Today was my birthday, and although I hardly ever go to the home page of google.com (I usually just search from the address bar), I went to the home page today because I wanted to use my microphone to search by voice instead of typing my query. (My hands were full).

Here’s what I saw when I went to google.com today.

Aside: Sorry for the poor image quality. I couldn’t easily capture the tooltip that popped up when I hovered over the logo – the one that said Happy Birthday, Donna – via screen capture, so I just snapped a pic of the screen with my cell phone camera. Hey, don’t judge me. It was easy and it worked!

Anyway, back to the point… Right there on the home page was a special logo wishing me a happy birthday, and the logo links directly to my Google+ profile page. How cool is that! Actually, I believe they’ve been doing the birthday logo thing for a while now, but I didn’t remember about it, so it was a total surprise when I saw it. Granted, the link to my profile is kind of a waste, because it’s not like anyone but me would ever see either the logo or the link to my profile, but it’s the “feel good effect” that matters.

Sure, the entire process is automated, and Google didn’t have to do anything “special” to make me feel special, but the effect is the same no matter how much or how little effort went into it. I’ll continue to harass Google any time I think they are being boneheaded about something, but they’ve earned some serious brownie points from me today, just because they bothered to show me a special logo on my birthday.

As my brother recently reminded me, “it’s the little things that matter”. I felt pampered by Google today, and they’ll earn some brand loyalty in the future from me for that. Now, not all of us have departments filled with programmers to create these “feel good” website components for us, but we should strive to pass along some feel-good pampering to our visitors when we can. I know I’m often too busy to reach out to every visitor. I don’t always take the time to respond to every single comment here for instance. I should. I don’t, but I should. I can’t promise I’ll respond any more often in the future than I already do. But I’ll try to occasionally pamper my visitors more than I have before.

I think you should consider pampering your visitors a little more too. I know first hand now how good it feels to have that little bit of automated luv thrown my way, and if you can throw some at your visitors, they’ll appreciate you more, I bet.

Just thought I’d pass that along.

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Lately, people have been quick to shout that Google Plus has mostly inactive users, and I’m here to say, “yeah, so?”. One of these shocking pronouncements came about in August 2011, when Bimeanalytics put out an infographic that swept the tech news and had everyone shouting that 83% of Google Plus users are inactive, or on the flip side, only 17% are active. Bimeanalytics later withdrew this stat from their infographic, mentioning that it might not be accurate enough. Still, it wouldn’t surprise me to think it is accurate. Or at least as accurate as these things ever are. But I still say, “Yeah, so?”

In any case, every time someone releases stats about some social network, in regards to active users, there’s a great hubbub about it. I think everyone reading about these stats needs to do two things:

Take the numbers with a mountain of salt. Most of the stats presented will be guesstimations at best, and possibly so far wrong, that it’s simply a load of [place your favorite "load of x" word here].

Remember that a low instance of active users is the norm for any social group – online or offline – past or present. People join things, and then fail to participate. It happens. Raise your hand if you know anyone who has joined a gym, only to stop going soon afterwards. If you want some stats to visualize this real-world group activity, various reports over the years have declared that 40% of people who join health clubs stop going soon afterwards, with 90% stopping within the first 90 days.

People Are Lazy

Pick any activity online or off that requires any effort at all, and you’ll probably find a statistic that claims a large percentage of participants are really inactive.

People tend to jump on things they think they might enjoy doing, and then quickly fall back into their previous routine. Face it. People are lazy and most people may be comfortable following or lurking but rarely lead or even participate in the smallest of ways – in anything.

Historically Speaking

So before you condemn Google Plus or any other social network that may be involved in the “Stat of The Day”, keep in mind that the same kinds of things have been shouted about every other social network – even those that are popular. Let’s take a quick look through the short history of Twitter, just to lay the foundation.

• In the summer of 2009, Hubspot reported (pdf) that about 55% of 4.5 million Twitter accounts had NEVER TWEETED, and nearly 53% had NO followers.
• In January of 2010, Marketing Pilgrim informed us that according to a study put out by RJMetrics, the percentage of active Twitter users was 17%. (There’s that 17% number again – just like the one recently thrown around about Google Plus).
• Just two months later, in March of 2010, Mashable reported that a study by Barracuda Labs showed that only 21% of Twitter users were active and 34% had never tweeted even once.
• That same month, Business Insider reported that of 175 million accounts in February 2011, 56 million Twitter users followed no one, and 90 million had 0 followers.
• Skip ahead to August of 2011, and an infographic reveals just 5% of Twitter users create 75% of the content but 52% of Twitter users update their status every day, so the active users have seemingly risen to more than 52% – possibly much more.

We could probably all find many of these same types of stats on nearly any popular or once-popular social group, but I think this is enough to make my point.

Stop jumping on every hyped-up stat that someone throws out about how many active users Social Network X has or Social Network Y doesn’t have. The shocking numbers are probably just more of the same load of [place your favorite "load of x" word here] that you’ve seen umpteen times before.

Yes, Social Network X has mostly inactive users. So does Social Network Y, Local Community Group Z, and School Groups 1, 2, and 3. All the noise about this news is not news. It’s just noise.

