Internet Marketing Blog

Social Bookmark Marketing Presentation

I am a del.icio.us addict. I save tons of things to my del.icio.us account and republish that content using their wonderful RSS feeds. It's just insanely useful. But as much as I love del.icio.us, there are a few things I'd change:

• In the Links For You section, why can't I accept all the tags from the person who sent me the link with just one click?
• Why can't I archive an entire page like you can with Yahoo! MyWeb?
• Why can't I use a minus sign when creating a tag search so that I can exclude links with a specific tag? e.g. http://del.icio.us/tag/football+news-soccer, so I can get everything tagged with "football" and "news" but not "soccer".

Aside from those admittedly minor complaints, I heart del.icio.us. I've been using it for quite some time now, so I know the ins and outs. I have, therefore, a pretty good idea of how to use del.icio.us in particular and social bookmarking in general as a marketing tool, as well. (And, no, I'm not talking about spam. I'm never talking about spam because spamming doesn't work.)

This is a presentation on social bookmark marketing I recently put together for a seminar on the topic:

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You might also be interested in my post on social bookmarking demographics for a breakdown of the demographics of the users of various social bookmarking services.

Social Bookmarking Demographics

In an article about social bookmarking in the Winter 07/08 issue of Search Marketing Standard, Joe Whyte cites Quantcast demographic data for some of the top bookmarking sites. This data is hard to come by, so it is valuable in helping to understand the respective services' audiences. Using eBizMBA's list of the top 30 social bookmarking sites, the following is a list of those sites with links to their demographic profiles at Quantacast:

1. Digg.com
2. Technorati.com
3. del.icio.us
4. Propeller.com
5. StumbleUpon
6. reddit.com
7. Fark.com
8. MyBlogLog.com
9. slashdot.org
10. kaboodle.com
11. Bloglines.com
12. newsvine.com
13. blinklist.com
14. netvouz.com
15. clipmarks.com
16. Furl.net
17. Mister-Wong
18. dzone.com
19. ma.gnolia.com
20. Tailrank.com
21. ShoutWire.com
22. simpy.com
23. BlogMarks.net
24. BlueDot.us
25. Spurl.net
26. Spotplex.com
27. linkswarm.com
28. Spotback.com
29. PlugIm.com
30. MyBookmarks.com

Defining White/Black Hat Internet Marketing

Link building pro Eric Ward has an article in the Winter 07/08 issue of Search Engine Marketing Standard called "Staying White Hat in A World of Gray."

The article is not, unfortunately, online.

Ward's piece is a fair and evenhanded attempt at defining just what is "black hat" and what is "white hat" Internet marketing, i.e. unethical versus ethical marketing.

His basic argument is your motive is anything other than sharing stuff you like with the rest of the world, then it's Black Hat. Using the social bookmarking site StumbleUpon as an example, Ward says:

"The moment you socially bookmark a site for which you have an agenda, you are engaging in a black-hat tactic. Why? Because StumbleUpon was not created for business people to use as a marketing channel. It was created as a way to share sites they liked, not sites they were being paid to promote."

I completely disagree with his definition. I think the most important criteria to determine whether or not a tactic is Black or White Hat, is whether the addition of a given piece of content is helpful or adds value to the audience.

Using Ward's StumbleUpon example, say I've got a blog the sole purpose for which is to sell stuff through affiliate programs. My blog posts are only affiliate links to products for sale and my sole purpose is to get people to click and buy those products so I make money though the affiliate program. I go and bookmark every page with StumbleUpon and use deceptive headlines when I do so. That, clearly, is spam and a Black Hat tactic.

Conversely, I almost always bookmark new posts of this blog to StumbleUpon and categorize them accurately and describe the content of the post honestly. My StumbleUpon account is e-strategy.stumbleupon.com and my account name is e-strategy so anyone with half a brain can put two and two together and figure out that I'm bookmarking my own posts. 

I am doing nothing clandestinely but my motive is to increase the readership to this blog. And this purpose of this blog, of course, is to share my knowledge of Internet marketing because 1) I love what I do, but also 2) I hope to get some business out of the demonstration of my  expertise. My motives, at the end of the day, are commercial.

