Paul Fleming

What Makes an Internet Marketer?

flemo — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:58:04 +0000

I consider myself an Internet Marketer. I’ve often thought about what makes up a good Internet Marketer and have always found that those best suited to the work have a built-in curiosity and a liking for the hustle. For me, I’ve been an early tech adopter for as long as I can remember especially when it comes to the Internet. Online progress has always been at such a frenetic pace and it feels like that pace gets faster and faster that it’s hard to keep up. There’s some new startup, a new service we have to try out, a beta invite, a must-have app….I have accounts that I didn’t know I have and others that I know I have that remain dormant. There are a few reason for trying to keep pace…some of it just plain curiosity, partially to check something that someone has put their blood, sweat and tears into or had the insight to create something they reckon people might be into. The other side of that caters to my profession in which I look for opportunities for clients. In Internet Marketing, there is this sense that to be successful, one needs to have, or at least pretend to have some form of Attention Deficit, to bounce from system to system, to constantly be on the go and prove value by doing new things and chasing that next big thing. That level of hustle always seems to serve our clients well. Out of that, a process has begun to emerge and we’ve created a more formal structure (sort of). At the very least, we have learned some lessons.

Here are just a couple of tips:

1. Follow other early adopters – there is no shortage of places to find the next shiny thing. A few choice selections on twitter will help but they can be easily missed so I’d suggest focussing on some key blogs. My favorite these days is TheNextWeb which has a very comprehensive coverage, so too Mashable which tends to crank out info by the second. Techmeme is my favorite aggregator.

2. Keep a master login list – the issue here is not that you should be concerned that your data is out there that you are not looking after but because there are times when you will forget about an account that maybe you didn’t “get” initially that upon a revisit recognize its value. This list (which can also remind you of your login info) can help to jog your memory. Evernote can be a useful tool for storing this list.

3. Really test – put it through it’s paces. Use it as if you want to break it and get to know it pretty well before looking around at reviews to see what others have discovered.

4. Use a persona – Mostly I use my own account for the testing but there is the odd occasion when an incorrect setup may impact your account so I have a few dummy accounts that i will use without fear of reprisal. I think a lot of us made the mistake of setting up Google Analytics accounts under our profiles instead of new accounts when it first came out and then losing that data when you had to move it over. We still come across those every once in a while.

While I’ve forced a move to a more manageable and balanced lifestyle (more away-from-the-computer time), I certainly enjoy that side of the business and it may be a big reason why I got into the Internet Marketing game in the first place. I feel like our clients would and should expect that we are doing this so that they don’t have to (until we decide that they need to).

So what’s my latest signup? I just signed up for an invite at www.so.cl, Microsoft’s own foray into social media…maybe. Also just began playing around with Gentlemint which is a guys version of Pinterest. How about you? Any newbies you want to share?

Google Plus Search Equals A More Personal Experience

flemo — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:34:21 +0000

Many of us saw it coming but honestly I didn’t think it would be this early. For mine, it was a no-brainer, a way to get numbers and action on their own social system Google+ and also an way to increase Search personalization which they have been increasingly moving towards for a few years now. Some question whether there is value in doing so and often search results can be a lot worse with personalization but they’re sticking to their guns.

I recently noticed the announcement on my search results explaining the latest updates.

This takes you to a page that further explains their new service and in typical google fashion includes a video and tells us that “search gets better by including photos, posts, and more from you and your friends.” Maybe.

So first things first, if you’re looking to be part of this latest Search iteration get yourself a Google+ profile. For businesses, create a page. Set up your circles, start following, engaging, sharing. Start getting comfortable with it, I think it’s only going to continue in its importance.

