The Stupidity of Post Only Email Marketing Messages

I recently went to a conference in Seattle and stayed at the Sheraton hotel. Within a couple days of leaving they sent me an email reminding me of their marketing messaging: Don't be a Stranger...Because you don’t just stay here. You belong. Yet when I replied to the message with feedback about my stay, it bounced. I don't remember opting into the email list. Putting my name in an email then ignoring me doesn't make you special. If you don't care for feedback it is best not to ask for it. Just in case Sheraton has a great worker who roams the web, here is my feedback:

  • we stayed only 4 nights, yet got charged for 6 days Internet access

  • we rented a movie, got charged for 3
  • our snack tray was never refilled during our stay
  • my wife and I were unable to be online at the same because you guys do not offer wireless and refused to put a second line in the room

We ordered room service and it was delicious, but all the above stuff was brutal. :)

How to: Buy Links Without Being Called a Spammer

The types of link buys that Google has a distaste for are the links that are exchanged directly for cash. Modify your way of thinking just a little and there are a wide array of easy to buy high value links awaiting your purchase. The key to having a low risk profile is to make the link appear indirect.

Most links occur because of a value exchange of some sort. People link because

  • they find a resource to be valuable
  • they get paid directly for linking
  • they get paid indirectly for linking

Here are 18 indirect ways to buy links without looking like you are on a link buying binge.

Guest Blogging: Have a lot to share but little budget for exposure? Consider saving some of your best content for other websites that have the attention of your target market & offer to guest post for them. If you are looking for more general exposure and can't get onto the A list websites start by submitting to some of the B & C list sites that accept guest posts and work your way up. Services like MyBlogGuest make it easy to find relevant opportunities.

Featured Content:

  • Involve people in group interviews like SugarRae's link building interviews or SEOmoz's industry survey.
  • Create infographics & promote them to your target audience.
  • Create other featured resource content & promote it to those who link at quality resources. Internet Marketing Ninjas is great at this type of content creation & promotion.

Testimonials: Best thing ever. Buy now! ;)

Testimonials help increase sales because they are a sign of social trust. Many content management systems, web designers, programmers, and web hosts offer links to featured clients. Some keep full directories of sites using their services, while other sites, such as Pligg, also allow people using their software to buy an ad on the official software site.

Conferences: By paying to attend a conference and being social there some people may reference you on their blogs. Some conferences also list speakers, post an official list of attendees, and highlight sponsors with direct links. Giving away t shirts or coming up with viral games (such as drinkbait) will get you links.

Association Memberships: Trade organizations tend to have significant global authority and topical authority. In order to push the agenda of the organization many of these list members to show proof of social value. These links are often priced far below their value, and contributing directly to associations is a way to also get significant exposure in front of the type of people who are likely to buy from you and/or link at your site.

Contests: People are competitive animals. Contests like the Mahalo Follow refer a friend program also move the spamming activity away from the source and onto other people, thus allowing the central sites to profit from spamming without being called spammers.

Awards: Even if winning an award has absolutely no value people still like recognition. Winners like to talk about what they have won. In some cases you can even give award winners your product to get them to talk about it.

Donations: Support causes you believe in. Money is the fuel upon which charities can fund themselves and spread their messages. It is hard to call you a spammer for donating money to a good cause. If you get a bit of link equity out of it as a bonus why not enjoy the benefits of good karma? Better yet, you might be able to donate software or services to charities at little to no expense to you. How much is an SEO services by link on a PR8 charity site worth in branding and distribution?

Free Samples: This acts similar to donations, except it is easier to spread to a wider audience without appearing spammy, and if people like what you offer they may review it on their sites.

Widgets: Many embeddable tools (like analytics products, what is my PageRank tools, etc) provide static links back to the original source site. Some companies also provide emblems that their site is hosted on a green host or that they support some other cause.

Sponsorships: Many email newsletters are archived online. If you target a compelling offer to the right audience this may lead to additional links. Services like ReviewMe also allow you to put targeted offers in front of audiences who may help spread the word.

Web Directory Submission: An oldie, but an easy one to do. Here is a list of some of the better ones. The editorial guidelines are not as stringent as we are led to believe, and here are tips for getting the most out of your Yahoo! Directory submission. If you like video content here is a video about submitting your sites to directories.

Affiliate Programs: Even if affiliate links do not provide direct link juice, good affiliates still send a relevant stream of traffic to your site. Some affiliate programs also 301 redirect the affiliate links to the end merchant site. Affiliate programs allow clean companies to profit from the dirty parts of the web (think AdSense or Mahalo Follow).