Does that mean the content I add to StumbleUpon is not worthwhile or in some way spam or underhanded? The quality of my content is ultimately for you readers to judge, but I like to think that my posts are adding value to the StumbleUpon community and the bookmarking of my posts is simply helping people to become aware of my content.

Likewise, my approach to search engine marketing is to help people find the information for which they've already expressed their desire. If the content accurately matches a search engine user's search query, and it is quality and appropriate content, then I've helped the searcher find the information I want, helped the search engine provide accurate search results, and helped my client as well.

Ward and I both agree that attempts to fool people or search services online will only backfire in the long run. And that's bad for me and my clients.

All Roads Lead To Rome...Online

Colosseo
Originally uploaded by sebatl

Just as all roads led to Rome during the Roman Empire, all online roads must lead back to your client and their message, if you are to have a successful comprehensive Internet marketing strategy.

Think of your client, your product, or whatever it is you are marketing as the city of Rome. You must make it as easy as possible for people to find you and travel to your city. The map must be clear and the roads easy to travel.

One of the primary reasons for the construction of Roman roads was to move the empire's armies quickly for their many military campaigns. Likewise, you too must build your online roads for your Internet marketing campaigns.

Multi Channel Marketing

The use of the word "channel" in the subheadline is deliberate, evoking, as it does a television metaphor and its content channels. Especially cable channels with their narrowly focused content; ESPN for sports, Comedy Central, the History Channel, and so on.

Internet channels define content as well: The Daily Kos for left-wing politics, ProFootballTalk.com for NFL football gossip, and engadget for consumer technology news. But Internet channels also define types of content: Technorati has blog posts; YouTube has videos; Flickr has photos, and Twitter has text messages.

Internet audiences are fragmenting because of hugely popular, deeply engaging sites like MySpace and YouTube. People are no longer spending a majority of their time at search engines, using them as portal to their final destinations. Now many people are going directly to their favorite online communities and spending a lot of time there. The word "community" is the operative word here because the most important thing most of these sites have in common are some sort of social networking feature.

All of these channels boast large, self-defined audiences: sports or history lovers; online video or photo enthusiasts. They give us the ability to reach the people who are most likely to want what we've got.

We know a lot about the audience already by the mere fact of them being there. MySpace users probably want to hook up with one another for whatever reason and because of the large presence of musicians and bands there, MySpace users are more likely than not music fans. YouTube users want to watch video; Flickr users want to share and look at photos; Technorati users want to read blog posts.

If you want to reach your audience online most efficiently, it is essential that you establish a presence at the online channels where your target audiences hang.

When In Rome

But, because of the social networking/media aspects of these channels, merely establishing a presence at these channels is likely not enough.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

The lingua franca of YouTube is video; for Flickr it is photos; for MySpace it is "friending" and comments. Take a look at what content you own and/or produce and match it to the medium. If you produce audio, upload it to Odeo. If you blog, make sure you feed your posts to Technorati. If you establish a YouTube account but don't upload and share your video, what's the point?

It is not just content type but also the tone of your content that matters.

Formal, Corpspeak on MySpace pages and comments just sounds weird. It's not in tune with the MySpace culture. Your blog posts that proclaim rather than discuss, announce rather than engage will fail; it's just not how the blogosphere works.

The Search Engine Glue - It's All In The Metadata

While, as I said above, people are spending more time at centers of online gravity, search remains a central function that serves as the glue that holds your comprehensive Internet marketing strategy together.

People don't abandon searching once they leave their favorite search engine; more often than not, they continue searching at the destination site. Search is, in fact, the primary and most efficient way of finding content at YouTube and Flickr and Technorati.

In order to reach the self-selected audience that search provides, you shouldn't forget to search optimize the content you provide these centers of gravity sites.

Finally, as I discussed in a previous post about blended search results, the content from the YouTubes and Flickrs and MySpaces of the world often rank well in Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live.

If you're skilled and a bit lucky, many of the links will lead to Rome.

NFL.com Redesign & Search Engine Marketing Blunder

Darren Sharper Tackles Cedric Benson 
Originally uploaded by NicelySighted

The fundamentals in football are how to block, how to tackle, how to catch and how to pass. One of the fundamentals of redesigning a web site is to preserve, or at least account for, existing inbound links to the site.