Google Locking Down Logged-in Users

flemo — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 20:50:22 +0000

Google recently announced that they will be encrypting Search for logged-in users. It’s their way of saying that we are looking out for the searchers’ best interests by making sure the data of “signed in” users is not susceptible to being stolen or tracked or used or abused. I’m not privy to the specifics of how secure or not secure it really is but in doing so they have also announced that website owners with analytics will not be able to view the keywords that these visitors used to access their website. Now website owners will see a (not provided) referral from Google. Somehow Paid Search is immune to this tightening of security and speculation is rife that this move was targeted at SEO companies. If anything, the target is the business owner who might be interested in this granular data and ends up jumping on the Adwords bandwagon, forking over more money to big G. But that’s the conspiracy theorists. I’m more inclined to suggest that it’s a shame that this is the only solution they have been able to come up with. While SEO’s are impacted, the business owners are the ones who are really being borked by this latest move.

So for us, it’s really just a matter of here we go again, how do we adapt what we do without diluting impact for our clients? Right now we’re not 100% certain, we continue to do what we do and start to address any anomalies in our reports as they come through but you should expect to see a reduction in the number of keywords driving visitors to your website (so far it’s a pretty small number). Rankings (for what they are worth) will remain trackable but the detailed keyword referrals will no longer apply.

So that’s a shame, not the end of the world as some SEO companies fear but a real shame. Forget about SEO and Internet Marketing companies who report on these statistics. Think about the website owners, especially those who use this data to help focus their business strategies and goals. Again, not the end of the world for them but a loss of some very valuable information.

Following Spammers for Internet Marketing Ideas

flemo — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 03:16:04 +0000

Ever inquisitive, I’ve always been quite curious to find out why people do the things they do. When you spend a lot of time online however, you tend to get pretty tired of any form of spam. Email spam. Comment spam. Spammy websites. All of these can be very frustrating. For me, it’s an opportunity. Surely there is a reason why these folks are doing this? Sure there are plenty of occasion where people are just being idiots under the protection of anonymity but many others are seeking opportunity, mostly to make money. You’ve seen those websites, the infomercials of web pages like http://www.incomehybrid.com (I am not affiliated and it may well be the answer you’ve been looking for!). You can see a pattern with all of these pages…A testimonial video, visually striking text, incredibly long single page without navigation, generally some sort of pop-up and my favorite style in that case is an “Are You Sure You Want to Leave?” notification.

Comment spam is pervasive especially to blog owners and it always intrigued me as to why bother. Most blog commenting systems are nofollow, many moderate and for the most part comment spam is pretty obvious so it begs the question, why are they doing this?

Email spam has been around since email began and should probably be considered the earliest form of Email Marketing. Strong subject. Succinct copy. Generally text-only…hey they do a lot right. Of course they also do a lot wrong like, oh I don’t know, not asking folks if they would like to receive their emails? I’m not forgetting listservs either as one of the earlier places to spam online.

So rather than getting pissy at spammers and ridiculous commenters, I like to learn why they are doing what they do. Those spammy one-page websites with all the bells, whistles and talking heads that I thought were ridiculous appear to actually work as I’ve had several clients reach out and ask about them. Some had even taken the offers. While I’d like to suggest that not all of them are rubbish, I’m afraid to say that the majority of them are. Most likely they are some out-of-the-box affiliate marketing scheme aimed at selling a cheap e-book on how to make money online by selling cheap e-books.

Comment spam like I said had baffled me until I saw a whole series of them on a blog post that was good quality and dofollow. Quite obviously that website did not moderate comments and this is what the comment spammers are hoping for. Get your comments out en-masse, maybe 1% will be fruitful. Hard Yakka if you ask me and not very beneficial but for most of these services, a link is a link no matter what the quality is like.

There have been a few sites over the years that seemed to attract a high level of spam and often this is where I will also look to help with Internet Marketing for clients only instead of spamming people, we prefer to do it properly and provide some value. A while ago ut was digg.com, then squidoo.com became quite useful and now I’m seeing quite a bit on Linkedin and Quora so I’ve been checking them out to see how they fare.

Digging this SEO Data

flemo — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 02:48:53 +0000

Right now I’m staring at a graphic of some data from an SEO campaign that we’ve been working for a few months now. There are a few key takeaways here but our focus is the non-branded (green) phrases driving traffic to their website. Some of the key components to this particular campaign included a moderate website restructure that removed crawl barriers, a modest link building campaign and slight content adjustment. I wish all campaigns were this effective.

