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Dan Nedelko’s Twitter Updates for 2009-03-16

March 16, 2009

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Dan Nedelko’s Twitter Updates for 2009-03-15

March 15, 2009

  • Spend­ing Fri­day night with the baby­mama in the burbs and I’ve never been hap­pier #
  • I am con­sis­tently amazed at how many bull­shit #seo “gurus” there are out there and how much of scam they really are. #
  • Two of the best TV show intros ever: http://bit.ly/Rxr2H and http://bit.ly/Wse5Z — you have to see both! No kid­ding :) #
  • #fol­lowfri­day is noth­ing more than spam. let’s be real here. #
  • Check out Brad Pitt on Dal­las (yeah from the 80’s that’s right!) http://bit.ly/cJmAv — good fam­ily val­ues! #
  • @Miss604 The #Canucks are out of it by every means. Sorry! in reply to Miss604 #
  • @tee­dubya #fakesxsw the thing is that the the real #sxsw is com­plete bull­shit any­how so the #fakesxsw is just as real! in reply to tee­dubya #
  • I think it’s bbq and patio set pur­chase day — get­ting away from the com­puter is a good thing, go #spring. #

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Dan Nedelko’s Twitter Updates for 2009-03-14

March 14, 2009

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Building Great Links

March 13, 2009

Link Build­ing is always a topic of con­ver­sa­tion for any­one in the world of Inter­net Mar­ket­ing. Peo­ple who push only organic SEO tend to be quite focused on the over­all process of build­ing masses of links with tar­get anchor text on sites which may pass link juice.

Per­son­ally that’s a nar­row minded point of view that really lim­its your over­all link build­ing goals. The real­ity of the sit­u­a­tion is that links drive traf­fic, rep­u­ta­tion, new vis­i­tors and poten­tially new cus­tomers. A well thought out online pro­mo­tional pro­gram will assist you in your organic SEO link build­ing efforts. But you need to have a holis­tic view of link building.

We build links to achieve a num­ber of goals:

  1. Pro­mote the site. We pro­duce great con­tent and we want the world to know about it.
  2. High­light other sites we think are great. We do this by com­ment­ing on arti­cles we love, par­tic­i­pat­ing in discussions.
  3. We are pro­mot­ing a con­test or pro­mo­tion based around a prod­uct. This could be con­sid­ered link bait­ing but it’s also show­ing peo­ple how cre­ative and fun we might. When I was Direc­tor of Inter­net Mar­ket­ing for BetUS we had alot of fun with this great link bait pro­gram — it was flat­ter­ing that Rand Fishkin from SEO­Moz thought it was genius mar­ket­ing. We had fun doing it and it was very successful.
  4. We are build­ing links to increase our search rank­ings. When I was at Bodog we built links for SEO specif­i­cally but tracked it with Click­tracks and opti­mized from there — times were very dif­fer­ent but it was (and is) an effec­tive tac­tic — it cer­tainly worked there. Check out the case study on Lyris.
  5. We are par­tic­i­pat­ing in a com­mu­nity such as Stum­ble­Upon, Face­book and Twit­ter. This isn’t for the pur­pose of build­ing links directly. It’s pro­mot­ing our prod­uct, ser­vice or just talk­ing to peo­ple. We gen­er­ate con­tent, talk to peo­ple and they shock­ingly enough they may link to us directly but that’s not the ini­tial goal (we don’t whack peo­ple over the head).

I just fin­ished watch­ing Rand Fishkin’s White­board Fri­day on the same sub­ject. I strongly sug­gest you check it out:

http://www.vimeo.com/3609778

What other link build­ing tac­tics do you use now? Let me know what you think of my take on link build­ing awe­some­ness. Have a great Fri­day the 13th!