So it was odd to discover after the redesign of NFL.com was unveiled amid much fanfare, that they changed the URL structure of the pages of individual football player's profiles but failed to account for all the links that pointed to the old player profiles.

Pro Football Bloggers' Links To NFL.com

According to Google, there are 22,800 inbound links to the root NFL.com domain. As of this writing, Technorati lists more than 67,000 blog posts linking to NFL.com. That's a lot of links representing a lot of traffic and a major marketing blunder.

As someone who blogs quite a bit about pro football, the league's failure to account for existing links to their site is especially annoying because all of the links I have to player profiles prior to the redesign are now broken.  This is obviously lost traffic to NFL.com, but, more importantly to me, the broken links create a horrible user experience for the readers of my blog posts. They get is an error page rather than the player profile they were expecting.

The extremely frustrating thing for me is that long ago I made it policy to link to a player's NFL profile under the reasonable assumption that the links wouldn't change. The problem of linking to team profiles is that players change teams though trades, free agency, and cuts and that results in broken links. It's reasonable to assume that many other football bloggers came to the same conclusion.

Perhaps I should only link to Wikipedia player bios from now on.

But it is not just links from blogs that have been broken, the links from the search engines are broken, too, and that's a user experience and branding problem for the NFL.

NFL.com's Search Engine Optimization

I'll use Minnesota Vikings safety Darren Sharper to illustrate NFL.com's previous URL structure for player profiles. The URL for Sharper's profile on NFL.com was http://www.nfl.com/players/4249.htm. The new URL is http://www.nfl.com/players/darrensharper/profile?id=SHA500479. Note that they've included the player's name in the URL itself, while the old URL only used an ID number.

As of this writing, this is what the Google search results look like for "Darren Sharper":

You'll notice from the screenshot above that the link for Sharper's old profile reads "NFL.com #42 Darren Sharper." That text is taken from the HTML TITLE Tag of the page. The new player profile pages use only the player's name in the TITLE Tag. Couple that with the inclusion of the player's name in the URL and it becomes obvious that the redesigned site is intended to be search optimized in order to boost the page's rankings on the search engine results pages.

If the NFL knew enough to optimize the redesigned site for search engines, wouldn't they know enough to account for existing inbound links? Apparently not.

When you click on the link to Sharper's profile from the search results, you get an error page. That creates a frustrating user experience for NFL.com and that frustration hurts the NFL brand.

Site Redesign Fundamentals

The fundamentals for dealing with an issue that many site's must deal with are well known and relatively painless: 1) permanent 301 redirects to seamlessly point an old page to a new one in a "search engine friendly" manner so that you do not lose your search ranking, and 2) using an XML sitemap to tell the search engines about your new pages. NFL.com does neither.

The NFL certainly doesn't need search engines to drive traffic to NFL.com. They've got television to do that. But the fact remains that NFL.com is listed in the search engines and accounting for broken links should have been done with the redesign. It's obvious the NFL has a pretty sizable Internet marketing budget, so you'd think their Internet marketing team would have planned for that.

Blogger Liaisons

Any organization with mass popular appeal that is likely to have a lot of people blogging about them--which is especially applicable to professional sports leagues--should think seriously of creating a blogger liaison. This person would have a blog themselves and reach out to bloggers, solicit their feedback, inform them of issues that may affect them and answer questions, etc.

An obvious example that will immediately spring to mind for those in the search marketing industry, is Matt Cutts who performs that very function for Google's relations with the search engine marketing community.

If the NFL had a blogger liaison and informed pro football bloggers about an upcoming site redesign, I'm absolutely certain those bloggers would have worried about broken links and the NFL would have become aware of the issue prior to the launch of their redesigned site.

Google's Problem With Paid Links

I've been meaning to write about this but, you know, hey, whaddya gonna do? Things get in the way.  But the topic came up again when reviewing a potential client's web site that looked like it was at risk of being penalized by Google because of paid links. So, though the topic may be a bit dated, it's still relevant.

