If you are not adapting social media into your marketing strategies you need to be. I still talk to so many people that either don’t understand the potential of a popular social media campaign or think they work in an industry that is not viral. All you need is one first page Digg, or one successful Stumble and you will be hooked for life. Traffic, subscribers, links and mind share they all spring from a successful social media campaign and any business can benefit from it. This post Mat did last week on some simple tweaks with Craigslist, has brought over 4k visitors and a whole bunch of subscribers in about 3 days. A digg and a bigger Stumble will bring much more, but when social media can bring 4k new visitors in 3 days on a post that wasn’t planned to go big at all you can see the importance.

We still hear from very large companies and individuals that they don’t see how Social Media can be leveraged to help their business and that there is no content that would make their business sexy. I wanted to take some specific industries that we have come across or been asked about and give some ideas for viral content. Especially since the Google algo is currently heavily favored on any viral campaign even if it is non related. You get a first page digg for something not related to your site you will see your rankings go up across the board. It is still better to come up with a related story though, as that will bring correct anchor text, subscribers and all the other benefits aside from links and traffic.

Trade Shows
The Trade Show and Display industry is full of old school ugly sites, with old school buyers and clientèle. Correct me if I am wrong but I don’t see a trade show blog flooding feed readers world wide. However there are a lot of things you can do with this industry in order to generate some buzz and get some links. If there is a big event that you provide a large amount of displays and product for, or that you would like to sell a large amount of displays and product for, create a post about that show with maybe some of these ideas, “Sexiest Booths Babes from Such and Such Convention” stole that from Shoemoney, or twist it and make it “Ugliest “Booth Babes from Such and Such Convention.” You could do, “17 Trade Show Displays that will Hurt Your Sales” and show all kinds of stupid displays with crazy lights or colors, or just plan idiotic designs. Or do, “Best Booths of Such and Such Convention 2007.” If done right these articles can be spread throughout the social sites and will generate links around the convention that you are targeting and you will rank for it and become a trusted brand for companies looking to represent themselves at that trade show or any other show for that matter. If you really wanted to get in front of the the elite “Linkerati” make those posts about SES, SMX or Pubcon as seo’s will pass the link love all day long.

Student Loans or Continuing Ed
If you are offering college type services like, school loans, continuing ed, or skill set training play off of the success of “High School Musical” and create a Youtube video called “College Musical” or “Drop Out Musical“, about partying, frats, dropouts etc… It would need to be no more than a couple minutes, maybe you make it a series to keep the links coming and release a new video every so often. If you made the songs and dancing really well, but covered funny college topics it could be very funny and generate a lot of buzz. You might think this would be more work than it is worth, but when you compare it to a weeks fees in ppc in the College Loan industry it may be money well spent. If you do a video make sure you watermark your url in the video and put it in the intro and credits, and launch it from your site to try and get the links to your site and not the Youtube URL. Also try to work some keywords in the the Youtube title, in case it does get a lot of direct links. This way you will get an extra position in the search results.
*If I was a college and I wanted to attract a lot of new students from throughout the US via the internet, I would be marching down to the drama department with some tunes humming in my head.

Weddings and Bridal Services
This industry would actually not be too difficult to create viral content for, there is a lot of newsworthy info out there and a very large online audience. I still want to cover it because there are so many people trying to compete in this industry online and for the most part they have very little budgets. Somedays we will turn away more than a handful wedding vendors because they want to rank for a decent word, but have no money for it. I always end up talking to them about viral and social media, at least now I will have a post to send them too. Create an article on, “The Ugliest Wedding Dresses of 2007,” or “The 20 Worst Songs Your DJ Could Play at Your Reception.” My mom is a self employed Harpist in San Diego, I could do a study on how there are actually more male Harpists then female and show some disturbing pictures of guys plucking away at the harp (Im sorry you can play whatever you want (maybe it is because I grew up with a mother that played Harp, but I will never hire a male harpist.)

I hope this helps to tweak your thinking, so you can look at your industry and see how easy it is to twist into something “Diggable.” Social media is a good path to defensible traffic, it can also be the secret weapon that your competitor can’t duplicate solidifying your position as number 1. It is easy for a competitor to copy your backlinks if they are all from link brokers and directories, it is impossible if they are coming from the natural growth of a viral idea. If anyone has an industry that they think cannot “Go Viral” please email me chris AT 97thfloor.com and tell me your industry and I will help you. I think it is possible for any site. I used to disagree with that, but I have become a convert from first hand experience.

