Leveraging Statistics to Dupe the Mainstream Media for Public Relations

From large scale stat providers right down to the smallest detail it is easy to take a statistic out of context and draw false conclusions from it.

Some examples:

Examples of bogus statistics and the value of evaluating stats out of context.

  • MySpace has more traffic than Yahoo! - over-represents automated spam and does not account for the targeting and value of some of Yahoo!'s search traffic and vertical content. In addition the story about this conveniently separated the Yahoo! traffic into multiple smaller streams, and typically counts pageviews when many of Yahoo!'s products use AJAx.

  • Yahoo! has 25% of the search market - over-represents Yahoo! by counting searches on vertical properties and internal searches. Their actual volume is probably closer to 10%...it is amazing how quickly their marketshare has been eroding.
  • Looking at search marketshare by referral data to large websites - does not take into account algorithmic bias of some engines toward large or small websites.
  • Alexa data for my site - because it is an internet marketing blog, it is heavily overrepresented.
  • Lower conversion rate for leads after redesign - I redesigned a friend's site and made it easier for people to contact them or get price estimates. Originally their site was unattractive and it was hard to contact them or get a quote. After making it easier to do those the end conversion rate of the people who did those action items was slightly lower due to it being so much easier to do them.
  • Higher AdSense earnings per click or clickthrough rate on a finance site on Christmas eve - the people searching may be more desperate, and thus more willing to click on anything, and they may also search a disproportionately higher rate for higher value terms.
  • Seasonal bias - I have a seasonal site which I fixed broken links right around when it was going out of season. It did not make more, but fell less hard than it would have. When the seasons changed again the earnings shot through the roof.

Why do Bogus Stats Matter?

As a marketer it is important to realize how statistics can lie for two main reasons.

  1. so you are measuring the right stuff

  2. so you can present market data in a way that biases your story such that it is remarkable and easy to spread

1.) After Brian Clark rewrote my sales letter my number of ebook sales per day jumped up in the short term, but that was largely because

  • a trusted voice recommended it

  • other trusted voices echoed that trusted voice
  • a new audience got exposure to my site

A better measure of the effectiveness of the new sales letter would be to look if the percent, conversion rate, or number of affiliate sales goes up. An even better measure would be a Google AdWords A/B split test.

2.) The MySpace has more traffic than Yahoo! story was a way to promote the Hitwise statistic service. But you do not even need to collect a bunch of expensive market research data to create a piece of market research data that would easily spread. Simply cross reference a few free or cheap publicly accessible tools like Quantcast, Compete.com, Alexa, Technorati mentions by day, Google Trends, Spyfu, Key Compete, buy AdWords to track search volume, and the number of Google search results over time.

Statistics & Humor

It is easy to find errors or weird biases when you look for ideas connected to weird human actions. And if they are funny, the emotional responses will help them spread quickly. For example, you can use Google trends to research which country or city the most perverted country in the world.

Serious Statistics

When you cite stats from any trusted brand you leverage the strength of their brand.

Many statistics are nothing but self promotional public relations drivel. If you do a great job with your public relations then you can make reasonably believable stats sound factual, even if the collection method is biased. Leverage the bias or errors in some of the publicly available tools and then try to spread that information to the media. Once you get a trusted third party to buy off on it, you then use that exposure as leverage to make the data even more concrete and believable, and to get additional exposure.

Selling Stats to an Audience:

How hard would it be to make the Digg homepage with a title like An Analytical View of Digg's Growth or Digg Traffic to Pass AOL by January 2008, especially if you cited third party research that backed up your claims?

How hard is it to spread stories on blogs about how important bloggers are? If it has a few images and stats in it a story feels far more concrete and is easy to spread, especially if spreading it makes the messenger feel important / valuable.

Giving ReviewMe a Try

After seeing and hearing some positive feedback about ReviewMe I recently decided that it would be worth it for me to dabble in getting a few reviews for my ebook, seo tools, and seo glossary. Rae recently reviewed ReviewMe, stating:

The site brought me a couple hundred visitors initially, which was a little below my expectations. But, it has continued sending visitors daily since the review launched (and yes, it has long been off the main page now, this site blogs several entries per day). Those visitors have also made the site money.

