Make Money Online

According to their own statistics, Facebook currently has more than 400 million active users. Of those users, more than 20 million become fans of Facebook pages every single day. It’s already been happening with Twitter, and now, Google is indexing Facebook Fan pages and displaying them in their search results.

We experimented with this a little bit today to find out whether or not this is already impacting Google search results. In order to come up with a result that all of us here recognized as a Facebook page and we know to be a very popular one, we did a Google search for “can this pickle get more fans than nickelback”. At the time we did our search, the actual Facebook fan page did not show up until the third page of results. Still, it’s better than not being there at all, as before, but I had expected for it to come up a little sooner, which sparked a discussion here on how Google is assigning authority to Facebook Fan pages.

Will you get more authority in Google if you have more fans, or is it just going to be based strictly on the requirements that Google has been using all along?

Either way, at some point I realized that on the Facebook Fan page they had actually changed the spelling of Nickelback to Nickleback to avoid any legal issues, so another search of “can this pickle get more fans than nickleback” moved the Facebook Fan page result up to page two of the results, given that it’s two letters more relevant. Pretty good, or at least, better.

Update: As of Friday morning, each of these search results put the Facebook fan page at number two on the list of results.

But it still didn’t satisfy my own curiosity of how Google would be assigning authority, or giving PageRank to a Facebook page. There has to be a little something else in the Google algorithm that is going to decide whether or not it’s going to be featured as a top result. So, I did a Google search for “how will google assign authority facebook pages”. Incredibly, the first result was actually a Facebook Note that was written by a person with a Facebook Fan page for their business. Well, that worked out well for them, didn’t it? However, I still don’t have an answer to my question.

So, what does it mean for those of us working in affiliate marketing world? It means one more opportunity for brand recognition, another opportunity to build links back to your own site and yet one more opportunity for people to find your page when they’re searching for content relevant to the goods or services that you provide.

Now, what I want to know is, when will I be able to check how many visitors I am getting to my Facebook page? Is Facebook ever going to provide us with some kind of analytics program?

What do you think of this latest addition to the Google algorithm, and how is Google indexing Facebook Fan pages affecting your business? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Google Indexing Facebook Fan Pages

Is your favorite search engine a “tell” to what your shopping habits and brand preferences are? According to a recent study by a collective of marketing agencies, Wunderman, BrandAsset Consulting, Zaaz, and Compete, what you type into your browser’s address bar says a whole lot about you and your personal habits.

As a Microsoft agency partner, Wunderman’s research has a definite preferential tone. Regardless it provides interesting observations toward users personal habits. The study also broke down certain market verticals, like travel (shown below), separating the users into three types: visitors, shoppers, converters.

Based on that data Wunderman compiled the following assumptions can be made about the users of these different search engines when it comes to automotive, travel, retail, and wireless:

• Google: users tend to gravitate to Target and Amazon for shopping. Other characteristics included leading conversion for services like Hotwire, a preference for JetBlue, and a propensity towards a Lexus. Oddly enough, Google users were described in the study as the average Internet Joe – conventional but open to new ideas.
• Yahoo!: users were described as older, and lacking in imagination, with a strong preference for Sprint and AT&T over Verizon and T-Mobile. They were also considered to be skeptical and cautious of new or untried ideas.
• Bing: users were called the early adopters of technology and innovators. They were more likely to shop at Wal-Mart and Toyota was their automobile of choice. The report also described them as middle-aged, highly educated, tech-savvy individuals who considered themselves to be average and spent more than 10 hours a week online.
• AOL: users felt less intellectual than their peers, are often 55 and or older, spend their money more conservatively, want to blend in with the crowd, feel like they’ve gotten a raw deal out of life, expect less from their future, and still use a dial-up modem.

So what does this mean for marketers? David Sable, vice chairman and COO of Wunderman explained it by stating that, “Search begins with the choice of search engine. What this means if you are managing a brand is this: you need to know how consumers relate to Bing, Yahoo! or Google and how that reflects on you.”

To me, it’s no surprise that Wunderman would hold Bing users in such high esteem. Calling them the early adopters and most tech-savvy of the group lends to their audience being perceived as fearless when it comes to Internet shopping. Sans the finding that Google users tend to prefer Amazon, the other three search engines were made to look like their users are hesitant to make online purchases. Adjectives like conventional (brick and mortar), skeptical and cautious (afraid), responsible spenders (bargain shopping) plant the seeds of doubt when it comes to marketing through these channels.

I agree wholeheartedly with Sable’s comments, and I would like to think that the study holds some merit, however I can’t help but feel it would be more effective had it not involved a firm influenced by any of the search engines involved.

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Search Engine Preference Lets Wunderman See Users Hand

In yesterday’s blog post, we delved into brand bidding, as it relates to merchants. Today, we are re-examining brand bidding from the affiliate’s perspective, with at look at some trends, consequences and some good old fashion advice.

Brand bidding is when an affiliate targets specific keywords associated with a brand, as opposed to a generic word, such as a noun or adjective that describes the product. Usually when brand bidding, an affiliate is bidding on a trademarked name, and is often therefore “competing” directly with the merchant.