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The battle of buying links rages on at SES San Jose. I really wish I could have been in the room that was (from what I hear) “standing room only” I can imagine with the panel that was put together. It would have been worth it for me just to listen to GrayWolf go off on the politics of Google. Oh how he does such a great job at that!

For me, something that Todd Friesen (again, since I have posted stuff from him I liked before about the buying links debate) from Range said describes my feelings PERFECTLY;

If link purchases have a positive ROI for a company, they’ll continue to make them. If they have a positive ROI, chances are good that they must also be serving the searcher effectively and thus, be good results for the engines.

When are we gonna get past the fact that Google is not the end all save all? Sure, they are huge and we will keep doing everything we can to optimize for rankings on the engine, but there are other sources of traffic.

They need to do a better job of practicing what they preach at Google if buying links is so bad. (Just Google “buy text links” and you will see how Google is getting paid by promoting buying links) I really didn’t want to make this a Google bash post, but I do think the whole debate about buying links is a bit silly when Google still endorses buying links with AdWords and suggests signing up for (PAID) directories like the Yahoo Directory.

I guess worthless results because of lack of optimization would prompt more clicks on Google Ads, so maybe it is a good business model?

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First off Im not going to start ragging on SES, most of their site is laid out and Optimized just fine. I was going through and looking at sessions and that lead me to Speaker Profiles and Sessions Sponsors for this weeks SES San Jose Conference. I noticed something I thought was a little strange in the terms of lack of SEO 101 with proper On page Optimization.

As I was reading the profiles of some of my friends I noticed that the SES page had no Custom Titles or Meta Tags. Take a look at Cameron’s Page It is specifically just for him but has no mention of him in the Title. I also looked at some of the exhibitors and sponsors especially the pages about huge players in the industry.Omniture has a full company profile on SES and it has no mention of them in their Meta Data either.

Why is this important?

SES is currently the largest Search Engine Marketing Conference on the Planet and they house some of the largest names in both speaking and exhibiting. They could carry out a pretty sweet co-brand Organic seo campaign that would Harbor a lot of traffic and increased credibility.

Company and individual names are always less competitive than your average keyword, yet they bring a tremendous amount of traffic if the name has been branded well. If the SES site had “Cameron Olthuis” in it’s Title tag it would probably rank for Cameron’s name no problem. Omniture might be a little different but with a company that large I would invest a little time in making sure a small campaign was carried out to ensure top ten for their brand search. Omniture pretty much Invented Web Analytics and Search Marketing Analysis and I can guarantee they are getting thousands if not 10’s of thousands of searches a day for their Brand.

I don’t mean to write a post on the importance of Meta Data but with the trust that SES has in Google, they could be getting a lot of co-brand traffic and recognition if they added 5 seconds of work into every profile or exhibitor page on their site. We have seen really good results in traffic, press and conversion by creating co-branding campaigns organically in Google. If people see you rank for a huge brand in Google and they go to your site and it talks about a partnership, or some kind of mutual interaction you will be granted instantly with increased credibility.

Check out the list of sponsors, there is so much traffic in conjunction with those names.

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Yes, we all love getting link love, but we all love getting traffic too - right? I really don’t think it was Danny Sullivans intent to be greedy with the link juice. People react way to quickly when tests are being run (and no, I really don’t care if it’s not a test). I will run tests all day if it can prevent more spam, and take less time away from me having to deal with idiots.

Something else people need to pay attention to is traffic they are getting from Sphinn. I am seeing some amazing traffic from Sphinn, and to me, thats where it really matters. If you are doing your campaigns correctly anyway you won’t have to rely on a site like Sphinn to pass you any link authority.

My hat is off to Danny Sullivan for creating such an amazing site to share search industry news, and a social site that “SEO’s” are not hated, but accepted. Sphinn, you can keep nofollowing me all day if you like, as long as you keep sending me that amazing traffic from stories that are worthy!

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I am not a Craigslist master by any means, but after testing a few things out (and failing miserably a couple times), trying to get rid of stuff I no longer wanted, I think I finally figured out some methods of listing that could help those struggling with making heads or tails out of selling on CraigsList. I guess you don’t have to be literally selling products for these techniques to work, you could be offering services or anything else that CraigsList allows. My case study was based on selling a personal product of mine though!

