I don’t think very many people even know what Postum is, but it is a coffee substitute for those that want a hot beverage in the morning, (or anytime) but do not want the buzz of a regular cup of coffee. I happen to know of Postum very well, having a Dad who was an avid drinker of the beverage.

You may be asking yourself what does Postum have to do with this SEO blog of mine, or viral marketing for that matter? I don’t know exactly how I can tie it in, but here is the lesson to be learned - If you want to survive in marketing online, you must be aware of any, and every kind of marketing opportunities that may present themselves. You must also keep up to date with everything that is going on around you. Pay attention to things that people are talking about, blogging about, doing anything about!!

A few weeks ago my Dad told me he was having a hard time finding his Postum anywhere anymore. Me being the marketer I am, I decided to investigate, and found out that Kraft was discontinuing their coffee substitute after many decades in business. I guess because they just don’t sell enough anymore. I know of a handful of people who drink it on a regular basis, but not many so I can see why it would happen.

My Dad was not a happy camper about it, so he decided to stock up before it was all gone. I also decided to stock up too, but not to share with my Dad (and no I don’t drink Postum). I thought that this might be the perfect opportunity to make some decent ROI, and at the very least have something fun to blog about.

It turns our I was right in my hunch, and these jars of postum are hot items on eBay right now selling for (in some cases) 5 times what they cost on the shelf. I remember my Dad saying they cost him about 4 bucks or so for a jar, and those same jars are going for anywhere from 35 - 50 bucks a jar right now. I bought a case of them, and am holding onto them a little longer, who knows I may end up giving them to my Dad after all, but it was a fun experience for me to test out. (I had to do something to make me feel better since all my Barry Bonds cards are no longer worth much!!) I can see why these kind of marketers do what they do, its kinda fun to see something like this happen! You don’t feel like you were the one who bought a house one month to late just before the market decided to go south!!!

I guess the real point I am trying to make is that if you are always on top of the market, searching out trends and other things like I just explained, you can make a pretty decent living on places like eBay and Craigslist. Just think about this - the people (who I think were crazy) that bought the Xboxes for thousands, (or Wii’s or PS3s - you name it) even 10k (one listing I saw when it was going down) when they first came out years ago. It’s the people who are taking advantage of the market situations (and paying attention to all the trends etc) that are making the real profit and money online!

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If you missed the update Chris gave on Monday, we are going to be doing something new on Friday from now on. If you didn’t guess from the title of the post, then let me spell it out for you.

Chris and I are asked all the time by businesses and individuals for help with viral marketing ideas in what they consider to be “very boring industries”. In some cases Chris and I have been challenged that we would not be able to come up with any ideas at all for some of these businesses. As always, we are up for the challenge and still feel that no matter what your industry is, you can find a way to market your site with viral content.

Before I get into today’s viral marketing idea (which I tried hard to find what I felt was one of the most boring industries on the web), I wanted to also note that anyone who is needing some ideas for their industry, please feel free to to either comment on (any) of the “Viral Marketing Idea Friday” posts, or click on the about us, find our email and let us know. We are going to go through all of the emails and comments during the week, and then pick out which one we feel would be good for that week. If we don’t pick yours one week, stay tuned into us each Friday, because it could be the next “Viral Marketing Idea Friday”!

Today’s idea was not sent in, it was not asked by anyone, but again - came from my brain that never stops thinking like a social media marketer (remember the post). I had gotten rid of a bunch of office furniture this week on Craigslist that I no longer needed since I finally updated (and upgraded) my new office. (By the way I sold the furniture in about 2 minutes after the posting went live on Craigslist - I guess I need to do an update to my post about making 500 dollars on Craigslist in 10 minutes. I honestly never thought I would top that - another day, another post.) Getting back on track - As I was taking pictures of the the furniture I wanted to take a picture of a piece that had gotten damaged (and disclose everything) by one of the movers when they were loading the furniture into our new house.