Every merchant will have different policies when it comes to brand bidding, so it makes for good practice to check out a merchant’s Terms & Conditions as you join a program. If you’re not sure, or the policy seems unclear, reach out to the affiliate manager to seek clarification. Going ahead with brand bidding without permission could lead to a myriad of negative outcomes, including having your sales declined, missing out on a performance bonus, being out-of-pocket for your PPC investment and even being kicked out of a program completely.

Many merchants may not allow bidding on their brand name, but may allow bidding on misspellings or variations of their brand name. Either way, affiliates should consider the cost of brand bidding. With other affiliates bidding on these keywords, as well as merchants, the costs can be high, and depending on what an affiliate has in mind in terms of ROI, may well be out of their spending budget.

That being said, it’s not just about how many people are bidding on a keyword that will determine your PPC price. Relevancy and quality content are equally important here, and may in fact play a more critical role in determining your bid price. As a general guideline, the better your landing page, the lower your bid price, so keep this in mind when investing in PPC.

For affiliates, it really is paramount to be in line with a merchant’s rules and regulations, especially concerning their brand name. It’s in your best interest to create long-lasting relationships with merchants that are based on loyalty and trust. The benefits of creating this kind of positive relationship are numerous, and may indeed lead to exclusive promotions, co-branded marketing tools and even the exclusive use of keywords.

Originally posted here:
Brand Bidding: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly Part II

If brand bidding will be part of your upcoming PPC campaigns, there are some definite pros and cons worth highlighting, and important considerations to keep in mind for merchants and affiliates alike.

Brand bidding is when an affiliate targets specific keywords associated with a brand, as opposed to a generic word, such as a noun or adjective that describes the product.  Usually when brand bidding, an affiliate is bidding on a trademarked name, and is often therefore “competing” directly with the merchant.

Today’s blog will look at brand bidding from the merchant’s perspective, and tomorrow we will examine this somewhat controversial subject from the affiliate’s standpoint.

Considerations for Merchants
Our first recommendation, and perhaps one of the most important things to say, is that no matter how you feel about brand bidding, it’s definitely something that needs to be clearly indicated in your Terms & Conditions.  Affiliates will be looking for this information, and you need to make your policy very clear.   To ensure there is no confusion, it’s a good idea to create a list of specific keywords that are off limits to affiliates, as well as a list of words that are allowed.

Pros
If you’re new to the online platform or don’t have your own PPC marketing strategy in place, then allowing affiliates to market your brand name online can be an effective way for you to build your brand awareness.

Say, on the other hand, that you have an established online business, and you invest in your own PPC campaigns—are there still benefits to allowing brand bidding?  Many people feel that allowing brand bidding contributes to increased visibility on a more consistent basis, and that this strategy can only help your business’ bottom line.  You may also choose to allow affiliates to use your brand name, limiting their usage to markets or search engines where you are not active.

Cons
Once you allow brand bidding, quality assurance does become a bit of a concern.  Affiliates could bid on your brand name to promote a competing brand, or use this keyword to send visitors to a rinky-dink site or to a site that also promotes other brands—that you may or may not want to be associated with.

For merchants who sell items that might also be sold by non-trademark owners (like the knock-offs you find on the streets of New York), allowing brand bidding may actually contribute to promoting your competitor’s fraudulent brand.  Major apparel, luxury, jewelry, fragrance, and other well-known and sought after brands are the hardest-hit by trademark infringement.

Misconceptions
Some people mistakenly believe that allowing brand bidding will drive up your bid price because more people are bidding on your keyword.  While this is true to a degree, the truth is that having relevant, high-quality content landing page and a high quality score will give you access to cheaper keywords, and is a more important consideration for search engines like Google.  Relevancy and high-quality content will, therefore, more strongly contribute to the price you will pay for a keyword, than having a competitor bidding on the same keyword.

Allow High-performing Affiliates to Brand Bid
On a final note, you might consider using the Share Results affiliate marketing software to segment your affiliates and assign different rights to different groups.  This is a great way of allowing your high-performing affiliates to take part in brand bidding, ensuring your brand name is always associated with high-quality affiliates. 

Check back tomorrow for more on brand bidding for affiliates!

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Brand Bidding for Merchants: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

We all know that Google makes a lot of money from ads, but it’s not very often that Google spends a lot of money on ads. The Web powerhouse has been chugging along for years on market dominance and word-of-mouth, but that changed on Sunday night.

During the third quarter of the Super Bowl, Google dove into the world’s biggest ad showcase. While the ad has had its critics (BNet rips it here), some sites ranked it as one of the best ads of the night (like Entertainment Weekly).

But whether or not you liked the aesthetics, approach or politics of Google’s ad, the bottom line was that the search giant got in front of the largest audience in television history to show what it thought was important.

Microsoft upped the ante when Bing launched, putting on an $80 million ad campaign in their attempt to pull casual users from Google . By comparison, Google spent only $5 million, according to the Guardian, on Sunday’s Super Bowl ad.