Stats That Matter

1. What stats should you really be concerned with? Your own.
2. Which social networks make the most difference to you as an individual, and which makes the most difference to you as a solo or small business owner?
3. Where are the conversations taking place about your niche or product?
4. Monitor your stats. Set up search alerts to inform you of brand or niche mentions so you know which social networks have the most active users that you specifically care about.
5. Then realize that even the non-active users might still be influenced by your participation there, either directly or indirectly, so be active where it makes sense for you personally, and ignore all the rest of the noise.

When you’re done with that, go lurk somewhere. You know you want to!

Yes, I realize the title of this post is a tad bit misleading, but it was designed to be that way to make a point. Oh hey, be sure to connect with me on Google Plus, Twitter, and Facebook. There’s a good chance I’m an active user at one, some, or all of them, at one time or another. Maybe even 17% or 83% of the time.

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Not long ago, I received an email from an employee of a social media marketing agency (Ivy Worldwide) that had just published a book, titled, “Social Media Judo“. I’d been contacted to see if I might be interested in reviewing the book or in speaking to one of the authors. I agreed to review the book, and received it in the mail a couple of weeks ago. It took me a little while to get around to reading it, but now I have, and I’d like to share some thoughts about it, and about the topic in general. The goal of this blog post is to discover lessons not only from the information within the book itself, but from the entire interaction which began with the email sent to me, and which ends not only with the publishing of this blog post, but beyond with your comments and interactions.

This is a long post (almost 2,600 words), but stick with me. I outline 5 specific lessons to be learned, and graded the book’s company/authors on each of the 5 as either succeeding or failing at that lesson. I can tell you right now they didn’t completely succeed. Follow along to see what they did right, where they fell short, and what takeaways we can extract from each.

The Lesson Within The Lesson

The book’s main goal is to help marketing departments of brands understand why they should embrace social media marketing, and how to effectively utilize it for maximum benefit to their brand. The email I received, inviting me to review the book, is one of the tenets that’s at the very core of what the book is all about, and it serves as a good place for me to start this discussion.

Let’s begin with the way the email was constructed. First of all, it began by addressing me by name, starting with “Dear Ms. Fontenot”. That’s a good start to getting my attention, although more will be needed, since of course, I do receive plenty of spam email from people who address me by name.

The first sentence of the email immediately let me know that a new book had just been announced, explained what it was about, and described who had written it. I was then informed that this wasn’t the standard “how to get more followers and friends on Twitter and Facebook”, but was instead a book that gives deep insights into how top brands were using social media successfully. That’s a good start in differentiating itself from the bland and banal items we run across our Twitter streams on a daily basis, so it succeeded in holding onto my interest.

The email then reinforced the fact that I wasn’t just on a spam list somewhere, but that the sender was familiar with me – at least a little. A relevant, previous post I’d written was mentioned and provided as the reason I’d been contacted.

Finally, the email reiterated the book’s central idea, and asked if I’d like a copy to review.

Now let’s see how this email is applicable to one of the central tenets of the book. On page 140, the section titled “A Personal Touch” begins, and on the next page, is this:

“In marketing through social media, we create personal relationships with the influencers, who in turn serve as gatekeepers to the millions of people we want to reach but don’t have the resources to contact on our own.”

The email to me was from a brand, who was reaching out to someone it identified as an influencer and a gatekeeper, as a step in reaching the influencer’s audience. Simply put, they reached out to me, with the hope that I’d now reach out to you.

This isn’t the same, of course, as a company buying influence. Sure, they sent the book to me free of charge, but I’ll in turn give it away to my local library later this week. This reaching out to me is, however, the essence of social media marketing, which embraces and understands that my opinion of the book is completely up to me. Will I be positive? Will I be negative? The authors have no way of knowing, but they trust in the process. On pages 76-77 is this:

“…we still get the same question every time we meet with a new company: “What if they say something bad about us? Listen: “They” already are, and they’re going to keep talking about you in both positive and negative ways, whether you join the conversation or not.”

In various other areas of the book, the authors stress that influencers can’t be told what to do, how to react, or what to say. And of course, I completely agree with that. The authors merely gave me the ability to talk about them, but didn’t attempt to control the message I might have about them. They simply opened up a conversation and had to trust in their product enough to let the conversation go wherever it might lead.

So, what did I learn just from the email I was sent? I learned that the authors practice what they preach, although I think they failed to completely adhere to what they preach in the book. They mention often that the personal relationship with influencers must begin before asking the influencer for anything. That didn’t happen here. I don’t particularly mind because it gives me a chance to show both the positive and the negative of a social media marketing attempt. We all learn best when we see both the successes and the failures of attempts that others have made. However, with that exception, I think the email was successful at “walking the walk”.

Success or Failure of the Email: Both, but more success than failure
Lesson: Find the influencers within your niche, reach out to them in a personal way, and allow them to interact with your product or service. This gives them the option to start a conversation about you – good or bad. If you believe in your product or service, then trust that the conversations will be more positive than negative, and never try to control it.

Lessons of Style

I mentioned earlier that we all learn best when we see the successes and failures of others, and that leads me directly into the style of the book. The style is focused on sharing actual experiences that the authors had with real brands. The entire book is structured around case studies. But before your eyes glaze over at the mention of the phrase “case studies”, let me assure you that the book isn’t filled with numbers and percentages and dollar amounts. Instead, it’s presented as clearly understandable stories.

