I recently had a chance to speak with a fiction writer and a memoir writer that sold the movie rights to her book. The writing advice I got from both of them was different than that I’ve received from professional bloggers and online marketers. They were both writers first and bloggers second and the result [...]
The post Lessons from fiction that Can be Applied to Your Content Creation Efforts appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Good Saturday morning to you!
As summer approaches, we all tend to get a little more of an itch to go outside at the weekend, travel to the beach, or simply enjoy the lazy days of summer. With that in mind, The Beal Deal will be taking a summer break and will return in the Fall.
We finish this batch of interviews with one of the most loved people in the internet marketing industry: Dana Lookadoo.
I have yet to meet a single person that doesn’t both love and respect Dana. She’s one of those people that shines with marketing smarts as well as warmth and compassion. If you’ve never met her, be sure to track her down at the next conference you attend, and you’ll see what I mean.
OK, enough with the gushing. Let’s get to the interview so you can see for yourself!
Q1. Your career includes working for yourself and working at agencies. Why the current switch back to being a consultant?
I thrive off working closely with clients and getting to know them and their needs.
I’ve predominantly been self-employeed or have run my own agency since 1999. It just works. I started an Amway business when I was 17, so I guess it’s in my DNA.
Relationships are central to my approach. Consulting and working with a small team provides more freedom to choose which clients are served with a personal, customized approach. If a call extends an extra 30 minutes or an hour to listen and discuss what’s going on in their life, there’s more freedom to do so. Admittedly, it’s a tradeoff. You can do more as part of a bigger agency, but then you also have more pressure to meet budgetary quotas. I thrive off working closely with clients and getting to know them and
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Google’s Matt Cutts: Domain Clustering To Change Again; Less Results From Same Domain Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a new video…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google announced a major update to their social network this week that changes the way Hangouts, photos and the Google+ stream are viewed by users. The decidedly Pinterest-esque layout was just one of many announcements this week out of Google I/O, the totality of which Jeremiah Owyang and Chris Silva dubbed a “wreck.”
“The end result, we hope, is an app that looks and feels great across a family of devices,” Senior VP Vic Gundotra wrote of the Google+ changes. This is in line with Google’s mantra of late: Technology works best when it gets out of the way, and lets people do what makes them happiest: living, learning and loving.
With the announcements of more interconnection of services, Google Maps as a virtual world, Google All Access music streaming and more, Owyang and Silva remind consumers to expect the tools and products to get better, but to know you’re the product. If brands want to play in Google’s sandbox, they’ll ultimately need to pay, they said in summary.
Visit Web-Strategist.com to see the rest of Owyang and Silva’s commentary on what they called a “patchwork set of announcements from a fragmented company,” live from Google I/O.
It’s no surprise much of this week’s news pertains to Google and their products, given their I/O event and a myriad of changes announced this week. However, Facebook also made headlines through their retail social/mobile partnership with Target, as did insightful reports for online marketers from Google and GlobalWebIndex.
Content Recommendation Engine for Mobile Sites Launched by Google
Google has rolled out a content recommendation engine, which makes content recommendations for users at the bottom of the screen on news sites with the service enabled. Sites need just one snippet of code to add
In spite of Yahoo! accepting revenue guarantees for another year from Microsoft, recently there has been speculation that Yahoo! might want to get out of their search ad deal with Microsoft. I am uncertain if the back channeled story is used as leverage to secure ongoing minimum revenue agreements, or if Yahoo! is trying to set the pretext narrative to later be able to push through a Google deal that might otherwise get blocked by regulators.
When mentioning Yahoo!’s relative under-performance on search, it would be helpful to point out the absurd amount of their “search” traffic from the golden years that was various forms of arbitrage. Part of the reason (likely the primary reason) Yahoo! took such a sharp nose dive in terms of search revenues (from $551 million per quarter to as low as $357 million per quarter) was that Microsoft used quality scores to price down the non-search arbitrage traffic streams & a lot of that incremental “search” volume Yahoo! had went away.
