Wingnut SEO

So you go to your favorite social media site, you try and be active, you try to get your stories to the front page, but it rarely happens because no one knows who you are… you are not a power user, you don’t know how to write catchy titles… Hell, you don’t know the first thing about using social media effectively… and even if you do know how you just don’t have the time it takes to become well known.

You know that social media can give you a ton of traffic overnight but YOU just can’t do it. What do you do then? Make friends of course!

From my own experience the social site power users are generally very friendly, all it takes is a little time to get to know them. Then when you do write that killer article you direct their attention to it and if they like it - since they are power users and like submitting things - they just might submit your article/page/what-have-you.

Depending on the reputation/relationship you build with these power users - you can even go so far as ASKING them for a submit. This tactic can work but I generally don’t like doing it, it always feels like begging. I have done this before, today actually, but it is a rare thing for me to do. I’d rather just show people great content that they feel should be submitted.

How do you go about building a friendship with these power users? There are several ways that I like to use:

• Be their friend on the social site - vote for their submits and comment on submits
• Joining their MyBlogLog community and saying hello
• Following them on twitter, being friendly and making a connection with them
• Reading their blogs, subscribe to the RSS feeds, and make intelligent comments or ask questions
• Get their contact info (generally found in their social profiles) and send them an instant message a friendly hello, how’s it going, love your blog (insert question about them here)

Sure there are a ton more ways but the above are some that have worked very well for me. It just goes to show you that a little bit of time spent being nice/friendly can go a long way.

I have now had Rubicon Project Ads running on 4 sites for 7 days - And I have to tell you, so far, I’m impressed. The sites I have this on are as follows:

• http://PrettyMuchAwesome.org - terrible click through rate but where 95% of my impressions came from
  
• http://BuySomeHappiness.com - Good click through rate - 95% of clicks came from here
  
• http://OutThereAds.com - terrible click through rate
  
• And of course right here at WingnutSEO -Clickthroughs poor

Impressions - 62,673
Clicks - 169
Revenue - 54.72 - Really not bad for 7 days and only having it on 4 sites.  As the goal for any site should be to make more money than it costs to run.

I you aren’t signed up and in for MyBlogLog, you should be. I know, I know being involved in another social network is a pain AND they force you to sign up for some kind of Yahoo! crap? What is this? Communist Russia?!

Well here is the deal. If you do any Stumbleing or just random surfing or have a lot of blogs in your reader and actually go to the sites… it’s important to be signed up/in with MyBlogLog. Why? Because if you look about halfway down my page, right above that crazy ad, you’ll see “My recent readers.” Want your picture there? Log into MyBlogLog and it shows up… and it shows up on every site you visit that has that nifty app.

I have received many message from people who found my site because they saw my picture on their blog log readers list and/or were happy that I was stopping by their blogs. Not only this, if you use that cool Lijit Wijit Search up there in the top right corner, you can add people to be part of your community - making that search all that more trustworthy. Plus it’s just kind of cool to leave your digital mark on every site you surf through

So you may have noticed I now have ads on my site. I recently heard about this ad network Rubicon Project and so I signed up for the beta. What this network does is pull ads from a bunch of different networks and throws them on your site - apparently Google ads is one as they are showing up (I’m personally banned from using Google ads thanks to some shady things I used to be involved in.)

Anyway, I’ll let you all know how it goes/what kind of CPM I find with it. I hear it’s a fairly decent system but I suppose we’ll see.

If you haven’t seen it already check out my recent article over on Adotas.com - “The obsession all marketers should have” - I’m going to be a monthly contributer over there, third Wednesday of every month.

If you’re a regular reader here you may also notice I have removed the translate from the sidebar. I had originally put it up as a test to see if people liked it or not - the resounding answer was they didn’t. Turns out people who read my work would rather read it in english even when that was not their primary language - Thanks to everyone who sent me an email or posted a comment about that plug-in.

Finally I was able to get around to making my URL’s more user/search engine friendly… What it did was ruin all my sphinn numbers - but the redirects are in place so the links from sphinn still go to the right places.

2007 marked the rise to god-like popularity for social networks. Starting in late ’06 with a deal ranging in the billions of dollars when Google acquired YouTube to the hundreds of million’s invested into Facebook just a few months ago – it is clear that being social is big business.  Social networks are so popular that even the porn industry has gotten in on the action with Penthouse dropping $500 million into acquiring several dating social networks. These absurd amounts of money have caused the world to take notice.

 Social sites are popping up everywhere.  You can find them for just about every niche group there is.  There are social networks for music junkies, car enthusiasts, bargain hunters, tech people, book lovers, marketers, religions, and everything else.

 This, in turn, has and will continue to cause a radical shift in how online marketing and search in general is done now and in the future.  As little as just five years ago there were only a handful of well known ways to go about promoting a website and gaining traffic – SEO, PPC, link buying/banner placement, and the infancy of the social networks – forums and personal blogs. 

With the rise in modern social networks, however, it has opened the lines of communication from marketers to consumers and consumers to marketers in never before seen proportions.  This has unleashed an array of viral marketing campaigns, corporate blogs, and link baiting tactics that would have been nearly impossible in the past.

