January 2007
Pimp my links: MyPunchbowl
Written by Cameron Olthuis on January 31, 2007 |
For the fifth installment of the Pimp My Links series we are featuring MyPunchbowl, a web based party planning application. MyPunchbowl makes it easy to put together all the pieces of organizing a party including picking the date, sending invites, managing the catering, purchasing supplies, renting equipment, and more.
Should We Measure Traffic In Minutes?
Written by Muhammad Saleem on January 31, 2007 | 39 comments
Let's assume that the ratio of referral traffic to social media traffic (by way of social bookmarking and socially driven sites) is 1:10. The question is quite simple actually, but the answer isn't. Would you rather have 5000 unique visitors from Digg.com or would you rather have 500 visitors from everywhere else on the web?
Text Link Ads and Us
Written by Neil Patel on January 31, 2007 | 6 comments
Text Link Ads is a company Cameron and I have loved since they started. They provide a great service to bloggers by helping them make more money from their blog and they help businesses increase their traffic through text links. Due to our passion for Text Link Ads and because I have known Patrick Gavin (one of the co-founders) since I was in "diapers" we decided to become the new evangelists for them.
Marketing Yourself with a Viral Hoax
Written by Muhammad Saleem on January 30, 2007 | 6 comments
Every once in a while I will come across a beautifully orchestrated hoax and ask myself, why would someone do this? Having too much free time on your hands and temporary Internet celebrity aside, a carefully crafted hoax can be leveraged to your advantage.
Is honesty the best form of linkbait?
Written by Cameron Olthuis on January 29, 2007 | 2 comments
Loren Feldman from 1938 posted a video on his blog saying that linkbait is for losers and honesty is the best form of linkbait. While I can appreciate Loren's opinion and he is definitely on to something I think maybe he went a bit to far. Yes, social media marketing should be executed in a way that you never want to lie to your customers and you should always be open and honest. But at the same time crafting a message with clever titles is just plain smart marketing.
Serph's Up
Written by Cameron Olthuis on January 29, 2007 | 28 comments
Last spring we started developing Serph, a tool that helps you find what other people are saying on the web right now. For a couple of months now we have slowly been inviting a handful of people into our closed beta for testing and feedback. As of yesterday we have officially gone from a closed beta to a more "open" beta.
Using YouTube to Drive Traffic to Your Site
Written by Muhammad Saleem on January 29, 2007 | 6 comments
YouTube is one of the most popular web sites on the Internet, beating the next biggest website, MySpace, by a hefty margin. Millions of people visit YouTube to watch the latest viral videos and to take a look at the featured content on the site.
Please welcome Muhammad Saleem
Written by Neil Patel on January 29, 2007 | 12 comments
I am proud to welcome Muhammad Saleem to the Pronet Advertising team. I have been good friends with Muhammad for quite some time now and we have both had great conversations with each other about social media. You may have read some of his blog posts on social media at The Mu Life or seen him on some of the popular social media sites. As a top 20 Digger and as a Netscape Navigator Muhammad has a lot knowledge and will be sharing his experiences on Pronet.
Titles, Descriptions and Digg
Written by Neil Patel on January 28, 2007 | 5 comments
Most people think that the key to getting on the Digg homepage is great content. Although this is true, a good Digg title and description can make "non-Digg worthy" content reach the homepage.
The power of fake commercials
Written by Neil Patel on January 28, 2007 | 3 comments
Commercials are a great way to brand a company or a product. But what's even more effective is when others start creating their own fake commercials to make fun of your product. We have seen this with Apple's iPod and now we are already seeing this with Apple's iPhone, which isn't even released yet.
Downtime can be entertaining
Written by Neil Patel on January 27, 2007 | 8 comments
Don't you just hate it when a site you trying to visit is down for maintenance? It usually causes users to get ticked off, especially if it ends up happening too often. This actually happens to Crazy Egg more often then we'd like because of the constant upgrades and tweaks we do. Due to this we decided to create a Crazy Egg maintenance game.