The site I had reviewed was given two links to the homepage with the site name as the anchor. The review was close to 300 words and they also added our logo to the review (which was also linked for a third link to the homepage from the review page). The blogger clearly stated that he was paid to review the site, but that all of the opinions about the site were his own and that only his time to review the site, not his thoughts *about* the site had been paid for.

I have not tracked sales from most of my ReviewMe reviews (because I do not generally track that granular), but John Chow put up affiliate links in his review of my ebook, and I can tell you that his review paid for itself the first day.

Know More Media offered book formatting tips:

Maybe along the left side of the page in the blank space, add something telling the reader what chapter they are in. Maybe add section numbering - 1.1a, 1.1b, etc.

Andy Beard highlighted a bunch of terms I need to add to my glossary.

Graywolf gave me some formatting tips for my glossary:

Ideally there would be a small bit of text, icon or graphic that would bring me back to the top of the document, at the end of every word might get a little distracting so adding one in between every letter would be OK. I also might think about adding a page only search box, pre-populated with terms from the page just to make navigating it a bit easier. Use a bit of fancy Javascript to use predictive filling.

Paul Stamatiou reviewed my glossary. In the review he both talked up SEO, and gave my glossary the thumbs up:

I had some SEO work done on this site in the summer and within a few weeks my traffic went from a daily average of 2,500 unique visitors to roughly 4,000 unique visitors per day. Those extra visitors are all from search engines. An optimized site can help your blog, portfolio or whatever your site hosts, rank higher on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), and beyond. ... The glossary is extremely useful and has already earned a bookmark in my browser, and I only bookmark things I use - the rest get sent to my del.icio.us. I would like to see an offline version of the glossary as well. Perhaps a nicely styled PDF that gets updated every month or so.

Imagine a trusted voice with thousands of subscribers highlighting your industry, highlighting your website, and offering useful constructive criticism that will help you further improve your offering. Is it possible for ads to have any greater value?

Because I have been involved with ReviewMe, many people have told me that they thought ReviewMe was just an SEO tool, but I realize that links / rankings / SEO in general / brand building / trust building / sales are all just a side effect of getting exposure and satisfying market needs. The benefit of reviews from a network like ReviewMe is that you get exposure in active channels that people trust and are paying attention to.

Feedback, direct sales, direct relevant link equity, secondary citations, new readers, branding and awareness... buying reviews from ReviewMe could pay for themselves many ways over, if you create things worthy of exposure.

Do You Have Anything Worth Reviewing?

So I decided to test out ReviewMe for one of my sites, and I think it has been a pretty cool experience. I think most advertisers are going to eat it up after they give it a go.

I actually had to look around a bit though to find things worth reviewing on the site I wanted reviewed because most of it was not too remarkable. Which, sorta leads to the point...is anything on your site worth reviewing? Is any of it remarkable? Most websites and most pages are not, but a few good well cited ideas bolted on a conversion oriented site can carry it in the SERPs.
Most real estate sites, for example, are information free pages segmented by town and tied to an MLS search. But if you could add just a couple good ideas to the site (like a history of the town complete with pictures of how it has changed over time, especially if you integrate things like census data and charts, or can score interviews of past mayors or other famous people from your area), get a few organic links to those ideas, and use that link authority to prop up the rest of the site you can move a site from a me too site to a top ranked site.

If you wanted someone to look at your site, what are the pages you would want them to look at? Does your site have any pages that makes your site stick out from competing sites?

Reciprocation vs Friendships & Passion

Brett Tabke closed down his Buddy Links program many years ago, stating the following:

You must ask yourself why sites would join BL in the first place? Because they couldn't get listed in the search engines. That left us at times "bottom" feeding.