There were all sorts of issues in place that are rarely discussed. Exit traffic, unclosible windows, forcing numerous clicks, iframes in email spam, raw bot clicks, etc. … and some of this was tied to valuable keyword lists or specific juicy keywords. I am not saying that Google has outright avoided all arbitrage (Ask does boatloads of it in paid + organic & Google at one point tested doing some themselves on credit cards keywords) but it has generally been a sideshow at Google, whereas it was the main attraction at Yahoo!.
And that is what drove down Yahoo!’s click prices.
Yahoo! went from almost an “anything goes” approach to their ad feed syndication, to the point where they made a
Like many content creators the task of creating ebooks, books and large bodies of work used to be a real challenge for me. I would start many potential projects but I could never finish them. Over the last year I developed a creative process that unlocked the ability to write books, ebooks, manifestos, and other [...]
The post The Counterintuitive Guide to Ebooks, Books and Larger Bodies of Work appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Today on the Google home page is a special Mother’s Day logo for all moms out there. This logo, or Google Doodle, as Google calls them, has a little more detail than the previous years. The logo is completely interactive allowing users to create up to 27 different pieces of art with 3 border…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Congrats! You made it to another weekend!
You don’t get a prize, but you do get to read this week’s Beal Deal interview with none other than Brett Tabke. Brett has built Pubcon into one of the biggest and best internet marketing conferences around. I sat down and asked him about that and his decision to sell the WebmasterWorld forums.
Let’s get to it!
Q1. Congrats on the continued growth of Pubcon. What’s the secret to its success?
Ultimately, that is our secret – to be able to move where our audience is going and is at.
We do one thing and do it better than any body else. I have seen 5 major conferences fail in our time and dozens of smaller ones. The majority of those failures are because the conference is an “after thought” or side show to their main business. We have been successful because this is “what we do”.
Secondly, we are not a generic niche conference. So many of the niche vertical conferences have failed (Twitter, anyone, Twitter conference?). Being a big and broad conference gives us room to do things like add social media when it is hot – or mobile as it heated up. We can go where our audience goes. Ultimately, that is our secret – to be able to move where our audience is going and is at. We are not chained to search, affiliate or even webmaster topics. We don’t have to change our name, everytime the internet winds blow.
Q2. Which keynote speaker is at the top of your wish list?
Oh, I have a few:
Current top: Sheryl Sandberg.
Usual suspects: Brin, Page, Zuckerberg, Mayer, Gates.
Unusual suspects: Ray Kurzweil, Sir Richard Branson, President Bill Clinton.
Fun Suspects: Aston Kutcher, Barry Weiss, Shawn Achor, Tom Peters.
Q3. What’s the single
Your customers want more personalized messaging and content. In fact, 64% believe it’s more important that companies represent them with relevant offers, compared to 36% who don’t want their activity tracked. Given the tools available to block ads, tactics to stop tracking, opt-in nature of communications and social participation, it’s clear that customers who do choose to interact with brands expect a more personalized experience as a result.
The Mass Marketing vs. Personalization infographic from Monetate shares a number of other interesting recommendations and finds, including:
See the infographic for tips on better personalization.
Mobile Increasingly Used for Local Search
More people are using mobile for search, especially for local information, according to a new Local Mobile Search Report based on comScore data from Q4 2012. PC traffic has remained static, researchers said, while mobile continues to grow as a percentage of overall traffic to websites. See more at SearchEngineLand.
Klout Aims to Let Consumer Be More Influential with “Experts”
Klout previewed their new “Experts” feature Wednesday. AllThingsD.com explains how it works: “If you’ve garnered sufficient credibility on a certain topic based on your Klout score — say, gardening or hair styling or whatever — you should be qualified to answer questions on the area. Moreover, you’re likely more credible than some result in a Q&A thread on a site like Yahoo Answers or perhaps a Quora.” Klout shared questions to some of its users, whose answers will show up in Bing search results (Klout’s official search partner) and
A few weeks ago I sat down with long time SEJ community member and SEO expert Alan Bleiwess. This is the start of an ongoing monthly video series that I’ll be producing for SEJ. Here are some of the highlights from our chat: How to Leverage Another Community to Build Your Personal Brand Why [...]
