This is one fascinating transcript (as is usual with Michael Campbell). Check out Slideshare. Looks interesting.
Traffic Generation with Colin McDougall: "Colin: You start controlling the conversations and taking over. You can go beat up your competitors using Web2.0 almost instantly.
I was just talking to Michael before we got on this call regarding some new sources. Ones that are highly effective, that take very little time to create some content, like Slideshare.net…
Michael: That's s l i d e? Slideshare?
Colin: Yeah, slide, like going down the slide. It's Slideshare.net. It's a sharing mechanism for sharing PowerPoint slides. And what you do is upload your content.
Michael: Oh, excellent.
Colin: Creating a PowerPoint is so much more fun than writing SEO copy. SEO copy gets to be a little cumbersome and monotonous after a while. And I'll talk to you more about how I actually create my SEO copy.
When you can spend 30 seconds putting together really cool slides, popping in the images, and have your site come up in bankcard related terms in a matter of minutes, it's like 'Wow, that's kind of cool.' It starts instantly driving traffic.
You can use that to entertain your audience even. They might say, 'Wow, what a great site.'
So start using it as a branding mechanism. Getting into their heads. Getting into their minds. A lot of these people are just hobby bloggers that might actually start talking about you and linking to you."
Friday, February 29, 2008
Social Bookmarking, SEO, and Selling Books
Some notes on Social Bookmarking and SEO (and selling books):
::We are social by make-up. We'd rather party than work.
::Our traditions are social. Our oldest histories and philosophies were transmitted aurally - with great presentations by remarkable storytellers.
- Huna was/is spread only by answering questions. The kahunas would never prompt, only answer. Serge King tells a story where he was given a stone by an African shaman - only to figure years later that there was some significance to that gift-stone.
- Most of our oldest records (Vedas, most books of the Hebrew Bible, New Testament) were told as stories for generations before they were ever written down.
::Our Internet usage is trending back to the social mechanisms (podcasts, videos) as the technology improves and broadband becomes more available.
- The written word is composed of letters, which were originally individual pictographs. People wrote with pictures first, which became letters, which were grouped into words - and somehow associated with meanings, grammar.
- Books were heavily illustrated first, then became more and more words later on. [See Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" - I've misplaced my copy somewhere in this mess :( ]
::Social bookmarking/Networking are simply expressions of our continual need to explore, to grow, to evolve.
::People prefer to grow and evaluate their data through stories. Give a group of people (or students) a simple list of important facts. Unless they are made to memorize them (repeat over and over and over), they won't retain them. However, tell them a joke, or a moving story or something they can associate with themselves somehow, and they will have that memory tucked away somewhere.
- Probably the basis behind advertising's slogans and jingles.
- Same could be said for popular songs (country-western even today lives on the richness of it's stories-in-song) which have telling stories and then repeat the chorus over and over.
- Religious hymns and spirituals...
- Religions in general form behind great figures/martyrs. It's their story which is retold - in terms which involve the listener through their own personal life stories.
- Collier and others are known as sales people/advertisers because they told effective stories. Check out Joe Vitale for a modern version...
::Analysis (evaluation) is based in comparisons.
::Any study of social bookmarking/networking must involve work in Gladwell's Tipping Point, as well as Anderson's Long Tail. Both are integrally related to the Bell Curve, which describes many aspects of each.
::Social bookmarking/Networking is a different cat and only now are tools beginning to be developed to enable its easy use.
- The Internet is enabling niche-users to find each other. And of course, people are involved with many Long Tail niches (which is why most advertising fails - they try to lump people into major demographics instead of major - and minor - conversations).
- Flock is a browser based on Mozilla (Firefox) as a means to do this. It has various toolbars which help you see your friends/groups/channels as well as what's become "traditional" surfing.
- Other tools are beginning to become available which enable graphic representation of people with similar interests (me.dium.com) - which looks similar to tag clouds, among others.
- Digg has a "swarm" beta going, but this is more for the end-product, rather than building niche-communities.
::One very smart SEO author said she did an experiment by working solely with social bookmarking and got remarkable response on the search engines (and to her blog).
::Both Michael Campbell and Dr. Andy Williams have been touting the results of social bookmarking for some time. They say you can get first page of Google keyword searches in minutes and then hold that page. A comment on Williams' recent newsletter said that one SEO'er said he not only got that ranking, but several related keywords as well.