The ad mattered because of what it told the public about what mattered to Google and because of what it featured. One of those things was YouTube.  Google  featured the ad as part of a series of promotional  online videos for three months prior to game time, essentially crowdsourcing  the ad. Crowdsourcing was exactly the kind of stunt Google would pull that Microsoft would never do, preferring to rely on ad agency think.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Super Bowl placement also signaled a significant change in tactics, as Danny Sullivan, Editor of SearchEngineLand, said, “This pretty much confirms that Google is absolutely feeling the pressure from Bing. The company has never, ever seriously advertised its core search offerings before in this manner.”

Or summed up succinctly by Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt’s tweet, “Hell has indeed frozen over.”

Instead of generic series of Google searches, this ad was a glimpse at features that casual users of the site might not know about.

• The ad stressed maps and business listings: This is a place where Google is making a big move, crafting what looks to be the world’s biggest business directory, with exterior maps (and rumored interior maps of stores), aggregated along with reviews.
• The ad stressed translation: One-click translation of foreign sites is another tool Google is attempting to leverage against a global audience it’s still looking to penetrate. Google is still looking at footholds in the emerging markets, so English-to-another language is as powerful, if not more so than another language-to-English.
• Finally, the ad stressed shortcuts. Google is emphasizing speed to search answers and tools that will be displayed on the top of search pages, so airline flight status and dictionary definitions are great examples of that.

Google is such a big part of everyone’s Web experience that it’s impressive to see them go from passive to active in their marketing. Doing it on such a large stage will have an impact and resonate with their users.

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Earlier this blog series, we discussed effective text and image creatives and how to use them to most efficiently promote products and services. In this post we’re going to look at monitoring the efficiency of your campaigns and some strategies for going about it.

At Share Results, we believe strongly that relationships are the basis for effective affiliate marketing programs. Strong bonds between affiliates and merchants are the foundation for any effective affiliate marketing program. With this in mind, we’ve created an affiliate marketing software solutionthat not only enhances transparency between the two entities, but also allows them to work together closely by using in-depth tracking and reporting features that monitor how well your creatives are performing.

In order for affiliates to be successful, the merchants whose products they are promoting must provide effective creatives to their affiliates. Knowing which creatives are going to be most successful requires some information:

1. The number of impressions must be tracked. How many viewers saw the page where this ad was located? Knowing how your traffic got there, and who they are is also a big part of this equation. It’s very important to understand who your visitors are. Did they get there via a search engine result, or were they recommended by someone else’s site? These differences should play a part in directing your campaigns.
2. Then, the click through rate must be examined. How many people who saw the ad clicked on it and went to the landing page (the page where the item can be purchased?
3. And lastly, the conversion rate: how many people who clicked through to the landing page actually made purchases?

If an ad is getting a high volume of impressions, but very few clicks, then there are several questions that you can ask. It could be that the ad’s placement on the page needs to be adjusted.  And it could be that the ad itself, be it a text or image creative, needs to be reworked.

Ask Yourself

Are you reaching the consumers you want to reach? Is this the right page for this ad? Does that ad have a strong call to action?

Use rotating ads with different images and text to test these until you find the one that works best.

If your ads are attaining a decent amount of clicks per impressions, but visitors are not converting into sales, then it is up to the merchant to look at the efficacy of the landing page. Also, it could be that the creative is misleading in some way, or has not effectively targeted the individuals who are most likely to convert into a sale upon arrival at the purchase page. There are many variables, so it is worth trying many different tactics to reach potential purchasers, and follow the results closely.

Merchants have the ability to see which affiliates are sending traffic to these landing pages, plus their URL, by using the ACID report in Share Results. With this information, they can discover the top performers and what kind of website works best for their product or service.

A great way to achieve success in this area is to constantly be testing and refining your campaigns as well as the creatives you are using to run them. Using a software system that can track all of this information for you will put you miles ahead of your competitors who may not be armed with the same information that you have at your fingertips. Merchants and affiliates must work together to ensure the success of affiliate marketing programs and the reports available in the Share Results software solution help them to do exactly that.

Once again—and there is no way we can stress this enough—always be testing your creatives.

A better understanding of how your creatives are performing = the ability to tailor campaigns based on top performing creatives = the ability to make more money from your affiliate marketing campaigns.

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Image creatives are often known as banner ads. These were very popular in the early days of online marketing, but at some point began to be slightly less effective. With recent innovations in design and technological advances, image creatives are once again becoming a very effective tool in an affiliate marketer’s toolbox. Indeed, banner ads are everywhere on the Internet and it’s likely that anyone surfing the Net on a given day will come across several.

Banner ads come in all sizes and flavors. From small square ads to rectangular banners that take up almost the entire length of a page and everything in between. There are no real rules or specifications as to what makes a successful image creative, but what is clear is that with so many being shown to surfers on a daily basis, one must find a way to stand out from the others.

The point of an image creative is simple: it is designed to entice someone to click on it, taking them to a landing page that should eventually lead to a sale. Why will a person click on a banner ad? Simplicity reigns here again. They will click because they have been offered a good or service that they are interested in obtaining. So how does one go about creating an ad that does this?

You must get their attention.

You ads must stand out on a page. As already mentioned, with so many banner ads out there, standing out in the crowd can sometimes be difficult, but there are a couple of ways to grab the attention of your potential customers. The answers aren’t all that much different than create great print ads, but with the Internet, there are more possibilities.