Imagine sitting down and having a conversation over coffee with someone about how they handled a marketing campaign. That conversation would be far more interesting (to me, at least), than a Powerpoint presentation showing lots of numbers and charts and statistics that cause my mind to wander. So, for me, the style of the book was just right. I was able to visualize what worked and what didn’t by reading the case studies in a conversational manner. While a fact and number style might be called for on occasion, I think the story-telling format is much more effective – and much more persuasive – in most cases.

Success or Failure of Presentational Style: Success
Lesson: Make sure you present your marketing message in the style that will have the most effect and be the most persuasive.

Lesson in Analogy

Just because a book adapts the story-telling style, doesn’t necessarily mean it completely succeeds in delivering its message in a way that really connects with the reader, so let’s talk about how Social Media Judo handles that. Let’s begin with the title of the book. Why is it called Social Media Judo?

Throughout the book, the authors use Judo and its various moves as an analogy to show that social media marketing taps into the power of spreading a message via influencers – to ensure maximum outcome from minimum effort. This ability to achieve a maximum outcome from minimum effort is likened to the way that a judo expert taps into the momentum of his opponent, enabling him to easily throw his opponent to the ground. By using his opponent’s own energy, the judo expert is able to win with minimal effort on his part.

Each main point that the book makes is once again related back to the art and skill of judo, which gives the point an extra focus and clarity. Does it work to really clarify the points the authors hope to make? Mostly, yes. Occasionally, I found myself skimming over the finer points of the judo lesson, but overall, it was an effective way to help me really “get” what was being presented.

Success or Failure in Analogy: Success
Lesson: If you can find a way to relate the subject matter to another, in such a way that the points are clarified and made more understandable, do so. Relating the two makes a visual connection in the mind of your audience that usually results in greater clarity and a stronger bond with the message.

Lessons In Reach

What audience have the authors targeted, and will the book appeal to people at all levels of online marketing? The authors run a marketing company that often handles brand giants’ marketing campaigns, including such clients as Microsoft, HP, Lenovo, etc. The case studies in the book revolve around actual marketing campaigns that these types of brand giants ran, and discusses both the succesful and the unsuccesful campaigns. If I had to guess at the intended audience of the book, I would guess that it was aimed at the internal marketing departments of large, well-known brands who have marketing departments that are still stuck in the mindset of “controlling every aspect of the marketing message” and who are balking at the thought of giving up that control to venture into social media marketing.

Does the book successfully argue that social media must become an integral and vital part of a big brand’s marketing strategy? I believe it does. Through the use of the case studies that vividly show both the successes and failures of brand social media marketing campaigns, the book leads the audience to the final conclusion that it is an absolute necessity. It not only persuades the big brand marketers that they must engage in the medium, but shows, through example after example, what to do and what not to do, if they hope to run successful campaigns.

In light of their target market, did the authors succeed or fail in choosing me as an influencer that they should reach out to? On one hand, I think they might have failed in that choice. They mention several times in the book that it is important to find the right influencers. If they did their homework, they should have realized that my readers generally aren’t big brands. I serve small businesses and micro businesses most of the time.

Is this book right for a mom and pop business, or a solo entrepreneur? Not exactly, in that these small businesses don’t operate with the same large budgets that are evident in the case studies, but the messages in the book don’t totally exclude small businesses either. While I and many of my readers will never have the kinds of budgets that Microsoft or HP has to throw at a social media campaign, we can participate at our own levels. We can take the same lessons and apply them to our smaller networks and our own circles of influence. So while the authors of this book may have failed on one level by choosing me in their circle of influencers, they didn’t fail completely. I and my network can derive benefit from understanding the principles of the book, even if we have to implement them on a different scale. For that reason, I’d say they probably failed at finding the perfect influencer when they chose me, but it wasn’t a complete failure on their part either.

Success or Failure of Reach: Both, but probably more of a failure than a success
Lesson: A large part of succeeding with a social marketing plan is to ensure you are socializing with the right people in the right areas so that your reach is extended out to the people who will derive the most benefit from your product or service. Sharing the message with the wrong people is wasted effort.

Lesson in Sentiment

After considering the the technical merits of the book, it’s time to move to the emotional level. How do I feel about the book? What kind of emotional impact did it have on me? Am I glad that I took the time to read it, or do I feel like I wasted my time?

Obviously, the goal of the authors is to present information that readers will appreciate, and the goal of reaching out to me with that initial email was to hopefully have me spread the word about the book in a positive way. I can say that I believe they presented the right messages, in the right way, and succeeded in creating a book that will be useful in helping marketing personnel understand why social media marketing is essential, and how to best approach it. I’m not sure it would be the kind of book a mom and pop shop owner would enjoy reading, but I’d feel confident knowing that they’d appreciate what they learned, even if the subject matter isn’t within their usual style of reading material.

For the target audience, I’d say it will have a positive impact and is a must-read. For those of you who are small or solo businesses, it’s not a must-read. Nevertheless, I’d encourage you to read it if you really want to understand how to approach social media – as long as you can take the lessons from the book and scale them down. With that mindset while reading the book, I think you’ll make good use of your time. That, by the way, is my true sentiment about the book: It wasn’t a waste of my time, and since time is extremely valuable to me, that’s as positive a sentiment as I can give.

