If you own a photography company, and are trying to go viral, I think you have one of the easiest industries (and biggest opportunities) there is to go viral with. I have had more posts hit the front page of Digg that were pictures then anything else, but the key here is to make sure you have some good link bait, and most importantly - let people know what you are offering them [Unbelievable PIC] - for example.

From the work I have seen of a few of my friends that are Photographers, you probably don’t have to look to far for something that could do well in a viral marketing scene. For example, I have a friend that is an Alabama Wedding Photographer, and he has showed me some of the funniest, non flattering, and “oops” type pictures he has taken (of the wedding goers) that I am sure these families do not want to end up in the family album. Without me even giving any ideas, I know you are starting to think of ways you could turn this into a viral post.

With permission (of course) he could use some of these photos on his blog, and give the post the title - “10 Pictures You Don’t Want To End Up In Your Wedding Album!” or “10 Things That Went On During Your Wedding That You Have No Idea About” or how about taking the cute route - “The 10 Cutest Kids Ever Caught On Film - Doing Something Bad” and then share a picture of the kid throwing a fist full of cake at Grandpa (while being very cute).

It would all depend on how long you stuck around taking pictures during a wedding, but at weddings where alcohol is involved, I am sure you could come up with a huge post laying out some of “The Funniest Pictures Of Drunk People At Weddings You Have Ever Seen” or “What Happens When You Are Drunk At A Wedding And Don’t Know Your Picture Is Being Taken”. You see, these would probably be some of the funniest pictures you have looked at in a while, but just telling people in the social networks to look at wedding pictures is not going to cut it. You have to make sure you are attracting users to click with these catchy “link baited” titles that make you want to click.

I have done case studies where I have shared pictures that were super funny, but gave them a boring non descriptive title, and no one ever saw them or knew about them. I would then use the same picture with a sexy title, and they caught like a wild fire and made it to the top of most social bookmarking or sharing sites. I know a lot of this may seem like common sense to us who understand this industry, but to a Photography business owner whose main focus is to take pictures that make them money, may not understand the power they may already posses with their photos when adding a blog and catchy title into the mix. That is the purpose of viral marketing idea Friday, and for me sharing this information.

Take this picture (below) I found after doing a simple Google image search of funny wedding photos - could have the funniest title ever “Just Imagine What The Wedding Night Is Going To Be Like”

As always, please feel free to send any viral marketing questions in the form of comments! We would also love to hear how you would add to the ideas we give (if you have suggestions). I love viral marketing, and the world is a much funner place (in my mind) because of it!

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An interview of a two part series was published over at Elance, 13 Ways to Make Your Blog Viral. I will be doing another interview this week that will go live in the coming month about basic SEO.

If you are not familiar with Elance they are one of the largest market place websites for Freelancers and Outsourcing. Everything from Virtual Assistants to Copywriters and Programmers.

It is pretty cool, when I first started offering seo services as a consultant I used Elance everyday to grab new clientèle and now Elance is one of my clients. Pretty cool how stuff like that works out.

That is my blogging Disclosure as well

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Thanks to Paul for submitting this last Friday in the form of a comment. This one I have so many ways to run with, that I actually had a hard time narrowing it down. I think I will give more examples of what a Financial Planning Company/Industry can do with viral marketing in later posts as well, because there are just so many. For now, I will stick with one of (what I feel) is the funniest stories I have ever heard that can be twisted to fit a Financial Planning Industry and Viral Marketing.

Here is a couple of pictures that were sent to me by Plastic Rewards (another company fishing for viral marketing ideas), a cash back credit card comparison website. Whether its true, or not, it makes me laugh and I know would make a ton of other people laugh. Being in the tech industry, and knowing a lot of computer techs, I have actually had a few of them tell me this stuff really did happen, and that they had to fish the credit cards out of the old “A” drives! (see pictures)

Like I said, I don’t know how true this is, and if people are really stupid enough to put credit cards in the “A” drive when on a website and asked for a credit card, but this is pretty funny if it is!

Since you can relate credit cards to finances, you can use this for a viral marketing campaign with a funny twist. Here would be my ideas of some of the funniest headlines for these pictures. “Ten Places You Should Never Stick Your Credit Card” (yes you could have fun with that one, and I did a simple Google search and found some pretty interesting stuff) or “The Way Stupid People Use Credit Cards [SEE PIC]” or “Please Insert Credit Card - No Wait, Not There!”

You see I could go on and on with the headlines of pictures that give me so much fuel like these ones do. I have several other funny financial related stories, and even more sent to me by Plastic Rewards (thank you - by the way) including pictures that I will use for other VMIF days.

