Being a parent, sometimes the going gets rough. Particularly when you're dealing with teenagers. Ya know what I'm talking about? Parenting experts don't call it the White Water Rafting Years for nothing. Last week was one of those weeks from Hell. *sigh* Hopefully it isn't anything that a little "tough love" won't fix though. Of course she is grounded. But a new and very warranted punishment was I confiscated her cell phone -- permanently. If she wants a cell phone, she'll have to buy one herself, and sign up for service herself, in her own name. She went ballistic on that one.

Anyways, I thought you'd enjoy seeing a couple of funny signs about children...

A sign spotted in China

A sign spotted in Madison, WI

You gotta check out this WebProNews video interview at ACCM 08 of Steve Spangler - the science teacher turned catalog company CEO/Emmy award winner/keynote speaker/toy inventor:

In the video, Steve talks about how his Mentos + Diet Coke experiment turned into a YouTube sensation and how he was able to leverage it for his own marketing purposes. Steve is a client of ours and he even mentions Netconcepts (thank you Steve!!) as his experts behind the scenes helping him, which was really cool to hear.

Also in the video Steve shows off his cool flaming wallet, and how he is privileged to receive "special treatment" at airport security because of it. Um, yeah, that's not the kind of attention that you want, Steve

What you don't see in the video is that Steve also has a flaming business card holder. It's hilarious when he whips out one of his business cards and he has to put the fire out on the flaming card before he hands it to you. I'd LOVE to have one of those card holders and then troll the trade show floor and then hand over a flaming card to overaggressive, hard-selling vendors - but WITHOUT putting the fire out! hehe

I'd like to add some additional context to my last post on Social Media Power User "Hacks". In that post I provided some power user tips for social media marketing and optimization. These power user tips are meant to augment or supplement the necessary prerequisites of creating great content, being a valuable member of the social site/community, and being authentic your interactions (rather than deceitful or dishonest). Guerrilla tactics aren't a replacement for adding real value.

There are some ethical must-haves (underpinnings) of social media interaction such as engaging in meaningful conversation, instilling trust, being authentic, etc. Entering the social space without an internal moral compass is a recipe for disaster. Although such ethical must-haves wasn't part of my preso (you're rarely allocated more than 10 minutes to speak on an SES or SMX panel), don't think it's not important. It's THE most important thing.

Put another way, social media marketing isn't just a bunch of tricks and shortcuts, it's mostly about being adding value in an honest way, with the tricks and shortcuts added on to give you that little edge over your competition.

And when applying those aforementioned guerrilla tactics to gain the edge, you must exercise restraint and use good judgment. Don't just go hog wild and use every "trick in the book" and do it to excess.

Now consider this example of moderation versus excess... Sending a good friend a site with the StumbleUpon toolbar is totally acceptable. But compare that with sending an army of "friends" that you don't know a truckload of URLs to sift through. The latter is spammy, unethical, and reckless; you'd be foolish to engage in such behavior. You'd torch your account, burn relationships and ruin your reputation.

In line with that thought, you certainly don't need to employ the whole kit and caboodle of guerrilla tactics. For example, that tip for friending bands in MySpace may be totally unnecessary. Hopefully you can get to a critical mass of friends on MySpace without adding low-value friends (low value as in not likely to have meaningful interactions with you and not in your target market) such as all the bands and musicians that you like. But if you are at only a handful of friends and can't seem to get over the hump, it's nice to know that there's something you can do besides just sit and wait for people to friend you; you can proactively friend bands that you like. Granted an artist like Weird Al Yankovic isn't going to be terribly interactive with you, so at some point in the future you're likely to remove that friend from your ranks. Incidentally, that particular tip of friending bands came from a jewelry retailer I interviewed for the Marketing on MySpace article I wrote for MarketingProfs last year. Here's the quote:

...when starting off, you need to get Friends. It's kind of a bragging right on MySpace. If you have too few friends, it'll be tough to get the good ones—the ones who will end up buying from you. So, before you go after those, get a few hundred "bad" friends—bands are the easiest. They'll give you a respectable number on your Friends list, and will leave comments on your page—giving a little realism boost to your profile—making the addition of friends of the "good" type that much easier.

Finally, your focus in your social media marketing shouldn't be solely on gaining links. The links are mainly a byproduct of being a good social citizen. Of course they're still an essential byproduct nonetheless if you are an SEO. But it shouldn't be your main driver for participating in social media. Taking such a self-centered and short-sighted view will backfire. People will see through it. Operate by the principle of "pay it forward". Karma, in other words.

Live long and prosper.