Broad Based Reciprocal Links Don't Work:

In spite of Matt Cutts mentioning how reciprocal links were hurting people some of my friends were still making the mistake of being too reliant on link trades, creating obvious links pages. One of my friends hired someone who did nothing but link swaps, and, in the process, prevented my friend from ranking for anything in Google other than one 7 word phrase.

Why Some People Still Think They Do:

I recently posted about how some sites engaged in broad based reciprocal linking are killing themselves in Google. The comments on that post were entertaining. After listening to some guy who goes by the name DomainDrivers comment on and on about reciprocal linking being an effective promotional technique I came to realize the disconnect which prevented him from believing the truth

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair

And then some people look at a portion of the market and want to believe that what is easy for them to replicate is the answer to their problems. Kirby made an excellent blog comment about why many people read the market wrong:

The debate on reciprocal links wont end for a few reasons.

First, the rules are not evenly applied. Older sites that have built up a degree of trust with aged links will get a way with more.

Secondly, it varies from industry to industry. With real estate, there exists a perception that since the space has lots of competitors, it is therefore competitive. Not true.

Do reciprocal links work in this space? Absolutely. The reason, however, is not because of the value of these links, but because its the primary tool of the majority of sites in this space. It tends to boil down to winning a race of mediocrity. Will they win in a truly competitive space? No.

Take a site and get a handful of good quality links with only a small percentage of reciprocal links and it will beat sites like domain drivers' clients hands down.

A Life of Finite Resources:

And the problem with reciprocation is not one associated with the web. The web is just a reflection of the real world, and the problems associated with reciprocation are that each of us have finite resources, finite attention, and a finite lifespan.

Your PageRank, your authority, your reach, ... they are all finite. Chop it up and trade it again, but eventually you are just going to create weird footprints.

Do Reciprocal Links Build Brands?

On that same thread a person who signed their name as being associated with Links Manager stated the following:

Reciprocal linking should be conducted as a BRANDING function.. never as an SEO function.

But you don't build a brand by trading links. You build a brand by promoting things you like and having people who like you promote you. It is much easier to do this if you allow others to fill in your holes where they are passionate.

How to Reciprocate:

Hugh recently mentioned a killer quote

I don't bother "networking" anymore, instead, I try to build relationships with people I find interesting, and who I think are doing interesting things. And I make it my mission to help them in any way I can to achieve their mission. I find this much more satisfying, much more honorable, and much more fun. And this is the cool thing about people....When you help them out in this way, they help you out. Not because it's a tit for tat deal, but because both parties are engaged in a mutually beneficial relationship that extends beyond the next favor.

Examples of Ways People Have Helped Me:

One person reformatted my ebook just because they liked it. Another friend recommended an editor that is currently editing it to make the grammar better. Another friend wrote my sales letter. Another friend helped me launch an ad network. Another friend offered to do multivariant testing. Another friend designed my site. Another friend gave me public speaking tips. Another friend became a business partner and sat next to me while I was giving a speech to department heads at a fortune 500 company. My most popular SEO tool (SEO for Firefox) was created by a friend who I knew before I got into the web.

Passion as a Proxy for Value:

If you are hanging around bottom hangers (reciprocal link trading hubs, for example) you are valuing your time at next to nothing and are surrounding yourself with bad ideas. Everything you see or do effects how you perceive the world and how you act. And how you act also determines what and who you attract into your life. If you are passionate then passionate people will enter your life.

You are only as good as the people you surround yourself with. You build a brand by creating friendships with honest people who are doing well, and try to help them do better. I talk to some friends like Andy Hagans, Caveman, and Werty all the time, and they always give me good ideas to help me improve my site and marketing.

When you are passionate about what you do you create value beyond your income. You accumulate friendships, assets, brand value, and market influence which are worth far more than most people realize.

I still trade links sometimes, or just link to friends knowing that they may link back, but most of my link swaps are only representative of friendships, and, to me, that seems the only way to make it worthwhile.