- According to Williams, Google is "camping out" at Digg. My own experience tends to confirm this - that whatever I Digg, that particular Digg-post will show up well before the blog or mini-net page that was dugg.
- And it is in minutes.
::Communities - Article marketing used to be top-dog in terms of organic SEO. This deals in stories and links to your site. And it is still useful. However, the top article directories are more social-network-oriented - they form communities. (And the way you can add hyper-drive to your articles would be to Digg/Stumbleupon/social bookmark your articles...)
- Success of Linux/Open Source is their community
- Success of MAC/Apple is community (and they upgraded their OS to an open-source base...)
- Failure of corporations (especially per ClueTrain Manifesto) is that they are silo-oriented - basically having a one-way flow of information and considering their public to be "consumers", consuming their product over and over.
- However the success of new marketing experts such as Robert Allen and Jay Abraham, is their approach in treating their buyers as "clients" - some one to be served and assisted, not just sold and forgotten.
- Best and longest-lived, successful corporations have supporting communities who are consulted with for all "improvements" before they are implemented. This isn't surveys and focus groups. People got too smart for these along time ago. They have an open interface with their publics (niches they serve).
- Best management, like the original Hewlett-Packard and Wal-Mart (under Sam Walton) and McDonald's (under Ray Kroc) were done by personal interaction and visits to the individual stores and franchises. H-P had "management by walking around", where they would talk to nearly every person in the shop every day. Employees (associates) were elevated to near-partner status and honestly consulted on what needed to be done. Shops that don't do this have incredible turnover.
::At this point (temporary conclusions): The real mind-bender is to see the whole Internet experience in terms of widening spheres of interconnection and influence. As a concept, it's different from many linear approaches. But it is the way Google is heading.
- Sites should build and serve their communities. This is really the reason for the top-run (short head) blogs. Communities have formed up around them.
- Internet sales are built on the idea of providing real service to clients. You only keep people buying when they are continually improving their lives through your services.
- You involve people in conversations, just like the open-air markets of old. Reviews (like Stumbleupon, Digg, Amazon's rating system) do just this. A variation of this is "Tell-a-Friend."
- Like it or not, you are in the Tipping Point envelope. (Gladwell's Connectors, Mavens, Salesmen all sneeze in your world.)
- The new approach of utilizing social bookmarking/networks is an evolution of organic SEO, where you worked to build optimized sites replete with emphasized keywords as well as LSI-themed content. You now build these, then blog about them, then social bookmark that blog and site - in that order. Then you article market to send traffic to your site - and social bookmark these articles. What you are doing is teaching the web what you think is important. Others will have different ideas. Meanwhile, knowing this, you are ahead of the curve and will consistently enable your creations to show up on top of Google/search engine rankings.
- This of course means you live in the social bookmark world and contribute to others. Comment marketing now has a much greater influence than before. Blogging has a greater influence. Having and finding friends is more important than ever before.
And that's the brave new world we now live in. Oddly, one interesting tertiary result would be a leveling of the playing field, aka, world peace.
- - - -
Sponsors:
by Dr. Robert C. Worstell
::We are social by make-up. We'd rather party than work.
::Our traditions are social. Our oldest histories and philosophies were transmitted aurally - with great presentations by remarkable storytellers.
- Huna was/is spread only by answering questions. The kahunas would never prompt, only answer. Serge King tells a story where he was given a stone by an African shaman - only to figure years later that there was some significance to that gift-stone.
- Most of our oldest records (Vedas, most books of the Hebrew Bible, New Testament) were told as stories for generations before they were ever written down.
::Our Internet usage is trending back to the social mechanisms (podcasts, videos) as the technology improves and broadband becomes more available.
- The written word is composed of letters, which were originally individual pictographs. People wrote with pictures first, which became letters, which were grouped into words - and somehow associated with meanings, grammar.
- Books were heavily illustrated first, then became more and more words later on. [See Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" - I've misplaced my copy somewhere in this mess :( ]
::Social bookmarking/Networking are simply expressions of our continual need to explore, to grow, to evolve.
::People prefer to grow and evaluate their data through stories. Give a group of people (or students) a simple list of important facts. Unless they are made to memorize them (repeat over and over and over), they won't retain them. However, tell them a joke, or a moving story or something they can associate with themselves somehow, and they will have that memory tucked away somewhere.
- Probably the basis behind advertising's slogans and jingles.
- Same could be said for popular songs (country-western even today lives on the richness of it's stories-in-song) which have telling stories and then repeat the chorus over and over.