Success or Failure in Sentiment: Success
Lesson: Make sure your product or service delivers a positive experience. What more is there to say?

Final Thoughts

In some ways, this book is more about the why than the how. You won’t find a step by step how-to blueprint in this book, though there’s plenty of information that can help you determine how to manage a successful social media campaign. But for those who are afraid to venture into the world of social media, or are uncertain about its benefits, this book does a great job of explaining why you should and what benefits come with making that leap.

Valuable lessons can be learned by looking at the successes and failures of those who tried things before us. In this case, I not only learned lessons from the case studies presented within the book, but also from the marketing campaign that promoted the book itself.

Do you ever analyze what works and what doesn’t work for others, so you can apply the lessons learned to your own business? If so, share some of the lessons you learned or let me know what you think about the lessons I shared here.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2011. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Social Media Marketing
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Probably half of the people around the world who know my name think of me as an SEO. The other half probably think of me as a blogger. I tend to think of myself as a “solo enterpreneur / web developer / ebusiness owner / seo / blogger”. Despite the many hats I wear, I certainly do have a strong background in SEO, and as most know, I definitely have some strong opinions that I share from time to time about SEO. I tend to speak my mind on occasion, and this is probably one of those times I’ll use in the future as a good example of doing just that.

What I Think About SEO As A Marketing Focus

• I think SEO is one very important online marketing channel.
• I think SEO should be heavily considered, implemented, and invested in – by some site owners.
• I think the average blogger should spend a relatively small amount of time understanding and implementing the very basics of SEO, and then more or less forget about it.
• I think many ebusinesses fall somewhere in the middle of the two extremes, and their focus on SEO should likewise fall in between the extremes.

My small business consists of one employee – me. Yours may also. Others may have a handful of employees. Small businesses can vary widely not just in the number of employees they have, but also in the amount of income they generate. Some small businesses make a very large amount of money – so large that it’s hard for little old me to classify them as “small”. But small they are. Because there are so many sizes and types of small businesses, there isn’t one cookie-cutter approach that they should all take when considering how they market their online business.

Many small businesses desperately need to heavily focus on SEO in order to be able to compete with their larger competitors, while some of them should concentrate most of their efforts on local SEO, assuming they have a local brick-and-mortar presence.

Other small businesses can get away with barely even knowing that SEO exists because they have very little competition. For some, merely using a relevant phrase on the site can garner them as much or more targeted search traffic as a full out SEO campaign might generate.

For a wide range of small businesses, I recommend starting by reading Small Business SEO: 46 Experts on the Biggest Mistakes SMBs Make with SEO and Internet Marketing (and How to Avoid Them). Once they’ve digested that, I’d then point them to Google’s own SEO guide. This is a good start to understanding and implementing SEO for their sites.

Ok, But What About Bloggers

So where do bloggers fit in? It’s almost impossible to really answer that since bloggers come from every niche imaginable and may or may not face stiff competition. So yes, some bloggers need to carefully and systematically work on SEO to compete in their niche. But I’d guess the majority of bloggers can safely ignore SEO once they’ve taken the most basic of steps to ensure they have a search-friendly site.

I’ll even go so far as to suggest that in some cases, bloggers go way too far when dealing with SEO, causing themselves more harm than good. This is the point I tried to make with the title of this post. It’s often painful to watch a blogger try to “grow up” to be an SEO without understanding the potential risks of “overoptimizing”. Overoptimized sites are ones that cross the line between blogging for your audience and blogging for the search engines. Sometimes less is more, and too much trips a filter that causes a search engine bot to treat the site less favorably than it should.

I’d rather see bloggers take a step back, evaluate which marketing channels make the most sense for them, and then place a strong emphasis on whatever those channels might be. They might find that another channel – social media perhaps – will be a better use of their time. Again, let me emphasize that bloggers should always take care of the basic SEO tenets to ensure their site is search friendly. But spending too much time on it, on a continuing basis, can be detrimental to what they might have accomplished if much of that time had been spent elsewhere.

A few years back, I wrote a post called The 5 Goals of a Search Optimized Page on my old SEO Scoop blog (a blog which was later acquired and now lives under the umbrella of Search Engine People). Though the post is old, and was written even before Google’s own guide was published, it encapsulates the basics of what you’ll find in Google’s guide. Simply put, make it easy for search engines to find, index, understand and evaluate your blog posts, so they can properly rank them. It’s this kind of basic understanding and implementation of SEO that I hope to see most bloggers embrace, leaving the advanced methods alone – at least until the blogger has fully determined the best marketing channels to place a focus on for his or her specific niche. If the blogger then wants to delve a little more, then iBlogZone’s SEO resources and tools list is another handy place to go. And if you really believe your niche requires major SEO understanding, then either the SEO training dojo or Aaron Wall’s training is the place to begin your advanced learning sessions.

If you’re a blogger and are wondering just how much SEO you need to incorporate into your blog, replace the old song lyrics, “Mommas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys”, with “Mommas Don’t Let Your Bloggers Grow Up To BE SEOs”. Sure, some of you need to be cowboys, er, SEOs, but I think many of you should focus only on the basics, putting more emphasis on other marketing channels instead.