That said, an ad should not be distracting, nor should it intrude upon the page that it is on.

Images should have something to do with the product you’re promoting. A great way to get those images to stand out is by using animation.  Animate, however, with caution. Even though big, blinking ads that scream at you will command attention, these are often ignored. Also, people often associate this type of ad with scam sites, so keep your animations engaging, but simple.

When using images, use ones that convey the message you want to send to potential customers. If the product is a vacation, an image of a couple relaxing on a beach sends a positive message to the viewer that indicates what they’re going to be getting out of this product or service. Show them the benefits.  And let your images be of top quality. The quality of the ad will be associated with the product you are marketing, so be sure to adjust accordingly.

In addition, these banners must load quickly. Slow loading banner ads may miss their chance to reach the audience you are trying to attract. Work with designers who know how to make ads that will appear on the page quickly, and in the time necessary to reach your audience. This is important as image quality is inversely proportional to load times, so finding a good image optimization technique will help you to find the middle ground between those two issues.

And once you’ve got their attention, image creatives must tie in what we learned about yesterday: the text that accompanies the image must be clear and concise, with a strong call to action.

Again, and we can never stress this enough, the way to find out which image creatives are going to work the best is by testing, testing and retesting. Keep abreast of the statistics of how your creatives are performing, and rotate your banners to test several at once. Never limit yourself to just one creative.

Affiliates and merchants must work together to create effective ads. The most important part of this equation is to understand the efficacy of these ads, and it’s through tracking the results that this information will be gleaned. In the next part of our series, we’ll look at how to use Share Results’ affiliate marketing software to track your ad campaigns, be they text or image creatives. Come back next week for more!

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What are Text Creatives?

A text creative is any text that you’ve written in order to entice consumers to click through to a landing page where purchasing takes place. You’ll see these used in pay-per-click (PPC) ads, on web pages and in promotional emails. And even if you’re dealing with image creatives, they all have text as well. Whether your text is just a few words, or quite a few, the important part is that it serves to generate an interest in the product you are promoting.

AIDA and CTA

AIDA is my favorite acronym. It stands for:

• Attention
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

What this means for a text creative is that it must first serve to catch the attention of a reader, then generate their interest. Once their interest is piqued, it must create a desire in the specific good or service, and then call the reader to action.

The call to action (CTA) should tell the consumer why they should be clicking on this ad.  For example, “click here” isn’t going to give the reader enough incentive to click. Using stronger language, such as, “Click here to save money” gives the reader the incentive necessary to take action.

Your text should always give the reader the most important information on what you’re selling them. Think of your text creatives like newspaper headlines. They should convey exactly what the reader should know about your product, promotion or service. With just a few words to convince someone to take action, it’s important to give the reader the information they need to know, with a strong call to action that will convince them to click through to the purchase page.

Be Specific, Don’t Mislead

Let your reader know exactly where they’re going. Again, text like “click here” isn’t telling them anything about what they’re going to find. “Click here to find out about schools in your area” is precise and succinct. Strive for accuracy in every single line of your text creatives, be they for PPC, email, or as accompaniments to images.

It can be tempting to offer more than what is actually being offered in text creatives. Doing so will only serve to diminish the effect of the initial incentive. If you tell someone they can get the deal of a lifetime, but are only selling goods and services at regular prices, it’s highly unlikely that they’re going to be convinced to actually convert into a sale.  And chances are if they see one of your ads again in the future, they will have no trust in you, or the product you are selling.  Hence, misleading someone can result in the permanent loss of a consumer.

Keywords

Whether you’re relying on PPC or natural search results, adding keywords that apply to the landing page you are sending consumers to will increase your chances of ranking higher in search engines, and give your readers more information on what is being offered.

Price and Promotions

Every consumer has one question: “How much?” Answering that question right off the bat, especially if you are dealing with a sale or a promotion helps the reader to distinguish what makes your deal special from the others. “Vacations from $450 all inclusive,” “Shoes starting at $15/pair.” This gives an opportunity for you to shine right off the bat.

Make sure that your text is not overselling the product on offer. Create a realistic impression of what the person who clicks on the ad is going to find when they get to the landing page. In the same way that a car salesman has one chance to create a good impression, so too must online marketers ensure that the creatives they use are serving not to repel, but to attract customers and gain their trust.

The most important thing is to test your creatives to see how they’re working. Stick with the winners and rework those that are not working as well until you find the winning formula. Remember that you must always be tracking your ads to see how they’re performing.

In the next segment in our series on creatives, we’ll look at image creatives, and how to best make use of them. And in the last part of the series, we’ll talk more about campaign tracking. Come back tomorrow for another installation.

Excerpted from:

Google is thinking small as it continues to grow. The search giant is focusing on mobile in 2010, according to CEO Eric Schmidt, who spoke during a conference call (full audio transcript) on the announcement of Google’s Q4 earnings.

Before he got into the nitty-gritty of this year’s outlook, Google announced that revenue was up 17 percent in Q4 2009 ($6.7 billion) and up $23.65 billion for all of 2009 (for a net income of $6.5 billion).

