September 2006
Creating buzz through creativity
Written by Neil Patel on September 30, 2006 | 1 comment
Nissan recently released a commercial for their 4x4 vehicles in Europe, but unlike most car commercials they did not waste time talking about how cool their vehicles are or all their great features they have. Instead they created a creative commercial that represented Nissan's "natural" 4x4 ability.
Marketing with life's mistakes
Written by Neil Patel on September 29, 2006 | 4 comments
People make mistakes in life all the time. It could be putting your shirt on backwards, mistaking a woman for a man or even kissing someone and then finding out that they are related to you. By taking these mistakes that happen in life and integrating them into commercials, you can create something that is both funny and memorable.
Catchup - 9/29/06
Written by Cameron Olthuis on September 29, 2006 |
- Micorsoft Digital Advertising Solutions
Microsoft is announcing the launch of "Digital Advertising Solutions" and a media campaign to go with it. It's an effort to bring together Microsoft's various properties into a unified platform that gives advertisers ways to buy reach and audiences efficiently: Xbox, mobile, PCs and, maybe, TV.
Don't forget to listen to what your customers are saying
Written by Cameron Olthuis on September 28, 2006 | 1 comment
Do you hear what your customers are telling you? Listening to the feedback from your users is important; the feedback that they can provide can prove invaluable to improving your business. It's the real people that are actually using your products/services that are able to provide the best feedback. Your product, service or website directly benefits them, since they are the ones that are actually using it. This is especially important when you are launching something new and you do not really know exactly how things are going to go.
What you need to know about digg and Netscape
Written by Neil Patel on September 28, 2006 | 8 comments
Many people have been using digg and the new Netscape and think that they are exactly the same, but they are not. Both of them are community driven websites, but there are many differences between them that affect how well the stories you submit perform on them.
What I learned from FeedBurner TotalStats
Written by Neil Patel on September 28, 2006 | 2 comments
FeedBurner offers two main options for RSS tracking, the first is StandardStats and the second is TotalStats. Most people use StandardStats because it is free, but if you have an extra $5 per month to spare here is why I think you should upgrade to TotalStats.
Everyone is an influencer
Written by Cameron Olthuis on September 27, 2006 | 8 comments
Lately, I have noticed that when it comes to tracking your buzz a lot of companies are only focused on tracking the so-called influencers. The problem that I have with this approach is that today, everyone is an influencer. You never know at any given time who can influence who and in what way. The barriers to publishing online are so low right now that anyone at anytime can damage your reputation, and they have a number of channels they can use to do so. That is why it is important to track everything and everyone, not just the influencers.
How to get StumbledUpon
Written by Neil Patel on September 26, 2006 | 14 comments
StumbleUpon is a popular social site that over 1 million people use. It is not as popular as digg or del.icio.us, but it drove 17,209 visitors in the last 25 days to this blog. That makes it a valuable traffic source, so lets see how StumbleUpon works and how you can use it to get traffic to your website.
Secrets to Beating the Sandbox
Written by Neil Patel on September 25, 2006 |
Many of you may have websites or blogs that are not doing to well on Google because they are in the Google Sandbox. If you ever wondered how to get out of the Sandobx, Andy Hagans from Text Link Ads recently wrote a detailed post on the "Secrets to Beating the Sandbox 2.0 REVEALED: The Ultimate Guide".
Tips on finding breaking news
Written by Neil Patel on September 25, 2006 | 2 comments
Yesterday I posted on "Making your blog popular through content" by using methods such as breaking news which can help boost your popularity. Although it can be effective it can be difficult and time consuming to try to break news, so here are some ways that might help you find breaking news:
Making your blog popular through content
Written by Neil Patel on September 24, 2006 | 35 comments
As a blogger one of your goals might be to become popular. You might be able to do this by optimizing your blog or by using the diverse social mediums out there today. These methods are great and can really boost your popularity, but they are usually not in your control. The one thing that you have in your control is the content on your blog, so here are some ideas on how you can increase your popularity through your content.
What is 9rules?
Written by Neil Patel on September 23, 2006 | 14 comments
Recently Paul Scrivens from 9rules announced that 9rules round 5 will be taking place on October 25th. Some of you may be thinking about entering your blog in round 5 and some of you maybe wondering what 9rules is all about. This blog and Cameron's blog both got accepted into 9rules during round 4 and ever since we have been discovering exactly what 9rules is all about. A lot of the people whom I've talked to see it as a blog network, but as a member here is how I see it...
Catchup - 9/22/06
Written by Cameron Olthuis on September 22, 2006 |
- YouTube & Warner Strike Music Licensing Deal
YouTube and Warner Music have announced an advertising revenue sharing deal with will distribute and license Warner Music Group Corp's copyrighted songs and other material through YouTube. Under the deal, Warner Music has agreed to license its songs to the people who upload their videos to YouTube. Meaning that any video producer can now legally use Warner Music in their videos as theme or background music, or even produce alternative videos for Warner songs.