The post SEJ Video Series: A Sit Down With SEO Expert Alan Bleiweiss appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
What is up with this weather?
The midwest is getting snow and here in Raleigh, NC, I had to turn the heating back on! Come on Spring, get with the routine, or you’re fired!
Now I’ve got that off my chest, let’s turn to this week’s Beal Deal interview. You’re probably sick of me gushing about each guest, but I really am fortunate that they are all great people, and great friends. Janet Driscoll Miller, CEO of Search Mojo, is no exception!
I’ve known Janet for many years and I even sit on her advisory board–and her company is also a valuable Trackur partner! Janet is laser focused on building her business, but not at the expense of having a fun time. She’ll teach you something important one minute, then have you cracking up the next.
So, with that, let’s jump into this week’s questions!
Q1. You started Search Mojo in 2005. What was your vision for the company then and how does it compare to today?
Our industry and business technology changes rapidly, and we’ve had to evolve with it.
Wow. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind. When I started back then, I really wasn’t sure how large we would become, and I certainly never envisioned having multiple offices. I was just speaking with someone the other day about business plans, and I remarked how my business plan has been ever-evolving – ever dynamic. It’s not as if I can put a five-year plan together per se. Our industry and business technology changes rapidly, and we’ve had to evolve with it.
Q2. You work with your husband, Tad. What are the advantages and disadvantages of working with your spouse?
In the end, our personal relationship must come first and our business relationship second.
First, I was fortunate enough to
When Google first released its updated Google Search app last October, it never made the iTunes top ten and, last week, wasn’t even in the top 100. But the addition of Google Now helped the app make the top ten in less than a week. Google relaunched its app last October with Siri-like voice…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
LinkedIn users can now add rich media content objects to their profiles, allowing designers, analysts, authors and others to share their best works in a visually interesting format. Users can now use videos, images and presentations to demonstrate their experience. Danielle Restivo, Head of Global Programs, Corporate Communications at LinkedIn, reminds us that brands have had rich media access on their pages for some time. “The ability to share rich media through company pages is already available for admins of the Company Page. So an employee of a company who has admin rights to update the Company Page can do this, but employees without admin rights could not,” she told TopRank.
There are 15 accepted file formats for rich media on Company Pages including images, video and presentation on company pages. Restivo recommends that brands use rich media within status updates and post images and video on their Products or Careers page. Administrators can add rich media content from the “Share an update” box on their brand page by clicking the paper clip icon and adding their file. See LinkedIn’s rich media for company pages resource for a complete list of accepted file types.
Brands have a new Instagram feature to get excited about: users can now tag accounts in their image uploads, including business accounts.
In an announcement this week, Instagram explained the new privacy controls that come with this feature: “Only you can add people to your photos, so you have control over the images you share… When someone adds you to a photo, you’ll receive a notification and the photo will appear in your
Measuring PPC and SEO is relatively straightforward. But how do we go about credibly measuring social media campaigns, and wider public relations and audience awareness campaigns?
As the hype level of social media starts to fall, then more questions are asked about return on investment. During the early days of anything, the hype of the new is enough to sustain an endeavor. People don’t want to miss out. If their competitors are doing it, that’s often seen as good enough reason to do it, too.
You may be familiar with this graph. It’s called the hype cycle and is typically used to demonstrate the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies:
Where would social media marketing be on this graph?
I think a reasonable guess, if we’re seeing more and more discussion about ROI, is somewhere on the “slope of enlightenment”. In this article, we’ll look at ways to measure social media performance by grounding it in the only criteria that truly matter – business fundamentals.
We’ve talked about the Cluetrain Manifesto and how the world changed when corporations could no longer control the message. If the message can no longer be controlled, then measuring the effectiveness of public relations becomes even more problematic.
PR used to be about crafting a message and placing it, and nurturing the relationships that allowed that to happen. With the advent of social media, that’s still true, but the scope has expanded exponentially – everyone can now repeat, run with, distort, reconfigure and reinvent the messages. Controlling the message was always difficult, but now it’s impossible.