Cheers,

Dan Nedelko

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Dan Nedelko’s Twitter Updates for 2009-03-13

March 13, 2009

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Defending George Bush

March 12, 2009

Ari Fli­escher went at it with Chris Matthews yes­ter­day. I think Chris Matthews is right, 9/11 did hap­pen on George Bush’s watch and for Ari to say Matthews should be ashamed to point that out is ridicu­lous. The fact is the biggest ter­ror­ist attack in US his­tory did hap­pen on Bush’s watch and there are numer­ous addi­tional facts show­ing that the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion failed hor­ri­bly in ignor­ing con­sis­tent and per­sis­tent warn­ings about an immi­nent attack.

The dereg­u­la­tion of Wall Street which admit­tedly began under Bill Clin­ton was accel­er­ated by the Bush admin­is­tra­tion which is one of the major fac­tors in the global eco­nomic cri­sis — which I think is going to be a long and deep recession.

Ari Fli­escher does make some good points and some stu­pid points.

YouTube Preview Image

If the US gets attacked on Barack Obama’s watch then yeah you would be able and jus­ti­fied to say that! That’s an idi­otic state­ment by Ari Fli­escher. This is a great back and forth!

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Google to Index Google Voice?

March 12, 2009

Google Loves YouIn an inter­est­ing although expected move Google is about to relaunch Grand­Cen­tral as Google Voice with a few new features:

  • Free voice mail tran­scrip­tion, which con­verts record­ings into typed text. Users have the option to have these mes­sages sent to them­selves as emails or texts — enabling them to search through, sort, save, copy or even for­ward mate­r­ial from voice mails.
  • Free con­fer­ence calling.
  • Cheap inter­na­tional calls, with rates com­pet­i­tive to online tele­phony leader Skype: $0.02 a minute to France or China, $0.03 to Chile or the Czech Repub­lic, for example.
  • Text mes­sage orga­ni­za­tion — texts are sent to whichever mobile phones you spec­ify, includ­ing mul­ti­ple ones at once. They are also col­lected into your Google Voice inbox, like email, and can be filed and kept — a first in mobile phone his­tory, the NY Times observes. As is the case with Gchat on Gmail, back-and-forth texts will be kept as “conversations.”

Now that means that pretty much your entire dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion stream can (and will) be cap­tured by Google. It’s going to be in an index some­where. I would be 100% cer­tain that your Google Desk­top Search will index these entries and Google will keep a cache.

I think I’ll stick with Skype. Is any­one else going to try this out? There is an inher­ent cool­ness fac­tor but I’m not sure how much more infor­ma­tion Google *cough* Big Brother needs about me. Check out http://voice.google.com

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Using StumbleUpon Effectively

March 10, 2009

Social Net­work Mar­ket­ing is cur­rently a hot topic in the world of Inter­net Mar­ket­ing. Many peo­ple want to inte­grate a social media and social net­work­ing com­po­nent to their mar­ket­ing mix. The most com­mon prob­lem I see is Social Media Mar­ket­ing thrown together in an ad hoc fash­ion and poorly executed.

The key risk from a mar­ket­ing per­spec­tive is this: poorly exe­cuted SEO will result in no rank­ings, poorly exe­cuted PPC results in wasted bud­gets, poorly exe­cuted Social Media Mar­ket­ing can result in a bad rep­u­ta­tion, neg­a­tive buzz and angry users.

You need to be very cau­tious when exe­cut­ing a Social Media Mar­ket­ing cam­paign — do not just throw some­thing together and start talk­ing to an online com­mu­nity, the ram­i­fi­ca­tions could be not only worse than you expected they could be dif­fi­cult to undo.