Here is the picture -

As you can see the damage is not bad, but that is not the point. The point is - This picture got me thinking about so many ways that I could turn this simple picture into a viral marketing campaign for a moving business that is found online (if only I had a local moving business, or general moving business as a client.) This gives me the perfect opportunity to share some of my ideas of how (even a smalll Mom and Pop) moving business could turn this picture (or idea) into a viral campaign that would increase trust, build links, build brand and name recognition, and help in the ranking of their keywords.

The picture just gives me the idea, so I am not saying I would use this exact picture, but you could find 9 other pictures of what you feel are some of the most horrendous moving disasters (either caught on video, or still picture) that you find on the web, You Tube or even that have happened in your life. You can give it the title “10 Of The Craziest Moving Disasters Ever Caught On Tape” or “Ten Of The Craziest Moving Disasters Pictures You Have Ever Seen“.

If you are the local moving business trying to gain more exposure for local keywords, you can use this in a blog post (or static page) talking about how that won’t happen with your company (of course), but it also keeps you really relevant when trying to use a social media site to market with, and it does not seem as out of place like it would on a site selling perfume. My guess if something like that was submitted on Digg, the community would eat it up.

I don’t know if you agree or not, but I feel that a local moving company is close to one of the most boring industries on the net, so if we can come up with something that would go viral for that kind of a company - anything is possible. Plus its something that I feel all would enjoy in the social communities because you are not creating something spammy that is full of garbage that won’t go anywhere. I can honestly see myself enjoying looking at videos of crazy moving disasters (mostly to make myself feel better for some of the crazy ones I have been involved in over the years).

Well there you go! That is pretty much the jist of “Viral Marketing Idea Friday” - and this would be as good of a place to remind you that if you are having a hard time coming up with viral content for your website - let us help. Either leave a comment in this (or any other “VMIF” posts) or send us an email and we will see what we can do to help.

Chris and I wanted to do this because we feel one of the biggest frustrations for companies that are trying to grow, and really learn about search engine optimization/marketing is the execution side of it. They attend search engine optimization trainings, and hear people speak till they are blue in the face about how important social communities are, and how you need to get your content on them, but thats as far as they go. They never teach you execution! The execution part is where Chris and i want to be able to help out! We look forward to seeing what this can turn into.

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I am sure you have read or listened to the hoopla going on over at Digg, If you haven’t to sum it up, Digg wants to even the playing field by tweaking the algorithm so that every submitter not just users with a lot of active friends can make the homepage. A lot of top users are seeing their stories die never hitting the front page with near or over 200 diggs while new users are hitting the front page with under 30 diggs. Last year in order to get to the front page you would sign up for the long haul, by digging and commenting others stories until you were noticed by enough users, then submit quality content and watch how close you get, then rinse and repeat (in a one sentence nut shell). This year you need to be more creative no more using Digg for the social aspect, no more late night chats about the natural high you get when playing the game that is Digg. If you are like most up and coming “middle class Diggers” (Hat Tip to Reg) seeing your stories mysteriously buried at 18 diggs after an hour, or hitting 189 diggs in 7 hours with a super sweet timely submission only to watch it die at 210 then you may want to try these tips.

1.) New Account - First log out of digg, clear your cache, cookies etc. then reset your IP settings to get a new fresh IP. Then go sign up for a brand new account, “diggorama”, “diggalicious”, “diggorati” any of those could be a sweet user name (if anyone has those I apologize, I made those up just now).

2.) No Avatar - Do not add an avatar, an avatar that you use on other social sites is social remember we need not to be social to succeed and adding an avatar is a sure sign of an “in for the long haul” digger, we are trying to look “Natural” here.

3.) LOLCats - Go digg some LOLCat stories there are plenty, make sure you don’t digg any pages that are deep down, no up and coming, no up and coming all/most nothing that would make your account look like you know how to use digg. Stick to the front page and subsequent front page archives. You can get away with the Top Ten FP’s in all topics widget on the right side.

4.) Submit - Now that you have dugg a dog licking a screen, an Anti Giuliani, and 250 Ron Paul Stories you are ready to submit. If you are having a hard time finding that great story first from a quality blog or trusted news source, go to a top diggers submission page, and grab a story that he has submitted that has 60 diggs in 3 hours and submit it with your account. Don’t worry the Digg Dupe engine will never catch it.