On the plus side, it’s now much easier to measure and quantify the effectiveness of public relations activity due to the wealth of web data and
As SEO grows more complex and the size of the sites you work on continue to grow, it’s more important than ever to have a set of high-quality tools that both give you a competitive edge and save you time. Tools can help with all of the vital aspects of SEO, including content creation, distribution…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
As the pace of content creation increases, our attention spans seem to be decreasing. This is requiring creators to adapt and consider ways in which people can consume content in a timely manner. The result is a movement towards highly visual content. While you may not have the resources to hire a designer or visual [...]
The post 5 Ways to Turn Existing Content into High Touch Visuals appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Is it finally feeling like Spring where you live? I sure hope so, otherwise you may wish to consider moving!
If you were to move to New Jersey, you may find a new best friend in Michael Streko, co-founder of KnowEm and one of the easiest guys to get along with that you’ll meet. I managed to take away his focus from growing KnowEm for just enough time to answer six questions.
I think you’ll enjoy his answers!
Q1. OK, let’s clear this up. Streko, Michael, Mike, “Mikey Mike & the Jersey Shore Bunch?” What’s your preference?
Haha! Honestly, as long as I can remember I have always been called “Streko”. There are just too many Michael/Mike’s out there. I will always introduce myself as Michael, but at the end of the day everyone ends up calling me “Streko”, so I have given up and just go with the fact that in life I feel like I am constantly on a football team.
Q2. KnowEm has become the go to site for securing social media profiles, what’s next?
We have a lot of stuff in the works.
The second big product that we are very excited about is our Publish Platform.
The two largest projects that Barry Wise (My partner on the site and co-founder of KnowEm) has been working on is our streamlined white label Enterprise Solution. Besides offering all our comprehensive services it also offers a mobile-optimized platform. This provides any agency or organization the ability to white label all of KnowEm’s product offerings (Including Trademark Registrations) to look like their own brand with a client login, admin panel, and a bunch of awesome features with an easily skinned look and feel. **Shameless Plug** If anyone is interested in seeing a demo, feel free to contact me here http://enterprise.knowem.com.
The second big product
Brands understand the importance of content marketing, yet most have not yet addressed their content needs on either a strategic or tactical level, according to Altimeter’s Rebecca Lieb.
Researchers for the company conducted interviews with executives actively engaged in content strategy or marketing; their findings were the basis of a new report, Organizing for Content: Models to Incorporate Content Strategy and Content Marketing in the Enterprise. Lieb and report co-authors guide brand marketers through a variety of organizational models for content, with recommendations to help companies execute an effective content strategy. Read the full report on SlideShare.
Buyers are overwhelmed by the amount of content available to them, making the content marketer’s challenge greater than ever, according to a new study from Demand Gen Report. Content plays an increasingly important role in B2B purchase decision making, with 68% of survey respondents indicating they rely more on content than they did last year. Variety is key: five out of nine content formats gained in popularity, while only podcasts and interactive presentations lost traction. Researchers found that three specific content formats stand out in 2013: white papers, E-books and webinars.
Sales messages are a huge turnoff for buyers, 61% of whom said sales-heavy content has been a problem for them in the past year. Survey respondents indicated they would like B2B marketers to focus on making content more readable, adding value, and showing their research to their audience.
The customer journey is complex, with engagement happening across platforms, devices and possible over a period of time, says Google. Their new tool on the Think Insights website aims to
The stock market had a flash crash today after someone hacked the AP account & made a fake announcement about bombs going off at the White House. Recently Twitter’s search functionality has grown so inundated with spam that I don’t even look at the brand related searches much anymore. While you can block individual users, it doesn’t block them from showing up in search results, so there are various affiliate bots that spam just about any semi-branded search.
Of course, for as spammy as the service is now, it was worse during the explosive growth period, when Twitter had fewer than 10 employees fighting spam:
Twitter says its “spammy” tweet rate of 1.5% in 2010 was down from 11% in 2009.
If you want to show growth by any means necessary, engagement by a spam bot is still engagement & still lifts the valuation of the company.
Many of the social sites make no effort to police spam & only combat it after users flag it. Consider Eric Schmidt’s interview with Julian Assange, where Eric Schmidt stated:
We would post editorial content more often, but we are sort of debating opening up a social platform so that we can focus on the user without having to bear any editorial costs until after the fact. Profit margins are apparently better that way.