Optimizing Pages for Link Potential or Profit Potential

Each web page can be optimized for conversion or linkability, but few pages are well optimized for both. That is part of why search as a business model works so well. The signals of quality that search engines look for are typically associated with information, not pages that convert well, thus those who have overtly conversion oriented sites and pages have to buy advertising.
You can complain to top ranking sites and complain to Google about an informational site outranking you, but other than giving them a good laugh you stand little chance of getting much out of complaining about how the system is set up.

If you and a competitor both have the same optimized sales funnel, but have sites which do not have content that inspires linking then the odds are prett good a blog or newspaper article might outrank you.

Building Authority Without Hurting Your Conversion Potential:

A search engine is going to trust whoever has more signs of trust bolted on to their offering. If you have linkbait on your site it helps boost the overall authority of every page on your site.

When Linkbait Goes Astray:

Many SEOs fail at creating a site that converts well because we integrate our linkbait content (or other spurious information) directly into the sales funnel in a way that actually makes our sites less appealing and less conversion oriented.

You can still host linkbait on your site without actively driving the attention of your audience to it during the conversion process.

Use linkbait to get the links, but don't promote it heavily on your site unless it builds consumer trust and leads them toward conversion.

Keeping Conversions on Track:

A couple of my friends recently wrote an article about using Google Website Optimizer to streamline your sales funnels.

What is This Page for?

Each page should teach, convert, or be linkworthy. If you can do all that with one page that is awesome, but with most pages and most ideas you can't be optimally effective if you try to combine them all. For most businesses it helps to keep citation-worthy linkbait and the sales funnel separate.

Free Elite Retreat Pass

We are holding a contest offering a free ticket to attend Elite Retreat. To enter for a chance to win free registration to the Elite Retreat, those eligible can reply via email to giveaway@eliteretreat.info with their contact information (name, email address, phone number, and mailing address), and their answer to the following question:

"Why should a legitimate business need to worry about SEO?"

Please note that if you win you still have to pay for your airfare and hotel.

Google Search Counts as Market Value Indicators?

I got a call about a week ago from a person representing talent, who was just about to have their record released, and had just lost a major sponsor due to the limited number of matching pages when someone searched Google for that person's name. With how easy it is to manipulate the number of results shown for a query, it is surprising that huge corporations would put any weight on it. That is like a VC going through Alexa and asking to invest in my site based on my Alexa ranking. Sorta absurd, isn't it?

The only marketing idea I found crazier was that the marketer wanted me to give them that information for free. I love berating marketers and people dealing with economics who try to squeeze a free consultation out of me without paying. I find their shortsightedness / greed amusing. What kind of value do they add to their clients? How much do they value their own time at? It will be funny if they get their website banned because they use blog comment spamming or some other dubious technique when there are so many cheap, fast, easy, and brand friendly ways to manipulate that data point.

Do you think search cues will eventually become a strong market value indicator? Could SEOs get in trouble for manipulating financial markets based on manipulating search engines?

Uncertainty as a Tax

One of the biggest reasons my first site failed was because I wrote too much content on it, making it more of an AdSense / spamsense model than a consulting website. But as far as conversions go, a site like Clientside SEM will blow my old Search Marketing website out of the water every time. When selling certain services or products filtering and qualifying leads are just as important as generating leads. What good are a million leads if you can only work on one or two a month? But you usually have to build up quite a bit of brand equity to be lucky enough to be able to be so selective with clients.

Many businesses still end up running far less efficiently than they can because they have websites that do not answer common questions. How is your product different than the competition? How much is shipping? How long will it take for me to get my product? Why should I trust you with my credit card details? Each of these pieces of uncertainty act as holes which tax your business:

  • by causing people to trust and value your products and services less

  • by causing fewer people to respond to your offers
  • by requiring more one on one customer interaction when smart site architecture and clear messaging would have worked

Based on this site you probably wouldn't expect me to be a fan of auto-responders and email marketing, but anything that can be fairly automated and helps you drive the sales funnel is a plus. I haven't done much with those on this site yet (other than sending ebook updates), but for many sites having a quick and easy automated way to interact and build trust more than pays for itself by saving time and allowing you to charge a greater premium for your products and services.

