Marketing Through Craigslist

April 22, 2008 – 2:07 pm

Can I Interest You in a Used Car?
Creative Commons License photo credit: The Rocketeer

Craigslist is both a bane and a boon to your work. It is popular, easy, highly effective, and frequently abused.

Here are some tips for getting better results from Craigslist:

  1. Get a Craigslist account – This will make posting and reposting quicker and easier.
  2. Write like you are advertising – You are given plenty of space to write, so give the viewer plenty of information.
  3. Link to your site – Show them that you are professional.
  4. Show your e-mail – People place more trust when you are transparent about who you are.
  5. Use the right pictures — Use non-stock image that are from your site so viewers get to see that you are consistent and original.

If you use these tips you will get ahead of the spammers and amateurs who fill the services sections of Craigslist. Trust is one of the main factors you have to consider; take advantage of the extra presentation options you have on Craigslist that you don’t have in things like paid search.

By Carlos del Rio | Posted in SEM, Search Marketing | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Do You Have A Complete Strategy?

April 21, 2008 – 12:28 pm

Buddha dog
Creative Commons License photo credit: SuperFantastic

Search Marketing is more than just search engines. One of the most amusing things to me is when people boast that they get the vast majority of their traffic from Google — sometimes as high as 80%. It is difficult not to laugh at that. Having a business that is entirely contingent on single channel of customers is not a real business, it is a party trick. You might as well be talking about how long you can balance a chair on your face.

What is your long term plan?

You should be considering not only where you get traffic from, but also what you are going to do with the traffic. A holistic search marketing strategy should include:

  • How you are growing your referrer network?
  • How are you following up people who abandon your sales funnel?
  • How often, and in what form, do you release new content?
  • What do you have to offer community oriented sites?
  • What do you have to offer your visitor that will induce them to talk about you?

If you don’t have an offer that is actionable outside of the implied endorsement of search engines than you have ground to cover. If you aren’t getting 1/3 to 1/2 the traffic from Yahoo that you are getting from Google you should be asking yourself why. And if you can’t afford to lose one of your channels you should be actively diversifying.

Spend a little bit of time thinking about what your site offers and find a site that offers something that is supported by your site, or supports your offering. Spend some of your link building time making financial partnerships, instead of building PageRank.

By Carlos del Rio | Posted in Analytics, Landing Page Optimization, Offline Marketing, PPC, SEM, Search Marketing | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (1)

Bring Home The Bacon In Image Search

April 18, 2008 – 12:11 pm

Bacon on a MacBook Pro
Creative Commons License photo credit: Patrick Haney

In the early weeks of April there has been an explosion in a very odd phrase, Bacon Bra, go search it. I’ll wait. There is quite a bit of content. But alas, no image content. The web results contain numerous versions of the original image from Flickr, but image search doesn’t feature any of the original images. Even Yahoo’s Flickr heavy results don’t include the original bacon bra photo.

So for all of you game minded Search Optimizers I am offering a challenge. Who is the best at optimizing for image search? If you are the first person to get one of the bacon bra photos to appear in either Yahoo! or Google for the phrase Bacon Bra I will send you a hand drawn post card that features: “[YOUR NAME] Brings Home the Bacon” and a stamp so you can send it to the person of your choice.

All entries must be created no earlier than April 18th, 2008 to be eligible.

By Carlos del Rio | Posted in Blogging, Search Engines, Search Marketing | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Creative SEO

April 17, 2008 – 1:18 pm

Today’s SEO review is of James Kinloch site. Yesterday he stopped by to comment on “Are you Doing Opt-in Wrong?” and invited me to check out his site. He wants the phrase creative SEO.

What is Creative SEO?

To qualify as creative you need to be doing something that is notably out side of the norm. Link dropping in comments & forums, optimizing titles & tags, or building a site map are not really creative — they are commonplace. Matt Inman’s Widgetbait gone horrible and destructive because of a silly mistake does qualify as creative. Matt’s “godzilla turd sized mistake” gave him an opportunity to create a very popular article on a powerful site, drop the name of his new site and links from the post, and purge the majority of his bad links from his old site. His mistake has given him a clean break from the sketchy things that where done to JustSayHi before his time.

Creative doesn’t mean way out in left field, creative means getting better value from your tools and resources.

So, on with the review of James Kinlochs site.