5.) Beg - Lastly since you can’t get any diggs from friends here are some tactics of scrounging up enough diggs to make the front page. Remember you only need 18-35 diggs so it can’t be too hard.

6.) Cover Your Tracks - Clear Cache, Cookies etc., reset IP, create new user name then digg the story and rinse and repeat (this will also give you 35 “Quality” accounts to use for your next submit. Remember when you make the front page you will get a lot of fans and they will start to digg your stories and you will never make the front page again.

7.) Be a Good Neighbor - Knock on your neighbors houses and ask to use their computer real quick.

8.) Caffeine - Hit up every Starbucks or Cyber Cafe in your town, you could probably get it done in about 5 1/2 hours since you aren’t a top user praying at 23 hours and 58 minutes

9.) You’ve Got Mail - Email your mom, dad, brothers, sisters, friends and everyone that doesn’t know what digg is and tell them to sign up then digg your story, then send you their login to use for a later.

10.) RSS - this is actually probably the most realistic, dump all your friends on your old account or use that new account with no avatar, and set up RSS alerts for all your old friends and have them do the same for you, just don’t comment on their submissions that would leave bread crumbs.

11.) Airports - Grab an Amex (to get rewards) and hit up every terminal in the airport

12.) Outsource - Use a Freelance site to hire some overseas diggs. Pay them 2 cents to digg your story. Actually since the Dollar is so crappy you may have to pay a lot more, but hey you are trying to get the FP so that your blogspot sub domain will have a chance at the digg effect.

I am sure I could think of more, if you have any please leave them in the comments. If you don’t believe the above read the comments of this story with a screen shot of a story going FP with 19 diggs. Maybe this is a way to get every digg user to have 5 accounts so that the investment banks can say we have 15 million registered users instead of 3 million or whatever it is.

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I have been a huge fan of local search (and Google Local) for quite a few years now, and have signed up for and/or recommended every client I have sign up with any and all search engine local programs. That being said, I am not sure how many have noticed what Google is now doing with their local results - check this picture out: (I did a search for Gilbert Arizona Web Design)

You will see much more then 3 results come back in the local results now (old version just showed 3 at most). I think this is a good move (even though the text is harder to read) because I always wondered just how many people actually clicked on the link to see more local results. This has the potential to give more local businesses exposure, users writing more reviews and make it easy for them to rank higher on the (more natural) search results for at least one of their most targeted phrases, and do it for free. Of course Google is going to benefit in the form of advertising revenues, but I still think this was a pretty good move.

If you are newer to local search on Google, you can go to http://local.google.com and click on the learn more for “add/edit a business” and sign your business up. It is pretty simple and easy to do, and most local businesses are not doing it, so this could give you even one more edge over them. Any of the major other engines have local programs to that you can sign up for Ask Local, Yahoo Local - you get the picture.

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I’m sure most of you have read all the posts that have been backing us up on removing Rip Off Report from the index. In case you didn’t you can see all the posts here

Public Spam Report: Google Your Honeymoon with Rip Off Report has to Stop

The Anatomy of a Rip Off Report Lawsuit

Chris Bennett on Rip Off Report

Rip Off Report Ripping off those Reported

Online Shake-Downs: help persuade Google to ban Ripoffreport

Also I am speaking at SMX West in Feb. on Reputation Management. SMX is by far the best conference series, it has effected my business more than others, and it is really hands on and intimate it will be really easy for you to meet all the SEO’s you want to meet.

Let us know by email or in the comments if you are going so we can make sure and meet up.

Also Mat and I are going to add some structure to our SEO Blog, we will be starting two different post series that will be taking place on Mondays and Fridays. Mondays will be a list and some notes on the best Viral Articles/Videos from the week before. I am tagging and saving so many of these throughout the week I figure I should start sharing them and adding some tips and thoughts. I will try to include one from us as often as possible too so I can give you more in depth info.

On Fridays we will cover Viral/Link Bait ideas we will be listing some ideas you can use on your sites and we will talk about ways you can research. We believe that every site can create a linkable article that doesn’t compromise its reputation and greatly helps its marketing efforts. We have not had a site yet that we haven’t been able to execute a nice piece of link bait for.