Making MySpace Effective
Written by Neil Patel on January 26, 2007 | 2 comments
Have you ever seen a company's MySpace profile? I have noticed that more and more large, medium and small businesses are creating profiles in an effort to leverage the MySpace community. It seems like most of them think that by popping up a decently designed profile and adding thousands of friends their business will grow to a whole new level, but the problem is that this in itself is not too effective.
Don't forget to learn from your Diggs
Written by Neil Patel on January 24, 2007 | 5 comments
Chris Hooley and I were talking today and we both noticed that Market Wire has been spamming Digg for almost 200 days. They have submitted over 300 press releases to Digg from their own Digg account in an attempt to get their press releases more attention.
There is more to social media then links
Written by Cameron Olthuis on January 23, 2007 | 9 comments
I've never been a fan of the word "linkbait" but it has stuck within our industry and so I've learned to adapt and accept it, even use it. One of the problems with linkbait is that it doesn't suggest a well thought out social media marketing campaign. It suggests that all we care about are links so we can increase our search engine rankings, nothing else.
Elite Retreat San Francisco
Written by Neil Patel on January 22, 2007 |
A few weeks ago I blogged about my trip to Shoe Money University where I learned how to make money through PPC arbitrage. It seems that a lot of you are interested in making money from arbitrage and trying to get into the whole online marketing space.
Abusing Sex Appeal
Written by Neil Patel on January 20, 2007 | 9 comments
Sex appeal is being used so frequently in commercials that it is starting to get old. We already know that the message of this type of commercial is going to be centered on a hot chick or good looking dude, so if you want to use sex appeal and capture people's attention do something unique and unexpected.
Pimp my links: Yourminis
Written by Cameron Olthuis on January 19, 2007 |
For the fourth installment of the Pimp My Links series we'll be featuring Yourminis, a flash-based personalized homepage. You can customize the minis (widgets) to watch YouTube videos, read RSS feeds, listen to music, check your email, and much more.
Spamming Netscape for Votes
Written by Neil Patel on January 19, 2007 | 3 comments
Muhammad Saleem had an interesting article on how Netscape is starting to become abused and spammed by users. A while back Netscape added a messaging feature that allowed users to send messages to each other, but now it is being used as a method for soliciting votes.
Why too many little icons can easily distract your visitors
Written by Neil Patel on January 17, 2007 | 19 comments
Because of the popularity of Digg, Del.icio.us, Netscape and all the other social sites out there, social bookmarking buttons have been taken to a whole new level. Instead of bloggers placing a few buttons at the bottom of each blog post, it seems that many enjoy offering their visitors all possible options.
The rise of "Made For Digg" websites
Written by Cameron Olthuis on January 17, 2007 | 11 comments
Ethan Kaplan recently proposed a new term, Made for Digg (MFD), which is similar to Made for AdSense (MFA). For those of you that don't know what a MFA website is, it is basically a website that has a sole purpose of getting people to click on AdSense ads. In a similar manner, MFD describes websites that are specifically built for Digg bait.
Traditonal PR with a touch of social media
Written by Cameron Olthuis on January 16, 2007 | 9 comments
Launching a social media marketing campaign in concert with a traditional media campaign, such as press releases, is a great idea. I've seen a few others touch on this subject in the past with the latest being Scott from SEOmoz, who talks about creating a Digg campaign to compliment a client's traditional PR campaign.
There's More to Digg Than Meets the Eye
Written by Neil Patel on January 15, 2007 | 6 comments
Although the concept of Digg seems very simple, it is actually very complicated. Most people think stories are submitted and the ones that are at the top of the upcoming section are the ones that are going to get promoted to the homepage next.
Don't forget that special touch
Written by Neil Patel on January 13, 2007 |
In a competitive space sometimes you need a special touch to win over customers.
Making your content Del.icio.us
Written by Neil Patel on January 12, 2007 | 8 comments
Del.icio.us is the most popular bookmarking service on the web. By getting on the Del.icio.us popular or hotlist page you could get thousands of visitors coming to your website within minutes. Here are some ways that I have found that can help your content get on these pages.
