Conversion Matters

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?

So apparently ‘people’ are getting bored of facebook, reverting to simply using twitter, or giving up on social media altogether. Who are these people and why are they not enjoying facebook?

Facebook is not built for marketeers

Sorry guys, facebook wasn’t built for you. It was built for people to socially interact with their friends. I don’t market myself or my brand on facebook I just chat with my friends, colleagues, family etc.

It’s like an answer phone for instant messaging!

Using facebook for marketing is a bit like blogging on a topic your not interested in, purely for profit, it’s not interesting and more often than not you get bored and give up pretty quickly.

Should marketeers use facebook regardless of who it was built for?

I strongly believe that for any marketeer it would be a mistake to ignore facebook. Firstly, there are a few groups where marketeers/SEOs/webmasters etc. hang out and discuss things. Facebook Whores for SEO, SMO and SEM Awareness where you can chat to and build up relationships with other like-minded individuals if you’re so inclined.

Another reason to embrace facebook is if you work with clients who either already have a brand name or are trying to build one up. Strategic use of facebook as a medium for brands to talk to consumers is clearly going to be beneficial for both parties. One of the ways this can be done is through facebook pages. These are essentially sponsored profiles on facebook that allow a brand to reach out to fans (or haters) and interact with them.

There are also many unofficial groups centred around brands that marketeers should be aware of. They can paint a positive or negative picture of your brand depending on the nature of the group. It is important to keep tabs on these as you should be of the web in general as part of your reputation monitoring strategy.

For marketeers who don’t work for big brands there is also facebook flyers/advertising/whatever it is officially called now. Essentially, you can advertise down the sidebar:

Or you can advertise in the news feed or users:

These adverts can be target to specific categories of users but I’m not entirely sure of the exact specifics

There did seem to be a lot of talk of the facebook ads performing really poorly. I assume it varies on a campaign by campaign basis but I’d say it’s worth checking out, at least some people are having success.

Facebook is much more suited for people interested in social interaction

While facebook is certainly going to be more interesting for people who use it for what it was meant for, keeping in touch with your friends, it’s still a service you cannot ignore as an internet marketeer. There are so many ways it can be used, from brand building and reputation management, to advertising/affiliate marketing, to simply building relationships with other industry contacts.

Don’t ignore facebook, it’s not going away any time soon!

P.S - Don’t worry I don’t actually think you guys are sleezy marketeers ;]

There are many different ways to make money online:

• blogging
• mini niche sites
• affiliate sites
• PPC
• countless other opportunities..

And to be fair, a lot has already been said about these topics BUT don’t worry I’m not going to say it all again - I just want to point out some quality posts by far more experienced (and richer) people than me to perhaps inspire you into taking action.

Make money online techniques for the cash short

I hate to tell you but if you want to make serious money online your going to have to invest at least a little bit of money. Anyway the following technique is pretty cheap.

Just get a .com from godaddy, which is about $10/£5 I believe (not much!) if you can find a valid coupon it’s even cheaper and some $10 or so a month hosting and your good to go.

The technique is to create a ‘funny video’ blog. You know, the kind of videos that go viral. Anyway, it’s dead simple - give it a whirl tomorrow.

Make money online with a video blog.

Blogging is another option for those short on cash but you probably need to be aware that unless you become a blogging superstar you are not going to make much money from one blog. Also don’t think about using wordpress.com or other free hosted blogging platforms - it’s just not worth the hassle when you see the light and decide it’s time to move up in the world.

There’s an ok guide for making money from blogging here but it’s a little out of date now but still worth a glance - be wary of the mighty google though ;)!

If you want to make money blogging I’d definately agree with the above sentiment of multiple blogs in seperate niches and network them together. If you want to make real money blogging then in my opinion you’re going to have to take a step back and act as more of a media business entrepreneur than an actually writer. Outsource the writing and focus on the business of running multiple blogs and you might be able to create the next b5 media.

Make money online with mini niche sites

There’s a really thorough guide to creating mini niche sites over here. It’s a little spammy but it’s well worth a read anyway to give you some ideas and pointers. The basic principle is to create 20?, 50?, 100? (really as many as you can) niche mini sites that will make you a tiny bit of money each day, perhaps a dollar?

Doesn’t sound like much I know but times that by 100 other mini sites and your already earning $100 a day. Not bad huh?

Make money online with affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing can be another [relatively] cheap way to make money online. I’ve started dabbling in eBay affiliate marketing which is pretty straight forward and worth a go even if you set up a few sites and forget about them.

There is also a really detailed guide about making money online with tshirt affiliate sites. Give it a read - Maki knows his stuff!

Make money online with PPC campaigns

PPC campaigns can be a great way to make money online but they require serious dedication time wise to make sure you don’t end up losing serious amounts of money instead of making.

You need patience and also initial cash flow to get it going.

Anyway, there are two thorough guides which I suggest you take a look at if you want to know more about PPC as it is not something I’ve ever experimented with. A guide to making money online with Microsoft Adcenter and making money online with Google Adwords.

Make money online with more complex techniques

Some people are cut out for greater things than simply blogging online - some people are clever enough to create mega SEO empires that net serious cash.

The following guides are not for the faint of heart. They’re for people who know how to program and aren’t scared by dabbling in the dark arts of more blackhat SEO.

Regardless of your opinion on blackhat vs. whitehat SEO check these guides out they are written by some very intelligent guys.

A guide by SlightlyShadySEO about creating an automated SEO system. It’s advanced stuff but well worth a look if you think you’ve got the knowledge to implement it.