If you are stumped and don’t know how to create something for your site that will be worth while, please post the sites topic in the comments or email us so we can create Ideas for you. You can use us to generate ideas for you, we love doing it, and we would love to be stumped.

Also I will be releasing beta invites to a startup I have with my brother who owns a web design company that I think will revolutionize Blog Stats, and Social Media for Firefox has some sweet updated coming soon.

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*Update* New links at the bottom to some really good cases against Rip Off Report

Before You Jump to any conclusions, I am not saying sites that warn consumers of true scams and rip offs are bad, I think they are very very good. I love the Internet because it levels the playing field for small businesses and individuals to compete with big business. Before the Internet that was impossible. However, I do not think that there should be a place in Google’s search results for a company that does nothing to scan or proof read their “User Generated Content” and that also blatantly spams and violates Google’s TOS. This Brings me to the current marriage of Google and Rip Off Report.

I am sure you are all familiar with Rip Off Report, it is by far the largest database of complaints about businesses, individuals and pretty much anything on the planet from religion to government all the way to Racist remarks. Rip Off Report has been accused of all sorts of shady things, racketeering, black mail and rip offs. I am not going to get into the lawsuits against it’s owner Ed Magedsonon or any of the many allegations of what appears to be shady practices. What I am going to get into is how they are being leveraged to manipulate Google’s search results and how Google is fueling their questionable business.

Rip Off Report thrives off of ranking in Google’s search results, I would say that the only reason they are so popular is because of the relationship they have with Google’s search results. According to Compete.com Rip Off Report receives roughly 606,439 referrals from Google’s search results each month. I bet you wish your site got that many referrals from Google each month, in fact I would say most sites on the net don’t. From October 2007 until now (Jan 2008) those referrals have come from 5,761 different search keywords. Again this is according to Compete. I was curious about how Yahoo and Live treat Rip Off Report in their search results. I don’t think that you will find the results surprising as Google can tend to favor and love certain domains where as Yahoo and Live don’t play favorites as often.

I ran a ranking report on the first 89 keywords that Compete said where their top referring search terms. Here are the results you can download the PDF here

As you can see Google is definitely treating Rip Off Report different than Yahoo and Live. Live has dropped them from their results all together, so applauds all around for them. Something I found surprising was Yahoo has almost twice as many pages indexed (676k +) as Google, but ranks virtually nothing whereas Google pretty much ranks every single post in its index in the top 20.

Let Me Get to the Meat:

First I’m going to lay out how they are very much violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. For those of you that aren’t familiar with them you can view the page here,

Like I showed above Rip Off Report thrives, and virtually exists only because of Google’s treatment of it. Look at what they say on the home page to encourage posting with them,

“By filing a Ripoff Report it’s almost like creating your own web site
..And, it’s FREE.

Your Ripoff Report will be discovered by millions of consumers! Search engines will automatically discover most reports, meaning that within just a few days or weeks, your report may be found on search engines when consumers search, using key words relating to your Ripoff Report.”

They flat out say, we get your crap indexed and ranked in the top ten in a matter of days. That is music to the ears of a shady employee that just got fired.

1.)Technical Guidelines from Google:

“Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.”

If you search for Rip Off Reports search results pages in Google by doing this site:ripoffreport.com - intitle:”search results” it will bring back only the search results pages that are currently indexed in Google which on my results shows 49,400. That is a lot of pages that shouldn’t be in Google’s index.

If you don’t think this is a big deal read this article from Search Engine Land and the main post from Matt Cutts of Google.

2.)Quality Guidelines - Specific Guidelines Section:

“Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”

Subdomains - w3.ripoffreport.com Exact replica of Rip Off Report over 2,000 pages indexed in Google.

Domains - www.badbusinessbureau.com Exact Replica of Rip Off Report over 17,000 pages indexed in Google.

3 Google Cached Links of the same exact post on all 3 domains, there are thousands of cached Duplicates.
1Cached on Jan 11, 2008
2 Cached on Jan 6, 2008
3 Cached on Jan 6, 2008

They are definitely up for Spammers of the Year.

