Balancing SEO Efforts

I was just looking today at my stats. Ok, I check them every day, but today I was thinking about the difficult challenge of balancing my SEO efforts. The question is whether I should continue to reinforce the existing keywords that are already bringing me large amounts of traffic versus building SEO for new keywords.

Of course the answer (like it usually is) is that I need to keep doing both. The hard part is finding the balance between the two. I don’t know a good model for doing the balance. Anyone have any suggestions?

At the end of the day, I just keep trying to create great content with good, relevant keywords and I try not to worry too much about the rest. I think it was Gary V who said something like do something, because something is that much more than nothing. I just keep trying to do a little bit of something each day to build my online empire. Maybe one day I’ll host a video show where I have the guts to make a cold sales call unscripted like Gary V. Until then, I’ll just keep doing something.

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February 3, 2009 I Written By

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Filed Under: Blogging  Online Marketing
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Twitter Marketing

I’m far from an expert on using Twitter to market. I’ve seen a ton of interesting ideas out there that people are using to connect on Twitter. You definitely have to be creative, but it’s a great place to apply your creativity.

The thing that surprises me the most about marketing something on Twitter is how an individual tweet can drive traffic. Certainly if you have 6000 followers and you post a link, then you’ll generate traffic. I’ve seen some traffic from that type of twitter marketing, but it’s never been huge (granted I have less than 1000 followers).

What I’ve found more interesting is when an old tweet generates traffic. For example, here’s a tweet that was generated from a blog post I wrote about Jason Mesnick getting engaged at the end of Bachelor.

Not only was this post done 15 days ago, but how many people look at individual tweets? The answer is not very many. I can only assume that the search engines have found that tweet and some search engine (most likely Google) has been driving traffic to that tweet which of course prompts people to visit my blog post.

I’ve had this happen multiple times. I can’t figure out the exact rhyme or reason to why it happens, but considering how long it’s taken me to set up a twitterfeed, it seems like a worthwhile addition to anyone trying to market an RSS feed.

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January 6, 2009 I Written By

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Filed Under: Blogging  Online Marketing  Technology  twitter
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Show Me Money…Not Link Exchanges

Am I the only one that gets a link exchange request and just cringes? Seriously, I hate link exchanges. The only exception is when I get a link exchange request from TV Guide, Buddy TV or some other major TV website that wants to exchange with my TV Blog network. That link exchange is worthwhile, because those websites are the websites when it comes to TV and I’ll be happy to share the love with them since they can offer some major love in return. Otherwise, I don’t want to exchange links with some spam site.

So, if you want to exchange links with me, then don’t bother me unless you’re internet royalty in your space. However, I do accept money for those really interested in having their link on my site. It’s amazing how loud cash speaks. I love to hear it talk and the larger it is the more profound an impact it has.

Honestly, I wonder how much value a link exchange has in search engines. My guess is that Google takes a link exchange (ie. both sites link to each other on some spammy looking webpage full of links) and discounts the value of those links to basically nothing. Compare that to a link that someone puts on a page because they think something you created is valuable, interesting or a good resource for that topic. Now that’s a link that has probably 100 times more value in the site of Google than some link exchange.

One other thought is maybe I’ll just reply to each of the people requesting a link exchange and ask them to link to my site before I link to there site. Then, I’ll never actually add their link. I wonder how many of these people asking for a link exchange really come back to see if the links there. My guess is that a ton of them don’t. I’ll just call their link the cost of me having to read their link exchange email spam (which most of them are).

I wonder if Matt Cutts would be willing to comment on the value or lack thereof of link exchanges. My money’s on a graph showing the value of link exchanges approaching zero.

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November 10, 2008 I Written By

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Filed Under: Blogging  Online Marketing  SEO
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Starbucks Opens A Website for Ideas

On CrowdSource This there is a really interesting post about the new My Starbucks Idea. It’s always great to see big companies using technology. Certainly Starbucks took a lot of this from Dell’s Idea Storm, but I don’t think Dell will mind.

I’m personally not a big Starbucks fan. Although I get a lot of chances to go there since I’ve won a bunch of Starbucks gift cards and so free Starbucks is usually worth it. Should be interesting to see what ideas come out of the numerous Starbucks fans around the world.

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March 22, 2008 I Written By

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Marketing Your Blog

So, you don’t know how to market your blog or you’re not sure what to do to drive traffic to your blog. Well, don’t say I didn’t point you in the right direction. I haven’t looked at too many details of this list, but just looking at the volume and the categorization I’m sure there’s a lot of information in it that could be used. In fact, probably too much. The key will be to take this list and find things that match your interests, blog and skills well.

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February 13, 2008 I Written By

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Backgammon Masters Animation Series

I recently came across a pretty interesting way to try and market something as common as a backgammon game. It’s a website trying to promote online backgammon. They are using what they call the “#1 Player at BackgammonMasters, Jean-Claude the animated tiger.” It’s really quite creative what they are doing. They have an animated video of Jean-Claude doing his thing. Here’s one of them:

It’s a pretty cool animation. The first part was really nice and I loved the sign that looked just like the sign that is so famous here in Las Vegas.

Jean-Claude is a really interesting character. He has a series of these videos of Jean-Claude explaining how to succeed at a variety of life’s endeavors. Jean-Claude is a tiger, humoristic, mafia type, dressed in 70′s clothes (bell-bottoms and cream-colored shoes, a button-up shirt with a dice print and a large dollar sign chain around his neck) sitting in his trailer in the used junk car lot he manages. I loved the bling around his neck.