Marketing with How-To Guides
Written by Neil Patel on September 22, 2006 | 4 comments
How to guides have been a smashing success on the web. New how to guides are written on a daily basis and you always see them popping up on sites like digg and del.icio.us. So why do how to guides have to stop with the web? Why not create commercials based on that principle, such as how to save money on your phone bill. Or even how to see a girl naked...
BMW is sleeping behind the wheel
Written by Cameron Olthuis on September 21, 2006 | 10 comments
I've always been a big fan of BMW and if you've ever had the pleasure of driving or owning one you know why. Last night I was watching TV and a commercial for the new BMW 3 series coupe came on, since I also had my laptop handy I decided to hop online to see more. I went to Google and searched for "bmw 3 series coupe" and this is what I saw...
How to get on the digg homepage
Written by Neil Patel on September 21, 2006 | 8 comments
Lately many bloggers have been making an extra effort to try and get on the digg homepage so that they can increase the popularity of their blog. Many of the bloggers will do almost anything to accomplish this, some go as far as telling all of their friends on their AIM buddy list to digg their story while others go to the extreme of joining digging groups where everyone diggs each others story. If you really want to get on digg, here is how you do it.
Targeting Social Media Optimization
Written by Cameron Olthuis on September 20, 2006 | 3 comments
One of the reasons I love trading emails is that I'm often inspired to blog about an idea that comes up. In a recent email swap with David, from the Social Media Optimization blog, we started talking about SMO strategies and how to target the different channels. With SEO it's easy, you pretty much want to rank on every possible search engine there is, anytime someone performs a relevant search you would want to show up. Right? SMO is different, most social websites have their own unique communities. For example, if you're a "cooking" social network then Digg is the wrong site to optimize for, Chowhound or some of the other recipe sharing websites might make more sense for you.
A comparison of SEO and SMO
Written by Cameron Olthuis on September 20, 2006 | 3 comments
Social Media Optimization (SMO), if you haven't heard already, is a term that was recently coined by Rohit Bhargava which refers to the process of ensuring that a website is easy to link to by utilizing the different social media sources including but not limited to, blogs, bookmarking websites and media sharing websites. There are a lot of similarities and differences between SEO & SMO. Because of this, and the idea that one cannot take over the role for the other, it is important to know when and why to use each optimization technique.
Using digg and Netscape to get traffic
Written by Neil Patel on September 19, 2006 | 22 comments
In the last couple of months more and more bloggers have been catching onto the power of digg and Netscape. Bloggers have realized that if they get their blog on the homepage of digg or Netscape thousands of visitors will flood into their blog within minutes. So the question is, how can digg and Netscape be leveraged for traffic, and what results can you expect from them?
Discovering a new Google design
Written by Neil Patel on September 19, 2006 | 7 comments
As some of you may have noticed, I am addicted to stats. Every couple of hours I have to look at my blog stats or else I go crazy. Today I noticed that my Google traffic went up drastically and my referrers showed that I was getting traffic for terms such as "soesman", so I decided to do a Google search and check it out. And lucky me, when I did a search I saw a newly designed Google search result page.
Interview with Todd Malicoat
Written by Neil Patel on September 18, 2006 | 2 comments
Recently I had the pleasure of speaking with Todd Malicoat at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose. Todd is a well known expert in the field of Internet marketing who has worked both for himself as well as marketing firms. Because of his experiences and knowledge in Internet marketing, I decided to do an email interview with him.
Catchup - 9/16/06
Written by Cameron Olthuis on September 16, 2006 |
Ask.com announced a new Germany research and development center to be headed up by Eric Heymann, former head of technology at Seekport, as director of global content acquisition today. The German R&D center will work closely with the Pisa, Italy, Campbell, Calif., and Piscataway, N.J. locations. Apostolos Gerasoulis, VP of search technology at Ask.com, said, "the expansion of our European research and development team will allow Ask.com to continue to develop and scale our world-class search."
Marketing with illusions
Written by Neil Patel on September 16, 2006 | 4 comments
Have you ever seen the magic trick where a person is cut in half with a saw and then put back together? As you probably already know, it is just an illusion; the person may seem like they are being cut in half, but in reality the saw never even touches their body.
5 ways to building a better blog
Written by Neil Patel on September 14, 2006 | 29 comments
Although the blogosphere is a new space on the web, it is starting to become a crowded. Millions of bloggers are writing on a daily basis and many of them are writing on similar topics. Because of the sheer number of blogs fighting for the same eyeballs, it is becoming harder to become popular, so the question is how do you make your stand out from the rest?
Creating buzz with how to guides
Written by Neil Patel on September 13, 2006 |
Writing how to guides is a great way to educate people as well as a great way to build links. Last week Chanpory Rith from LifeClever wrote a unique how to guide on dressing like a Mac which drew a lot of buzz.