As Google drives smaller sites out of the index & ranks junk content based on no factor other than it being on a trusted site, they create the incentive for spammers to ride on the social platforms.
All aboard. And try not to
Local business owners have a new tool for managing their Google Places For Business listing: a dedicated app that works on the iPhone and iPod Touch. There’s no official announcement that I can find about the app, and as best I can tell, the iClarified blog was first to report on it. The…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
At its core engagement boils down to one key idea. You have to remember that there is a human being on the other end of every tweet, status update, blog post, email or video. If we can view all these things as connection tools first and communication tools second that will make a huge [...]
The post How to Increase Engagement with Your Audience appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Google made a splash in May of 2012 when they announced the Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge Graph is a key component of Semantic Search. Semantic Search aims to get at the real intent of the query, rather than simply matching a page to a search string. A good analogy is that of a headhunter or [...]
The post Semantic Web: Are You Taking Advantage of Semantic Search? appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
The Beal Deal is back!
I’m not quite sure where to start with the introduction for my next guest. Jennifer Cario (aka Jennifer Laycock) and I go way back–if I recall correctly, she had to proof read my posts back when I started writing for Search Engine Guide….a LONG time ago. Over the years, Jen has found lots of ways to stay ahead of her competition–turning a C&D letter from the Pork Council into an amazing publicity opportunity! These days, Jennifer is focusing on Pinterest marketing–when not chicken farming or baking delicious treats!
Here’s your bento box of Jennifer Cario!
Q1. Let’s start with your rebrand. You “merged” with Matthew Cario back in 2011 and changed your name from Jennifer Evans to Jennifer Cario. What challenges have you faced building a new name for yourself?
It’s a reminder of just how much work you really do have to put in to establishing that presence and brand recognition.
Merged…good word choice there Andy. 
You know for a good portion of my career in the industry, I’ve had a habit of launching test projects for the sake of experiencing things from the perspective of my customers. A lot of old timers will remember my “Lactivist” blog from back in the early 2000′s that I launched to write about building a start-up on a shoestring. Others will remember the bento blog I launched and blocked from search engines to see if I could build up a strong site using only social media.
It seems a bit funny to consider that I walked into this one without really thinking about it, but in many ways it’s given me a lot of perspective on what it is to rebrand, or even originally brand a name. After fifteen years in the industry, most
What adjectives would you use to describe Google as a company? Maybe cool, inventive, forward-thinking, a fun place to work. How about Yahoo? I’d go for old fashioned, stale, boring, strict.
That’s why Yahoo hired former Google exec Marissa Mayer last summer. They want Yahoo to sound more like Google, but Mayer’s first few weeks in the office did little to improve the company’s image. Nine months later, she’s still known as the woman who rescinded Yahoo’s telecommuting policy but she’s working to change that, too.
Speaking at the Great Place to Work Conference, Mayer defended her decision saying,
“. . people are more productive when they’re alone but they’re more collaborative and innovative when they’re together. Some of the best ideas come from pulling two different ideas together.”
Two of those ideas hit the market this week – newly designed mobile apps meant to prove that Yahoo is still a contender.
First is the new weather app for iOS. Weather apps are extremely popular. I don’t understand why but maybe that’s because I live in Southern California where weather conditions only effect us a few times a year. Like all weather apps, Yahoo’s will tell you the temperature and the forecast for the coming week. But what sets it apart are the graphics.
Yahoo’s new weather app uses photos from Flickr to illustrate the weather conditions in whatever city you happen to be standing in. Whether its raining in Paris or sunny in St. Louis (they don’t have graphics for every city in the world, but you get the idea), day or night, and I love the big, bold text. You can add multiple cities if you’re traveling or if you just like knowing what the temperature is in your old home town.