3.) also from Quality Guidelines - Specific Guidelines Section

“Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.”

Check out the recent post attacking us

Check out the title tag,

“97th Floor It Is Better On Top Spy With Firefox 97th Floor social media scam spyware tracked users scam 97th floor firefox social media Internet Internet”

They mention 97th Floor 3 times, Firefox 2 times, scam 2 times, social media 2 times then Internet Internet at the end.

Common sense tells me that isn’t the way Google would like title tags to be written. If I was Matt Cutts and I followed Rip Off Reports logic to title tags, my title tag would be like this compared to the original.

Original Title:
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

New Title based off of Rip Off Report Style Optimization:
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Matt Cutts, Google Google and SEO Matt Cutts, Gadgets Internet Internet

Do you think the person that wrote the title for the post about our Social Media for Firefox ext. wanted it to rank in the top ten of Google? It was written on Jan 7, 2008 and indexed and in the top 10 of Google on Jan 8, 2008. Rip Off Report can I hire your spammer seo?

Most of the posts in Rip Off Report are totally stuffed full of keywords both in the Title and the body, it is so blatant it is a joke. This stuff makes BMW Germany look like a saint.

The validity of these posts are what brings me to my last points.

They State on their Homepage,

“While we encourage and even require authors to only file truthful reports, Ripoff Report does not guarantee that all reports are authentic or accurate.”

Doesn’t that contradict itself? I know that it is virtually impossible to guarantee that user generated content can be 100% reliable, but we all know the trouble that sites like Myspace and Facebook get into when things slip through the cracks, why should Rip Off Report be any different. What, they require that they post truth by putting it in the TOS, but never policing or following through. Here is how I know that the post about our Social Media tool is 100% crap or written by a brain dead idiot.

It reads,

“Install 97th floor social media attachment for firefox and get tracked.

Way to go, database user info…Whatever would that before.

Nice way to use your add-on -build your business at others expense.

97th floor claims it was an error. Pretty big oversight. 97th floor catches it after it could be to late for most users who downloaded it. Social media firefox cheaters. Good luck next time.

97th floor ripoff - tried to scam and now caught?

Tmx wpb fl
west palm beach, Florida
U.S.A.”

First of all is that even English? Second here are the facts. There are only 3 sites that posted that I may be trying to spy on people with my new Fire Fox tool. Seo Scoop, Ekstreme, and Sphinn which was a link to the story on Ekstreme. All the stories had updates within 24 hours stating that the bug had been fixed and that I handled it well and that we were in the clear and that it was a super sweet tool. So all of the sudden a post gets added to Rip Off Report on Jan 7th 2008 about 5 months after I released the tool, and it says I am a scammer and all this stuff, but the only places the writer could of gotten the content were from sites saying, “Updated, 97th Floor is in the clear”. So this was a blatant post to damage my companies Rep. and to rank in the top Ten for my name. As he even admits in the first post that we “clam it is an error” and that it was a “big oversight” so he read all the posts saying we fixed it and that it was a mistake, but posted it anyways. I wander if it is because on of our biggest keyword referrals from google to us is “Rip Off Report”

Look at the rebuttal which was posted a couple hours after the first post was made,

“Tmx wpb fl
west palm beach, Florida
U.S.A.
97th floor

Upon further review, the social media extension is legitimate. It has been modified and was a true and correct error. Will download again and continue to use.”

The guy says he loves the tool and that he is going to use it again. The time frame is so close to the original post that it makes me think did he post it, wait to get the email that it is live, and then go post the rebuttal, all as an opportunity to make it look real and to have an excuse to use the term, “97th Floor” a couple more times. It just doesn’t make sense to me.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page are in Rip Off Report and it is still bed buddies with Google?

Go to Google and type in “Sergey Brin California” you will see around number 8 this post(don’t worry Sergey No Followed that for ya).

Claims that some guys named Sergey Brin and Larry Page where drunk and picking up teenage girls in a coffee shop in California.