Wikipedia dominates brand search results
Written by Cameron Olthuis on September 12, 2006 |
Steve Rubel recently conducted a study that compiled the top 100 advertisers on AdAge, then he entered each of them in Google and tallied the results. What he found is that Wikipedia is showing up most of the time for brand searches, this will come as no surprise to any SEO or anyone else that spots trends in search results. But Steve finds a quite a few interesting things, one particular find is...
Snooping on a blog's FeedBurner stats
Written by Neil Patel on September 12, 2006 | 4 comments
Have you ever wondered how popular a specific blog is? You might be able to tell by doing a backward link check in Google or by looking up their Alexa ranking, but that will not always give you a full picture. If the blog uses FeedBurner you might be able to view their subscriber count to get another viewpoint on their popularity with a few simple steps.
Will Social Media Optimization become mainstream?
Written by Cameron Olthuis on September 11, 2006 | 5 comments
A couple of days ago I was asked the following question; What do you see as the main obstacles that Social Media Optimization needs to overcome in order to become a more mainstream marketing strategy? Social Media Optimization is still very much in its infancy. Although most of the concepts have been used for awhile, the phrase was just recently coined and through the community, the rules and concepts are just beginning to take shape.
My 50 favorite design resources
Written by Neil Patel on September 11, 2006 | 20 comments
There are thousands of design resources on the web which can lead to an overwhelming experience when looking for inspiration or ideas, so I created a list of resources that I use on a regular basis. Here is a list of 50 design resources that can be helpful to any designer or marketer.
Catchup - 9/9/06
Written by Cameron Olthuis on September 9, 2006 |
YouTube has taken a step in the serious direction of fortifying its management team and monetization efforts with the recruitment of Gideo Yu, Yahoo's Treasurer. Yu is now the Chief Financial Officer at YouTube.
Marketing like a Champion
Written by Neil Patel on September 8, 2006 |
The Olympics is an event where you get to represent and support your country. Because of all the patriotism shown around this time and the millions of people glued to their television sets companies are sponsoring these events to keep their branding strong.
Learning from Google's data centers
Written by Neil Patel on September 7, 2006 | 18 comments
Have you ever wondered how many data centers the search engine giant Google has, or why it is important to know each one? Currently Google has around 39 or more data centers. They can tell us a lot about how Google works; such as giving us an indication of when they are doing an algorithm update or when they are updating pagerank.
Getting out of the Google Sandbox
Written by Neil Patel on September 7, 2006 | 3 comments
Is your website getting no Google love when it should be getting a lot of love? In March 2004 the mysterious theory of the Google Sandbox came about, which is when Google puts new websites through a probation period where they do not rank well.
Everybody thinks they know everything
Written by Neil Patel on September 5, 2006 | 6 comments
Last week a guest speaker came to one of my marketing classes at Cal State Fullerton. The college has guest speakers quite often and this time they brought in Boris Bugarski, the CEO of an email marketing company called mUrgent. ...
SEO is not dead
Written by Cameron Olthuis on September 5, 2006 | 3 comments
SEO is far from dead; in fact it is still one of the best ways to drive targeted traffic to a website. Normal people don't read technology blogs so they aren't going to hear about your company that way. You need to find a way to get in front of them in their own territory, which is through Google. Unfortunately most startups don't realize this; instead they would rather focus all of their attention on getting bloggers to write about them. Don't get me wrong, it is important to create buzz through the blogoshere but the majority of people won't find you that way. The echo chamber does not equal revenues but search terms do.
Learning from your referrers
Written by Neil Patel on September 4, 2006 | 2 comments
We all know web analytics can provide a lot of data about your website and its visitors. It can tell you how many visitors came to your site within the last month, your source conversion rate and even a breakdown of your search engine traffic. ...
Catchup - 9/3/06
Written by Cameron Olthuis on September 3, 2006 |
Google has deployed the first pieces of its upcoming Office suite. They've launched Google Apps for your Domain, a set of Google services targeted to small and mid sized companies. With the new service, companies can use Gmail, Talk, Calendar and Page Creator under a single control panel. Applications and data will be hosted by Google, for free, with ad support.
Don't be silly with your marketing plan
Written by Neil Patel on September 3, 2006 | 3 comments
In the past couple months I have heard a lot of dumb marketing plans. Some of these guys who created these plans are new to the online industry while others have been in it for years. Cameron also wrote "What's your marketing plan" a few days ago, so I decided to compile a list of the 10 dumbest plans I have ever heard.
Smirnoff: Tea Partay
Written by Neil Patel on September 1, 2006 |
Music videos are a great way to promote a product. You usually see them on TV stations like MTV or VH1 promoting a song, but why not create a commercial out of a music video. This is the exact thing Smirnoff did with their new drink called Tea Partay.