And here is a long guide by Eli about creating an SEO empire. Also well worth a read.

The most important thing to remember about trying to make money online is to actually get moving and do something. It’s all too easy to spend all your time reading posts like this and never actually putting any of your ideas into action.

Good luck!

A fair number of people arrive at this site looking for information about adding Google Analytics tracking to 1shoppingcart so I figured I better write something more thorough about it as at the moment the only content is comments on some other posts!

I’m currently working for a guy implementing some Google Analytics goals amongst other things and for some of his products he uses 1shoppingcart so I naturally attempted to add the Google Analytics script to those pages.

Unfortunately it appears that 1shoppingcart strip out any <script></script> tags which means you can’t add the Google Analytics tracking tag to the 1shoppingcart pages. I assume they’re doing it for potential security reasons? Although it still seems a little silly to me.

You really only have two options to get around this.

Tracking 1shoppingcart using Google Analytics

You can still use Google Analytics just not very well. You have to leave it off the sales pages on 1shoppingcart meaning you can’t do any advanced e-commerce tracking.

It’s also quite inaccurate because you are relying on the user to actually go back to the conformation page on your site otherwise the goal won’t get tracked.

Tracking 1shoppingcart with their own tracking system

1shopping cart actually have their own bespoke tracking system now as far as I’m aware (which I think is another reason they’ve blocked Google Analytics from working.

I’m not entirely clear how this works but later today or in the next few days I will be finding out about it and I’ll update this post with more info on it.

Stay tuned…

I just unsubscribed from techmeme, read/write web and mashable ‘cos they try to steal too much of my precious time. I figured I must be missing some of the more valuable posts just ‘cos I’m getting so clogged up with posts from those three sites alone.

I’m just not that good at using the Google reader interface and I don’t know all the tricks so I tend to use the little scrollable box on my igoogle homepage.

Already I’m seeing a bunch of quality articles I probably would have missed before.

Perhaps it’s time you take a quick glance through your feed list.

Whilst I agree that wordpress is a fantastic piece of software I think it’s important to realise that it has it’s place and that place is not everywhere.

I used to think that I’d probably end up using wordpress for every site ever unless there was a really obvious reason not to use it. I’ve now realised that kind of philosophy is wrong.

Think, for example, about a mini niche site - I’m talking < 10 pages kind of site - would you really want to use wordpress for this? Sure there are benefits, like being able to create content really easily with the editor but I think for a mini site the cons outweigh the pros.

For wordpress to be really good you have to download, unzip, upload, and activate at least a few plugins. That’s not the end of the world I know but couple that with creating databases, modifying name servers and you begin to realise that wordpress isn’t quite as simple as you initially thought.

And then the major drawback security risks. Wordpress itself is not an inherently insecure piece of software. However, not keeping up to date with the updates and patches is very risky business. From experience it’s enough effort keeping one or two blogs up to date. Imagine trying to keep 100 wordpress sites up to date?

Right now I’m in the process of creating, well, as many mini niche sites as I can, and I am not using wordpress. One day I’d love to create myself a centralised dashboard for upgrading and managing all my wordpress installs but at the moment that is not an option.

Fortunately with the tiniest bit of PHP knowledge you can still have some relatively easy to create websites. Head on over to the OSWD and find a template you like. Then simply split it up into header / footer etc and with a simple <?php include('header.php') ?> you have a nice easy to use template and don’t have to worry about security (so much).

I might release the template I’ve been using at some point when I’m done making my sites but it’s not difficult, anyone can do it really.

I read something a few days ago that struck a cord with me. It was about a tobacco industry spokesperson who said to his son:

There is no right or wrong. There are just arguments. If you win you are right.

That’s kind of how I view SEO. There is no right or wrong - what is ethical SEO? There’s some kind of argument that it’s bad to spam or engage in blackhat techniques and therefore blackhat is wrong.

Is it ethical to be doing SEO for companies that rip off consumers with limited financial knowledge who don’t realise that 60% APR is not cool?

It’s not clear to me how you could say that is any more or less ethical than say a creating a splog?

I saw a comment on an article vaguely about blackhat SEO. I feel it’s kind of misinformed. He talks about how you can’t be open and honest while using blackhat techniques.

You could, you could say to your client: “Today we’re going to spam your website to no 1. and then after a week or two it will probably get banned”.

That’s open and honest it just might not go down that well. You have to accept that the techniques you use to promote or optimise a website have to be proportional to the risk/reward. Can you afford for the website in question to get banned or penalized? If the answers no then don’t do anything shady. If the answers yes then spam away.

When I was working last year there was a car insurance company we worked for where we did the SEO for some of their sites and they did some inhouse SEO on some of their other smaller doorway type sites.

They did some overly aggressive link buying and managed to manipulate some pretty high rankings for that site for a brief period before it got caught out. Then there was a small uproar: blah blah spam blah blah blackhat blah blah dodgy. Who cares?

If they looked at the risk vs. reward of spamming that website to high rankings for car insurance and decided they were willing to go with it and didn’t mind if it go banned then fair play to them. They still had their main site and their other smaller sites if it did get banned.

If I was trying to be successful in a highly competitive niche I wouldn’t have a problem with performing some dirty SEO to outrank the competition. As long as you were actually providing a useful service and had a reasonable website - I don’t see the customer caring. Obviously you’d have to except that you were likely to get burnt at somepoint and have your main brand/website totally clean and just slowly build that site up organically as best you can. While that sites hanging around in the sandbox you can be ranking these other mini sites.

I’m rambling a bit now, cya..