Here in Toronto, I just finished my presentation on the Social Media Success panel. I shared some "hacks" for some social sites and services -- and when I say "hacks" -- I mean in the good sense of the word, not the evil sense. In other words, the way that the book publisher O'Reilly uses the word in their series of books such as Google Hacks. O'Reilly define "hacks" as "tools, tips, and tricks that help users solve problems." Such hacks tend to be aimed at intermediate-level power users. Here's what I covered:

Wikipedia

• Build up your street cred (long & virtuous contribution history, user profile page with Barnstar awards) before doing anything that could be construed as self-serving. It's not good enough to be altruistic on Wikipedia unless you demonstrate it. i.e. It has to be visible as a track record (i.e. do squash spam and fix typos and add valuable content, but don't do it anonymously).
• A link on a high-profile article is worth gold, as it builds your credibility and visibility with journalists and bloggers. Negotiate with an article's "owner" (the main editor who most polices the article) before making such an edit to get their blessing first.
• Monitor your articles-of-interest with a tool that emails you (e.g. trackengine, changenotes, urlywarning, changedetect). Don’t just rely on Wikipedia’s “Watch” function.
• The flow of PageRank can be directed internally within Wikipedia with Disambiguation pages, Redirects, Categories.
• Make friends. They will be invaluable in times of trouble, such as if an article you care about gets an "Article for Deletion" nomination.
• Don’t edit anonymously from work. This could come back to haunt you. Have you heard of WikiScanner??

Wikis
There are plenty of other wikis out there that are a lot more edit-friendly than Wikipedia where you could contribute valuable content, get links, and build relationships. Examples include ShopWiki, The NewPR Wiki, WordPress Codex, conference wikis such as the Web20Expo. Some even pass link juice, which is a nice bonus.

Digg

• Strip away all commercial links during the initial Digg swarm. Digg alpha geeks are repelled / repulsed by overly commercial sites.
• Friend popular Diggers. Better yet, if you can convince a popular Digger to submit your story, you'll significantly increase your chances of the story hitting the Digg home page. Consult the Top 100 list of Diggers for the most popular "power users".
• Time your presence on the Digg front page for daylight hours
• Craft a killer title using this formula from Muhammad Saleem: number + adjective + key phrase. E.g. “13 Most Chilling Haunted Hotels” or “16 Incredibly Unconventional Hotel Rooms”

StumbleUpon
You can "force" your friends to view your request to stumble a particular URL using the “Send to” function in the StumbleUpon toolbar. They have to view your URL before they can continue with their random channel surfing. Don't abuse it, or your tick your friends off.

YouTube

• With most popular YouTube promotions, YouTube gets the links and the original site usually does not. Stack the odds more in your favor by creating a microsite and making the microsite URL your username. e.g. “willitblend.com” is BlendTec’s username.
• Use as many tags as possible while still being accurate.
• Run a contest and recruit popular YouTube users to enter. Their video submission will get pushed out to all their subscribers. e.g. Intuit’s brilliant Tax Rap contest.
• Be creative but unpolished. A great example of this is SolarDave’s SES San Jose spoof with cut-out figures as the actors.
• Some other examples of successful YouTube videos include Eepybird’s Bellagio Fountain of Diet Coke + Mentos, BlendTec’s “Will It Blend?” series, the Heroes spoof commercial (“Zeroes”) – an NBC creation, and John Cleese Backup Trauma webisode

MySpace

• You need a good number of friends. No friends and you look like a loser, just like in the real world. You can establish critical mass quickly simply by friending bands. They’ll take anybody! Also models (male and female), fiction authors, actors, go-go dancers, and DJs work too. Find them using the “Search Profiles for People with Similar Career Interests” as part of MySpace’s Search function. You can remove them later on when you no longer need them.
• Long page load time will drive your profile visitors away. Disable HTML in your comments so users can’t fill your page with slow-loading pictures of LOLcats etc.

LinkedIn

• Add links to your website, blog, and one other URL and select “Other” so you can specify the anchor text. Don’t use the pre-selected categories “My website” etc.
• Add a LION (LinkedIn Open Networker) or two to your network. i.e. a “promiscuous sneezer” (in Seth Godin-speak). You can find LIONs on the TopLinked.com list. e.g. Flip Filipowski
• Add your email address to your “professional headline” so folks 4+ degrees away don’t have to waste an InMail to contact you.
• Questions posted to LinkedIn Answers can also serve your own purposes e.g. “We’re looking to hire an SEO analyst and are willing to pay whatever it takes to get a top-notch person. What job boards do you recommend?”

Flickr

• Always use tags – as many as possible while still being accurate. Put multiple word tags in surrounded by quotation marks
• Make descriptive titles for your photos
• Create thematic Sets for your photos
• Links on profile, set and collection pages are not nofollowed
• If the photo is location specific, go into Flickr’s tools and geotag the picture.
• Go into the Flickr set tools, and locate the location on the Yahoo! Map, then drag the picture onto the map to pinpoint its location.
• Creative Commons license your photo and put how you want the user to credit you in your photo’s description.