Where does Google go from here? Right in our pockets, it appears. The release of the Nexus Phone made a splash, but Google is concentrating on the red meat of advertising and search to really make its mark in 2010, especially on mobile devices.

In 2009, Google saw mobile search increase 5 fold. The advertising that goes along with mobile search is even more specialized for customers. According to Senior Vice President of Project Management for Google, Jonathan Rosenberg:

“The new formats, the targeting tools and the reporting we are giving to advertisers (are) making a difference. Click to call, letting advertisers target specific high-end devices or carriers (we are) seeing improved monetization across mobile.”

This goes along with the trend Google has shown in strengthening its geo-specific local search results and the goal of getting answers to search result question to the user quicker. The feature is especially appealing to marketers as more consumers are using their phones to research the pricing on a possible item before buying.

Beyond mobile, Google is banking on a boom in its revenue from display advertising, which goes beyond the AdWords/AdSense model to more enriched advertising content.

Said Schmidt: “We have said is that our next huge business is display. If I were to talk about absolute numbers that would be No. 1. But smaller ones (revenue growth opportunities are) growing faster. No. 1 there is mobile. We have a lot of evidence that people are moving towards data-friendly mobile devices quite quickly. 2010 will be a year of significant mobile revenue growth.”

Display advertising is growing market for Google as the integration of DoubleClick, which was acquired in 2007, has finally been completed. Coupled with DoubleClick’s vast inventory the type of  reporting Google Analytics is able to provide is very appealing to marketers. Especially when combined with interactive, call-to-action display ads (ie, click here to do this, go to our web site or become a part of our social network), there is a lot of area for expansion for Google. Google has already rolled out more ad templates to make it easier for small businesses to get into the game and is eager to have video powered display ads as well through YouTube which is the de facto leader in the space.

So it looks like the new ecosystem Google is building for 2010 and beyond will focus on display ads powering the revenue picture in a what that AdWords has done since Google’s beginning, along with a more local-oriented, geo-savvy search on mobile, with faster and better answers and targeted advertising that gets as specific as the device being used as the search.

It’s a plan that can fit in the palm of your hand, but one that Google is banking on for this year and the years ahead.

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Google Q4 Earnings Point To Changes in its Marketing Focus

You may, from time to time see us refer to “creatives” on this blog. Enough people have asked us, “What are creatives?” that we have decided to launch a four-part series on what creatives are and how you can use them to help you build your business.

When we refer to a creative, we are talking about any advertising method by which you attempt to reach consumers. For example, the text in a PPC ad can be considered a creative, as could a Flash banner advertisement. Some creatives – mostly image creatives – are available directly from merchants, while others will be created by affiliates, or even a third party.

Essentially, anything that you do to market goods and services that requires imagination, artistry, innovation, and inspiration is a creative.  Everybody uses creatives in different ways, but they all fall into two basic categories: text and images.

In the first part of our series, we’ll look at text creatives and how they can help you reach your audience. We’ll talk about the importance of powerful PPC ads, and solid, relevant copywriting. We’ll also explore how SEO fits into the big picture, and how it can be used within your text creatives to reach your target audience.

In the next part, we’ll look at image creatives. We’ll explore what makes a successful image creative, where to place them on your website to get the best results, and some things to avoid.

And in the final part of the series, we’ll take a good, hard look at the value of monitoring your creatives and how tracking them can help improve your business. We’ll investigate how to use the Share Results software to help you get more information on what creatives are working for you, and how you can enhance your strategies in order to improve your conversion rates.

Come back tomorrow to read all about text creatives, and how to use them effectively. And be sure to get in on the conversation by leaving a comment or by sending us an email to let us know if you have any further questions.

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Join Jay Berkowitz, Author of “The Ten Golden Rules of Online Marketing,” where he will explain how to use Social Media in combination with Search Engine Marketing to drive traffic to your website or your personal social media locations.

Also, learn how to use Crowd Sourcing, People Search, Search Results from Social, Social Media Transcriptions, Link Bait and ‘Follow’ Link Sites for your benefit.

This free webinar will take place on Wednesday, February 3, 2010 12:30pmEST – 1:30pmEST. To register please visit: 10 Strategies for Social Media SEM

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InternetMarketingClub.org Presents 10 Strategies For Social Media Search Engine Marketing

It’s interesting what the words SEO is dead can do. Such a simple statement causes armies to rise up on both sides ready to do verbal battle on their blogs and forums. But is SEO really dead? A simple search for this phrase turns up close to 8 million results. I think that alone answers the question.

While I can’t agree more with VP of Business Development for Lijit Networks and Chief Evangelist for Graphic.ly Micah Baldwin’s statement that SEO is something that needs to be done in-house as a shared responsibility, not outsourced to the consultants who sell snake oil promises of top three rankings in Google; practicality tells me that optimization is not something that can be ignored. Especially in today’s online landscape.

8 Million Results

Eight million results returned for the phrase “SEO is dead” shows us that the web is over-saturated at this point. Your site may have the most well-written content, a great collection of images, and plenty of useful links but if you are ranking anywhere below the top ten, there’s a good chance that nobody is going to ever see it.