“I am sixteen years old and I met Sergey Brin in a coffee shop in Santa Monica. Sergey started talking to me and my friend and told us that he was a big shot in computers or something. He wrote down his first name and cell phone number and asked me to give him a call the next day to go out.

My friend left because she had to go meet her mom. I stayed because I was bored and Sergey bought me a milk shake. He really knows how to talk to a girl. He told me that he can get me in at any concert for free. His friend Larry arrived, and him and Sergey had to go. When I called his cell phone the next day, a message came in: ‘This is Sergey Brin, please leave a message.’ That’s how I knew what his last name is. When he called me back I asked him about the free tickets but he said that he wanted to see me to give them to me in person. I had a bad feeling about it, especially when I spoke to my friend the next day and she said this guy wants something. He is like thirty or even maybe older!

When i talked to him I told him I was sixteen and he said: ‘I don’t kiss and tell. He you want we can meet in a hotel, have a nice time and I’ll bring the free tickets’. ‘ Then he said: ‘Have ever had Vodka?’ I thought I would talk about this guy here because he is way too old to want to go out with me. I am a virgin, I don’t drink, and I am not meeting nobody in a hotel!
Peace-

Meredith
Beverly Hills, California
U.S.A.”

Then there is an update,

“I forgot to say that Sergey Brin was trying to hit on bothe my friend Maria and me at the coffe shop. He is really gross! His friend Larry introduced himself as Larry Page. Sergey Brin really smelled of liquor. BAD!! Larry seemed sober but he kept on looking at my boobs and my friend’s. Then Sergey Brin was asking if they were real, and it made me laugh because he was funny.

I think he was really drunk. At some point he poured something out of a tiny bottle in a paper bag in his cup of coffe. That was after my friend left. He asked me if I wanted some. I didn’t wanna sound like a loser but I said no. I had a bad feeling about the whole thing. Then like I said I talked to him on the phone the next day, but I did not make a date. He called me the next day and a few times after that. Sergey Brin sounded really drunk again! Larry Page sound like the same old pervert, but he didn’t try nothing, because his friend saw me first I think and my friend left.

Anyway he is too old for me that Sergey Brin! He said he drives a really nice car and wanted to take me for a spin but I was afraid of what he’d try to do to me in the car. Thank you for reading this.

Meredith
Beverly Hills, California
U.S.A.”

Then Meredith’s friend Maria Velasquez pipes in (but it was posted by Meredith)
I was there what a creep this Sergey Brin and his friend Larry Page

“My name is Maria Velasquez. That Sergey Brin guy is really creepy. My friend and I was at the coffe shop in Santa Monica and that Sergey Brin Guy and his friend Larry Page wanted to pick us up. I left because I had to meet my mom. I told Larry Page no can do. I think he liked my friend Meredith better because he kept on looking at her boobs. They were trying to impress us because Sergey said that him and Larry Page worked for a big computer company or something. Larry got mad at Sergey when he took a phone call and said Larry’s last name over the phone to someone. He said ‘Page is here with me, you wanna talk to him?’ That’s how we knew the other guy’s last name. Sergey Brin was just too drunk to care anyway. I’m not even seventeen yet and those two are way too old for me or Meri.
I LOVE JLO!”

LOL, “I LOVE JLO”…. You can’t make this crap up.

So to sum up an extremely long post, Rip Off Report is spamming Google’s index, and Google is currently letting them get a way with it. They know this and so do their users and as a result thousands of peoples lives are being ruined due to blatant lies and and made up stories. Again I am a lover of the Internet and as messed up as Rip Off Report maybe there is a place on the internet for lies and junk, that is the beauty of the net we all have a voice. However there is no place for this whatsoever in Google’s search results.

P.S.

All Links to ROR are Happily No Followed

I Love JLO

*Update Rand at SeoMoz is backing us up, and he brought up another TOS violation that ROR is engaging in. Read the post to get the full details but, it looks like ROR is not putting No Follow on Paid links and advertisements.