Meetup.com
Get involved with local Meetups and get your meetup.com member profile page linked from the meetup’s page, which will pass juice to your profile then on to your site.

Actually there are many social sites with profile pages that pass link juice. Here is a nice list of some of them.

Blogs

• First, get involved via comments and build rapport. Careful about making the commenter name keyword-rich. That can look spammy and get your comment deleted by the blogger.
• It's helpful from a PageRank perspective to comment on blogs that “dofollow” comment links. e.g. Mark Cuban’s Blogmaverick.com, Rimm-Kaufman Group's blog.
• Submit to blog carnivals. Host one (requires that you have a blog). Start a new one.
• Be a contributor to a group blog (e.g. BusinessBlogConsulting.com, Shop.org Blog)
• Be a guest blogger on someone else’s blog (e.g. TechGazing.com, Problogger.net)
• A Tip Jar indicates the blogger is desperate for cash and is open to having sponsors help support them.

Twitter

• Create a microsite dedicated to Twitter e.g. twitter.zappos.com
• Avoid getting your message junked by a recipient's email spam filter or adding to an already overflowing inbox by using Twitter's direct messages.
• Influence the top influencers in your Twitter network by influencing those in common with you. Identify the common “friends” with tweetwheel.com. You can send your request for them (e.g. to check out your latest post) as a direct message.

And finally, here is my PowerPoint from the session. Enjoy!

I'm here at SES Toronto. It's been a crazy last few weeks, with SMX Advanced, then Internet Retailer, and now SES Toronto. I came in late to the session "Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Online Mentions", so I only have notes from Jim Hedger's presentation. Here are Jim's main takeaways:

• The fastest path to prominence is to create something of value every day
• Get involved in conversations
• The internet is a conversational medium
• Create informative content (audio, video, text, whatever)
• Give insights about your industry
• Offer your own techniques, tactics and forecasts
• Review software or products your readers might find useful
• Give others something to reference or link to
• Get involved in conversations
• Create informative content
• Participate in community forums like SEW, Cre8asite, WebmasterWorld, Digital Point, IHelpYou, etc.
• Do nice things. Acts of kindness go a long way in this community. e.g. Search Engine Journal's SEM Essay Prize Pack, Metamend's Hockey Tournaments for the Food Bank, SEOmoz's free passes to SMX events, MarketingPilgrim's SEO/SEM Education Scholarships
• The Internet is a collective memory. Which is good because otherwise nobody would remember exactly what happened at the infamous Internet Marketers of New York / Best of the Web charity parties.
• Be of good value. It's really hard work, but it helps you stand out in the crowd.
• Start early. repeat frequently.
• On authoritative sources, journalists and bloggers: Be a pal. Be a source.

• Remember a few vital rules...

  • #1: Never tell a journalist or blogger something you don't want everyone else on Earth to know
  • #2: Keep it simple. The media has a dozen different story options to choose from every day. each story is extremely complicated. Help writers get it right.
  • #3: Know your audience. Learn the interests and passions of favored writers. Pitch stories to writers who might be interested. Avoid annoying writers with uninteresting stories.
• Always be honest. Every writer has heard his or her share of big fish stories. Writers might research your cliam.

• Things not to do:

  • Don't make up fake news stories
  • Don't assume entitlement. You don't get links because you are you. You have to work for it.
  • Don't spam writers.
  • Don't forget to say thanks

Following up the previous post about SEO reporting to clients, another major part of over-delivering to clients is how you communicate with them. Every time you send something to a client, you need to be crystal clear on the following two points...

First, you need to tell them what you are sending them and why. This should go without saying, however, all too often someone new to the business of working with clients will send out a document to a client without being clear about what it is. If you are sending a keyword universe to show the client some early research and you are not clear about what this is, they will be confused. Confused clients are a bad thing; they get cranky quickly. Be clear; explain what you are sending and why you sent it.

Secondly, summarize each document's major takeaway. Many deliverables and reports can read like a foreign language to the non tech-savvy. To avoid this, be sure to explain the significance of each report and technical document. You can send a client a well-written thousand page report on their SEO, but if you do not sum up the main points succinctly, your recipient will likely miss them. Never assume that a client will understand or even read what you send them. Most of the time you are working with managers who see their company at a very high level. All they really want to know is that you're getting the job done and that the traffic and money are flowing. It is your job to convince them of that.

Probably one of the best pieces of advice I can give for anyone selling in any field, especially SEO, is to always under promise and then over deliver. A very quick way to impress a client, ensure client retention, and promote referrals from them is to promise them a mule and give them a stallion. This isn't to say sell yourself short, however, when you are selling SEO, there are many variables that you cannot foresee. Make sure the client is well aware that ranking for their keywords might be difficult and take some time. If/when you start ranking and send a lot of traffic much more quickly than promised, the client will be thrilled.