The Yahoo weather app is as simple as can be and
To give further credence to consumers’ love of “second-screening” and why marketer’s should be salivating at the opportunities these new habits behold, Nielsen released stats on just what consumers are doing on their tablets while watching TV. Social networking sites…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Bing: Our Search Results Do Not Infect Users, “Malware Study Was Wrong” Bing has responded to the malware study conducted by AV-TEST earlier this…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
It seems like every week I read a new set of statistics about the importance of mobile in a company’s marketing strategy. Two of the most recent stand out. The first, from SteamFeed, included the fact that in the United States, 37 percent of internet usage occurs on mobile devices. The second and more interesting [...]
The post 5 Must-Have Mobile Marketing Tools for Businesses appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
LinkedIn quietly continues to be a force in its section of the Internet space. It’s not a social network but it is. It’s just expanded online resumes but it’s more. Trying to describe LinkedIn and its potential is not easy.
One thing is certain though; it is working. ABCNews puts it this way which is pretty convincing.
LinkedIn’s approach has been highly successful so far. Although the Mountain View, Calif., company is about one-fifth the size of Facebook in terms of annual revenue and total users, its stock has been the hotter commodity on Wall Street. LinkedIn’s shares have nearly quadrupled since the company went public in May 2011, while Facebook’s stock has sunk by 30 percent from its initial public offering price 11 months ago.
The latest effort to expand its reach and to increase revenues comes in the growing area of mobile. LinkedIn has updated its mobile apps for iOS and Android and will now offer the chance to serve mobile ads to LinkedIn mobile users which make up about 27% of overall users at the moment.
LinkedIn will begin showing advertisements within the mobile app’s news stream as part of a “small test,” said LinkedIn spokeswoman Julie Inouye.
The new app, available for both the Apple Inc iPhone and for Android smartphones, makes it easier for smartphone users to interact with content in LinkedIn’s news stream, such as “liking” or commenting on a shared news story.
While we appreciate the ‘small test’ sentiment it’s not hard to see where this will lead. Every social network is coming to grips with mobile and its monetization (aside from Google+ but that’s Google’s M.O.). LinkedIn has set a standard of performance that is not about being sexy but more about being very effective. In the long run, effective usually outlasts sexy.
ABCNews continued
LinkedIn’s new
Text messaging open rates are far superior to those on Facebook, email and even Twitter, according to this latest infographic from SlickText.com. In addition, SMS coupons are ten times more likely to be redeemed and shared than mail or newspaper coupons. Almost all text messages are read within the first five minutes, they claim, which makes sense as the average person checks their phone over 150 times per day. See more insights at SlickText.
Never mind that just 38% of the world’s population use the Internet today; within a decade, every person on the planet will be connected through the web. So said Google chairman Eric Schmidt recently in a public Google+ status update.
The post sparked a flurry of discussion around the possibility that every single person on the planet, particularly those in developing countries, could so soon have access to the web. Schmidt attempted to revive the conversation a few days later in a post that read, “Think about how great the internet is with 2B users. Now think about how amazing it will be when 5B come online in a decade. #NewDigitalAge.” However, it didn’t come close to touching the popularity of his first post, with 570 +1s, 90 Shares and close to 100 comments.
Googler John Mueller submitted a question to webspam czar Matt Cutts for the popular GoogleWebmasterHelp series and – surprise! – Cutts featured his inquiry in this video:
If your timeline allows it, said Cutts, avoid adding too many pages to your site too quickly. He also notes that it is
Google announced their Q1 2013 earnings today, and as many analysts expected, the company posted revenue gains over the previous year. Revenue rose 31% year-over-year to $13.97 billion for the quarter, beating expectations. Here are the highlights: Paid Clicks — Aggregate paid clicks,…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Search Engine Designed By Denmark Researchers Helps Medics Diagnose Rare Diseases Technical University of Denmark researchers have designed a search engine that…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
If you’re a Facebook brand fan, you’re worth 28% more than you were only three years ago. Doesn’t that make you feel good, to know that your value is rising in the social media world? Right now, you’re averaging about $174 but some brands, like Levis, are ready to hang a much higher price tag around your neck.
Want to know which brands value you more than others? Syncapse has the answer:
(The third one down is Monster Energy Drink)
Young, hip brands such as Victoria’s Secret and H&M put the highest value on their Facebook Followers. Old standbys such as CocaCola and Nike, come in under the $100 mark.