I think there on to a pretty interesting concept that could be an interesting method of viral marketing. Especially since viewers win prizes for trivia questions after viewing, and are offered rewards for suggestion any script ideas used. Looks like even the common game of backgammon isn’t immune to viral internet marketing.

This post sponsored by Gammonish.

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April 4, 2007 I Written By

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Filed Under: Games  General Life  Online Marketing  Technology

Taxes When You Make So Much Side Money

Well, this last year I have done quite well with bringing in some side cash. It’s a great thing to bring in some side money. It’s not so great a thing when taxes come due. I’m just lucky that I have made $1798.15 doing PayPerPost. Yes, that’s right. I’ve made that much money blogging for payperpost. Blogging is the best and I’m sure most advertisers will agree that blog marketing is on the way up. Too bad almost all of my money is going for taxes. I guess it’s better that it goes to pay my taxes then trying to have to find that money somewhere else. Either way, taxes suck. I normally get them done near the beginning of the year. This year I’ve been waiting as long as possible since I know I’m going to have to pay a heft amount. Oh well. I guess I’ll just have to make some more money blogging. I must admit that I still like doing PayPerPost, but I have become much more picky with which opportunities I am willing to take. I remember near the start of PayPerPost I was perfectly willing to take a $2.50 opportunity. Now I don’t remember the last time I took something less than $10. I think it is also because the topics that were available at the beginning of PayPerPost were more interesting. I mean I got to blog about So You Think You Can Dance. That’s a great TV show and I got paid to write about something I would have written about anyway. I guess we’ll see how they are able to innovate over time. We may need the extra money at some point. Like for taxes next year.

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March 26, 2007 I Written By

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Filed Under: Blogging  General Life  Online Marketing  PayPerPost

Make Your Blog an Email Newsletter

A little while ago my wife went on a trip with my son and so I was home alone. When I’m home along I usually find something cool on the internet that I can play with and implement. During this trip, I found phplist. Essentially it crunches an RSS feed and then sends it out as a newsletter.

I wanted to use this for an LDS news website (and I still think this could do well if someone wants to do the work of compiling LDS news for me) and then I rolled it out for my BYU Football and Basketball Blog. PHPList wasn’t an easy app to figure out. It wasn’t too bad of an install for me, but some of the details of reading in the RSS feed weren’t very good.

I should have just looked around for some other way to do email marketing like Zookoda. Turns out that Zookoda will do all the work for you. It’s everything that you could want in an email subscription to your blog. It’s a great application, because you can really use it to build readership and market your blog. Sure, many of us techies have RSS feed readers and the like. Well, let me tell you that the majority of the population doesn’t have a feed reader and doesn’t know what a feed is. However, most people know how to read an email and click on a link. Ta da!! You just increased the number of regular readers you have.

Of course, the best part of Zookoda is that it is FREE!! If nothing else it’s worth a try.

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March 10, 2007 I Written By

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Filed Under: Blogging  General Life  Online Marketing

Swimming Girl Video By A Jewish Dating Site

I can’t believe that a Jewish Dating site would put out a video like this. I guess I shouldn’t be that amazed, but I guess I would have just expected a more conservative approach to the audience their trying to market to. The video’s pretty funny. I’m mostly surprised that they didn’t post this video on YouTube or some other sharing site where it would become hugely popular.

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December 7, 2006 I Written By

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Filed Under: General Life  Online Marketing  Videos

PayPerPost Mentioned in SmartMoney – The Wall Street Journal Magazine

I don’t know if any of you read or know of SmartMoney Magazine, but there is an article in the November 2006 edition where they quote me talking about PayPerPost. Page 94 and 96 if you find the magazine. It is funny because on the cover it is called “WEB RIP-OFF Retailers Fake Rave Reviews”. However, inside the magazine the article is titled “Romancing the Bloggers.” The things they do to get you reading their magazines.

I can’t find the article online. I don’t think they’ll be putting it online. I’ll see if I can scan it later if someone wants to see it. I’m just not sure how copyright works for it.

The article gives a nice statistic, “Six million Americans over the age of 30 keep a blog, and the majority write about companies or products at least once a week.”

This is exactly the principle of PayPerPost. Bloggers are writing about products already. Why not get paid to write about things you would be writing about anyway? When I started PayPerPost I was able to turn 2 of my existing blog posts into paid posts. Cha ching!!

The rest of the quote from SmartMoney Magazine says, “Meanwhile, 57 million American adults read blogs, according to Pew Research Center, and 32 million post comments to online forums.”

Now I’m thinking that the $3 million investment in PayPerPost i spretty small. Ted, I’ve got a couple thousand dollars I’ll throw on the table next time you need a little funding.

I was a little disappointed that the article treated forums and blogs as the same thing. I guess it was ok in the article for the purposes of exposure and marketing. However, the inset was called Best of the Blogs. However, there were a ton of forums listed and not many blogs. I was excited to find other blogs and ended up with a bunch of forums.

I was also happy to see that the SmartMoney Magazine article used my quote to end the article. Here’s what I said:

“If the product is bad, you’ll eventually read about the bad stuff.”

The quote didn’t capture my full idea, but wasn’t bad. My point is that if a blogger trusts one post on my blog to purchase something, then they are crazy. My blog should be just one piece of the online research that’s done before making a purchase.

Thanks Anne Kadet for writing the article. Too bad magazines don’t have hyperlinks. I wonder how much traffic this could really generate for PayPerPost? It doesn’t even give the address for my blog so I guess I’ll have to be happy with just seeing my name in a magazine with Warren Buffet on the cover.

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October 23, 2006 I Written By

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Filed Under: General Life  Online Marketing  PayPerPost
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