To answer the question that I know you are thinking right now; YES, I really did make $500 bucks this morning on CraigsList in about 10 minutes. I will get into how in just a minute, but I want to give a little more background.

The last two weeks I have been testing and testing on CraigsList, I have been playing around with pricing, images, content - all with the exact same product. I wanted to come up with the best techniques possible to get the most money with the quickest time frame. I can better illustrate some of my findings with screen shots I took of my various listings. There are two that stand out that I think make the point better then anything.

Here is the very first listing that I made:

I made the ad very straight to the point with exact descriptions of what the product was including model numbers and everything. There was no personal touch at all. People are scared enough to buy electronics on places like CraigsList, so this ad might have scared some people off since I got NO emails, or calls for a week with this ad.

The listing that changed it all -

I want to point out the title on this photo compared to the other one. I have done a few things to make it stick out. I only included the things that people are searching for like “60 inch big screen” or “hd tv”. People could care less (from what I found out) about the brand name when doing initial searches. They may ask later on, but the point is to be found so they will ask you questions.

With the second example listing I showed you I got a call in 10 minutes (from time of listing), and it was a guy offering me full price (thus, making $500 bucks in 10 minutes). I probably got 30 calls before I finally took it off (I just wanted to test it out) and 40 emails all ready to buy the tv from me.

What were the main differences in the ad? First ad was not very personal. It was just giving you the specs of the tv and thats about it. The title was doing the same. There was nothing in the title that made it stand out, or made people want to click. Notice on the second ad how I have used symbols *** and wording like “NEED TO SELL” and only keywords that people are using to search.

When going through all the listings at CraigsList there are so many people have to choose from, you need to make yours stand out.

Look at the screen shot below and you will see what I am talking about.

You will see the arrow pointing to my ad, and you will notice a few others that stand out. Do you see the difference? These are the ads that will be clicked on, and these are the people who will make money quickly selling their items.

All the other ads will be skimmed through and not have as high of a click through rate, even if they have the same exact product at a better price. The point is to get them to click on the listing! People remember things like "Need to sell" so they get the idea they are getting a good deal, because "I need to sell", and that is why they click!

Hints -

• Use symbols to stand out such as ******* OR @@@@@@@@
• Use ALL CAPS when appropriate.
• Write the ad as if you were talking to a person that could care less about the model number (or brand)
• Use keywords that people would actually use when searching for a big screen tv.
• Use real pictures that you take yourself, and not from the manufacturer.

I had a pretty fun time testing out CraigsList as I have not been a huge user in past, but will be from now on. Just think about this. I probably could have sold the TV for the same price on eBay, but then I would have eBay and paypal fees cutting into my bottom line. I love CraigsList and this post just explained why!

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If you haven’t realized already Social Sites that allow for “Search Engine Friendly” Urls have a relatively easy time ranking in Google. This is due to Google’s over trusting nature on old and large sites. It is true that Google lets old sites get a way with Murder while new sites can’t steal a stick of gum. Don’t believe me? Start to watch how many times Wikipedia, Technorati and Squidoo show up in your every day search results. If you know how to leverage these sites you can get some pretty good rankings in a short amount of time for decent keywords. This method is nothing new in fact it has been overly exploited to the use of Social Media Squatting. Just like buying domains that have your competitors names or products in them you can register those pages at social media sites. I own a squidoo page for one of my old competitors names, I have never done anything with it and never will as we are in different leagues now and I don’t care, but the fact of the matter is I own their name on a large social site. I could rank that page for their brand name and have it filled with all of my companies information. But I digress, social squatting is not the point of this post.

The point is if you notice someone leveraging a social site to rank for a word that you are actively seeking you can poach the work that they have done to rank that page and sneak in right underneath them utilizing Google’s indented rank feature.

If there is a social site ranking in the top 20 for your keyword phrase, go and create a profile on that site with a slightly different URL and similar title tags. Then optimize the text to coincide with the keyword phrase and throw some good links to the page. If you do it right you will see the page show up as an indented rank just below your competitors already existing page.