One of the advantages to being small and having few customers is that you can pay so much attention to each one, be so close to each one, and use that interaction to streamline your sales stream. The lack of leads can be viewed as a reason to be nervous, but that isn't going to help you as much as if you are receptive to leads and keep using the feedback to convert better each time.

I used to read a ton of books, but the rate which I read has went way down because I am constantly drowning in a sea of emails, customer inquiries, and other opportunities. If you are uncertain what to do there are always more things that we can be learning, and if you are close to customers use that to make your business as efficient as possible so you can be efficient and scale it out once you start getting more exposure.

Also, so long as you are profitable and know you are making changes to streamline your business you probably shouldn't worry if editing a page is going to hurt your SEO (unless you are doing things like changing your content management system or going to introduce big problems like duplicate content issues). Even if you take a short term hit in traffic the traffic will eventually come back if you are delivering more value to site visitors. When you get more efficient that gives you more time and/or capital to put into improving customer relationships / delivering greater value / marketing and brand building.

How Google AdWords Ads Manipulate Google's Organic Search Results

SEO Question: I was thinking about buying Google AdWords and AdSense ads or placing AdSense on my site. Will doing any of these increase my link count, Google rankings, or rankings in other search engines?

Answer: PPC ads go through redirects, so they do not count toward your link popularity, but there are other ways to tie together PPC ads and organic search placement. Search engines claim there is no direct linkage between buying ads and ranking, but they only talk in ideals because it helps reinforce their worldview and help them make more money.

Buying AdWords Ads

What They Won't Tell You:
Highly commercial keywords may have the associated editorial results go through more relevancy filters and/or be editorially reviewed for relevancy more frequently. Also, because they want people to click on the AdWords ads there is a heavy informational bias on the oranic search results.

I know some people who have large ad spends that get notifications of new ad system changes ahead of time, and others who get to give direct feedback to allow them to participate in cleaning up search results and minimizing unfair competing actions in the ad systems. So that is one type of cross-over / feedback that exists, but I think that tends to be more rare, and the more important cross over / feedback that exists is an indirect one.

Just by Being Real
You can't really explain why and how everyone does what they do. Some people who find your product and enjoy it enough to leave glowing testimonials will even tell you that they don't know how they found it.

In the same way that targeted ads can lead to purchases, they can also lead to an increase in mindshare, brand, reach, usage data, and linkage data. Just by being real and being seen you are going to pick up quality signals. If you try to factor all of those into your ad buys most markets are still under-priced.

Cross Over Due to Buying AdWords:
A well thought out pay per click campaign can feed into your SEO campaign more ways than I can count. Here are a few examples.

Integrating Offline & Online:
In a TV commercial Pontiac told people to search Google, and got a ton of press.

Big Controversial Ads:
Mazda quickly bid on Pontiac.

Many companies also have strong ties between the legal and marketing departments. If buying or selling an ad gets you sued and gets you in the news the value of the news coverage can far exceed the cost of the ads and legal fees.

Small Controversial Ads:
When I was newer to the field one friend called me the original link spammer. He meant it as a compliment, and I still take it as one. In much the same way I was an aggressive link builder, I was also quite aggressive at ad buying.

I caused controversy by buying names of other people in the industry as AdWords ads. I was prettymuch a total unknown when I did that, but some of the top names in the industry elevated my status by placing my name in heated discussion about what was fair and reasonable or not.

You can always consider placing controversial / risky ideas or ads against your brand or competing brands as a way to generate discussion (but of course consider legal ahead of time).

Drafting Off New Words & Industry News:
When the nigritude ultramarine SEO contest started I bid on AdWords. Some people discussing the contest mentioned that I bid on that word. If an event bubbles up to gain mainstream coverage and you make it easy to identify your name as being associated with it then you might pick up some press coverage.

