SEM Blog

Links! Links! Links!

It’s all you ever hear anyone say when they talk about off-site SEO/SEM. Many people have been successful with basing their entire plan on getting just text links, but the truth is you can benefit so much more from those links being in a review of your company, product, or general website. Especially if the review is written by a consumer.

You’re link becomes that much stronger when in an article with more of your keywords and more relevancy to your site. Considering a review is a direct look at your site, you really can’t get much better of a link than that.

Let’s examine this from a few different angles:

• Credibility Of Review Location

Pro: The website that reviewed you is reputable enough and credible enough that you’ve just solidified another result in the first page SERPs that points right over to you.

Con: Unfortunately some sites just pump out reviews to fill up content and don’t even spend time with the product. Many of these sites are filled with ads and can leave a bad taste in peoples mouths, making them avoid anything listed on that site in their future searches.

• Quality Of The Review

Pro: Good reviews help sell people. The more enthusiastic the person is who reviews your site, the more likely someone else is going to make a visit over. Reviews don’t have to be epically long or contain anything special, they just have to be genuine to the person who reads it and actually focuses on the key points the people want to read about.

Cons: One of the top sites in your niche just wrote a review about your site. Perfectly written, clear points, everything. Issue is, it wasn’t in your favor. No you’ve got a negative review out ranking your main site on your keywords and everyone’s going to click there first.

If you run into any of these negatives, you can easily take care of the situation by getting involved yourself. Nearly all sites that post a review also have a comment field, so take advantage of that area to answer any issues or differences of opinions you might have with the person writing the review. Just remember not to get too mouthy or you’ll hurt yourself even more than that review did.

You have 364 days left to take advantage of this, so you’ll want to set an alarm to remind and come back to reference this post.

Today the internet goes dead. Every news source and trusted form of information now lay suspect as the dreaded Fools Day leaves its mark. But what’s that you say? Your social bookmarking sites are flooded with hilarious or concerning stories that you can’t help but click on? Your search engine of choice offers to let you to search into the future? And of course, you can’t simply click the link and read it and be done with it. No! You must send it out to everyone you know so that they too can share in the hilarity.

Congratulations. You have provided some giddy marketer with the results desired from there viral marketing campaign. April Fools day is all about capturing the attention of your specific audience and giving them something to gab about. So while Google is just doing it for the giggles because, let’s face it, we live in their world, everyone out there is fighting for a piece of the pie. The following is a list of the April Fools Pranks from this year that definitely make the grade.

• Newsflash: Digg Admits It’s Rigged and Just a Game
• Clinton Drops Out!!!!
• NASA to Burn Sponsor Logos into the Surface of Mars
• Betamax to HD-DVD Converter
• Match.com Works For eHarmony Founder

So what do these sites gain by putting up this little piece of humor for the world to see? Traffic, and lots of it.

So how can you take advantage of April Fools Day 2009 like everyone in marketing should?

1. Create a fake news story or product/service based off of a popular buzz term.
2. Make sure it at least makes you smirk before you launch it. Test it out on your friends.
3. If your target is the U.S. then launch it right at Midnight EST.
4. Use social bookmarking sites and sites specifically tailored to listing April Fools Day Pranks submitted by users.
5. Keep tabs on what blogs in your niche write about, the cool April Fools Day Pranks they’ve seen and either comment on them or send the publisher the link right as you go live.
6. Know when to call it quits. YouTube directed every featured video on their site to a Rick Roll. Shortly after they reverted back to normal and many people clicking over to see the prank most likely surfed around for a bit.

So next year when you’re planning your April Fools Day Prank, I’ll be one year closer to living on Mars with Project Virgle’s Plan B.

After reading my last post about defining viral marketing you’ve probably gone out and created a killer product or found something popular’s coattails that you can ride one. After taking all the time to get the process started, you realized that you’re not sure exactly what the benefits of viral marketing are. To ease your worries and as a way to convince you to credit me when your product catches on, I’ve decided to outline for you some of the key benefits of viral marketing.

A big benefit of viral marketing is how inexpensive it can be in comparison to nearly all other marketing methods. Take that product you’ve created and send it out to some influential people in your niche for free. As a professional blogger, I review every thing that I’m sent in the most honest fashion possible. I even carry the product around with me if possible for at least a week before passing judgment. In that scenario, your cost is the loss of one product for a review and a wide audience of people to come in contact with it first hand outside of a retail environment.

Another great benefit of viral marketing is the wide audience you’ll be able to reach. I’m sitting here writing at Starbucks on my Eee PC that I fell in love with after reading a review on it. Do you know how many people, from little kids to grandma’s, ask me about it on a daily basis? That product has just trickled down three levels and I’m only one small factor in the reach the original review had.

The process can easily work with services as well. Take a cool concept like OwnMyTeam.com which is growing it’s numbers to achieve their goal of owning and operating a professional sports team. They’ve spent no money on advertising what so ever and have made more growth through sending info out to influential individuals in their niche to the point that their traffic is steadily beating their only stateside competition even when the competitions biggest marketing piece came from a misleading review of their services posted in the New York Times. People are 10 times more open to an idea if it comes from someone they deem to be at their level.

These benefits don’t end once you’ve finished the campaign either. The trickle down effect can spread infinitely further than your normal ad campaign. But watch out, if you’re product sucks, viral marketing can ruin you over night.

Pretty much all of the internet and that little thing attached to it that we call reality are completely infatuated with social networking in one form or another. The rate at which people interact through networks like Myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn continue to grow on a daily basis. And of course you have to take into account how many blogs, social bookmarking sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us), and forums that people frequent day to day so they can catch a glimpse of how everyone else sees it.

If you stand back and look at the whole picture, what you see is a marketing dream. All it takes is one splash, something to captivate even one individual and spread like a virus through all of their avenues of communication. But unlike conventional marketing, you can’t approach viral marketing as straight forward.

The goal behind viral marketing is for you not to see it as marketing at all. In essence, the product or service being marketed needs to either be so appealing that it can explode onto the scene or you’ll have to attach it to something that already has. From there, your target audience is in the drivers seat and ultimately they’ll be the ones spreading your viral marketing or stopping it in it’s tracks.

Let’s take a look at two examples using a similar strategy:

Mountain Dew Commercial: An already well known product has been attached to a pop culture reference. You know it’s an advertisement, but until the Mountain Dew sign at the end, it’s just another Chuck Norris joke.

Will It Blend?: This is a series of videos dedicated to showing how insanely powerful this device is. Instead of paying for infomercial spots where they blend up a nice smoothie, they’ve torn through everything from an iPhone to GI Joe’s. They’ve cut out the obvious and stepped it up a notch.

Which method is actually the more successful of the two? Will It Blend has become so popular that every new video hits the front page of Digg the day it’s launched. But which of the two products are you more likely to buy? I’d say Mountain Dew.