In order to get our content in front of our targeted audience, something has to be done to give it the page ranking it deserves. For a while, tricking the search engines through blackhat techniques was the way many SEO experts were able to accomplish this. Of course, once the engineers who build the search engines started to look into ways to prevent these tactics, “traditional” SEO started losing ground to more honest optimization techniques.

Social Media

Some in the camp that advocates SEO has been buried, point out that social media is one of the conspirators who dealt one of the deadly blows. Baldwin gives a great example of this in his blog, Learning to Duck by stating, “The content generated by users of social media began to rank highly in search engines, because it was RELEVANT. Because it had VALUE. Because it was TIMELY. Because it was REAL.”

People want to hear what others have to say much more than they want to read a relevant keyword over and over again in the first 100 words. Add to the mix the fact that social media fuels the viral fire and you have a formula for success.

Technical SEO

A particular movement in SEO has been to drop the keyword stuffing and the irrelevant content and move towards Semantic HTML.  Semantic HTML moves the developer towards a set of standards in the design of the website to make it easier for spiders to crawl the site and find the relevant content. Adding alt tags to images, using proper tags and page structure, and getting rid of tables not only makes the site easier to crawl, but makes it helps the site comply with the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative that works towards making websites accessible to the disabled.

Is that really SEO?

Listen to some of the big names in SEO and they will cringe at the thought that SEO is limited to tricks like keyword stuffing and meta tags. They may be 100 percent correct, but do a search for SEO techniques and see what you get in return. Out of the 17,500,000 sites, how many of them actually go through the true SEO techniques that the few true professionals advocate? Most of what you will get is a self-proclaimed “expert” selling his latest e-book that instructs you to write relevant content dense with keywords in the first paragraph.

So answer the question

So is SEO dead? Not hardly. If we apply Moore’s Law to the web, we can see that the number of sites has approximately doubled every two years from 23,148 in 1996 to over 162 million in 2008. With that much competition for the coveted top ten results, developers face a rough road when optimizing their sites.

SEO is evolving as it adapts to technologies like Wiki engines, blogs, Facebook, and Flash. At the same time, it is coming full-circle by getting back to the roots of what the web really is. By throwing away all of the methods used to trick the search engines and is focusing on providing useful, human-friendly content, true SEO will be alive and kicking for Web x.0.

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In a recent post I commented on how I believe that Kapersky Labs is wrong when they claim that the amount of fake anti-virus software will decline in the upcoming year. Malicious hackers show no signs of leaving behind the BlackHat SEO techniques that made them rich over the past few years.

Riding the news story of Brittany Murphy’s untimely death just weeks ago, attackers immediately began crafting rogue websites that contain malicious scripts used to trick the visitor into believing that their computer is infected with dangerous malware. This tactic, known as Scareware, frightens the visitor into purchasing anti-virus software or other malware removal tools from the attacker. Of course, this anti-virus solution is bogus and at times the credit card used to purchase the software is often stolen by the attacker as well.

Search Poisoning
To successfully implement this attack, the malicious hacker needs to first draw visitors to their illegitimate site. Using a BlackHat SEO technique known as Search Poisoning, the attacker’s site is pushed to the top of the search engine page rankings. According to Websense, a search for “Brittany Murphy death” returned several malicious links within the top ten results as a result of this technique.

To achieve such a high page ranking, attackers make use of comment spam from legitimate sites such as blogs, comment spam on forum posts and other tricks like back linking. To further enhance their results, many scrape the latest content from legitimate news sources hiking their ranking and fooling visitors into trusting them as a news provider.

Don’t Become a Victim
In mid-December, the Federal Bureau of Investigations addressed this problem by putting out a press release describing how this attack works and what people should do if they encounter scareware, or malvertising as the FBI calls it.

·    Run legitimate anti-virus software on your computer
·    Keep virus definitions and/or signature files up to date
·    Only install software from trusted sources
·    Do not give your personal or financial information to anyone without knowing exactly who it is
·    Report scareware sites to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)

How it Hurts
Of course, search poisoning hurts by pushing legitimate sites down further in the page rankings. Organizations who work hard at producing quality content are hardly noticeable when their keywords become the target of this technique. In the long run, search poisoning and other BlackHat SEO techniques are going to continue to damage the trust people have in smaller online publishers. While Mashable, TechCrunch, Huffington Post and the other giants may not see much more than a dent in their level of trust among readers, new blogs and websites may find that in addition to fighting for traffic, they will be fighting for legitimacy among visitors.

With the upcoming Olympic Games and another year of sensationalized news stories around the corner, we can only assume that these attacks will escalate, especially when the FBI claims that over 150 million dollars have been spent on bogus anti-virus software. To that end, we can also expect the search engines to look at ways to prevent attackers from working their way to the top of the rankings. With increased scrutiny from both visitors and search engines, publishers need to make sure that the SEO campaigns they employ are both legitimate and ethical. Skirting the boundaries of BlackHat techniques could wind up backfiring once the algorithms and visitors begin to look twice at sites that spam for traffic.