Google Quora Social Connection

flemo — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:54:02 +0000

I haven’t seen this one before, possibly not having searched what I searched (which was a persons name) but interesting connection here with Google wanting to connect me to my Quora account. While I’m still pretty ambivalent about Quora, it makes one question whether or not there is some search impact given this tie-in. The fact that they’ve been collaborating initially raised suspicion but I’ve not seen anything until now.

These are A Few of My Daily SEO Things

flemo — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 20:52:24 +0000

We all have our own little way of doing things to make our professional lives easier or better or clearer. Sometimes these are tools that we have stumbled across, other times recommendations from friends or colleagues and other websites or blogs similar to this one. One thing that Dinkum does at the foundation of all of our Internet Marketing campaigns is Search Marketing and, for the longest time, so much of what we did was very manual. Over the years we have adopted tools that makes us more efficient and improves what we do for our clients. These are the business tools (seo things) that I personally use on a daily basis to make sure that we stay on top of our game.

iGoogle – this is my own little dashboard with relevant information that I have gathered and continue to gather. My page is pretty long but it contains quite a few very useful pieces which includes my email, calendar, client blog feeds, industry blog feeds, google hot trends, sticky notes…a lot of good stuff that can be viewed at a glance.

Raven – there’s a lot to like about Raven, they’ve provided a great deal of value under one roof. All of our clients go straight into this tool including target keywords, Google Analytics not to mention the keyword research tools that they provide. For us though it’s the reporting capabilities that we love, taking what was once a very manual process and automating many parts of it.

Social Mention and Google Alerts – a bit part of what we do is listening on behalf of our clients. What’s going on? Is there buzz? Are customers complaining? Are there opportunities we can leverage? For this, Google Alerts has traditionally been our tool of choice but increasingly we have been in need of something a little more comprehensive which is where www.socialmention.com comes in. Pop your keyword in (or URL) and create an email alert or grab the RSS feed and pop it into iGoogle.

Open Site Explorer – this tool built by the folks at SEOMoz (also a very useful resource) provides a wealth of relevant information about a website or competitors. It shows the number of links, anchor text distribution and linking pages as well as their own rating scales.

Tweetdeck – This has become my tool of choice for updating my Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Foursquare accounts as well as a very useful realtime listening option. Best of all its free….for now (it was recently bought by Twitter, so we will wait to see what happens next).

What tools are in your daily toolkit? Share with us in the comments.

Photo Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/604255

Look

flemo — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 17:13:00 +0000

The Social Media Influence on SEO

flemo — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 02:30:52 +0000

We’ve suspected it for a while now but it was recently confirmed by extremely reliable sources (Matt Cutts from Google actually) that social media is having a greater influence on search rankings. A web page stacked up against another web page with the same credentials will apparently be given greater weight if it is shared around on twitter, facebook and other social media sites.

So let’s assume that you’ve taken care of the SEO essentials, this new news certainly presents an opportunity and in most cases, implementation does not need to be difficult. Let’s have a look at a couple of options available.

Wibya – by far the easiest and only mildly obtrusive, wibya places a social media bar at the bottom of your website and remains there even when a user moves from page to page. It takes about 10 seconds to sign up and just as many to add to your website and they have a bunch of options from free to $30/month. We’ve seen it have some influence with our very own eyes so know it works.

ShareThis – I feel like these guys have been around forever and was once our go-to but their button options started feeling a little stale when there were so many others. Well now it’s a different story as they really updated their selection not to mention their additional analytics and branding options. Easily customize your buttons on most platforms, including easy WordPress and Blogger integration and place the code in the appropriate location on your website.

Sharedaddy (by WordPress) seemingly the default option for WordPress users (and there are plenty of them) this plugin is slick and easy.

AddThis – self-proclaimed #1 Bookmarking and Social Sharing website and while this is most likely the case, it wouldn’t surprise me that their popularity is waning. That said, it looks like they’ve rolled out accompanying analytics which really is a very valuable resource. Again, a super simple setup.