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Using Facebook pages for marketing is a huge topic, and one that this post won’t try to cover in detail, but luckily, there are others who are already covering it well. Just in the last week or two, I’ve seen some good posts that make the concept of Facebook marketing – and Facebook Pages in particular – a little easier to grasp for the one-person or micro-businesses that many of my readers comprise. So have a look through these and let me know what’s missing. What are you still confused about? What would you like to know more about? I’ll continue to help you find the answers to those questions.

I’d start with understanding the difference between a page and profile on Facebook. Then get a quick tip about using vanity URLs for Facebook pages. Follow that up with a tutorial on creating your Facebook fan page photostrip. And finally, with that background under your belt, immerse yourself in this excellent and comprehensive post, titled, How to Build the Perfect Facebook Fan Page, 2011 Edition.

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Post tags: Facebook, social media strategy, solo entrepreneur
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First, let’s review what this thing is. You can read more about the original product here, but I’ll summarize it now:

So what is an online press kit, anyway? Sometimes called a media kit, it is really just an expanded “About Me” section that includes things like images and graphics (like headshots of yourself or images of your ebook cover), and lots of in-depth information about yourself that journalists could use when either writing about you, or quoting you. The more information you give reporters and bloggers in a simple, easy-to-get format, the better. The key is that you want to make it EASY for a reporter to choose you when they are looking for comments and quotes from an expert in whatever topic they are writing about today. Reporters have tight deadlines. They want answers and they want them fast.

Journalists are trained to look for press kits. They’ve been relying on company media kits for decades. Just by having your own online press kit, you let them know that you respect them, and you are willing and ready to work with them. You let them know that you are available as a source. That gives you an edge over all the other “gurus” who don’t have an online press kit.

I can hear you asking already…how do I set up an online press kit? You can simply add a section to your current web site that gives all the pertinent information on its pages. Keep it simple and clean, with navigation that makes it impossible for a hurried journalist to get lost. Include quotes, testimonials, syndicated articles, suggested questions, podcasts and videos, images and graphics, and lots of bio information.

Ok, so if you want to check it out, and see the demo of it, just click here (opens in new tab). If you want to download it, just click here. Yeah, it’s that easy. Enjoy. (Oh, and I forgot to mention that it comes with several color schemes, so you can just choose which color stylesheet to use).

I’d like to really encourage everyone to think about how a press kit can be used. Many of us are hurting from the bad economy. Everywhere I turn around, people are either out of work, working less, or have family members who lost their jobs. Unemployed people still have incredible work experience and knowledge to share. If you, or someone you know, needs to build up their personal brand, please make use of this template, or use it as inspiration, to start making it happen. I believe we can all help dig each other out of the economic hole we find ourselves in. This is my small contribution to that effort.

Note: If you think this is useful, I’d appreciate it if you’d link to it or share it on your fave social networks.

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Luckily, we can get an idea of who some of those smaller casualties were by reading through the long thread started by a Google employee, looking for examples.

The Water Cooler Talk About These Sites

Since then, I’ve noticed quite a few people making fun of the sites listed in that thread. The general attitude in many conversations has been along the lines of, “Well, have you seen those sites? They are typical spammy, autogenerated, ugly MFA sites.” After seeing that kind of remark many times, I just assumed it must be true, and in my mind, all the sites in that thread must be ugly, autogenerated trash.

Once I started really reading through the thread, however, and began looking at some of the sites listed, I questioned what I’d heard. The sites I saw didn’t really fit that description. I’m not saying they are all beautiful, but it isn’t the trash-heap I’d expected.

Just The Looks, Ma’am, Just The Looks

Keep in mind I’m only talking about the overall look and feel of the sites. I haven’t fully analyzed the actual content deep throughout each site. I definitely haven’t had the time to do that. So is it possible that the sites do contain low-quality or ugly content? I suppose so. I’m not able to fully judge that at this point. But I did think someone needed to stand up and say, hey, lots of the sites that got hit DON’T fit the ugly, autogenerated trashy look. All in all, I think they tend to represent the web as a whole pretty well, in terms of design.

So What Do They Look Like?

I grabbed 50 or so sites I found in that thread (turns out to be 45) and took screenshots of the homepages of each. There are more sites in that thread, to be sure, but frankly, I just ran out of time and patience copy/pasting urls and taking screenshots. I figure the following are pretty representative, however, since I just grabbed urls without knowing what they would look like.

So here is a gallery of the homepages of some small sites that Panda Farmer update decimated. Some look good, some not so good, some are a little ugly. I’ll let you decide what you think about the overall “quality” of the sites based only on a quick look at them. Remember: I’m not able to judge the true quality of the content this way, but I did think someone needed to defend against the water cooler talk that all the sites were ugly. Click on a thumbnail to open the lightbox and then click the arrows to scroll through them:

The site urls are listed below. Hopefully, someone with lots more time than myself will do some real analysis (not based on design alone) of why these sites may have been hit.