Syncapse’s study makes a correlation between low value and retailers with lower price but I don’t see it. Surely Levi’s and Nike are in the same price category but Levi’s fan value is way above Nike. Also, McDonalds is over the average but Subway is below. Xbox is near the bottom, but their price point is certainly higher than that of CocaCola and Dr. Pepper. No, I prefer my logic, which is that hip companies have better Facebook fans.
How did Syncapse arrive at these numbers? I’ve got that, too.
The study compared Facebook Fans and non-Fans based on their product spending, brand loyalty, propensity to recommend, media value, cost of acquisition and brand affinity. For example, 20% of a brand’s customers represent 80% of revenues, and that 20% segment often indexes highly within a brand’s Fan membership. Data were collected from over 2,000 panelists residing in the U.S. in late January and early February 2013.
One of the things that makes a brand fan so valuable is that they’re more active on social media than non-fans. Two-thirds of fans follow 10 or more brand pages while most non-fans (of a given brand) follow less than 10
Today is a groundbreaking day for Google Bloggers. If you’re on G+ and you use Google’s blogging platform, Blogger, then you’re going to love this new update. Today they released their new Google + commenting system. I just recently started using a Blogger blog and when I heard about the new commenting system, I hurried [...]
The post Have You Seen The New Google+ Commenting System? appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Last night, I received an email telling me it was time to wrap up my business with the Google Affiliate Network. If that email had arrived a month ago, I would have tossed it without much thought. But two weeks ago, I started a new niche blog which included several ads from the network – but not the one I wanted most – Netflix.
Netflix was the reason I joined the affiliate network long, long ago, but when I went to grab banners for my new blog, there were none. Netflix’s affiliate page still sends you to the network, so I was confused. I attempted to get answers through the support group but no one responded.
When I looked through the other available options there wasn’t much to pick from. Surprising, since Google is. . . well. . .Google. You’d think they’d have the top brands in their inventory.
Taking all of that into consideration, I wasn’t surprised when I saw the closure notice.
Our goal with Google Affiliate Network has been to help advertisers and publishers improve their performance across the affiliate ecosystem. Cost-per-action (CPA) marketing has rapidly evolved in the last few years, and we constantly evaluate our products to ensure that we’re focused on the services that will have the biggest impact for our advertisers and publishers. To that end, we’ve made the difficult decision to retire the Google Affiliate Network and focus on other products that are driving great results for clients.
Publishers can continue to earn revenue through the AdSense network. And marketers can take advantage of other CPA-oriented Google tools like Product Listing Ads, remarketing and Conversion Optimizer to drive valuable online sales and conversions. These areas are growing rapidly and we continue to invest significantly in them.
We’ll continue to support our customers as we wind down the
At SMX Advanced, everyone is a master of the technical basics — 301 redirects, canonicalization, HTTP status codes. But even battle-scarred veterans can run into serious challenges when they dive into web site infrastructure, and find that things get a lot more complicated. URL parameter facets +…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Everyone in SEO is talking about it…a new Penguin update is on the way and it is rumored that it will make last April’s ruthless Penguin update look like child’s play. People are running scared, wondering if their site, and business, will be slammed like so many others were last year. In this article I [...]
The post 5 Ways to Protect your Website from Google SEO Penalties appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Yandex is Russia’s leading search engine, besting even mighty Google in numbers of unique visitors in its home country. But did you know comScore also ranks it as the world’s fourth largest overall search engine, ahead of Bing in number of search requests processed? In part,…
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The City of Boston’s response to the bombings at the 117 Boston Marathon serves as a model for how communities and emergency responders deploy coherent systems of communication during times of disaster. During such tragedies, the ability to connect and communicate with those who are potentially missing or hurt, is critical to ensuring that one’s [...]
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Consumers will use their tablet to shop for clothes and their smartphone to search for a local restaurant but what about those small but important things in life such as toilet paper, milk and cat food?
Millennial Media set out on a mission to discover the links between consumer goods and mobile and the time has come to reveal the results!