James Kinloch

  • URL: http://www.jameskinloch.co.uk/creativesite.html
  • Title: Creative seo james kinloch
  • Meta: N/A

First Thoughts

From my understanding James apparently is targeting the phrase creative seo. He uses the phrase Creative SEO in is his title, but he should consider capitalizing his title and separating his name from the phrase

Since he is using this as his Home Page he might as well name it something like creative-seo.html instead of creativesite.html. Separating your words will make the URLs easier to read.

Also he should consider using a meta description.

Creative SEO title and content

James has used his target phrase in his H1 and 5 times in his content, twice in <strong> and once with <em>. That is a nice high density for the key phrases, but there isn’t much useful information here so he might as well include some of the content that is accessed by the giant “Next” button in the lower right that obscures your bottom navigation. For that matter he should probably get rid of the bottom navigation, since it is an exact copy of the top nav.

Creative SEO Links

James has only linked 50% of his navigation currently, so he is missing much of the value. The anchor text is not particularly informative either. Navigating his site is largely a guessing game of where you will end up and what navigation choices you will have. James should consider changing his architecture to consolidate more of his content on each page and to get rid of the unused portion of his navigation.

Use of Images

On his main page James Kinloch has only given alt text to 3 out of 9 images and 2 of the alt text are the path for the image. He should change the alt text to be more informative, especially for the images that are also links.

By Carlos del Rio | Posted in Design, Search Marketing | Tagged | Comments (4)

Are You Doing Opt-in Wrong?

April 16, 2008 – 10:36 am

(No Cursing??) Sign
Creative Commons License photo credit: christopherdale

Opt-in is all the rage. Seth Godin says don’t interrupt your viewers, get their permission and you will have a dedicated channel. The major problem with permission marketing is, most of the time, you don’t actually have my permission.

I get e-mails from Target, TicketsWest, Wild Ginger Restaurant in Seattle and Wrrl because they not only ignored my initial subscription choices, but they also ignored subsequent opt-outs.

Excerpt of e-mail from Whrrl:

Hi Carlos,

It’s come to my attention that you had tried to turn off your notification settings

That about sums up many companies attitude toward “permission marketing” — that I need their permission to leave. That is bull. When I say NO notification I mean it, it is not a suggestion. I didn’t ask for notification, it was auto-checked on all registrations. I didn’t ask to get your new newsletter you ignored my subscription settings and sent it out just in case I changed my mind, that is not permission marketing that is SPAM. Today I even received a spam e-mail form an online acquaintance to ask if I want to be on his mailing list? No, but thank you for the personalized mailing.

Companies that auto-opt-in new users and customers are not following the spirit of opt-in. If you have a check box do not recheck it at every step in the process, and don’t change the settings on my account when you update your site.

I didn’t care the first time and I certainly don’t care now.

By Carlos del Rio | Posted in Reputation Management, Search Marketing | Comments (4)

Make Content Whenever Possible

April 15, 2008 – 7:04 pm

Yahoos
Creative Commons License photo credit: Finstr

Today I have been doing a good deal of “away from the computer work” and Internet exploration. Checkout a landing page review that I did at SEOmoz. I compare and contrast decisions that were made by the original designer and introduce the changes with a revised page so you can see the results.

Back when I did the Zappos site review I intended to make it a fairly regular thing, but I lacked a clear vision of how much information to include. I think that I have a better grasp of the right level. I should be doing one weekly now on Thursdays, most of the time.

Speaking of Zappos, their CEO, Tony Hsieh, seems to be enamored with Twitter, he offered to fly a random Twitter follower to Las Vegas to have a tour. One Social Media cynic thinks it was just a “follow-bait” scheme. But I think that he just likes the frenetic outlet that Twitter offers

By Carlos del Rio | Posted in Blogging, Landing Page Optimization, Working in Tech | Tagged | Comments (1)

Are You Losing Focus?

April 14, 2008 – 10:48 am

Secret Love
Creative Commons License photo credit: Thomas Hawk

Over the last week I have seen a surprising rush of people in my life “getting” Twitter. It seems that every few weeks there is a little spike in the number of tweets that come in to me. I have a pocket of friends that sign up for everything, and don’t really use them. And I have one friend An Bui who legitimately tries to use every social media outlet she can find.

One of the more interesting ones that she has invested time into is Whrrl. At first I liked the concept, combining Yelp with Dodgeball, now I find it annoying. They have summarily ignored my do not e-mail me mandate. I don’t care that someone I don’t know has responded to someone I do. This was especially vexing on April 13th when they sent me 7 versions of every update.