Also great post by Andy Beal and Distilled

And a new post diving head first into the legal side of ROR by Sarah Bird who is in charge of legal at SEOmoz

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If you are thinking of going to SMX West let me try and convince you. One of the most important aspects of success is the old adage, “it is not what you know but who you know.” This couldn’t be further from the truth in SEO and the online business world. You know someone at TC or Mashable it is going to be easier to get a look, you know some top diggers you will front page more often, etc.

SEO Conferences and specifically SMX conferences are the best way to expand your network and grow your online “Crew.” SMX has been my favorite for networking, because the feel and the structure is more geared towards just that. Danny and Chris are working hard to make sure that there is an open environment to talk, discuss and meet pretty much anyone that you want in the industry. SEO’s are already cool by nature and all about networking so it makes it even better. If you are thinking of going in Feb, and whether it is your first conference or not, let me share a personal experience with you as to why you must attend.

Mat and I planned to go to SMX Advanced in Seattle, it had been a while since we had been to any conferences, and we had a lot of huge plans in the works for 97th Floor, clients and our sites. So we figured it was the time to go and really expand on our network. We have been doing SEO for a long time and I guess cause we had gotten into it together, we really didn’t network that much until this last year. We had just landed the sweetest client of all time, we had Social Media for Firefox in idea/alpha stage, we relaunched the new 97th Floor design and migrated our old blogs and we really wanted to get to know some people in the industry.

To make a long story short (you can read the rant) I ended up getting stranded in Vegas for 2 days, I missed the entire conference except the last session. Mat was chilling in Seattle on his own for two days and I was stuck on a laptop in a terminal with 60 super angry people. Yet it still turned out to be the most productive conference I have ever attended. After the last session everyone went and got some dinner and then headed over to the SEOMoz after party. It was a super intimate get together at a sweet little billiards hall and Mat and I got to know everyone. Specifically Cameron Olthuis, he and I had been commenting on each others blogs and emailing each other, he now lives where I grew up in Cali, and I live where he grew up in Utah and there aren’t very many SEO’s that Surf at least that I know of, so we had a lot to talk about. As a direct result of growing the contacts and expanding the online IM Crew, we generated over a million unique visitors in the last 6 months that we wouldn’t of if we didn’t go. Our eyes were opened up to some new avenues of marketing, specifically making boring sites go viral. Below is some snippets of just 3 sites that had their traffic and success increased because we went to SMX.

A Site Mat and I Run
May 2007 2,086
Jun 2007 2,362
Jul 2007 2,850
Aug 2007 9,975 (this is when we started to implement things)
Sep 2007 25,736
Oct 2007 19,143
Nov 2007 18,249
Dec 2007 32,653

A Clients Site
May 2007 19,704
Jun 2007 16,008 (I called client, we are going to switch our strategy and focus on certain types of content)
Jul 2007 12,348
Aug 2007 12,721
Sep 2007 10,736 (finally got site ready and started to implement for a push in Oct.)
Oct 2007 149,586 (One of the viral articles we did this month got over 4,600 links and counting)
Nov 2007 32,413
Dec 2007 94,786

Site I Partner With a Buddy
Jun -Sept (I have an idea for a site I got from talking to some people at SMX)
Oct 2007 47,458 (started the site brand new domain on Oct. 27th)
Nov 2007 66,534
Dec 2007 76,555
Jan 2008 17,767 (so far)

Together that equals 669,670 unique visitors not 1 million plus, but this is just 3 sites out of about 10 specifically that were all greatly effected by attending SMX.

So if you are new to SEO conferences, or you haven’t attended an SMX, you need to go. You will be surprised on how easy it is to meet the people you need to, in order to grow your business.

I will be speaking on Reputation Management so come and say hi. I am looking forward to getting to finally meet Chris Winfield face to face as we have emailed, and talked on the phone, but never in person. I want to sit down and chat with Rand as we have always said hi in passing and really the longest conversation I have had with him was when I emailed him and and went off cause my friends Pest Control website that I was marketing for pennies hadn’t been approved by SocEngine as fast as I would have liked. I need to digg up that email, I was like, “who is this Rand guy, I paid my $7 bucks over a month ago.” I also want to meet Tamar and many others, of course all of our readers.