Plan­ning, edu­ca­tion and exe­cu­tion are crit­i­cal to a suc­cess­ful social media pro­gram. I would sug­gest that you con­sider the fol­low­ing points before launch­ing a social media mar­ket­ing program:

  1. Which social media sites will you be tar­get­ing? Is your con­tent appro­pri­ate for that net­work? For exam­ple: Digg is extremely pop­u­lar among tech­nol­ogy and design audi­ences. Stum­ble­Upon is pop­u­lar for humor, enter­tain­ment and gam­ing audi­ences. Newsvine is pop­u­lar among polit­cal junkies (these are fairly sim­plis­tic exam­ples but you get the point).
  2. What voice do you want to project for your prod­uct to these audi­ences? Direct mar­ket­ing doesn’t gen­er­ally work well. Infor­ma­tional, edu­ca­tional and inter­est­ing con­tent is needed with a sub­tle hint towards pro­mot­ing your product.
  3. What are you try­ing to say to the audi­ence? Social Media Mar­ket­ing is really about start­ing an ongo­ing dia­logue with an audi­ence, it’s about build­ing trust rela­tion­ships that are sub­tle. For­mu­lat­ing a mes­sage is extremely impor­tant, con­tin­u­ing the dia­logue in a gen­uine way is crit­i­cal. If you are not going to do that then you need to recon­sider lever­ag­ing this medium.
  4. Social Media Net­works are com­posed of and run by real peo­ple. Remem­ber that. This is not tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing. You are devel­op­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with real people.
  5. Be pre­pared to hear things you may not like. You may get no reac­tion. You may in fact get a neg­a­tive reac­tion. Ensure that you know how to deal with a neg­a­tive reac­tion and always remem­ber that some­one who gives you a reac­tion is some­one who cares. Engage them and sort it out, it will be worth it!
  6. Be pre­pared to engage the com­mu­nity as a com­mu­nity mem­ber. Par­tic­i­pate in a very real way, if you do any less your pro­grams will not succeed.

Although I’ve gone off on a tan­gent slightly, I am lay­ing the ground work for this screen­cast and dis­cussing one of my favorite sites: Stum­ble­Upon. I’m not going to intro­duce Stum­ble­upon in this arti­cle, I do that in the screen­cast below. You can also learn about Stum­ble­Upon right here.

So enjoy the screen­cast and I’m sure I’ve missed some­thing in my overview so let me know by leav­ing a com­ment. Click Play and watch my screen­cast on Stum­ble­upon, you might find it useful!

Get the Flash Player to see the word­Tube Media Player.

If you are already on Stum­ble­Upon or ready to join and get into it, add me to your friend list or sub­scribe to my stumbles.

Happy Stum­bling!

Dan Nedelko

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Barney Frank versus Bill O’Reilly

March 10, 2009

I guess Bar­ney Frank is not tak­ing any crap from Bill O’Reilly which is awe­some. This is how I look at this sit­u­a­tion. Bill O’Reilly is not only a thug high­light­ing his lack of intel­li­gence through bul­ly­ing, he is an utter and com­plete dis­grace to his pro­fes­sion. I would not even bring down the pro­fes­sion of Jour­nal­ism by imply­ing that he is a jour­nal­ist, the way this utter and com­plete moron bring down fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples of rea­soned debate.

Dear Bill,

In order to give an indi­vid­ual with an alter­nate point of view a chance to speak you need to shut up. You vio­late every­thing that makes open sys­tems of polit­i­cal speech and expres­sion the amaz­ing sys­tem they are.

You cover your­self in patri­otic self cen­tered ego dri­ven media sen­sa­tion­al­ism and fun­da­men­tally have no com­mon decency or respect for the alter­nate views and opin­ions of others.

You vio­late every­thing your coun­try and your pro­fes­sion are sup­posed to stand for, degen­er­at­ing to your level any fur­ther is just the thing you want peo­ple to do.

It’s sad, it’s class­less and you are noth­ing more than a dem­a­gogue.

