There is some talk about “SEO Fame” going around started off by Lee Odden and then continued today with a post over on SEOmoz by Rand Fishkin – they both seem to be saying the same thing… It’s not an end in and of itself. Well, yeah, duh… But it sure doesn’t hurt… Both Odden and Fishkin are “famous” – How many people do they have reading every word that they write? Well, just looking at subscriber stats 40k+ between the two of them. How much ad money is brought in, how many clients actually find them because they are famous? Sure does make sales a little more simple when people are searching for you by name.
They do make a good point though – Fame is not your end game. So then, why chase it? For me it is not fame I’m seeking but just powerful networking. The fruits of my social media and SEO network labor are already starting to pay off.
Case in point: I was downsized last Monday from my agency job – Two hours later I had a better paying agency job and started Tuesday thanks to my interviewers knowing who I was because they had seen my blog on Sphinn a few times. Awesome. I’m totally famous, well… not really. BUT I AM KNOWN BY SOME. Cool.
Example 2 of my awesome power of networking: I’m looking to buy some kind of rad 4×4 for escapes to back country mountain camp sites. I get on Twitter and ask “Anyone know what car is good to get for offroading? I’m thinking about a Jeep Wrangler” A couple hours later Dan Perry who works SEO and Online Marketing for Cars.com calls me up and gives me a rundown on what’s good and what’s not – Now that is just straight up cool… I’ll be getting an FJ Cruiser, by the way – Thanks Dan 
Becoming “famous” is really just a side bonus of networking. The more people you are nice to and know… the more people will be nice to and know you. That’s what SEO fame is good for. It’s so helpful being known by all the other great SEO’s out there – being friends with – friends help friends out – they will answer questions and help you meet other people… Social networkers are social people… social people are generally good to have on your side.
Well, that’s all I have to say about that. Fame would be nice to have – Do I want it? Sure, who doesn’t. If it helps me reach my goal of not being someones grunt and either running my own agency or just being happy doing freelance because I’m known great… You just have to understand what Lee and Rand both said – Fame is not an end game in and of itself, but it’s one hell of a helpful thing for any career.
Tags: fame, famous, network, SEO, Social Media
As I sit here naked, before I go to bed, I look down and wonder what every man asks… Is my StumbleUpon profile long enough? Sure, it’s O.K. Every time I stumble my girlfriend’s sites she loves it. It totally brings her to about 300-700 more readers. It’s also larger than 60 people, it’s above average… But I want it massive. I want it so large as soon as I pull it out and use it servers fall to their knees. I want small websites to cower in fear before it.
I just wish I knew about the power of Stumble sooner. I have had it for years, been addicted… But I didn’t actively seek friends until about 3 months ago when I made this account… to follow along with the Wingnut brand.
So much sudden traffic for days!!!… Sigh, I just need to go to sleep… But… after just one more stumble!
Tags: stumbleupon
As we all do on our free time, I was discussing PPC over lunch with someone. Her claim was that bidding on branded terms was illegal and unethical. While I respect her opinion as she is highly regarded in the search marketing world – I disagree.
Lets look at the first statement: Illegal – Nope, Google is not the law… It may be against the GoogleAds TOS, but this does not make it illegal. Until such time that The Oracle (aka Google) assumes control of the legal system and imposes a curfew and mandatory internet search time – The legality of this is not questioned – It is perfectly legal. Not only that all it takes to shut down someone bidding on your branded terms is a simple phone call to Google… If you’re not paying attention that’s your companies fault.
Her second point is slightly more ambiguous. Is bidding on someones branded keywords ethical? I’m going to have to say it is perfectly ethical – and here’s why:
PPC and SEO are not a game – They are a war. You are in constant struggle with your competition for top rankings. Sure, you can play nice and make it a friendly battle… but at the end of the day you are in it to win it. If you are not in the top of the SERPs you have lost the day – and more importantly - lost valuable traffic.
You do whatever it takes to drive that traffic to your site. If that’s pushing the boundaries of SEO or bidding on your competitions branded terms for your PPC campaigns – SO BE IT.
If you don’t look at SEO/PPC as a fierce competition then you are going to lose the war and end up falling behind.
Tags: love and war, PPC, 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.
Tags: ads, rubicon project
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.
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.
Tags: rise of social media, search engines, SEM, SEO, Social Media, trust
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
Tags: bookmarks, helpful links