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Some might consider it a blessing to be able to see everything as a marketing opportunity (as I do), but sometimes I wonder if its a curse.

Let me explain -

Here is a picture of my son I took the other day with my iPhone (thus the sucky quality - sorry) of something my son had discovered to be one of the “funnest” things he had ever done (his words). He decided this all on his own too, that going down a steep hill in his Tonka truck would be a good idea:

Just looking at the picture, it looks like a normal picture of a kid having fun with a toy, right? Well here is the problem for me. I look at this picture, and my mind starts to race, and gets flooded with so many marketing ideas that I think I am going to explode if I don’t act.

The very first thing that comes to my mind is this - I may have a client selling children’s toys, and what I start to think about is how I can use this to better market their site, make it go viral, build links, and of course - trust. For example - finding 9 other uses for a Tonka truck (besides the one pictured) and trust me, my son has about 20 other uses of that Truck that I think Tonka had not intended. Then, I can create some amazing content for a blog post worthy of building up a ton of links - “10 Uses Of Tonka Trucks They Never Intended [PICS INCLUDED]” and it would probably end up being pretty dang funny post that would get lots of attention.

Now don’t get my wrong, I can appreciate a funny picture of my son without thinking about some way to monetize it, but I just wanted to share with you a little insight to how our (Chris and I) brains work. We have blogged in the past that anyone can find a way to make their topic go viral (even for a boring industry), and all it takes is a little creative thinking (just like this with this picture).

Hopefully this makes sense, and you see my point of just thinking outside the box in order to take advantage of marketing opportunities. I guess I am lucky to have the kind of son I have, as he is ALWAYS giving me more then enough ideas to be able to go viral with!

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What am I talking about? Reputation Management - My favorite subject of 2008!

2007 was a good year for cleaning up reputations of clients over here at 97th Floor. Chris and I pride ourself on what we have been able to accomplish for some pretty big businesses (and individuals) with online reputation problems. However; one thing has also stuck out, is how quickly some businesses give up on their online reputation problem. You have got to remember that in some cases (if you are finally starting to do something about it) you are going up against sites or articles that have been hammering at you for years. You are not going to clean that up with little effort, time or money.

If you think that you can easily clear up some bad search engine results after just a couple of months and a few hundred dollars, you are very mistaken! Its funny to me sometimes to see big businesses, that obviously have loads of money to dump into marketing give up after a few months with what they consider little results, or the “negative” results only moving down a couple spots. In some cases I have been told by company VPs that just moving the negative result from the #1 spot to the #2 spot has increased their sales, and reduced the number of canceled sales or charge backs. These negative results have caused some of our clients millions of lost dollars a year, so the money spent per month to get rid of the results outweighs the cost of the reputation management if you keep the long term picture in mind.

If you are in this industry, you know how huge pushing negative press down even a few spots is a huge accomplishment. I am amazed at how quickly businesses want to throw in the towel after a few months, if the negative press is not moved off the first page completely. My suggestion to these businesses that are going through a cleaning up process - be patient and hope even for a result below the page break on the first page. It will do more good for you then you realize.

You must remember you are going up against pages that have been indexed for years, have years of links built up, and have great trust and authority (although sometimes I don’t agree with how much authority (and trust) Google gives some of these sites in certain cases - but that is another post - another day).

Cleaning up your online reputation problem will take time, money and a lot of patience - make no doubt about that! Make it a goal in 2008 to do everything it takes to clean up your online reputation, and spend whatever amount of time (and available budget) it takes to do so, even if it takes until 2009. If you are in business for the long haul (like I am) then it must be done, and will eventually help your businesses bottom line. If you continue to tackle the problem head on, and not give up, you will get results - maybe not in a couple of months, but eventually you will win. I see proof of this everyday with what I do for clients that don’t give up to quickly.

If you are ready to clean up your online reputation in 2008, remember Chris and I have given you some pretty powerful information on reputation management already that should help get you started.

I also wanted to take this time to wish everyone, especially our readers a Happy New Year! 2008 is going to be an amazing year over here at 97th Floor, and I am proud to be a part of it!

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