aqua-fish.net
artpromote.com
askageek.com
askmehelpdesk.com
best-running-tips.com
blippitt.com
c21theharrelsongroup.com
calfinder.com
charlesandhudson.com
chinesechicken.net
classroomjr.com
craftjr.com
darrenbarefoot.com
diet-blog.com
do-it-yourself-gifts.com
dreamhomedecorating.com
ergoindemand.com
everythingusb.com
excellent-romantic-vacations.com
fonerbooks.com
freegeographytools.com
gadgetvenue.com
geeky-gadgets.com
giftcardgranny.com
healthhype.com
homeconstructionimprovement.com
italianchef.com
kitchensource.com
lcipaper.com
miami2vegas.com
mondinion.com
mrbreakfast.com
my3cents.com
oneprojectcloser.com
onewayfurniture.com
pcmonitors.org
prices4antiques.com
proposalwriter.com
pubclub.com
shoutpedia.com
thewhippet.net
totalbeauty.com
trendtimes.com
universetoday.com
wirelessandmobilenews.com
wordnik.com

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2011. | Permalink | 19 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: farmer, Google, Panda, search industry, update
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

A Virtual Smack Upside The Head

I have a lot of friends and acquaintances in the SEO industry, some that I’ve been happy to help promote along the way. These are people I really like as people, and recommend as colleagues. So what happens when they make assumptions that I’m pretty sure are wrong, and then espouse them as facts, holding those assumptions up as flags of proof that they’ve been right all along? What happens? Well, I’ll tell you what happens. My guts get all tangled up in aggravation and frustration because I’m annoyed that I want to smack my friends upside the head. I don’t like wanting to do that. Really! Well, ok, maybe I like smacking my best buddy upside the head (virtually) now and then, but that’s different. He’s my best buddy and can take it. Yeah, buddy, you know who you are.

Conundrum

So. Conundrum. Oh, that’s a good word, isn’t it? Am I starting to sound like Charlie Sheen yet? Hehe. But I digress. Conundrum – an intricate and difficult problem, or what I like to call “being in a pickle”. What do I do when I come across my friends making grandiose statements that make their assumptions sound like facts, and then they wrongly assume that they deserve accolades for having been right all along, when in fact, they probably just got lucky, or hadn’t had to face a particular problem before.

Opinions, Theories, and Guesses, Oh My

How confused am I making you? Hopefully not too much, but I’ll try to de-confuse you. Lately, since Google’s Farmer Update knocked down many content farms, ignored some of the worst content farms, and caused collateral damage to many sites that don’t seemingly fit the content farm profile, there have been quite a few opinions voiced in the SEO industry about the update. I like opinions. I especially like opinions that honestly convey themselves as merely opinions, or perhaps theories, or even wild guesses. That’s what we in the search industry do. We do a lot of guessing, hopefully backed up by some evidence, but the end result is always a guess or a theory or an opinion.

So when some of my friends make some assumptions about the Farmer Update, based on the fact that the few clients they have weren’t hit by the update, and then quickly proclaim things like,

“See our ways are the right ways. If you’d just listened to us all along, you wouldn’t have to worry about these pesky updates”.

(That was me totally paraphrasing a few things I’ve read recently from various people, btw).

Uh, Not So Fast There, My Friend

What gets my goat is that I have a strong OPINION that the things they mentioned are definitely not a part of this update, since I have some insight into some sites that got hit that are clearly not out of line with the “you should have done this and not that” kind of statements being made. Don’t get me wrong. The advice my friends give is generally good advice. But that advice very likely has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not some good sites are seeing problems with the Farmer Update.

But since the sites that these friends control don’t happen to fit a particular pattern, they would probably not have been hit by the Farmer Update, regardless of whether or not my friends’ advice had been heeded. One had nothing to do with the other, in other words. And I say this not as a fact, but as a guess. Yep, I’m merely guessing so keep that in mind, ok?

So now what do I do? What I want to do is slap them around a little and say,

“Hey! Stop patting yourself on the back. Your good advice likely had nothing to do with keeping your clients safe from this particular update, and won’t keep others safe from some other updates. I’ve seen sites that followed your good advice get hit by this update. So, there’s something else going on, maybe, probably, most likely. Don’t make assumptions, and then self-proclaim your righteousness, ok? It’s really annoying.”

But will I do that? No, probably not. Maybe I’m just a wuss. Maybe I don’t want to stir up trouble amongst my friends and acquaintances. Maybe I don’t like fueling name-calling and outing. Maybe this, maybe that. So, instead, I think I’d rather just write a semi-confusing (perhaps) rant that lets me get this off of my chest, without naming and shaming.

But yo…if you’re one of my friends, and the shoe fits…well, ya know…

Please Don’t Pat Me On The Back Either

As always, this rant is the opinion of a woman who has been in the search industry long enough to be tired of the back-patting and self-righteousness of even the nicest people. Remember…you might be wrong. I might be too, so don’t pat me on the back for this rant. Don’t forget that, please.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2011. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Google, search industry
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

1. Start with an idea for a new website.
2. Find all the relevant themes within that site’s niche.
3. Click a button to discard the only-slightly-relevant themes.
4. Click a button to discard the themes that don’t bring in good traffic.
5. Click a button to discard the themes that have too many competitors.
6. Click a button to discard the themes that are relevant, have good traffic, and have acceptable competition – but don’t have enough monetary or commercial value to you.
7. Click a button to see how strong the top 10 competitors are for any particular theme that’s left in your filtered list, so you can determine which of the remaining themes are the best to target.
8. Click a button to find an excellent domain name for this niche.
9. Click a button to find products you can promote within this niche.
10. Click a button to research and find the authorities in the niche and the subtopics that are popular within the niche.
11. Click a button to compose and publish content on your new site.
12. Click a button to find promotion and backlink opportunities for the content you create.
13. Click a button to track and analyze the rankings increases you receive over time.
14. Repeat a similar quick and easy process to find and use additional long tail keywords to augment and enhance your site’s content.