AddToAny – also a pretty popular option with alot of options, possibly too many. Mouseover the button and a long list of sharing options pop up. Again, simple to implement.

Overall we see much better reaction to larger buttons with fewer options. Twitter, Facebook and maybe LinkedIn should probably be the only options plus possibly the opportunity for a much larger list. Try a few options and perform some split testing if you must but including these options on your website, especially your blog, has become the norm and as stated, will apparently help your search visibility. Personally I like ShareThis as my main choice but of course we’re constantly experimenting and exploring other options particularly on different layouts, designs and audiences. We suggest you do the same.

Could SEO Have Saved Borders?

flemo — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 11:40:24 +0000

Many of us heard about the possibility that Borders could go under and now word comes through that they filed for bankruptcy in New York after four years of sales declines, and now plans to shut about 40 percent of its superstores in the next several weeks. Both Borders and Barnes & Noble have been struggling to adapt in this digital age up against newcomers Apple and Amazon. While I am not one to speculate as to why the company itself has struggled, one area that I can comment on is their Web presence which, as a Web Manager of a book website, I have been observing with keen interest.

The Borders website has been through a few iterations over the past couple of years. My relationship with them officially started in 2006 and during this time, Borders had opted for a very visual, image-based website. Prior to this time it looks as though they have had a fairly primitive website, then they teamed up with Amazon for many years before once again striking out of their own. I recall the Magic Bookshelf dominating their website which I thought was pretty cool at the time.

Border’s latest iteration is more stripped-down and reminds me a bit of Amazon. It’s a lot cleaner, better organized and seems more focussed on doing what it is they do. They’ve also incorporated several essential social elements in their design which is also a notable plus. It’s still a little image-heavy for my liking but that shouldn’t be a big hindrance for SEO.

So let’s have a quick browse through some SEO elements to see how they stack up.

The Home page URL is a strange one right off the bat. Having a well organized site structure is key and already we’re 2 deep with “Online” and “Store” incorporated in the home page string. At least they have set up the but we’re already going in circles. The primary domain is chosen as www and they are redirecting. They’ve at least covered a couple of basic best practices it seems.

Digging a little further we see the poor domain structure continue. The Gift Cards URL looks something like http://www.borders.com/online/store/BGIView_giftcards. Certainly not optimal and with the inclusion of an underscore instead of a hyphen, already we’re pretty sure that no SEO has been consulted here. Further in and it gets even worse. Kids New Releases looks like a dogs breakfast http://www.borders.com/online/store/Landing?view=2&type=1&kids=true&nav=5185+501363+5215&simple=false. I don’t care if Sergey Brin himself says that they have no problem crawling URL’s with parameters, they are at a significant disadvantage for many reasons but at the very least by excluding keywords as part of the URL. Not only that but I’m not about to link to that page because it’s painful so they’ll lose a few incoming links.

So drilling into a specific book, let’s go with Silverlicious by Victoria Kann. My URL is still a horrid mess http://www.borders.com/online/store/TitleDetail?sku=0061781231&id=61293569, my title tag is pretty weak but OK with Silverlicious – Victoria Kann – Hardcover (ISBN 9780061781230) – Buy Books, Music and Movies at Borders. I’m also not seeing any category organization, no breadcrumb trail, the book description is pretty light…any longtail benefits I’d hope to achieve is going to be a tough ask. Let’s just have a quick glance at Amazon’s URL for the same item http://www.amazon.com/Silverlicious-Pinkalicious-Victoria-Kann/dp/0061781231/. That’s already better. Rather than go on, I’m going to suggest that all this simply points to the fact that very little thought had gone into SEO during web development.

I’m pretty doubtful that SEO would have had saved the business. There’s obviously more to it than that. It just irks me that all this thought and planning and funds that goes into developing a website and a pretty crucial component would be ignored. Oh and what do I get when I Google “Silverlicious by Victoria Kann? Not Borders.