Conversion Matters

I was in the shower and an idea popped into my head, not something I’ve heard explicitly talked about before. I can only assume this is due to one of the following:

1. It could be a completely rubbish idea
2. It may be being used by sneaky people who don’t want it revealed
3. It could be a unique and creative idea not thought of before (unlikely but one can dream.. ha!)

Eitherway, I don’t have the required skills to test the technique so I’ll just talk about it and let other people decided whether it’s awful or not.

I saw a tweet by Lyndoman about a piece of link bait he’d written on the subject of credit cards that hit the front page of digg.

Then my brain went on a random path of thoughts, something like:

‘eh front page digg -> wonder how much he makes -> maybe he should bait and switch or use social media to promote his own affiliate sites; could make some nice extra dough -> hey, how about bait and cloak?’

Introducing Bait and Cloak

I imagine someone has already thought of this idea but it’s just possible that it has never been executed; the time and effort required to pull it off would probably off-put many black hats who might be tempted to try it.

What’s the frigging idea Adam?!

Everyone’s heard of bait and switch I assume: essentially writing link-bait and then 301 redirecting to another page. The problem is, if people notice, some of them get a bit pissy with you.

The bait-cloak idea’s simple:

• Start a blog
• Write quality link bait for 3-6 months on various topics: credit cards, gambling, travel etc.
• Start redirecting the post to highly targeted, niche affiliate offers to googlebot (based on IP of course) and to people who arrive via Google.

After many successful front-pages, the domain should have built enough trust and authority to be able to rank for these offers.

Also this way people visiting from ‘citations’, or from Digg/Stumble etc. still see the linkbait but others see the affiliate offers.

Someone would no doubt notice eventually, but if you keep it quite niche/long tail you could probably keep this going for quite a while (long enough to turn a profit I reckon).

Give it a go Lyndoman or Graywolf - I know you love the link-bait and the shadier side of SEO ;).

Good idea/rubbish idea? Your thoughts welcome as ever..

A fair few weeks ago I wanted to see if I could still code any Perl, which I’m glad to say [I think] I can, so I decided to port a little php script to Perl. For some reason I can’t access the original post/script anymore, but it was deStone’s delicious referral spammer - if you can get the link to work, your computer is better than mine!

So all it does is load up a list of keywords, go through each of the associated tag pages and then visit each site with any refer URL you want to promote.

It’s pretty pointless, I can’t imagine too many webmasters still look at old school stats packages, but I could be wrong.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize;

&main();

sub main {
	my $throttle = 10;
	my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
	$mech->agent_alias( 'Windows IE 6' );

	## get our list of keywords from the dictionary file
	open (KEYWORDS, '/Users/adam/Documents/Perl/dictionary.txt');
	my @tags;
	while () {
		my $tag = $_;
		chomp($tag); push(@tags,$tag);
	}
	close (KEYWORDS);

	my $url;
	my $result;

	## grab del.icio.us url for each tag
	foreach my $tag (@tags) {
		print “$tag\n”;
		$url = “http://del.icio.us/tag/” . $tag . “?setcount=100″;
		print “$url\n”;
		$mech->get( $url );
		$result = $mech->content;
		&process($result, $mech);
		sleep($throttle);
	}
}

## scrape del.icio.us for urls
sub process {
	my $result = $_[0];
	my $mech = $_[1];

	my @urls;
	my @links = $mech->links();
	foreach my $link (@links) {
		if ($link->url() =~ /^http/g && $link->url() !~ /del.icio.us/g) {
			#print $link->url() . “\n”;
			push(@urls,$link->url());
		}
	}

	&ref_spam(@urls);
}

## hit up each site with our url to promote as the referer
sub ref_spam {
	my @urls = $_[0];
	my $mech = $_[1];

	my $promote_url = “http://www.test.com”;
	$mech->add_header( Referer => $promote_url );

	foreach my $url (@urls) {
		$mech->get($url);
	}

}

[I’m aware it displays a bit messed up - you’ll have to deal with it.]

This no longer works for me ‘cos I’m in halls and would need to add proxy support, but I think it worked ;)!

Play around with it if you want; I’m not advocating any particular uses for it or being massively helpful on how to run it - deliberately.