I’m an old SEO who has been doing this for years, so over time, I’ve come up with my own ways to handle most of the processes above. It all takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, and frequently ends in me forgetting some vital tasks. When I forget something, the site I worked so hard on, ends up with the rest of the failed sites on the ‘net.

Now, I’ve known that a tool existed for about a year now that claimed to do all of the above. I even tested it a while back (for about 5 minutes, and then something distracted me, and I forgot to test it further). I may even be the last internet marketing person on the planet to have really latched on to the awesomeness of this tool. Still, just because I’m late to the game, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t rave about it. Just in case there’s anyone out there who doesn’t already use it, ya know. I know my tedious process has been forever changed for the better, since I bought this product. Maybe yours will too.

So what is this amazing product, and does it really live up to its claims? It’s called Market Samurai, and yes, it does. Ah, see? I knew most of you had already heard of it!

So for the few who haven’t tried it yet, you should know why I think Market Samurai is currently the best tool on the market to ensure that you don’t waste time creating sites that bring no traffic and make no money.

Yes, I’ve created sites that made no money. And I may still do that occasionally, but I bet it won’t be nearly as often anymore. Market Samurai finally gives me all the info I need and all the tools to implement the info in one place.

Let’s look at a summary of the modules that Market Samurai includes.

Keyword Research

This module goes beyond just spitting out a list of relevant phrases. Clicking the Analyze Keywords button will check various factors about each, such as SEO competition, and you can then filter the results based on whatever thresholds you set. This is a powerful way to quickly find the sweet spot of phrases to target. Want to know how much traffic you can expect if you rank #1 for a phrase? The tool gives an estimate of that as well, and much more.

SEO Competiton

One of the things I love is the color-coded competition chart. At a glance, you can see which keywords are the easiest or hardest to rank for, so it’s the perfect next step after keyword research. It gives a ton of info such as anchor text distribution, number of backlinks, PR, cache info, and domain age.

Domain Tool

If you’re researching a new niche, you’ll want to use the domain tool that’s provided. It not only helps find domain names related to a keyword, but it also shows aged, expiring and for-sale domains that are already ranking well for the phrase! That’s sweet! (A free account at domainface is all you need for the aged domains list. If you want extra info on the aged domains, you’ll need to have a paid domainface account. But since the free version of domainface does provide the aged names, it’s still a great feature).

Monetization Tool

Ok, so you know what phrases to target, you now have a perfect domain to build on, so what’s next? How to monetize it? Yep! Fill in your various affiliate details (such as username for cj, amazon, clickbank, etc), and the tool finds products related to a keyword that you can promote. In addition, it will generate dynamic ads for you, such as Google’s contextual Adsense ads or Amazon content-relevant ads. Need a landing page or sidebar ad? No problem. The tool will create them for you by displaying relevant images, headlines and sales copy from the affiliate sites. Just drag and drop the headlines and sentences you like most into a blog post, sidebar, or banner generator. The ad can also use your short url account (like your bit.ly account) to generate a short link to the product. Any ads you generate, dynamic or affiliate, can easily be published to your self-hosted WordPress blog with the click of a button. If you don’t have a WP blog, you can simply copy/paste the content or ad code into your site as you normally would. This module of Market Samurai is unique. I’ve never seen this done in another tool of its kind.

Find and Publish Content

Although you’ll be creating your own content, Market Samurai makes it easy to find the most popular content related to a keyword, so you can determine what types of content your visitors will love. The tool does a great job of letting you find specific types of content (blog posts, videos, etc.) to help you research the niche. Once your research is done, you can use the Publish feature to easily compose and add content to WordPress blogs right from the tool. (And yes, you can choose to easily publish articles from article directories too).

Promotion

This section helps you find backlink opportunities and niche authorities, letting you filter by type (blogs, forums, q&a, etc), and then analyzing each (just use the Analyze All button) to determine the best ones to promote to. You can then choose to participate in those conversations, and promote your site to them, which can generate traffic and backlinks, or you can reference sites by adding links to other relevant sites that except pingbacks to blog posts you’ve previously published right from the tool, which will ping those sites, notifying them that you linked to them. Any pingbacks created are backlinks to your site.

Rank Tracking

Again, this goes beyond the standard tracker that merely shows where a phrase ranks; it also lists the particular page url that ranks for the phrase, what it’s PR is, and gives the number of backlinks that page has. Because it keeps this history, you can always see a graph of how well your efforts are paying off over time.

More Info

Price: Forget monthly fees. Pay one price, one time and get use of the product for life. If you work it right, you can get 35% off as well. Just try the free trial of Market Samurai to get that opportunity.

Cross-Platform: Runs on PC, Mac, and Linux. Double-sweet!

The only drawbacks for me are:

• Managing multiple projects isn’t as smooth as it could be, but I wouldn’t doubt that this is a feature they’ll improve upon at some point.
• I’d also love to be able to print a nice report that shows me a basic to-do list based on all the information gathered. It would be very cool to have a tree diagram showing the main theme keyword at top, category keywords next, and long tail keywords last. From there, a content research and creation plan could be listed so that I can easily build the site using the plan as a guide. The various modules do have a .csv export feature, but I’d love to see a nice human-oriented report that sums it all up for me.
• Some parts are slow. Startup, for instance, can take a couple of minutes. While you stare at a blank gray window, you might think the program has died, but it hasn’t. I use these slower bits of time to grab a diet coke or a snack.