- Religious hymns and spirituals...
- Religions in general form behind great figures/martyrs. It's their story which is retold - in terms which involve the listener through their own personal life stories.
- Collier and others are known as sales people/advertisers because they told effective stories. Check out Joe Vitale for a modern version...
::Analysis (evaluation) is based in comparisons.
::Any study of social bookmarking/networking must involve work in Gladwell's Tipping Point, as well as Anderson's Long Tail. Both are integrally related to the Bell Curve, which describes many aspects of each.
::Social bookmarking/Networking is a different cat and only now are tools beginning to be developed to enable its easy use.
- The Internet is enabling niche-users to find each other. And of course, people are involved with many Long Tail niches (which is why most advertising fails - they try to lump people into major demographics instead of major - and minor - conversations).
- Flock is a browser based on Mozilla (Firefox) as a means to do this. It has various toolbars which help you see your friends/groups/channels as well as what's become "traditional" surfing.
- Other tools are beginning to become available which enable graphic representation of people with similar interests (me.dium.com) - which looks similar to tag clouds, among others.
- Digg has a "swarm" beta going, but this is more for the end-product, rather than building niche-communities.
::One very smart SEO author said she did an experiment by working solely with social bookmarking and got remarkable response on the search engines (and to her blog).
::Both Michael Campbell and Dr. Andy Williams have been touting the results of social bookmarking for some time. They say you can get first page of Google keyword searches in minutes and then hold that page. A comment on Williams' recent newsletter said that one SEO'er said he not only got that ranking, but several related keywords as well.
- According to Williams, Google is "camping out" at Digg. My own experience tends to confirm this - that whatever I Digg, that particular Digg-post will show up well before the blog or mini-net page that was dugg.
- And it is in minutes.
::Communities - Article marketing used to be top-dog in terms of organic SEO. This deals in stories and links to your site. And it is still useful. However, the top article directories are more social-network-oriented - they form communities. (And the way you can add hyper-drive to your articles would be to Digg/Stumbleupon/social bookmark your articles...)
- Success of Linux/Open Source is their community
- Success of MAC/Apple is community (and they upgraded their OS to an open-source base...)
- Failure of corporations (especially per ClueTrain Manifesto) is that they are silo-oriented - basically having a one-way flow of information and considering their public to be "consumers", consuming their product over and over.
- However the success of new marketing experts such as Robert Allen and Jay Abraham, is their approach in treating their buyers as "clients" - some one to be served and assisted, not just sold and forgotten.
- Best and longest-lived, successful corporations have supporting communities who are consulted with for all "improvements" before they are implemented. This isn't surveys and focus groups. People got too smart for these along time ago. They have an open interface with their publics (niches they serve).
- Best management, like the original Hewlett-Packard and Wal-Mart (under Sam Walton) and McDonald's (under Ray Kroc) were done by personal interaction and visits to the individual stores and franchises. H-P had "management by walking around", where they would talk to nearly every person in the shop every day. Employees (associates) were elevated to near-partner status and honestly consulted on what needed to be done. Shops that don't do this have incredible turnover.
::At this point (temporary conclusions): The real mind-bender is to see the whole Internet experience in terms of widening spheres of interconnection and influence. As a concept, it's different from many linear approaches. But it is the way Google is heading.
- Sites should build and serve their communities. This is really the reason for the top-run (short head) blogs. Communities have formed up around them.
- Internet sales are built on the idea of providing real service to clients. You only keep people buying when they are continually improving their lives through your services.
- You involve people in conversations, just like the open-air markets of old. Reviews (like Stumbleupon, Digg, Amazon's rating system) do just this. A variation of this is "Tell-a-Friend."
- Like it or not, you are in the Tipping Point envelope. (Gladwell's Connectors, Mavens, Salesmen all sneeze in your world.)
- The new approach of utilizing social bookmarking/networks is an evolution of organic SEO, where you worked to build optimized sites replete with emphasized keywords as well as LSI-themed content. You now build these, then blog about them, then social bookmark that blog and site - in that order. Then you article market to send traffic to your site - and social bookmark these articles. What you are doing is teaching the web what you think is important. Others will have different ideas. Meanwhile, knowing this, you are ahead of the curve and will consistently enable your creations to show up on top of Google/search engine rankings.
- This of course means you live in the social bookmark world and contribute to others. Comment marketing now has a much greater influence than before. Blogging has a greater influence. Having and finding friends is more important than ever before.