In April, Matt Cutts, Google's search engine marketing liaison, explained the company's attitude toward paid links and clarified in May. In short, the search engine does not like them because some search engine marketers use them to try and improve the ranking of their site in Google's search results.  As such, Google considers them Web spam.

You need not worry if you've been buying links from reputable, legitimate sites and not link brokers. Google won't penalize you for that but, if the site linking to you is viewed very favorably by Google, you will incur no benefit from that site linking to you. That's often the reason people buy links, to get Google to think of your site favorably because of a link from a site the search engine already views as very favorably.

Google's Paid Link Policy

Google's paid link policy is an eminently reasonable practice to keep Web spam from its search results. Google wants its search results to be as relevant and precise as possible because that keeps people using the service and the search engine's user base is what drives ad sales.

But the policy calls into question how Google will treat paid links that are not necessarily intended to game their search results or links that are intended to boost the linked-to site's search ranking yet are topically relevant.

Let me explain.

Buying Topical Links

Let's say I have a baseball blog that I've been posting to for a while but haven't really marketed in anyway. The traffic to it is low and I've finally decided I want to grow my readership. But I want to do it relatively quickly because the post-season is approaching and readership for baseball blogs in general is going to rise and my team, the Minnesota Twins, will likely make the playoffs. (Hey, they did it last year!) This will be my prime opportunity of the year to tap into a large audience.

So, I plan on buying some links from Twins blogs and I'll buy links from a few blogs that cover Major League Baseball in general but are not devote to a specific team. In both cases, the topics of the sites I'm going to buy links from and my own blog are the same: The Minnesota Twins and baseball.

Boosting Search Engine Ranking Through Link Popularity

My purpose for buying these links is to grow my own audience, so I obviously want those sites' visitors to visit and read my blog and become part of my readership. But I'd also like to try and get some search engine traffic, so I'm going to use relevant keywords in my link text. My link text will read "Visit my Minnesota Twins blog" to try and rank well in the search engines for the phrase "Minnesota Twins Blog."

Why should should Google disapprove of my links, much less penalize me for them?

As I said, Google needs quality search results to make money from advertising. But my link buying campaign is doing nothing to affect the quality of the search engine's results.

Let's say that I post daily, sometimes more, that I'm a brilliant baseball mind and a superb writer, so the content of my blog is of the highest quality. If my site ranks highly because of my link campaign, I'm improving the quality of Google's results for the phrase "Minnesota Twins blog" because my blog is as good as if not better than the rest that are listed. And a link to my blog precisely matches what the searcher wants.

Though they don't say specifically, it would make no sense for Google to penalize this type of Internet marketing because it only helps Google improve their results. It's a win-win for both my blog and Google's quality. So I have to think Google will not frown on such paid links.

That's the approach I take to search engine marketing: Help Google improve their search engine results by including my clients' high-quality, relevant content in their results. Such an approach is in everyone's long-term interests: Mine, my clients' and Google's.

Communications 2.0 - Social Bookmarks Marketing

This is the fifth part of a presentation Ann Treacy and I gave on Web 2.0 technologies, called Communications 2.0. We presented to a nonprofit communications class at Hamline University.

The fifth segment discusses social bookmarks marketing through such services as del.icio.us:

See also:

• Communications 2.0 - The Theory Of Web 2.0 - Part 1
• Communications 2.0 - Flickr Photo Sharing Marketing - Part 2
• Communications 2.o - Podcasting & Podcast Marketing - Part 3
• Communications 2.0 - Viral Video Marketing - Part 4

Google's Matt Cutts Offers SEM Insight

I Just finished reading an interview by ClickZ Network's  Mike Grehan with Google's  Matt Cutts, the company's  liaison to the  search engine marketing industry.

The article is a summary of the interview, highlighting some of the key points Cutts makes, not the least of which is "Just make a great site, with great content and a normal reason why people would want to link to you and visit your site. A compelling reason why people would want to link to your site."

It's a point I've been making for some time with clients and potential clients and find myself making more and more as bloggers become a larger part of the Internet marketing equation. If you want to take advantage of the primary channels through which consumers find products and services, your ability to create compelling content will be ever more crucial in determining your sucess or failure.

The article is worth a read and it is accompanied by the entire interview in MP3 format split into part one and part two.

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