It all begins with incredible growth. Mobile ad spend in Consumer Goods grew 235% year-over-year. The biggest push came from Beverages. The manufacturers of soda, alcohol, juice, tea, energy drinks and bottled water bought 43% of the ads in the category. Cosmetics and Hygiene came in second with 28%.
Since most people don’t buy consumer goods online, most (46%) marketers were simply hoping to promote brand awareness. 40% also used location-based advertising to push consumers toward a nearby store or, as in the case of a beer brand, a nearby bar.
44% of ads asked consumers to watch a video, 34% sent them to a social media site and 20% sent them to a retail promotion.
The study also found that women were more likely than men to access Consumer Goods content with their phone and the majority fell between 25 and 34. What’s really fascinating is how men and women differ in the way they use their smartphones while shopping. (82% of Consumer Goods impressions came from a smartphone, only 18% came from tablets.)
A quick glance at this chart says it all – men and women work from completely different mindsets. While shopping for consumer goods, men used their mobile devices to check product availability, compare prices and find coupons. Yes, that’s what it says. . . 47% of men searched for coupons.
Women used their mobile phones to get more information from friends or family members. They were also more
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No, literally… everything, from Facebook and WordPress, to Google Analytics, MailChimp and even Salesforce.
This month, we learned that although 65% of brands participate in influencer marketing, just 10% of total digital marketing spend goes to social, which includes influencer marketing. Some have cried, don’t people see the opportunity? Why aren’t they spending on influencers!
Technorati Media’s 2013 Digital Influence Report shared the above insight, as well as the fact that a mere 6% of social spend is allotted to marketing to influencers. This doesn’t signal a problem to me at all. In fact, it’s an indication that while influencer marketing is recognized as a valuable piece of the online marketing puzzle and many practice it, it doesn’t require a great deal of budget to accomplish. That, friends, is what we call an opportunity.
That’s not to say influencer outreach is easy, but that an array of low-cost tools are available to help marketers better identify, understand and connect with industry influencers. These social tools enable us to automate much of the research, to weed through a mass of data and identify trends or common characteristics among the people who can positively impact our business with a tweet, a blog post, or a thoughtful comment.
Check out these social tools for brand marketers looking to more easily and inexpensively measure and act on influence in their industry.
Commun.it is a Twitter-specific dashboard for managing relationships and identifying/engaging influencers. In addition to serving as a dashboard, it serves up handy reports on new followers, unfollows, total reach, and more. It integrates seamlessly with Twitter, allowing you to interact from within the dashboard. This tool allows for multiple users and multiple Twitter accounts (with a paid package) and is
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Page Rank really is known as a weighting system in the Google Algorythm, but is one of 100′s of factors which affects how your website ranks, some of it is due to CTR (click through rate) , bounce rate and many other factors. An SEO Consultant can verify that it is used more for a quick blink over on how your website is doing according to Google, but it is taken very lightly now in 2013!
Do users find big headlines more relevant? Does using long text lead to more, or less, visitor engagement? Is that latest change to the shopping cart going to make things worse? Are your links just the right shade of blue?
If you want to put an end to tiresome subjective arguments about page length, or the merits of your clients latest idea, which is to turn their website pink, then adopting an experimental process for web publishing can be a good option.
If you don’t currently use an experiment-driven publishing approach, then this article is for you. We’ll look at ways to bake experiments into your web site, the myriad of opportunities testing creates, how it can help your SEO, and ways to mitigate cultural problems.
The merits of any change should be derived from the results of the change under a controlled test. This process is common in PPC, however many SEO’s will no doubt wonder how such an approach will affect their SEO.
Well, Google encourages it.
We’ve gotten several questions recently about whether website testing—such as A/B or multivariate testing—affects a site’s performance in search results. We’re glad you’re asking, because we’re glad you’re testing! A/B and multivariate testing are great ways of making sure that what you’re offering really appeals to your users
Post-panda, being more relevant to visitors, not just machines, is important. User engagement is more important. If you don’t closely align your site with user expectations and optimize for engagement, then it will likely suffer.
The new SEO, at least as far as Panda is concerned, is about pushing your best quality stuff and the complete removal of low-quality or overhead pages from the indexes. Which means it’s not as easy
