Archive for the 'SEM – Search Engine Marketing' Category
Oh,Pick Me!
One of the first things I learned early in my career is that when you are selling something, you will never make a sale unless you ask for the money! Just like the famous expression from Jerry Maguire, “Show me the money”.
So we all agree that every website and preferably every page of a website should have some sort of call to action in order to convert a visitor to becoming a customer.
But when is it too much? I came across the below web-page and even though I am involved in digital marketing on a daily basis, I was overloaded and clicked the back button within one second….then of course I came back to take a screen-shot, count the calls to action and write this post.
On the page below (and I don’t mean the whole page, just the initial visible area) there are 47 requests for action and I just find that to be way too many.
My advice would be to limit this to 10-15 total actions per visible area of your web-page, preferably less. In my opinion you have a way better chance of getting the action you want with less choices and if you present too many choices most people will be overwhelmed and the only likely action will be the back button of the browser or the close page X.
Here is an update to my previous post! Traffic has been down to 20k visits per day for the last two days but the buzz is still alive! I actually heard my fake news story on the radio (102.1 The Edge) on the way to work this morning!!
It seems this story has gone viral WORLD-WIDE! The smoking gun has called it out as fake after some research (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/
One story even called my web site sketchy but hey, it was all in good fun and it will be interesting to see how these new links effect the long-term growth of my website. Here is a short list of websites carrying this story, from Germany, Mexico, Italy, China, Nigeria and across North America!
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/
http://perezhilton.com/2011-
http://www.fox26medford.com/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/
http://news.gather.com/
http://www.metro.us/newyork/
http://abovethelaw.com/2011/
http://globalgrind.com/news/
http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/
http://urbanlegends.about.com/
http://www.northwestohio.com/
http://informe21.com/
http://noticias.terra.es/2011/
http://www.elporvenir.com.mx/
http://www.cnbc.com/id/
http://world.huanqiu.com/roll/
http://www.nieuwsblad.be/
http://dunya.milliyet.com.tr/
http://www.sigmalive.com/news/
http://www.nownews.com/2011/
http://www.net1news.org/ex-
http://www.fakt.pl/Zrobil-
http://noticias.r7.com/
http://virgula.uol.com.br/ver/
http://www.bellenews.com/2011/
http://www.nollywoodgossip.
http://kissfm969.com/the-girl-
http://www.deceptology.com/
http://whatsgoodington.com/
http://www.examiner.com/culture-events-in-chicago/a-tattoo-revenge-saga
I was told by a friend this evening that he heard about this news story on The Howard Stern Show Thursday morning, I just confirmed it by looking it up at http://www.marksfriggin.com/news11/11-28.htm#thu – it seems Howard and Robin talked about this on her news feature at 8:50am and then then Howard mentioned that the news was a hoax at 9:35am.
December 7, 2011 update – As you can see below the news story is still going strong but it has spread so far that I am no longer being noticed as the original source. Traffic on my site is down to just a couple of thousand a day.
I put together a fake news story last week and it seems someone posted it to Reddit.com and then the fun began! I got a phone call from my host at around 8pm and he said my website might be under a DoS attack because it was receiving 100+ http requests per second!! Needless to say my poor shared hosting account crashed and my host was working hard to keep it live!
Here are the results so far
The website usually gets 200-300 visits a day. The 86k requests I could not serve kinda sucks but I was not really expecting this to go as viral as it did. I will update this after the 24 hour mark.
30 hour update!
Referers.
We have all had that dream of hitting page one of the social bookmarking sites and getting so much traffic that our hosting servers explode along with our analytics! But what does it take to get the magical viral video. A few years ago I found a stop motion video posted on a relatively obscure website and I reposted it on one of my blogs. It got to number 4 on digg.com and garnered me a boatload of visitors and the website itself ended up getting a lot of great links and did well for me until I sold it a couple of years later.
From the moment I saw it I new it was cool and had a shot of going viral but these days it is really hard to tell what might work and what might bomb. I recently came across the video below while doing some research on a stop motion video project for a client. I just find it amazing that almost 5 million people have watched this over the past 4 years…..
So as fast as Google can think up new ideas it seems the darker parts of the web are ready to profit from them!
There is already many websites out there selling this service. Here are the promises made by one of them.
- All +1′s come from people with a google account that has been verified by phone (Phone Verified Accounts)
- All +1′s come from real people. No bots are being used!
- All +1′s are being given by manually going to your website and clicking the +1 button It’s untraceble because the +1′s are being given from different IP’s
- All +1′s are given dripped over a couple of days so it looks natural
OK, so who can answer this question…what search engine shows 11 sponsored results and only 4 organic results on the first page??
?
?
The answer is GOOGLE!!! These keywords are very expensive, so less organic results equals more clicks and more money in Google’s pockets.
I do realize this could just be some testing but if it is a sign of things to come, my feeling is it will translate into a very poor user experience…
Typically most SEO’s will begin with a new website by optimizing the home page because that is usually your best starting page in terms of current search engine visibility but many beginners neglect the power of inner page conversions. Inner pages can be so valuable because often the traffic that you send there is laser targeted and will therefore convert at a very high rate. I have found it common to see inner pages with bounce rate and/or conversion rates that are 5-10 times higher better than home pages.
Here are a few results I pulled from a client that has been with us for the past two years and it can give you a good idea on the growth potential of inner pages.
The moral of this post is that you should always make sure the search professional that is working for you has a holistic approach to your search engine success. Focusing solely on the home page will leave a lot of visitors and money on the table.
This has been going on for months on my local Craigslist and I can’t figure out for the life of me why they would not put a stop to it. It is so blatant and occurs on a daily basis that it makes them look really bad. Every day it is a battle of the spammers as to who will heave up the most crap.
It seems like Google is no longer happy with just pushing the organic listings down further on the page, they seem to have gotten rid of them all together. Many local searches are showing 7 Google Places listings and that is it!
Actually many of my test searches have been getting an interesting page like below:
Now that is a what I call stealth results! But seriously, how are they going to decide who is in the 7 Google Places spots? With those being the only listings on the first page, how long till they are selling these for $1000′s a month. When is a new search engine going to step up and show organic results again? I understand the concept of a ‘level playing field’ but dropping a nuclear bomb on the land to level it, is not really fair in my opinion.
As a follow-up to my last post about the cost effectiveness of FaceBook advertising I thought I would take a look at a relatevely identical ad on LinkedIn, ouch!
I have my CPM bid set to .35 on FaceBook and in actual fact isi it coming in much lower at only .08 and LinkedIn won’t even let me run my ad unless I bid a minimum of $3.10!! The quality of LinkedIn impressions might be higher but I don’t think they are eight times more valuable, maybe twice or even three times – my effective CPM on FB is .08 so my actual CPM might be 35x higher on LinkedIn. The trail won’t be that painful because of the $100 credit coupon LinkedIn sent me to try their ad network but if they intend me to keep on advertising they are going to have to lower their prices or I am going to have to see some crazy, spectacular results!!
FaceBook Ads
LinkedIn Ads
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