Summary – Marketing Samurai answers the following questions:

• What keywords should I target? (most profitable / least competition)
• How hard will it be to rank for the phrase(s) and what will I need to do to compete?
• Who are the authorities in this niche?
• What type of content do visitors in this niche prefer?
• What products can I promote?
• How can I create compelling ads for those products?
• How can I create and manage targeted content?
• Where can I find backlink opportunities?
• How well are my efforts working?

Try it. You can actually use it for free for a while. After the trial period is up, guess what? You can still use the keyword research module freely forever! For that reason alone, you should try it. They don’t snag your credit card info or paypal info just to try it. Really. You won’t have to worry about some stupid automatic charge that you didn’t remember to cancel. Nothing like that will happen. Just try it for free. No risk, no hassle.

By the way, I strongly recommend using the free tutorials offered. While the product isn’t overly complex, the tutorials will ensure that you don’t miss some important steps that can make a huge difference in your success rate. For example, the first tutorial looks at the relevancy of your keywords, and why it’s so important, how to filter out the useless keywords guaranteed to cost you time and money, and how to slash the number of people who leave your site because they can’t find what they’re looking for. Missing out on any of that because you decided to just “wing it” would be a mistake I don’t recommend. Even if you quit using the product, watching the tutorials will be an education into smart internet marketing!

Try it for free. Actually watch the training videos. Really. Don’t skip that step. Actually USE the free version after watching the videos. Don’t make the “5 minute test and move on to something else” mistake that I did. Give it a real solid test. I think you’ll be glad I bugged you to do so. Even if you still can’t part with the cash to get this product, you’ll have learned how to go through the process and can do what I’ve done all these years – putting all this into practice using various free tools and lots of manual labor. Either way, you’re probably better off than before.

Just try it for free to find out:

• What markets are worth targeting;
• What markets are worth avoiding;
• Which keywords you should focus on for fast results;
• Which keywords should be avoided;
• Which markets have weak competition;
• Which markets show impossible levels of competition;
• What are the chances of achieving front-page rankings for a keyword;
• What topics you should write articles on for your website;
• Where to find quality backlinks;
• How many backlinks you need;
• What quality backlinks you need;
• How to determine the quality of a page for a backlink;
• …and so much more!

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Keyword research, Marketing, Search engine optimization
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

Where most Web apps today are trying to be either the Twitter or the Facebook of their separate niche, Friendshuffle is out to be the StumbleUpon for Twitter and Facebook.

The idea is fairly simple. When you visit Friendshuffle, you connect it with your Twitter and/or your Facebook account and Friendshuffle, with a UI very similar to StumbleUpon, lets you “shuffle” through the sites and pages your friends have recommended.

It’s a fascinating concept, building a “stumble” layer on top of existing social networks, but there are several problems holding it back and keeping it from being more than a mere novelty.

What FriendShuffle Does Well

Everything about FriendShuffle is about as simple as you can make it. Once you connect your accounts, everything is controlled by two buttons, a “Shuffle” button that takes you to the next page and an “I Like it Too!” button that lets you send the page to your friends.

Though the service offers a tutorial in the form of popup bubbles on your first visit, it truly isn’t necessary. You’ll be up and shuffling in a matter of seconds.

Beyond that, the interface is clean and responsive and the app does a great job finding new content for you, starting with the most recent works and working its way backward.

All in all, though FriendShuffle itself doesn’t “do” much, what it does do, it does very well.

Where it Falters

First, there was a minor technical glitch with the service where my browser was blocking the popup to connect my Twitter account. It was easily fixed once I realized what was going on, but it isn’t a problem I see with other Twitter-connecting services.

Second, there is also a minor issue where connecting with the site via Twitter forces you to follow @FriendShuffle. For those who closely limit those they follow, this could be an annoying “feature” even though you can easily unfollow at any time.

The bigger problem though is the lack of filtering. You can’t select a list of friends to shuffle through nor can you limit your pages viewed to certain categories. This is one of the best features of StumbleUpon and its omission here is glaring.

The vast majority of links I Shuffled to had little interest to me and many were just promotional links posted by friends or businesses I follow. While they are fine in my Twitter stream, where I can choose to not click on them here, having them pull up blindly is annoying.

Getting tighter control over what links you see would really make this service much more useful, even if it meant going back farther. It could even be done by limiting the shuffle to a certain list or group, thus ensuring only friends who write about a certain topic are included.

Conclusions

In the end, FriendShuffle is a pretty slick time-waster but it really isn’t much more than an interesting concept begging for a more complete execution.

With the addition of filters and a means to control whose links you see, FriendShuffle could be a powerful tool for organizing and displaying the tsunami of links that come in over social networking sites.

As it is, it just isn’t as interesting as the sites it emulates and doesn’t make the best use of the sites it relies upon.

This guest post was written by Lior who works for an online task management start-up from new york and also advises an MBA abroad school.

© guestposter for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, Lior Levin, social media, stumbleupon, Twitter
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.