I’m sure it could be improved upon - to use proxies, threads or made more OO but I only hacked it up to check I could still code Perl.

Here’s the dictionary file and the perl script (rename to .pl).

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, feel like saving myself until I have something unique to say, anyway I need a job in July so I thought I’d pimp myself out on my blog for a start.

So briefly:

I spent a year as a ‘Junior Web Developer’ at a UK search conversion agency in London, where I was taught Perl, MySQL, Linux etc.

I’m currently a first year undergraduate student at the University of Durham studying Computer Science where we’re being taught Java, SQL, computer systems and lots of maths.

I’m also interested in analytics, blogging, social media and search engine optimisation.

I can work in either London, Newcaslte/Durham or around the Bath area.

I’m not hugely hopefully about getting a decent job just for a month (especially just through my blog) but we’ll see. It can only be for July because I’m at university until the end of June and then I’m going to go interrailing around Europe in August.

If anyone wants anymore information just drop me an email using the contact form.

I just spent £10 on magazines - quite excessive for a poor student! I bought .net as well as a few others because a featured article caught my eye - ‘The hottest SEO trends. Starring: Google’s Matt Cutts, SEO Guru Danny Sullivan…’ (not to mention there was something about ‘Porn 2.0′ - porn and SEO, could you ask for more..?!).

Anyway, what do they think are the hottest SEO trends.? It’s pretty standard stuff really:

• Matt talks about social media being important and therefore content needs to be interesting. He also thinks in the future blackhats are going to become (h/cr)ackers - I assume he means inserting links maliciously via XSS and other exploits.
• Danny says that “having a blog is very important”. He also mentions the importance of social media for increase brand awareness and backlinks.
• Links. Links are also important. And you can help boost your PageRank (who cares?) by submitting to geographic or industry specific directories.
• Glossary pages, forums and YouTube marketing can also help.
• Don’t rely on automated SEO tools.
• ‘Ensure your site is uploaded to Google Sitemaps’.

What not to do

• Don’t cram your text into one page
• Don’t focus on too many keywords
• Don’t be insular

Okay so it really wasn’t that interesting or ground breaking but thanks anyway Mark Buckingham, gave me a break from my assignments.

I guess if you want to read the whole article you better buy this months .net but I wouldn’t suggest going out of your way to find it.

A few weeks ago I received an email asking if I wanted to review a new internet marketing product, The 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan [aff link] and I figured I may as well.

Essentially the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan is an informational product designed to teach a beginner about internet marketing. It covers a wide variety of topics and is quite a comprehensive package.

It was created by the people at Purple Internet Marketing a British internet marketing company.

What’s included in the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan?

In the box you get four workbooks, four DVDs, eight CDs, a poster and a tshirt.

What does the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan cover?

The 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan is broken down into four main phases:

1. Website Structure - this covers the planning and creating of your website: keyword research, site architecture etc
2. Automation & Launch - this is about blogging, building email lists, and using press releases and pay per click to market the launch of your website/product.
3. Broaden Your Base - this phase is pretty much all about link building: directories, forums, articles etc. Pretty standard stuff.
4. Broaden Your Horizon - the focus in this phase is social media, widgets and other marketing techniques.

Is the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan any good?

In a word: yes. The DVDs are essentially a video of a training seminar where David Bain is teaching a group of business men and women about internet marketing. It is slickly produced. There are no wobbly cameras or dodgy audio in the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan and it covers a lot of topics.

The target audience will be absolute beginners to online marketing as it is all fairly straight forward stuff that you could easily learn from blogs and forums but it’s convenient to have it all in one easily accessible format.

The workbooks are transcripts of the DVD with space for writing notes. Which is nice for reinforcing what you’ve watched on the DVD.

There were a few things I thought were a bit odd about it, for example, there is quite a long section about wordpress and blogging which goes as specific as to discus plugins yet fails to mention plugins I see as being essential, like the All-In-One SEO Pack. Also the whole thing felt not very cutting edge, information wise. It seems to be all the same things that have been said over and over: create great content, submit to some directories, write some articles, start a blog, participate in forums social media…. etc etc but I guess you could argue not much has changed?