Don't just use this advice on the initial sell. Continue to set expectations below what you think you can deliver. There is nothing worse than giving the client a expectation that is never met. If this happens, there is nothing worse than constantly trying to get out of a hole you dug for yourself.

One of my duties at ACCM 2008 in Orlando was to host a table at "Lunch with the Experts". The table's stated topic was one Netconcepts specializes in -- SEO for large-scale ecommerce sites. Most of the table's discussion revolved around two representatives from a company in a true SEO crisis. Their product pages were invisible in search engines, and their ancient and outdated CMS was about as search-unfriendly as possible -- it even used frames! To add insult to injury, the people who understood that the website had problems were having a great deal of trouble convincing management to redesign the company site.

So the first element of the crisis is the technology. The site in its present condition is unable to generate any natural search engine traffic to the company's many hundreds of product pages.

The second element is internal company politics; for whatever reason, someone high in the corporate hierarchy had an interest in using an inappropriate and underperforming CMS and wouldn't relent unless the two ACCM attendees were able to present a solid business case for making dramatic technical changes. The two men's purpose at ACCM was to collect information and material that would help support that business case.

The third element to the crisis is that the company is losing potential customers. Through extensive research, they'd determined that the Web was the number one way to attract new customers, and so they have relied on paid search placement via Google AdWords. They've had some success there, but understand that they'd do much better through high placement in organic results. They really needed their product pages to place well for their selected keywords (I didn't ask them much about keywords, so I don't know for certain that they're on the right track as far as determining placement).

A few missed customers might not seem like a serious enough issue to label the situation a crisis... until you take into account the fact that this company's products are such that potential customers only buy once about every ten years. So if you miss today's opportunities, they will likely not show up again for quite a long time. A lost sale is a major problem for this corporation, and improved search engine optimization is the quickest, easiest, and least expensive way to solve it.

You might have guessed that I recommended GravityStream, Netconcepts' proxy-based automated SEO platform. As fun as it is to battle one's IT department, upper management and the accompanying internal politics, IMHO a proxy server that sidesteps these things adds to one's career longevity.

Another great search marketing session at ACCM 2008 was "Conversion is your secret weapon," given by Wine Enthusiast's VP of marketing Glenn Edelman and The Rimm-Kaufman Group's Larry Becker. The first part of the session concentrated on in-depth ways of determining advertising ROI and effectiveness. The general advice that Web marketers get on this subject can be pretty lightweight, but these guys gave some really great advice:

• Track at both the keyword and the ad level
• Pay as close attention to your organic search results as you do to your PPC results
• Choose your tracking technology carefully; if possible, use multiple redundant solutions

The second half of the session concentrated on both landing page design and general site design -- the other half of the search marketing equation (it's not all about keyword research and ad copy!) The presenters offered tips and tricks for fine-tuning your ads, landing pages, and your entire site as a whole. Every page needs to serve one of three purposes: It should offer information, an opportunity to buy, or an opportunity to click deeper into the site. In essence, every page is an offer page.

The presenters spent the last portion of the session talking in depth about usability as it applies to conversions and sales. They gave some examples of good and bad sites, concentrating specifically on the level of hassle of signup pages (and the degree to which visitors are satisfied after they've completed them).

Overall it was quite an informative session for search marketers. I'm sure everyone in the audience got at least one actionable tip from it.

The second search marketing intensive session at ACCM 2008 was all about how to maximize your PPC search engine marketing efforts. The speakers were Ryan Gibson of the Rimm-Kaufman Group and Glenn Edelman, VP of marketing at The Wine Enthusiast.

Much of the initial advice covered the basics of keyword research and calculating ROI, but there was also a wealth of detail in the presentation that you don't usually hear in a typical PPC presentation. For instance, many people know that you have to track ad performance to determine the ROI sweet spot, but how far do you usually go with it? Do you track seasonality? Do you know the differences in ad performance according to day of the week? It's this kind of analysis that can lead you to greater ad refinement and thus a better ROI.

A lot of people treat keyword research as an event, but it's really a process, which the presenters instilled in the audience by showing that the search volume for a keyword plus the word review has gone up dramatically over time; people are increasingly using Google for product research. Keywords and search engine user trends evolve rapidly with time, so you have to keep an eye on search trends and regularly re-evaluate not only your keywords, but also your ad performance.

The session offered other excellent advanced details such as how to budget your advertising spend after you've determined your most valuable keywords -- "As much as is profitable!" That sounds like obvious advice until you put it into the context of a typical, strictly limited business budget. If you're doing more conversions and making more money for every dollar you put into your PPC campaign, why wouldn't you keep plowing money into it until you reach a point where it drops off? I think a lot of marketers overlook that simple truth.