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In a recent post I commented on how I believe that Kapersky Labs is wrong when they claim that the amount of fake anti-virus software will decline in the upcoming year. Malicious hackers show no signs of leaving behind the BlackHat SEO techniques that made them rich over the past few years.

Riding the news story of Brittany Murphy’s untimely death just weeks ago, attackers immediately began crafting rogue websites that contain malicious scripts used to trick the visitor into believing that their computer is infected with dangerous malware. This tactic, known as Scareware, frightens the visitor into purchasing anti-virus software or other malware removal tools from the attacker. Of course, this anti-virus solution is bogus and at times the credit card used to purchase the software is often stolen by the attacker as well.

Search Poisoning
To successfully implement this attack, the malicious hacker needs to first draw visitors to their illegitimate site. Using a BlackHat SEO technique known as Search Poisoning, the attacker’s site is pushed to the top of the search engine page rankings. According to Websense, a search for “Brittany Murphy death” returned several malicious links within the top ten results as a result of this technique.

To achieve such a high page ranking, attackers make use of comment spam from legitimate sites such as blogs, comment spam on forum posts and other tricks like back linking. To further enhance their results, many scrape the latest content from legitimate news sources hiking their ranking and fooling visitors into trusting them as a news provider.

Don’t Become a Victim
In mid-December, the Federal Bureau of Investigations addressed this problem by putting out a press release describing how this attack works and what people should do if they encounter scareware, or malvertising as the FBI calls it.

·    Run legitimate anti-virus software on your computer
·    Keep virus definitions and/or signature files up to date
·    Only install software from trusted sources
·    Do not give your personal or financial information to anyone without knowing exactly who it is
·    Report scareware sites to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)

How it Hurts
Of course, search poisoning hurts by pushing legitimate sites down further in the page rankings. Organizations who work hard at producing quality content are hardly noticeable when their keywords become the target of this technique. In the long run, search poisoning and other BlackHat SEO techniques are going to continue to damage the trust people have in smaller online publishers. While Mashable, TechCrunch, Huffington Post and the other giants may not see much more than a dent in their level of trust among readers, new blogs and websites may find that in addition to fighting for traffic, they will be fighting for legitimacy among visitors.

With the upcoming Olympic Games and another year of sensationalized news stories around the corner, we can only assume that these attacks will escalate, especially when the FBI claims that over 150 million dollars have been spent on bogus anti-virus software. To that end, we can also expect the search engines to look at ways to prevent attackers from working their way to the top of the rankings. With increased scrutiny from both visitors and search engines, publishers need to make sure that the SEO campaigns they employ are both legitimate and ethical. Skirting the boundaries of BlackHat techniques could wind up backfiring once the algorithms and visitors begin to look twice at sites that spam for traffic.

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As the New Year approaches, you might be reflecting on how you spent your marketing budget in 2009, and what you might change in 2010. Chances are you’ve spent some of it with Google Adwords, and maybe even Yahoo! Search Marketing and/or Microsoft AdCenter. After all, search marking is a critical first step of online ad buys. But with only  5% of pages views on the web come from search, there is likely some room to get a better ROI by diversifying your online ad strategy.

There are three incentives for running campaigns on a variety of networks:

• First, you can reach new audiences, which means better targeting.
• Second, running on many networks can offer lower costs-per-conversion because campaigns can be targeted on more of a niche-basis.
• Finally, you can get more out of each ad dollar spent because running campaigns cross several networks lets you determine which messages perform best with which audience. This allows you to optimize your campaigns on a network-by-network basis.

In a nutshell, advertisers should  look at  other ways of approaching ad buys in 2010: via social media and niche-based networks. Depending on your business model, either one (or both) of these approaches can represent a wealth of untapped traffic and new customers.

5 Social Media Ad Networks

The real value social networks offer advertisers is the ability to precisely target ads. You see, when users use social networks, they provide a wealth of data about themselves — their interests, demographics, etc. As an advertiser, you can tap into this data to set-up campaigns and target users in a variety of ways. Here’s an overview of five of the more well-known social media ad networks; each offers dynamic ways to buy advertising and acquire potential customers.

Facebook Ads: By advertising through Facebook Ads, you can target users with a variety of criteria, including age, location, gender, and education, as well as with targeted keywords. Facebook Ads are mostly text-based and have a maximum limit of 135 characters, but you can also include a small image. You also have a choice between buying ads either on a CPM or CPC basis.

StumbleUpon Ads: Through StumbleUpon, you can target a pre-determined number of users according to their interests, as well as other criteria such as location, gender, and age. StumbleUpon lets users discover new content/websites based on their preferences. Users hit a “stumble” button and are shown sites at random that fit those preferences, the user then gives the as  a thumbs-up or -down, and an algorithm tries to figure out their personal taste. When advertising through StumbleUpon, however, you want to ensure that your landing page is appropriate for the audience you’re targeting. If it’s not, enough users might vote it down that you won’t get your money’s worth in “stumbles.” To help you along  StumbleUpon provides metrics on how many users like/dislike your landing page, and provides  you with user reviews of your landing page. This lets you adjust your campaigns to suit the StumbleUpon user base you are trying to target.