And that's the brave new world we now live in. Oddly, one interesting tertiary result would be a leveling of the playing field, aka, world peace.
- - - -
Sponsors:
- and -
Thinking at Internet Speed
by Dr. Robert C. WorstellHere's a guide to thinking beyond any box, learning how to swim through floods of data, and developing your own world view to make your own success, prosperity, and happiness.
You have within you all the capability for happiness, power, success, becoming rich and famous. The only true limits to your achievements is within you.
The trick is figuring out how to release these capabilities and make it all happen.
This is the original doctorate thesis which evolved into a popular version: Go Thunk Yourself, Again!
The Butterfly Effect
Gawd is this dated. Just subscribed to someone's abandoned blog. But it's still an effective approach to upselling your subscribers and quickly getting sales and weeding out your freebie-seekers.
The Butterfly Effect: "In February 2006, [tag]Mike Filsaime[/tag] launched Butterfly Marketing. This is the system Mike has used to build huge lists of subscribers.
The way it works is that you invite prospects to download a free ebook or training course, or give them free membership to a private membership site. Once they have signed up, you present them with a ‘One Time Offer’ - something of great value, at a really good price.
If they buy the One Time Offer, you’ve gained a customer as well as a subscriber. If they only subscribe, you have the chance of selling to them at a later stage.
Even if you’re only selling an ebook, using this kind of membership site model makes a lot of sense. You can build a subscriber list which you can sell to over and over again.
Most of the sites that have been set up with the Butterfly Marketing script allow members to become affiliates as well, whether they buy the One Time Offer or not."
The Butterfly Effect: "In February 2006, [tag]Mike Filsaime[/tag] launched Butterfly Marketing. This is the system Mike has used to build huge lists of subscribers.
The way it works is that you invite prospects to download a free ebook or training course, or give them free membership to a private membership site. Once they have signed up, you present them with a ‘One Time Offer’ - something of great value, at a really good price.
If they buy the One Time Offer, you’ve gained a customer as well as a subscriber. If they only subscribe, you have the chance of selling to them at a later stage.
Even if you’re only selling an ebook, using this kind of membership site model makes a lot of sense. You can build a subscriber list which you can sell to over and over again.
Most of the sites that have been set up with the Butterfly Marketing script allow members to become affiliates as well, whether they buy the One Time Offer or not."
The Digg It strategy - and why this social bookmark raises your Google rank
Just so I can find the reference again. Social bookmarking has some which are more unequal in effect than others. Digg is one of those.
ezSEO Blog » 2008 » February:
" 3. Digg It
– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — –
ezSEO Blog » 2008 » February:
" 3. Digg It
– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — –
Web 2.0 is here to stay. Anyone who dabbled with Web 2.0 strategies cannot fail to have seen their webpages improve in rankings. Here is a little tip that I use to consistently get pages indexed in hours, and usually a few top 10 results as well.
1. Create a high quality themed article and upload it to your site. Make sure the article is of a very high quality, and well themed.
2. Create an account at digg.com if you don’t already have one.
3. Login to your Digg account, and dig your article.
Sit back and wait.
Usually within 24 hours I’ll start to get traffic to the page on my site, and often for quite competitive search phrases.
e.g. over a year ago I used this strategy on a new PR 0 site. I wrote an article and “digged” it. Within 24 hours my page was #1 in Google, and #1 in MSN.
I know a lot of you want to know if the ranking was temporary. Well, today, over a year later, that same page is #3 in Google (and has a PR 2) with around 15,000 competing pages (searched in quotes). The other pages in the top 5 are PR 4 or PR 5.
The page has slipped out of the top 10 at MSN though.
It does not seem to matter if anyone else “diggs” your story. That original story on Digg from a year ago still only has 2 diggs.
Go out and test it yourself. See what results you get."
= = = = =
– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — –
1. Get a link - Part I
– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — –
In the newsletter last week, I gave you one great way to get a link to one of your pages on your site. That method not only gets the inbound link, but can often get your page indexed and ranking high in Google in only a few hours (assuming the content is high quality).
While on-page factors are increasingly important, it is still true that off-page factors are more important. In other words, Google wants to know what other sites are saying about your site.
If lots of similar topic sites link to your site, then Google will assume your site is important, and will rank you accordingly.
Getting links to pages is one of the areas that most people neglect. Why? Simply because it takes too much work… Or does it.