I tolerate a wild stream of information from my PageFlakes, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Linkedin, etc. but most of the time I only do one or two serious visits to these place in a week, except for SU, that is a more frequent visitation.

How much of your social media networking profiles do you really use? When was the last time you updated? The trend of reduction in communication – micro-blogging, texting, instant messaging – has made the barrier to use the number of simultaneous experiences you can maintain.

I enjoy having lots of information, but some days I need re-direct. Today I have decided to take advantage of Twitters inherent structural encouragement of Haiku. I encourage you to send one Haiku a day – 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables – it is a fun way to recapture your mind from technology.

By Carlos del Rio | Posted in Search Marketing, Social Media | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Old-fashion Thinking Is Killing The Web

April 10, 2008 – 3:51 pm

beached sperm whale
Creative Commons License photo credit: zen

Does a combined Yahoo! Microsoft make sense? No probably not. Both have structural issues that make integration likely to compromise both of them. Neither company is particularly search motivated these days. They make money from advertising through their portal aspects, news, mail, etc. and search is just one of the channels. If ever there were a company that could compete and steal the lime light from Google it would be a focused search company with search as their only goal.

I’m not sure who seeded the idea to me, but I think that Microhoo Search is only feasible if it is a separate and dedicated organization that is all about search. Searching the web, searching mail, searching news and searching the portal aspects of the combined services. Yahoo is very good at being a portal, they should focus on that and let their organic and paid search go. Microsoft is a software juggernaut , but they can’t even implement Office Live in a way that is particularly compelling, they should let their organic and paid search go.

As it stands Microsoft is not really in a position to integrate Yahoo! in total into their organization. But if Microsoft only buys Yahoo! Search or does something as radical as jointly creating a Search/Advertising organization that is separate from the parent organizations and has the agility to out pace Google by leveraging the combined network of Microsoft and Yahoo! as distribution channel we could see a dramatic shift on the web.

After managing and analyzing countless pay-per-click campaigns I feel confident saying that volume is the real weak point for paid search competitors of Google. Right now Microsoft and Yahoo! should be piecing up and making trades to create a more future-forward paid search complex.

On the Internet business as usual will kill a good opportunity. It will create a beached whale of search that will be slowly dying. These two companies need to take advantage of this opportunity to make something very different.

By Carlos del Rio | Posted in Search Engines | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (1)

Amplify The Voice of Your Customer

April 9, 2008 – 12:48 pm

Touched by an alcoholic
Creative Commons License photo credit: the Comic Shop

Who is your customer? What do they want?

I want to think that my audience are people that are somewhat aware of marketing on the Internet. People that have a concept of longtail, social media, etc. I wonder what that person wants to see.

I think there is a lack of intermediate to advanced information on Search Marketing. Where do you go when you know the 101 but you aren’t ready to be a thought leader. I want to help lead your search for the information you actually need. But, I don’t really know what are the topics that you crave.

Right now I am listening to a phone call with Seth Godin and he is telling me that I need to be quick and I need to amplify the voice of my customer. So, you are my customer, tell me what you want to see.

I will write a post to answer your questions and link to you.

Leave a comment or e-mail me Carlos at 100DollarSEO.com

By Carlos del Rio | Posted in Blogging, SEM, Search Community, Search Marketing | Comments (0)

Stupid Comment Spamming

April 8, 2008 – 5:14 pm

Yesterday I went in to moderate the comments on “SEO Standards Protect Site Owners” and I found the most amazingly stupid piece of comment spam. Someone had actually copied verbatim 3 sentences from the post and put a link in it to their site.

Generally I am all for furthering discussion, even if you are not creating new content. For example Eric Itzkowitz left the same comment on both Graywolf and SEOmoz. Eric makes a good enough point that it can bear repeating. Some people either lack Eric’s standards of self-censorship or believe that blog writers are very stupid.

Perhaps I would have let the comment slide if it had been plagiarizing someone other than me, or if they had at least stolen content from another post.

If you have no concrete strategy beyond dropping comment links then let me offer a few suggestions. You should fulfill 1 or more of the following conditions if you are dropping a link:

  • Say something so mind bogglingly brilliant that everyone want to know who you are.
  • Link to something valuable
  • Link to something informative
  • Link to something that furthers the discussion
  • Write something that is not plagiarizing the blogger you are commenting to
By Carlos del Rio | Posted in Blogging, Linking | Comments (2)