LinkedIn Direct Ads: For targeting business professionals few ad networks offer the quality or database that LinkedIn does. Through LinkedIn Direct Ads, you can reach a worldwide audience of over 50 million professionals and target them according to location, industry, job title, and company size. Ads are also available on either a CPC or CPM basis. You should be aware, though, that this isn’t the most affordable network. For example, CPMs in some ad categories can reach $50 or higher, and although rich media placements are available, they are restricted to advertisers with budgets of $25,000 and up.

MySpace MyAds: Through MySpace MyAds you can “hyper-target” MySpace users with banners ads on either a CPC or a CPM basis. Hyper-targeting means that you use criteria such as gender, age, location, education, interests, hobbies, and parental status. Also, since MySpace MyAds is part of the FOX Audience Network, you can take your campaigns beyond MySpace and reach out to users on other Fox-owned content sites.

Sponzai: This is the latest network from Izea,, a social media marketing company. Sponzai is a bit different than  traditional media buying networks in that it lets you proactively connect with a blogger’s audience by posting guest posts on their sites. Essentially, you write a potential guest post, upload it to the system, and indicate how much you’re willing to pay to have it featured on a targeted blog. Then bloggers review your content and price, and make a decision whether or not to place your post. The interesting thing about Sponzai is that you don’t only get eyeballs, but the ability to actually interact with someone’s audience and contextual backlinks.

5 Alternative PPC Ad Networks

When diversifying your online ad campaigns, you don’t necessarily have to go into completely new territory. You can also stick to conventional ad-buying models/networks.. There are a number of these traditional, auction-based ad networks that let you buy ad real-estate in a more conventional way — i.e. on a variety of content sites that belong to the networks as publishers. Some of them can even help you target users on high profiles sites that just aren’t available through Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

Ask Sponsored Listings: Although this search engine isn’t as big as Google or “BingHoo,” it’s focused on specific verticals, making it an opportune network for certain advertisers. It also features publishers such as Excite, Mamma, and Dogpile, not to mention other lifestyle and technology sites, such as CNET.com. Just like on it’s larger, search engine counterparts,  here advertisers bid on ad placements via a CPC model. Ask Sponsored Listings claims a reach of over 70 million unique users.

AOL Advertising: Acquired by AOL over two years ago, this ad network was formerly known as Quigo AdSonar. On it, advertising is sold on a contextual basis, and advertisers bid on a placement through a CPC model. Rich media placements are also available, and AOL’s sponsored listings let advertisers reach users through sites such as ABC.com, CNN Money, The Washington Post, AOL Money and Finance, and FOX News.

Marchex Adhere: (aka IndustryBrains) Through Marchex Adhere, you can buy ads on either a call- or click-basis. The verticals you can bid on include business, finance, real estate, IT, and HR. You can also buy site-specific placements with publishers like BusinessWeek, PC World, The Globe and Mail, and Kiplinger.com. Although the familiarity of their keyword-targeted placements might appeal to you more, Marchex’s real strength is in their site-specific targeting.

Pontiflex: This is more of a Cost Per Lead (CPL) marketplace than an ad network. While there isn’t a roster of publishers per se, Pontiflex offers a technology that lets you access the entire CPL marketplace. This technology can even help you manage non-Pontiflex campaigns. The Pontiflex CPL network is available through the AdLeads and AdUnitX platforms, and some of publishers using the technology include such notable sites as Pandora, Monster, and Admob.

MIVA: (aka Findwhat) Acquired by the performance-based advertising network Adknowledge in March 2009, MIVA was once known as e-Spotting and FindWhat. Their Precision Network is intended for targeting specific verticals, and MIVA also has a network of thousands of sites available for sponsored placements. Without setting up an account as an advertiser, however, it’s difficult to get information on the specific sites and publishers in their network.

Before the Leap of Faith

Search marketing is an important first step in online advertising because it can deliver the volume you need to determine your average cost per conversion. Without that data, you can neither  determine whether a network is worth advertising with, nor  calculate how much to invest in such a campaign.

If you’re running big campaigns, automated tools like Shoemoney Tools or, on the enterprise level, SEM software like Acquisio SEARCH can help get the most out of the primary PPC channels. They both offer PPC bid management tools that are good for managing the keywords of many campaigns.

Then, you have to make sure that a network’s pricing model fits with your business model. Ad models can range for from CPC to CPM to CPA, and you need to decide in advance which are most appropriate for your goals. Finally, test a few small campaigns before fully launching a campaign across a new channel. This will help you both measure the value of the traffic and optimize your campaigns around that traffic before you go all out.

Auld Lang Syne

Because of the weakened economy and how user behavior has evolved over the last two years, online advertisers should consider diversifying their media buys in 2010. Not only will it better insulate them from sudden shifts in the market, but it will let them target campaigns with much more accuracy and  see greater returns.

Advertisers need to look for criteria identifying their users beyond a mere search term. They can find this through either niche-based networks or social networks. While social networks let you target users according to a variety of strong interests, niche-based networks help you reach users on the basis of one strong interest.. Either way, advertisers should be exploring ways to dynamically target users even when they’re not actively looking for your products and services.

Excerpt from:
10 Places to Diversify Your Online Ad Budget in 2010