These new practices have caused online marketers to build reputations on networks such as Digg or StumbleUpon for the sole purpose of being popular enough to send thousands of unique visitors to a website with the single click of a button or a few lines of a written review.  This is no easy power to obtain but there is obvious value for companies to have people like this on their side.

Further changes to the state of search and the rise of social media in the near future include sites like Mahalo that continue to gain popularity and more users each day.  These sites are giving the power of search results to the people, by letting them submit like, find useful or think should rank more highly.

As this trend in social networks and social search continue the general population may one day inevitably turn away from the faceless Googles and Yahoos in favor of more reliable search from the people they or their friends trust. 

In essence that is what all the social networks are about - trust.  Something that the major search engines are losing as the general population starts to understand what sponsored links are and how easy it is to game the system to place a spam site at the top of the search results pages.  At the same time people are growing more wary of the search engines tendency to data-base everything they do for unknown (potentially sinister?) purposes.

In 2008 social networks will continue to gain steam with the general populace and with them more corporations will see the value in being a part of the social world through blogging and/or hiring people to become leaders in various social networks.

What the end result of these social networking and search trends will mean to the SEO and online marketing world is, as of now, uncertain. One thing you can count on, however, is that it will be very interesting to watch how the major search engines react to this fundamental change in how people find content online.  

Someone was asking me today what I have book marked so here goes:

SEO Related:

• http://www.seomoz.org/ - Great articles, great tools.
• http://searchengineland.com/ - Helpful news about the search engines
• http://www.seo-browser.com/ - Quick Spider Simulator
• http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/ - Another decent Spider Simulator
• http://www.seotoolset.com/tools/free_tools.html - Free SEO tools
• http://www.sxw.org.uk/computing/robots/check.html - Errors with your Robots.txt because you know nothing about it?
• http://info.vilesilencer.com/ - Need to find some SEO friendly directories for quick and dirty low quality linkage?

SOCIAL MEDIA Related:

• http://sphinn.com/ - Should probably just set this as my homepage
• http://www.gooruze.com/ - Only use it for the Q&A section

BLOG Related:

• http://www.wolf-howl.com/ - My very first SEO related blog bookmark
• http://www.irishwonder.syndk8.co.uk/ - Blackhat musings
• http://www.searchenginejournal.com/ - 125 Social Bookmarking sites
• http://www.zanypixel.com/blog/untapped-link-building-strategies/ - 100 link building strats
• http://www.kolbrenerusa.com/blog - 50 Niche Social Networks

DESIGN Related:

• http://www.colorjack.com/sphere/ - Find the right colors
• http://browsershots.org/ - Test your web design in different browsers

TECH Related:

• http://techmeme.com/ - How can you live without the Tech News?
• http://forums.techguy.org/ - Great forum for any tech problems you have

FUN:

• http://www.theoldcomputer.com – Because everyone needs Nintendo ROMs sometimes

So as my fame grows I get named more and this time with 74 other awesome SEO/SEM/Social Media/Blogging people - This time I was called an “Internet Marketing Guru (on Twitter)”

So check it out - I follow most of the people listed, but added a few thanks to the great list by Brian Chappell. Thanks for the mention and everyone should check it out.

And if you don’t already you should FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER!

You may have the best idea in the world for a website - except you will never make money with it because you’re just sitting on it.  Either that or you developed it but then decided to stop marketing it.  The fact is you’re lazy.  You have all these great ideas and you’re not doing any single damn thing with them… other than parking the domain.

That’s my problem anyway.  That’s why I’m working a 9-5 and not out there doing what I want to be doing.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I pretty much love my job/people I work with… But no one ever got rich working for someone else.

The hardest part about making money online is the follow through.

There are hundreds of thousands of ways to make money online so I’m not even going to get into that.  I have made a little, a paltry sum for the amount of ideas I have yet to make happen.  You just need to get out there and make them happen.  You need to stop getting hung up on the ideas that fail - let them go for now come back when you can - it was/is a great idea just needs more baking… cast a wide net, produce 20 ideas and hope that 2 or 3 start bringing home the bacon.  Then wash, rinse, repeat.

If you are sitting around waiting for someone to do the leg work for you, you’re an idiot.  Get out there and make your ideas happen, someone else isn’t going to do it for you… but even if you do get some sap to be your partner and do all the leg work - he’s taking half of YOUR money that came from YOUR great idea. It’s far more fun to split $1 one way.

The title of this entry comes from my analytics. It actually made me laugh when I saw it, I tried to find where I rank for this but I was not in the top 50 listings so I gave up. Reguardless, it asks a solid question.

Do you have to know how to write good well to blog?

The resounding answer is no. Look at all of the blogs out there. I’d venture to say that well over 94% of them are not worth the digital paper they are written on. The writing is poor and actual content is even worse or they are just scraper sites that are scraping crappy blogs.

So to you, whomever found my site with this long tail search, no you don’t have to write good to blog… you just have to be able to write well if you want readers

Dan Perry has come up with a rather genius link-bait in the form of giving away something - Win a Google Fridge.  I have decided I need to win this fridge because it would be the perfect size to store my life sized bust of Matt Cutts that is made entirely out of his hair and used chewing gum (pilfered from conference trash bins).  Without a fridge the bust needs constant spritzing of the purest mountain spring water or it tends to dry out and catch fire… I don’t know why

Real posts will happen when I find some time… so thanks to all my readers for sticking with me