Summary

If you’re new to internet marketing and want a convenient, easily accessible introduction to the field you could do far worse than purchase the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan [aff link], which I should mention is retailing for £399, however, if you already have an idea about internet marketing and are reading some of the top blogs then you’ll be fine without it.

I may have suggested you should consider Aaron Wall’s SEO Book but he has recently changed his business model and is no longer offering the ebook.

The 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan probably fills a void in the market, not replacing SEO Book, but offering an alternative, which, money-wise, is probably more viable than something like Internet Marketing Ninjas (although they’re all slightly different products).

Photo Credit.

Every other day there is a post about the top 10 webmaster/SEO/webdeveloper [insert person here] toolbars/addons etc. that people use and it does, admittedly, get a bit boring. However, I thought I’d quickly share with you what I have and why because I actually find them rather useful.

Firefox Addons I couldn’t live without!

I have a few addons which I don’t really use but here are the ones that are actually useful:

• Web Development
  • Web Developer Toolbar - this has soooo many features that it is an essential toolbar for any webmaster or geek interested in web development. Think it was one of the first firefox addons I installed.
  • Firebug - similar to the web developer toolbar this is another one that is really useful for web developers/designers, especially if you do a lot of JavaScript. It is a really powerful tool if you learn to use it properly.
  • Cookie Editor - again probably more useful for the web developers out there but never-the-less worthy of a mention. It allows you to quickly edit/delete cookies.
  • IE Tab - this is pretty simple. Allows you to render a page as internet explorer would without needing to leave firefox. Really, really useful.
  • Live HTTP Headers - allows you to see all the individual header requests, status codes etc. as you load a page. Very useful.
  • Colorzilla - so you’ve just setup a new template and are heading off to set up some blended adsense units but have no idea what the colour codes are on the site? Well this handy plugin has an eyedrop whatsit thing that allows you to get the code for any colour on a web page. Great time saver!
• SEO
  • Search Status - this is quite handy, shows PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete rank as well as allowing you to check a load of things about a page.
  • SEO Quake - turn this on to see lots of useful information about a domain/page when searching in Google etc.
  • User Agent Switcher - want to see what Googlebot sees? Then use this plugin to easily change your user agent.
• Social Media
  • Stumpleupon - a social site that’s fun, interesting and a great time waster!
  • Del.ico.us - don’t lose that interesting page; tag it with del.icio.us instead.
  • Social Media For Firefox - the concept behind this is great: shows you how many times a page has been dugg/stumbled/redd/del.icio.us’d. From my experience, doesn’t appear to be entirely accurate but it should still help with working out what to submit where.
  • Twitterfox - this makes keeping up and replying to tweets dead easy, they just popup while your browsing.
• Misc.
  • Down Them All - ever wanted to download all the .jpgs/.mp3s etc on a page quickly? This addon allows you to do just that. I think it supports regex too!

Web apps/sites I can’t live without!

• Facebook - yes some people don’t like it but it’s undoubtedly my most visited website (probably because I’m a student..)
• Google Reader - couldn’t live without this, it’s how I keep up to date on all blogs I read.
• Twitter - ok so I used to not see the point in Twitter but it’s actually really good for having short conversations, sharing links etc. You’re definitely missing out if you don’t use it.
• Stumbleupon and del.icio.us - you may have guessed from the addons above that I really like Stumbleupon and del.icio.us. I use Stumbleupon because I find it interesting and fun and I’m trying to build up more of a power user account there because I feel it’s the social sharing/bookmarking website I enjoy the most and one I actually waste an hour or so a day on! I use del.icio.us because it’s useful to have a central repository of all my bookmarks. I mostly just tag interesting blog posts that I’ve read but will probably forget about.

Applications I couldn’t live without!

There is only really one application I would say I can’t live without and that is: Launchy. What is it? Well it’s a free launcher application so basically you hit Alt-Space and a little box pops up and you start typing iTun.. and then you can load iTunes. Much quicker than the start menu/desktop etc. Massive time saver.

Actually that is a lie, I couldn’t live without MSN Messenger either. Everyone I know (pretty much) uses MSN Messenger. With a mix of messenger/facebook it pretty much negates the need for e-mail amongst my close friends.

I just purchased an ebook about domaining (affiliate link btw) on the recommendation of TheMadHat. I kind of see domaining as a dark art, something I don’t really know anything about and I’m hoping this book will change that.