I have per­son­ally run into two peo­ple in my life like you per­son­ally. One of whom I’ve writ­ten about here, the other is not even worth dis­cussing. Have a look and tell me what you think:

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SEO Return On Investment

March 9, 2009

I am pretty active on LinkedIn and have been for quite some time. I really do my best to try to answer one ques­tion per week and par­tic­i­pate heav­ily in that com­mu­nity. It’s a good way to con­nect with oth­ers, make con­tacts and also use it as a sound­ing board for input to my ideas and thoughts on SEO, Search Mar­ket­ing, Inter­net Mar­ket­ing and what I do for a liv­ing both with Hon­ey­pot Mar­ket­ing and with my own projects.

I fig­ure since I am post­ing there I should also share some that with this audi­ence. So the ques­tion that was posed from LinkedIn was this:

“How can you cal­cu­late the ROI of fur­ther SEO Invest­ments for online project? Is there a model that can be used?“

That is a darned fine ques­tion since typ­i­cal ROI mod­els do not stand up well when it comes to SEO and Organic Search for a cou­ple of reasons:

  1. Invest­ments are indi­rect. You invest in link pro­grams, con­tent etc and it doesn’t directly drive traf­fic. The engines drive the traf­fic but the invest­ments are there to help increase your author­ity in those engines. It con­fuses alot of peo­ple as to the logic.
  2. Most com­pa­nies fall flat in terms of cus­tomer acqui­si­tion mod­els. They are not cor­rectly track­ing a con­verted vis­i­tor from search, which makes it impos­si­ble to opti­mize your con­vert­ing terms from the engines. I have seen many instances where terms which you wop­uld not think are big con­vert­ers in fact are mas­sive con­vert­ers (espe­cially in tail of search). If you dont know this infor­ma­tion then throw out your ROI model, you’ll be guess­ing any­how — you could lie I sup­pose but then again that would be even worse and since SEO’s never ever lie (I’m duck­ing from the light­en­ing!) that would never be a problem. :mrgreen:

Given those two fac­tors I’ve come up with a fairly decent model that I find works and here for your view­ing plea­sure is the overview. If you dis­agree with me or if you think I’m wrong then reg­is­ter and com­ment or email me.

One of the key things to con­sider is that cal­cu­lat­ing ROI on Organic Search is dif­fer­ent than tra­di­tional media. Here is the lay­out I utilize:

A Total Amount of Search Traf­fic
B Total Amount of Con­vert­ing Search
C Con­ver­sion Rate from Search
C Life Time Value of a Con­ver­sion (is it CPA or LTV)
D Con­vert­ing Terms (focus on these)

Deter­mine total Search Traf­fic = 1000
Deter­mine the Con­vert­ing Search Ratio: B/A (10/100) = 0.10
Use the Total Con­vert­ing Search Num­bers = 100
Deter­mine the value of the Con­ver­sion: C = $200

You have prof­ited $20,000 from organic search.

Total cur­rent bud­get : Link Build­ing $1500 per month plus other monies spent (I am not sure what these are)/

Do You Cal­cu­late Your SEO ROI?

View Results

Loading ... Loading …

Your profit of $20,000 from all search engine opti­miza­tion pro­grams is being gen­er­ated by $1500 of spend to acquire 200 cus­tomers. Your cost per cus­tomer is $7.50

Your spend is gen­er­at­ing a 13:1 profit to cost ratio. Now you know your bud­get to work with and you can shift your over­all tac­tics to increase the over­all num­ber search joins as you wish.

I’ve used this model (with much more detail) suc­cess­fully in the past on numer­ous projects in the online gam­bling indus­try includ­ing online sports­books, casi­nos, generic ecom­merce sites, online dat­ing, lead gen­er­a­tion and ebook mar­ket­ing indus­tries. It pro­vides for a strong ROI model, jus­ti­fies SEO bud­gets and keeps the busi­ness peo­ple happy since they under­stand what the goals of the pro­gram really are.

I would love to get your input, com­ments and sug­ges­tions on expand­ing the ROI model for Search Engine Opti­miza­tion. Please com­ment below and let know, even if you think I’m com­pletely wrong!

Cheers,

Dan Nedelko

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