcast and video entertainment--even beyond what is offered by about 500 existing television stations. Think of this as a programming guide on steroids. With a media PC or Xbox attached, TV viewers could search both the broadcast spectrum and the Internet for their video entertainment. Marketing Blurb does not want to stand in the way of progress. We will say, however, that you can search the Internet for television programming, and you can search the airways for television content. But in the end, there is not much worth watching.

Those of you who follow the financial news must know that Burger King completed the IPO, and traded today on the NYSE. And yes, despite the scary King, they actually closed up about a dollar. We are not a financial pundit; we just know that BK advertising is frightening. But we also know a monster burger when we see one.

In honor of BK’s stock exchange listing, we decided to visit their website. We didn’t look at the company information, because our attention was immediately drawn the Texas Double Whopper, a burger as big as your head.

Here is the picture reproduced full-size for their website. Even this image will feed a family of four. But crowns off to the King on their day in the headlines.

In the world of search engines, there is Google, and well, everyone else. Google commands almost 43% of all web searches, with Yahoo in second place at 28%. MSN is third, and Ask.com queries tally only about 6% of online searches. But things are looking up for Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves.) Walt Mossberg, the technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, recently praised Ask.com as a credible alternative to Google. And the number four search engine has decided to launch their own television advertising campaign. Commercials are scheduled to air on NBC's Today Show, Saturday Night Live, and Will and Grace. Yahoo tried television advertising a few years ago, but retired their campaign. Marketing Blurb wishes Ask.com well with this effort. Online Media Daily has more information.

As reported earlier by Marketing Blurb, companies are increasingly turning to online search to effectively reach certain challenging customer demographics like Gen Y. Ideally, this is a dual focused campaign consisting of search engine optimization (SEO) and keyword advertising, often called search engine marketing (SEM.) According to a study by SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, only 11% of search campaigns actually enable search engine optimization, while 83% of campaigns default exclusively to paid keyword advertising or search engine marketing.

The preference for SEM, while short-sighted, is easy to understand. SEM campaign results are easily measured by direct marketing metrics. SEO campaigns require companies to change the contents of their website, and to continue tweaking search engine friendly variables overtime. Ironically, SEO can produce superior results, as reported by Stoney deGeyter of Pole Position Marketing. Marketing Blurb agrees, and recommends a more balanced SEO/SEM approach, even at the expense of confusing traditional offline marketing executives.

Oops! In a poorly executed stunt maneuver, automaker BMW crashed on Google. According to Adverblog (who in turn is quoting several search marketing pundits) BMW has been banished to the lowest ranks of Google results for deliberating trying to manipulate and artificially boost their ranking in Google search results. BMW was using so-called doorway pages. Doorway pages are invisible to people, but crafted to fool search engine spiders regarding the relevancy of keywords and other ranking variables. Using doorway pages is specifically prohibited by Google Terms of Service. Marketing Blurb says shame! There are countless legitimate ways to optimize websites to improve search engine results.

Search marketing is turning the advertising industry upside down. While still a small portion of overall ad spending, the rate of increase is gaining dramatically every year. And as you might expect, search marketing is ideal for e-commerce. In fact, according to a recent study by analytics company WebSideStory, search engines have more than twice the e-commerce conversion rate of other traffic acquisition sources which include banner ads, affiliate marketing links, shopping search engines and other referring links. “During the last three months of 2005, the search engine conversion rate at business-to-consumer e-commerce Web sites was 2.30 percent, more than twice the conversion rate of other acquisition sources at 0.96 percent.”  Only direct navigation or bookmarks has a higher conversion rate—4.23% by the study. You can learn more from The Direct Marketing Association.

Marketing Blurb loves teenagers because they are unpredictable, and they drive marketers crazy. Oh, and we love the clothes they wear. And it turns out that teens are increasingly searching online to find the latest fashion trends and rags to buy. According to a recent survey of 15 to 19 year olds conducted by Yahoo, teens consider search on par with fashion magazine to identify trends, brands, and specific products. “Overall, 50% reported using search to find clothing, accessories, shoes and jewelry, saying they turn to search more than television ads and fashion web sites when researching such products.” Since most teens lack credit cards, however, they purchase the clothing they find online at retail.  The study suggests that fashion retail merchants need to direct teen branding and advertising online. Internet Retailing has more information from the study. Marketing Blurb says “do we look way cool, or what?”

Have I got a deal for you. You know that keyword marketing is booming. In fact, savvy marketers in all industries are increasing their budget for SEM, search engine marketing or paid keywords. But all keywords are not equal, naturally. Back in December of 2004, when real estate was still sizzling, if you wanted hot keywords associated with mortgage advertising, the average rate was about $ 4.79. But according to Fathom Online, a keyword tracking association, mortgage keywords dropped 31%to $ 3.30 by December 2005. In fact, the average rate for keywords overall dropped 16% from $ 1.70 to $ 1.43 from December 2004 to 2005. Marketing Blurb and others believe this is good news, because despite dropping prices for individual keywords, the SEM industry is booming overall. As always, the secret is simple—just own the hot keywords your prospects are using to find information online. Expect $ 14 billion worldwide spending on keyword advertising in 2006. Oh, and if you wanna mortgage on this condo in Fort Myers, have I got a deal for you.

Housewives are desperate. They are desperate to find information about your product. They are not watching your television commercials—they are searching for information online. If you want to reach these women, you need a paid search marketing program. According to a report from Piper Jaffray, as reported by ClickZ, the paid search industry is expected to grow 41% in 2006, generating about $ 14 billion globally. (Much of this ad spending will go to Google, which by some projections will increase net revenues almost 60% this year.)

Paid search offers significant advantages over television advertising including more precise context, targeting, and results tracking. Paid search is also an active pursuit rather than a passive interruption. Some marketing pundits are even claiming the 30 second television spot is dead. This is clearly not so. It is only television viewers who lack a pulse.