Industry buzz words that are discussed often have significant mindshare, get searched for frequently, and larger / bureaucratic competitors are going to struggle to be as plugged into the market as you are or react as quickly to the changing language.

Snagging a Market Position Early:
When a friend recommended I read the TrustRank research paper in February of last year I knew it was going to become an important idea (especially because that same friend is brilliant, helped me more ways and times than I can count, and was the guy who came up with the idea of naming the Google Dances).

I read it and posted a TrustRank synopsis. In addition to trying to build a bit of linkage for that idea I also ensured that I bought that keyword on AdWords. Today I rank #1 in Google for TrustRank, and I still think I am the only person buying that keyword, which I find fascinating given how many people use that word and how saturated this market is.

Buying AdSense Ads

Buying Ads Creates Content:
If your ads are seen on forums people may ask about your product or brands. I know I have seen a number of threads on SEO forums that were started with something like I saw this SEO Book ad and I was wondering what everyone thought of it. Some people who start talking about you might not even click your ads.

Each month my brand gets millions and millions of ad impressions at an exceptionally reasonable price, especially when you factor in the indirect values.

Appealing to an Important Individual:
I have seen many people advertise on AdSense targeting one site at a time, placing the webmaster's name in the ad copy. It may seem a bit curt for some, but it is probably more likely to get the attention of and a response from a person than if you request a link from them.

Ads are another type / means of communication.

Appealing to a Group of People:
I get a ton of email relating to blogs and blogging. And in Gmail I keep seeing Pew Internet ads over and over and over again. Their ads range from Portrait of a Blogger to Who are Bloggers?

Going forward they will have added mindshare, link equity, and a report branded with that group of people. When people report on blogging or do research about blogging in the future the Pew report is likely to be referenced many times.

Selling AdSense Ads

Don't Sell Yourself Short:
Given the self reinforcing nature of links (see Filthy Linking Rich) anything that undermines your authority will cause you to get less free exposure going forward. So you really have to be careful with monetization. If you do it for maximal clickthough rate that will end up costing you a lot of trust and link equity.

There are other ways to improve your AdSense CTR and earnings without costing your credibility and authority.

More tips:

Don't Monetize Too Early:
Given the lack of monetization ability of a new site with few visitors and the importance of repeat visits in building trust and mindshare you don't want to monetize a new site too aggressively unless it is an ecommerce type site. It is hard to build authority if people view your site as just enough content to wrap around the AdSense.

Spam, Footprints, & Smart Pricing:
In the past search engines may have discounted pages that had poison words on them. Search is all about math / communication / patterns.

If your site fits the footprints of many spammy sites then your site might be flagged for review or reduced in authority. MSN did research on detecting spam via footprints, and link spam detection based on mass estimation shows how power laws could make it easy to detect such footprints.

Graywolf recently noted that landing page slippage may be an input into landing page and site quality scores for AdWords ad buyers. Google could also use AdSense account earnings or AdSense CTR data to flag sites for editorial reviews, organic search demotion, ad payout reduction, or smart pricing.

Market Timing in New Verticals & Self Promotional Contests in Consumer Generated Media

I recently made another post about the importance of brand building and niche markets, and Solomon Rothman commented that one way to go niche is to go stylized / have a unique delivery approach, which is totally valid. Another way to dominate niches is market timing. If you bet early on markets you are passionate about the odds are pretty good that your investment will pay off big. If you were not the first to market in a vertical you can still leverage the brand strength of other companies and get in early when they create new channels. Many authorities are adding community features to their sites each day. The guide I wrote for Work.com is currently their most popular guide, which is probably going to provide some solid exposure for me for the $0 and hour or two it took to write. And them emailing their top guide writers is also smart on them, because it means that marketers who were able to get significant exposure once may end up mentioning them again to try to fuel their own ego or protect their position on the leader board, and marketing the Work.com site again. If you have a site with consumer generated content offering prizes, logos, and arbitrary status levels provides a way for the most active members to identify with / feel important about / provide free marketing to your community.

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