For example go to Google and Type in Online Reputation Management you will see a squidoo lens on the second page. This used to be on the first page, but it is being re-done and they have lost their title tag and it is now on the second.
I know because our site 97th Floor ranks for Reputation Management words and I have been watching. The lens is labeled with the URL of /onlinereputationmanagement, so when they created their profile they chose their URL to be the main keyword without any spaces. What you would want to do is create your lens and choose your URL to say the same thing but with dashes. If that is taken then say the same with dashes and add a number or something else to make it slightly different like, /online-reputation-management-1 or /reputation-management-online. Then create your profile talking about your services or company linking it to your site and then publish it. Then link to it from your site, your blog or anywhere you can get some good links and you will see it jump through the hoops to an indent rank just below the existing site.

Now if you know what you are doing and don’t mind getting into a little battle you can optimize your social profile better then the first ranked page by passing more authority links to it with varied anchor text and you can replace that pages rank. If you are really good you can actually optimize your profile so well that it will separate you and the indent rank pushing the indent rank to the second page while keeping you on the first. At SMX Seattle one of the best takeaways from the Give it Up Session was explaining,

“Stephan Spencer has 7 tips in 7 minutes:
Secret #1 - Grouped results: Google groups results from the same site together. To find the true position of an indented (grouped) result, you can add a &num=9 to the domain search to see if indented listing drops off.”

This explains that the indented group result is not really the next in line it is most likely number 9 or 8 and Google chooses to move it up next to the other result since it is from the same domain in order to simplify their results.

So you can use that knowledge to steal your competitors rank by creating the profile, grabbing the group indent result, optimizing better and then pushing them to the second page.

This can also be done on Directories or any site that allows for business profiles. If you see a large site with a profile page of one of your competitors ranking you can most likely take advantage of that.

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I am amazed at how many competitors for some clients we have over here at 97th try to duplicate exactly what we are doing to get their websites ranked. The problem is they are missing the point with good search engine optimization and what it takes to rank sites. I see them duplicate things that I do that are only for “aesthetics”, thinking they are going to steal away my clients rankings. It is pretty funny, but I guess copying could be considered the best form of flattery. If these guys spent even half the time trying to develop some decent content then would already be a step closer in the right direction. I just love how they are all missing the point! I would love to hear any other funny stories of flattery related to this!

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With so many amazing social networks and communities to choose from, there is one main golden rule I think people should follow, and that is to be a good neighbor. Think about your real community where you live. How would you like it if your neighbor spammed you with flyers everyday about ring tones, or viagra?

However; if you built up a relationship with your neighbors, and they started to “trust” you they will probably be more willing to check out the things you like (or are offering) and you will build up more friends this way. Social communities can be a powerful source of traffic when done right. The traffic can even be a higher converting traffic source then the normal SERPs.

It really does not matter what social network you fancy more - MySpace, Facebook or some other one, you just need to become the type of “neighbor” that everybody loves talking about, and not in a bad way. If you spend some time recommending good things, proving good information, linking out to people that you have met (and like), the love will be returned.

If you need me to spell it out for you - make sure that you are not just saving your own articles, or web pages to sites like Del.icio.us or Digg. Share other peoples “stuff” in the community that you like (they will notice) and other things you like related to what you are doing. Make friends, ask people to be your friend, give people reasons to come back to your profile and most importantly, do everything you can to get your face out in the community!

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A few months back I was up late working, as usual, and was up so late, that the late, later, even latest show was over and the infomercials started. I happened to be watching one talking about making money online, and how easy it was etc. I like watching these anyway, because they are funny to me. I was paying close attention to the “keywords” (buzz words) they were using to grab peoples attention. The main reason I was taking notes was because one of our biggest clients at 97th is in the “make millions” industry!

So, in my process of doing a little late night keyword research I wrote down all of the “buzz” words they were using including the branding words they were using for their “new revolutionary money making system”. I came up with some pretty cool ideas, and keywords to test out.

I did a little competitive research online with the words and found out some of them were pretty amazing words, and the only thing I had to do is put them to the test and see if they converted worth a crap.

Long story short, After approval from my client, I pursued the keywords and found some pretty amazing words that are converting about 10% - 15% of the time (based on web analytics) for my client by watching infomercials.

The lesson here is to pay attention to non-traditional ways of keyword research. If you are still just using the old keyword tool from overture to find keywords, then you really need to think about better ways of doing keyword research (or get out of the industry all together).

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I just wanted to wish Cameron the best of luck in response to his moving on post! No doubt he is just getting started, and it’s going to be exciting to see all of the stuff he has in store! Good luck bro!

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