I think you see how these could go pretty viral, and be some of the funniest stories you read for the day. It just takes a little imagination and how you can twist your industry into a viral campaign. Please, continue to send your industry requests in!

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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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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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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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This is a Quick Update things are crazy this week, Mat and I are speaking at the eTourism Summit next week in San Francisco. We are pumped to be there. We plan on opening up the travel industries minds to Viral Content and SEO in general. We have some sweet screen shots of stats from our latest viral campaign that got our client over 109,000 Uniques in two days. It was sweet, it got 25,000 hits from Reddit which is the most I have seen from them, I would be interested to see if our readers have seen more.

Social Media for Firefox has been updated today to version 1.0.14 in order to fix some problems we have had with Del.icio.us. We also noticed last night that Reddit has changed how they handle things. We have fixed that as well, the only thing now is you have to be logged into Reddit in order for the tool to work. They changed their search function that we use.

Social Media for Firefox has had over 20,000 downloads, and according to Webmaster Central we got over 5,500 links. We also rank for “Social Media” in the top ten and are pretty stoked on that. Also I have had numerous people say that they have been able to drive their accounts into the top 500 users on digg because of the tool. I had a bunch of people email me and say they hit the digg homepage for the first time with the tool. Same with people focusing on Stumble and Reddit.

Mat and I are speaking next week at the eToursim Summit Nov. 8th and 9th. Im speaking on two panels one on Reputation Management and the other on Social Media. Mat is speaking on Blogging. They may be like 10 tickets left but I doubt it, if anyone is going that reads us regularly let us know.

All my family was evacuated in California but no one lost their homes, we were very fortunate. I had a friend whose entire yard front back was scorched, along with their truck sitting in the driveway. Yet their house was 100% untouched. Got to hang out with Cameron Olthuis and his family this week cause they had to leave SD and that was a lot of fun. Our wives hadn’t met before and our kids got a long really good.

Hope everyone else is doing well, sorry for the personal post and no meat on some new technique. We will be posting some sweet things we have been testing in Social Media leading to conversions soon.

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So over the weekend I took a little break from my computer (I know - hard to believe), and attended a 10 year class reunion for my wife. Class reunions are a whole different topic that I don’t think I will ever get into! The one thing I will say about class reunions if you have never been to one is that they are a big “size you up party” more then anything. Of course people wanted to know what my wife had been up to during the last ten years, and with 3 kids and me … that was pretty much it! Then the conversation would always come my way because my wife would tell people that I worked from home, and ran my own businesses. Then the question would come; “What do you do?”

I decided to turn it into a little un-scientific marketing research, and turned it into a question; “Do you know what SEO is”? I would ask, and not one of the 15 people that I asked had a clue. I am talking serious deer in the headlights here. It would not get much better when I followed it up with “search engine optimization?”. Even when I told them when they go to Google and type in a keyword phrase, those results that come back … they would interrupt and say, “oh you get those sponsored results” …. by this time I was DONE with the conversation, and just told them I ran Internet businesses, and helped others by consulting.

The point here is we have a great opportunity as SEOs. We are in a field that is ready to harvest. I am amazed how many people call me back after talking to them about what I do, even when they still have no clue exactly what it is. They just know that they need help online, and I seem like the person to do it. It seems almost everyone has a need, or knows someone who has a need for SEO services. It does scare me though with so many worthless companies out there claiming to know SEO, and I usually go in and clean up a mess, and try to polish our reputation as SEOs.

Anyway, I just thought it was very interesting that not one person out of 15 I talked to had a clue of what SEO was, or even understood the industry enough to have a conversation. My next post? I think I will talk to you about the lady who asked me how old my son was, and when I told her 13 months, she said … oh so almost a year? Um… yea….

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I do my best to teach (those who ask) about finding targeted niches and keywords when starting their business online (and sticking with them), and I want to spotlight a company that I think has been brilliant at this. The guys at DB Clay are friends of mine, (especially Mr. Diggles) and this is not a paid post, and I just wanted to thank them online for sending me one of the sickest unique wallets I have ever owned in my life!

DB Clay has been making unique and designer wallets for several years now and has had a humble beginning, but has managed to turn their niche into an empire, and stay true to their product line. The reason for their success is they figured out what people were looking for online when it came to wallets, and they hit that group of people hard, and did not venture out into other areas. They knew the keywords they wanted to be found for, and built a website around it.

They also understand about the power of social communities and getting people to talk about your product, so they started Evil Backwards (LIVE). DB Clay considers this their online business paper trail, but I think of it as an amazing idea to get people involved and actively talking about product. Every business owner can learn a lesson from the accomplishments of DB Clay, and their small little niche!

Again guys, thanks for the wallet!

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