Social Media: Partner with someone who enjoys writing junk for sites like Digg. If you are too lazy for that, StumbleUpon ads allow you to target ads to specific groups on StumbleUpon, and there are a number of Digg spamming services on the market. Here are some tips for link baiting.

Google AdWords or Other Ad Buys: You can buy ads and send targeted traffic streams to your linkworthy content. You can do it one keyword at a time, or target ads to specific websites. In some cases businesses get organic links just because people are talking about how often they see their ads, plus top of mind awareness leads to more usage and more links.

Link Out to Egomaniac Bloggers: This is a way of buying links by paying with your attention and distribution. People like getting mentioned, and are more likely to link to people who agree with them. Seth Godin linked to my blog again a few weeks ago and when I saw he mentioned my site (even if only in passing) for some reason that made me happy. Insightful blog comments are also likely to make a blogger want to talk about you.

Blog Carnivals: Blog carnivals are where a group of bloggers all talk about a topic and mention everyone else in the ring. These amount to a big circlejerk. If your site is legit and a market leader there is no need for this sort of stuff, but if your site is new in a saturated field doing this might be helpful. Plus others in the blog carnival may end up adding your site to their blogroll or talking about you again on their blog.

Press Releases: Do it too often and it looks cheesy, but some mainstream media outlets like CNN syndicate press releases, while others may choose to interview you based on your press release.

Hire Them / Buy Their Brand & Site: If someone already has a large following but is not monetizing it to the full potential consider hiring them and letting them help you build a more profitable business. You can also look for under-performing sites to buy. If someone is outside of your financial reach you may still be able to leverage their brand by interviewing them.

Domain Tools Live Auction

Streaming online right now... coverage here.

Many (perhaps most) domain buyers are like better SEOs...direct marketers who track results, and reinvest. Worth looking at to see how much money there is sloshing around the web, to justify increasing your rates. SeoHints.com is not up yet, already has a couple bids, and is at $1,161. How many SEO related domains do you have that would go for more than that?

The prices are all over the place. Some seem cheap to me, but some of these prices makes me want to dig through Sedo and BuyDomains.com for a few deals.

Either tonight or tomorrow I am going to try to write a more in depth post on domain stuff from the view of an SEO.

Every Brand is an Ad Network

TechCrunch recently highlighted how most of Glam's growth has come from the combination of shallow pure SEO play to pump pageview stats and syndicating their ads on other related sites to further pump the success story, all while the network is projected to lose over $20 million this year. But VentureBeat also noted that the growth is significant enough that Google wants to do a custom ad deal with them.

Marchex recently had a brutal quarter which drove their stock price down to $9 a share. Their site development process was far too broad and far too shallow. They need to start developing their top domains or sell them off to someone who will leverage them for their full value. In response to Marchex's down quarter Sahar Sarid asked what they should do and got this brilliant comment:

What is the business model here… we got out sites indexed by Google but the users had a shit experience and BTW our indexed sites make nothing compared to if we just parked them. Come on - it not really very hard to figure it out- take the top 30 golden domains and build them into authority sites NOT openlist scrape sites but bankrate.com’s

Keep in mind that when you create one Bankrate.com you get the leverage to charge advertisers more, which allows you to spend more on marketing. As you increase that spend search engines are willing to look the other way if you create a bottomless pit of near identical white-labeled search spam.

As markets consolidate, 2 of the biggest determiners of who will win a market are going to be
brand perception and AdWords ad budget.

  • Brand perception: Google gives brands a discount on AdWords ad prices while price gouging smaller competitors, which subsidizes the value of building a brand. If BMW spams, Google is afraid to remove BMW from their index for very long. If a smaller site does something that is borderline gray and comes under scrutiny Google may penalize the domain and pay an AdSense spammer for stealing that content and keeping it in the Google index. It all feels a bit like the mafia, but this is Google's way to extort you and kill smaller market players without being branded as a corporate criminal.

  • AdWords ad budget: if you are blowing millions a month on Google AdWords then Google will be more likely to white list your sites and less likely to penalize you for white-label clone sites, robotic content, subdomain spam, or bought links.

Even if you lose money on the main brand, it still allows you to backfill with high margin garbage with limited risk from Google. What are the odds of Google doing anything about this BizJournals spam? If you want to monetize garbage you have to put one star brand at the center of it to mitigate you risk profile.

Why Are CPC Prices so High?