Over the next few weeks, I want to give you link building tips that will help build quality, natural links to your site. These tips will build into a good link building resource that you can apply to any and all of your sites.
Let’s say tip #1 was the one from last week.
Tip #2 - getting links back from other people’s blogs. The way this works is that you leave comments on other peoples blogs, with a link back you your site in the comment.
Now, you are probably thinking one of the following:
1. Blog “auto-comment” posting software is spam.
Yes it is. Don’t use it.
2. Leaving crappy comments on other people’s blogs is spam.
Yes it is. Don’t do it.
3. Most blogs use the nofollow tag rendering any link back useless.
Yes they do. Find ones that don’t use the tag.
OK, so what is the best strategy to use here to avoid the spam trap?
Well, you need to find on-topic blogs that do not use the nofollow tag, and then leave comments that are high quality and informative. The information you leave should be complimentary to the original blog post.
Great. We have a plan.
One question though.. How do you find related blogs that do not use the nofollow link?
Well, I have a special treat for you, and it is fre.e.
Neil Shearing has created some software that he is giving away, and it does just that. Type in your main niche keyword, set a few options, and the software will go off and find these blogs for you. Just make sure you use it for good rather than evil ;O).
1. Find on-topic blogs.
2. Post genuinely useful comments
You can find the software here:
= = = =
– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — –
2. Get a link - Part III
– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — –
I know, last week was Part I, so why is today part III? Well its simply because the first “Get a Link” was the Digg technique described in newsletter 191, but I hadn’t numbered that one, as I had not come up with the idea of running a series on this.
Part I - Digg technique
Part II - The Blog Technique described last week, using Neil’s excellent fre.e tool for finding quality blogs to post in.
Part III - Forums.
You are allowed a “signature” in most forums. This gives you an ideal opportunity to include a link back to your site. The idea of this link capture method is this:
1. Find quality forums in your niche that allow a link in your signature.
Make sure that the forums are spiderable by the search engines (do the posts of this forum appear in Google?), and look at the source of a page from the forum - are the links in people’s signatures tagged with nofollow?.
2. Read the terms of use for the forum so you stay within guidelines.
3. Spend a few days reading posts in the forum, to get an overall impression of how the forum is run and what type of stuff people post about.
4. When someone asks a question that you can help with, answer it with as much detail as possible. Your post will have your sig, and your sig has a link back to your site.
5. Continue with this for a while, so that you “brand” yourself as an expert in the field.
6. After you have written a dozen or so quality replies helping others, if an opportunity comes up to mention a product of yours, do so. Don’t make it obvious selling spam. Simply answer a question, and then point out that your site (mentioned in your sig) has XYZ that might help them. Or, refer to an article on your site in response to a question.
e.g. Someone asks “Which firewall is the best for Windows Vista”, you can reply something like:
“I personally use Zone Alarm as I found Comodo caused problems with my anti-virus, but you can read a comparison of several firewalls that I wrote here:” and supply a URL. Most forums wont have a problem with this.
The two immediate benefits of forum posts are easy to see:
1. Links back to your site from every post you make on the forum.
2. If you get recognised as an expert on that forum, you will have non-stop traffic from people on the forum who respect your opinion and want more information from you.
As a method of getting inbound links to your site, this one can be very good, and even if the inbound links were not counted (e.g. the forum used nofollow on all links), I would still do it because of the traffic it generates.
I like to find 3 or 4 different forums in a niche, and spread my help around a bit ;o)
– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — –
3. Feedback on the Digg Technique
– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — –
A couple of weeks ago, I told you about the Digg technique I use to get pages indexed quickly, and ranking well. If you missed that issue, you can read it online at my blog here:
Anyway, I had an email from Martin who had tried it with an article his writer had done for him.
Here is what Martin wrote:
“Just as an aside, I uploaded my first theme article yesterday and submitted it to Digg like you said. It was indexed in Google within 24 hours and during the next 24 hours it was found for 8 different, new phrases. I feel really good about sticking with it and making sure the writer did a good job (I didn’t know a TQS of 70% was ok so 60% of them are 100% 
and it feels even better that what you are teaching actually works! It takes work to master the process, but it’s obviously very much worth while. Thank you.
- Martin”
NOTE: TQS refers to the “Theme Quality Score” of the article, as reported by the Fat Content Creator - part of my Fat Content Course.
What Williams discusses under Forums, is covered in the Online Millionaire Plan as Comment Marketing (Right there next to Article Marketing...)
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