I’m not really expecting to flip any domains for $xxxxx any time soon but I figured if I could at least purchase more valuable domains for my web properties I’m planning to build that in itself will be valuable knowledge.

Anyway, I’ll try and give a bit more of an in-depth review of it later when I’ve read some more. So far it seems pretty good though. Don’t get put off by the spammy sales page - you can get two chapters for free so you might as well try it out. It’s always good to attempt and diversify income streams.

So anyone who uses Facebook must be aware of the multitude of applications that you get ‘invited’ to try and most people find it a bit annoying.

One of the reasons a lot of people don’t like them is because by default they completely clutter up your profile page. However, often the applications are intriguing. And it’s possible to add an application without actually adding it to your profile or really letting anyone know you’ve added it.

The following has happened to me twice now. I can’t remember what the first application was but the second was ‘What kind of lingerie are you’. I thought to myself, hey I’m bored, this will waste two minutes. However, it wasn’t something I really wanted other people to know I was looking at ;] so I unticked all the boxes that would place it on my profile. I went through and answered all the questions and was ready to find out if I was a thong or a pair of boxers when I came to a page that says I must invite 20 people before I can view the results.

Hold on a minute.. is this allowed? It’s a very sneaky marketing trick. It’s a sure fire way to increase application exposure. I felt quite angered by this yesterday when I started writing this, though now most of that emotion has faded away but I still think it’s wrong of the application developers to force people into inviting people. There was literally no other way of seeing the results so I just deleted the application.

I think facebook need to look into this, application developers shouldn’t be allowed to force people into inviting their friends to use the application. I still don’t know what type of lingerie I am :[…

So in my head I’m thinking to myself, sure if you’re a top (I really doing mean top, not just quite good) SEO why on earth would you sell your services to others?

Say, for example, your ranking a few websites top 10 for ‘car insurance’ or ‘credit card’ or any other lucrative term. Why would you do that if it wasn’t your own site?

Even if you’re being paid a shed-load you’re still making less than the company your doing SEO for. Instead of optimising other companies sites for ‘car insurance’ why not make money supermarket 2? Even if you can’t make websites yourself you should be able to team up with others who are capable of making competing websites.

Sure, you might not have the business acumen but with the marketing skills there’s no reason why you wouldn’t be able to successfully compete.

With a quote aggregation website you don’t even have to provide a service really. Just scrape a few other insurance sites and hey presto.

Aggressively market and your earning a lot already. I can’t really see any reason why a top SEO would provide consultancy services to other companies. Unless they have absolutely no confidence in their own business ideas or they really enjoy the interaction with other business.

If I was skilled enough to compete for ‘personal loans’ I wouldn’t do it for other business - I’d do it for myself!

Does that not make sense? What do you think?

I assume most people are aware of the fact that many companies perform their SEO in-house with their own search engine marketeers. It’s cheaper, they have more control and they get full time SEO work - whereas with an agency the time available to provide SEO services will be spread over multiple clients.

There’s a good overview of in-house SEO here.

In-house SEO makes sense, you can [try] hire someone really good who can then train someone else/a small team up to take over, or you can probably get away with a couple of mediocre in-house SEOs too. Either way it probably works out quite well, probably wise to take on board advice though.

Is it equally feasible to do social media marketing in-house?

I’ve been asked if I think it’s possible for a company to hire an SEO to help with in-house social media marketing as well as just plain SEO and I’m not honestly sure it is.

There are some high quality social media marketeers around but I think it’s a pretty rare breed at the moment.

It’s not easy to become a power user on a social network, it takes a huge investment of time.

I don’t think it’s something that is as obviously suited to in-house as general SEO. You’re more than like going to have to invest a month or two of stumbling/digging/mixxing aggressively before you will be respected enough to promote your own content successfully.

Likewise, if your social media strategy revolves around blogging you’re initially have to go and invest a substantial amount of time in building up a blog - it won’t happen over night.

Personally, I’d just hire someone to help and consult with the social media marketing and stick to general SEO with the in-house team. Obviously there is no harm with tinkering with social media you just have to be aware that it could be a while before you see any real ROI.

What do you think?