Spammers have caught wind of MyBlogLog
Written by Neil Patel on January 11, 2007 | 12 comments
MyBlogLog is on so many popular blogs that it was just a matter of time before it started to be abused by spammers. At first, people were able to sign up for fake accounts under other people's name and now users are able to leverage it for free advertising.
Pimp my links: How Do I Mac?
Written by Cameron Olthuis on January 8, 2007 | 1 comment
For the third installment of the Pimp My Links series we'll be featuring How Do I Mac, a blog that helps people get the most out of their Mac experience. The blog is mostly made up of video tutorials as the author has the philosophy that showing is better than telling.
There Is More to Digg than the Homepage
Written by Neil Patel on January 8, 2007 | 12 comments
Sites like Digg are well known for driving thousands of visitors to a website within a very short period of time. Because of this everyone is scrambling to get a story on the homepage without realizing that they could get hundreds of hits from Digg on a daily basis without even getting their site on Digg's homepage.
Reaching Your Target Audience through Social Media
Written by Ryan Fujiu on January 7, 2007 | 5 comments
Reaching your target customer is a difficult task in marketing because of the lack of information about public preference. The more information you have, the better job you can do establishing who you target market is and how you can reach them...
Be careful when you sing along
Written by Neil Patel on January 6, 2007 | 8 comments
Have you ever heard those songs on the radio that was so good that you wanted to start singing along? So good that you even heard other people singing them when they thought no one is watching? Just imagine if you captured one of those moments on camera, you could turn that moment into a humorous commercial...
Thanks everyone
Written by Cameron Olthuis on January 5, 2007 | 14 comments
I'm proud to say that Pronet Advertising has won the award for Best Social Media Optimization blog of 2006 in the Search Blog Awards that was put on by Loren Baker from Search Engine Journal. We are really honored to win this award and would like to thank everyone who voted for us. We look forward to stepping it up another notch in 2007.
Social Media Discussions at SES
Written by Neil Patel on January 5, 2007 | 1 comment
Last month I attended the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago where thousands of people in the Internet marketing industry came together. I know many of you could not be there and are wondering what these conferences are like. Here is a video where Todd Malicoat, Mike McDonald, and I discussed Digg and SEO. This is a good example of the type of things that get discussed during the day when everyone is not out partying...
What I learned at Shoemoney University
Written by Neil Patel on January 4, 2007 | 29 comments
As many of you already know I am currently a senior in college and have around 9 classes left. Some people think I must graduate even if it takes me a couple more years to finish and others say I should drop out. And then there's Jeremy Schoemaker who told me to drop out of my current college and attend University of Nebraska, Shoemoney (UNSM); so I decided to take Jeremy up on his offer and attend his university for a few days. Here are some of the things that I have learned from Jeremy...
LinkedIn launches Answers
Written by Cameron Olthuis on January 4, 2007 | 5 comments
LinkedIn has launched its new Answers service, which allows LinkedIn users to both ask questions and answer them. The service is very similar to Yahoo Answers except for the fact that it only covers a small niche whereas Yahoo Answers covers topics for anything. This actually gives them an advantage because they aren't in competition with other questions & answers sites.
AdBrite launches InVideo
Written by Cameron Olthuis on January 4, 2007 | 5 comments
I've been checking out this new video advertising service from Adbrite that Shoemoney blogged about last night. Basically it is a video hosting service that offers a customizable video player that you can brand with your own logo. The player also comes with non-intrusive ads; if the user hovers over a little text link in the top left corner there's a small ad that drops down, split screen style, on top of the video.
Social Media Optimization vs. Social Media Marketing
Written by Cameron Olthuis on January 2, 2007 | 12 comments
Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Social Media Optimization (SMO) are two new phrases that popped up last year to define marketing through social media and social networking sites. There seems to be a lot of confusion about what each of them mean and what exactly they define, which is bound to happen with any new phrase.