In some markets $5 a click is cheap. Conversion rates are going up. Well run internet businesses have low overhead and are getting bigger cuts from merchants as their businesses scale. Domain Name Wire posted that throughout the first half of this year CreditCards.com earned $4.64 per visitor:

Internet Real Estate Group sold the domain to Click Success in 2004 for 'only' $2.75M. Daniel H. Smith pocketed $97.7M from the sale to an Austin Ventures-backed group in 2006. The purchase by the group in 2006 from Click Success was financed partially with debt from American Capital Strategies (NASDAQ: ACAS).

CreditCards.com's S-1 filing is a treasure trove of information about the company's traffic (they actually have more than one domain driving traffic) and earnings per visitor. In the first half of this year, the company received 5.899M visitors and earned $4.64 per visitor. The traffic was up only slightly from the same period last year, but revenue per visitor increased 46%:

Don't Trust Google Webmaster Central (or, Is Buying a Web Business Considered Spam?)

Google has long hated publicly on people buying or selling links. Some of the better SEOs have moved beyond just getting a link here or there and have moved into acquiring trusted properties, improved them, scaling them, and marketing them. Google hates the practice though because they would prefer to have crusty dated content or incomplete blog posts ranking, such that anyone searching with a commercial interest is more drawn toward their Google AdWords program.

It is only a matter of time until Google tries to call buying websites and web based businesses a form of spam. They may not do it publicly yet, but it is well known in the SEO underground that they do it privately. It is just something they don't talk about.

Should Google be allowed to profile webmasters and ban them specifically because they are SEOs, even if their content quality is higher than that of the top ranking site? If so, then how can they justify rewriting their relevancy algorithms to feature YouTube more frequently in their search results after they bought the site?

Conversational Marketing & The Online Branded Advertising Experience

Many of the most useful publishing formats and many of the most widely used sites are hard to effectively monetize. The solution is to use targeting technology and blend ads and content so closely that they appear to be one and the same. Many people have pushed this from many different angles.

This is somewhat of a rambling post about the merging of content and advertising.

Offline Ad Integration

I recently went to a hospital with a friend. While I was there I flipped open some magazine published by WebMD and read what was perhaps the most basic article on bipolar disorder ever written. The page long article had pictures added to make it two pages long, so the content wrapped around an advertisement for a bipolar drug, and there was even a quiz in there, which was not quite as overt as this Effexor one, but still pretty bad.

How Bad Does Google AdSense Suck at Monetizing Contextual Ads?

Many months ago as an experiment I created a backfill AdSense ad group where I bid a dime a click. Many of those ads appeared on Digg and MySpace and lots of blogs. The overall group had a 2 cent CPM. 19,083,546 ad views cost me $338.01.

Individual publishers can focus their content on expensive topics, but they still can't push the ads too aggressively in their content to their regular audience without losing some of their credibility and exposure.

Bloggers & Smaller Independent Publishers

There are many different takes on how individuals publishers can profit:

  • Sell products or services, like I do here. The easiest thing to sell is something associated with your brand. Nobody is going to get mad at Discovery.com for promoting a Discovery toy store.

  • Dave Winer suggests using authority and influence for indirect profit
  • sell ads: contextual, brand ads, keep your main channel clean while creating an associated offers section on your site, or some combination

In many verticals advertising is overtaking the other monetization models. You only need to think back to the Wordpress Mesothelioma fiasco to remember how much people are willing to trade in their brand for a few dollars, and as long as Google puts a $0 value on your content then advertising is going to beat out paid content in most fields.

In Content Ads

With the flood of content in an endless number of formats advertisers are asking for more value than they did in the past. They want to be able to track the results, and they want ads delivered right in the content.

Ads on Large Social Networks

Get enough exposure, traffic, and leverage and you can sell what you once gave away. This philosophy was core to Google's success, and also helped make Facebook wildly profitable. Facebook has done a good job of selling custom sponsorships. Valleywag found their rate card, and noticed that they are likely making up to $90 million on Facebook community sponsorships. There are many clever elements that make FaceBook's sponsorship program work so well

  • there is only one sponsored ad on the page at a time

  • the ad is put in content and formatted like content
  • their ad unit format is so new that people have not yet learned to ignore it
  • when someone clicks on an ad they still stay on the Facebook site
  • after enough people join a Facebook group that brand gets free follow up advertising by having their brand located on other spots throughout the site, which leads to more sign-ups, which is similar to StumbleUpon ads, social media marketing, or buying organic SEO exposure with PPC ads. You buy enough exposure, mindshare, and traffic that people believe your brand to be credible and they vote for it too.

Facebook is getting some blowback from advertisers about having their ads appear next to some sketchy groups. Of course even if they don't advertise next to those groups they still support their existence by advertising on Facebook. But Facebook, like Google, has so much exposure that many brands feel they need to be seen there.

Behavioral Targeting & Interactive Ad Units

Any form of interactivity or any distribution model that becomes popular can become an ad stream. Google has beta tested making their ads more interactive, creating gadget ads, and allowing users to edit their search results.

Yahoo! and Microsoft promote behaviorally targeted ads. Google claims they are against the idea of behavioral targeting, but already use it, displaying ads based on past searches. Both Microsoft and Google have bought in game advertising targeting companies as well.

Unmarked Ads

Having a large audience makes it easier to enter new markets. Last year Google spent $58 million buying marketshare giving away Google Checkout. Not only are they promoting themselves by carpet-bombing their SERPs with checkout ads, but they also rewrote their relevancy algorithms to boost the relevancy and exposure of any content on Google owned video websites. Many of these videos will eventually carry ads.

Google also leveraged the video interactivity to do cross promotional advertisements that were completely unmarked, and only labeled as promotions after people complained.

Google has also removed disclosure from many Google syndicated ads, which may lead some content readers to think publishers advocate certain lifestyle choices. Google, aware of the power of advertising, recommended HMOs carpet bomb consumers with deceitful educational messaging.

Paying for Content

Anywhere there is a believable story and an arbitrage opportunity someone is putting the pieces together to create profitable content. Colleges are hiring student bloggers, many sites grant a brief moment of exposure for contributing your content, Google is paying college students for gathering local business information, and there are a near unlimited number of business review sites.

How Does All This Relate to Me?

  • You can look at how these various networks are blending and targeting ads to think of types of sites you could buy or types of content that you can make today that will be more profitable as the ad networks evolve.

  • Some of these sites do an excellent job of ad integration to make the ads look like content. Emulate that on the profitable portions of your site.
  • As the market gets saturated with free content sorting through it becomes more than most would desire to do. Central editors will be paid nicely, and the value of a strong brand goes up.
  • If a market has few real competitors in it you can leverage wealth stratification, the desire to be important, and improving social software to take advantage of consumer generated content to create a backfill of information, knowing you can display ads differently to site members and non-members.

Bad Marketing & Bad Domain Names Kill Businesses & Cause Lawsuits

Perhaps this is a lawsuit as a marketing strategy, but recently a smaller private company sued BankRate for being a monopoly

A private company based in White Plains is suing Bankrate Inc., saying it has unlawfully suppressed its competition in order to build a monopoly. ...

BanxCorp aggregates, publishes and distributes bank-rate data from financial institutions nationwide through its BanxQuote.com Web site. Bankrate, a much larger, public company based in Florida, owns and operates Bankrate.com.

Bankrate's informational name adds credibility and trust to their offering, as does their slogan Comprehensive. Objective. Free. The distribution deals also help build their brand and aid that image. All of these likely increase trust and conversion rate, and may make some consumers go so far as to think they are a non profit industry body or an extension of the government.

Bankrate may be a near monopoly, but having a misspelled domain name and letting the media describe your field of service using the competitor's business name isn't going to help you dethrone the champ. Not only is BanxQuote.com a bad domain name, but it is only a PageRank 4. How serious can these guys be about suing the competition when they haven't even tried marketing their business?

Is PornHater.com Better Than SeoBook.com?

I just grabbed Quantcast's free rankings of the top 1,000,000 sites. Currently Seobook.com comes in at 112,095, which is 5 spots below PornHater.com, which is apparently a PageRank 3 porn blog stuck in an industry with an endless supply of traffic. Based on some of the SEO sites that were missing from the Quantcast top sites database I don't think you can fully trust their data as being exceptionally accurate, but if you search through it you should be able to come up with at least a few cool ideas, especially if you combine it with other free and cheap data sources.

The last couple days I have been planning a fun project and feel like a kid in a candy store with competitive research and Internet marketing tools. Now hopefully some of the ideas I came up with will work. :)

Colleges Leveraging Student / Consumer Generated Content for Lead Generation

To attract better students colleges are paying current students to blog about their experiences on campus. When old institutions like those are already embracing the web (and using refer a friend type marketing techniques) that has to hint at the raw untapped marketing power and strong growth potential of the web. It also makes me appreciate how cluttered the web will be with information.

Most everything related to information outside of marketing is moving toward free. Marketing is often the only thing that separates what is perceived as valuable and what is not. Perception is reality.

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