Recently in marketing Category

I was interviewed recently by Andrew Warner of Mixergy regarding search engine optimization and some basic internet strategy.  You can stream or download the podcast at Andrew's blog.

Google Sitelinks explained... sort of.  For some searches, Google will display a cluster of internal site links, creating a much more robust, deep-linking #1 listing for whoever is at the top of the search.  Here's an example from one of my sites:



There is nothing specific you can do to guarantee a listing like this, but sticking to good practices for a website in general, including strong navigation, lots of quality content and ongoing incoming link efforts will position you well.  Try checking out articles on Google Sitelinks explained and How to Get Google Sitelinks for some additional info to improve your odds.

The SEO Rapper has got game, fo shizzle...

Addictive marketing from The Big Word Project... smart guys charging a buck a letter to link words to websites, similar to the Million Pixel Project.  After spending $17 $19 to buy four five words and a half hour of clicking around other entries, I can attest they've got a nice thing working. (Of course, Paypal dollars don't feel entirely real...)

An interesting article in the Pacific Coast Business Times on Avantair, a company in Camarillo that promotes "environmental responsibility in general aviation."

Avantair, a Clearwater, Fla.-based exclusive seller of fractional shares in Piaggio Avanti P.180 aircraft, keeps one of its few sales and only two maintenance facilities in the United States at the Camarillo airport. Dubbed by the company as the “hybrid of the skies,” the aircraft boasts the fuel efficiency of a turboprop and the speed and comfort of many jets.

To further the appeal of the P.180 as a green air transportation option, Avantair recently formed a partnership with TerraPass, an organization dedicated to the management of climate change.

People aren't going to stop traveling via air anytime soon (unless the bird flu hits - then all bets are off. Would you get on a plane with 200 people, knowing that someone with the sniffles might have a virus that could kill you in three days?). And so, aviation becomes yet another industry that is moving towards being "green", in terms of fuel consumption, emissions and of course marketing. And look what happens when a company decides to take the lead in environmental responsibility. Others follow, which begins as a trickle and may turn into an industry-wide flood.

Following Avantair’s partnership with TerraPass, NetJets, a major private aviation company and fractional seller, announced a plan to take several steps to offset its climate impact, including reducing greenhouse gas emissions, offsetting unavoidable impacts and investing in research for environmentally efficient aviation technologies.

I particularly enjoyed this paragraph, if only for Ms. Goodspeed's name: “When people join a fractional program, they fly frequently. They want to have the best options possible to them,” said Ginger Goodspeed, Avantair’s Camarillo customer service manager.

An artist here in Ojai inquired about some web marketing assistance.  I had a hard time pinpointing exactly where he was going to get the most bang for his buck.

Search engine optimization probably won't help much because an artist has very little textual content on the pages.  We could do some standard link building, but its fairly expensive and I don't think its going to have the kind of impact we'd both like to see for his site. 

So I recommended that his best bet right now is to concentrate on social media, particularly social networking sites that focus on artists.  Basically, an artist need to sell himself through his imagery, and traditional search engine optimization doesn't really cut it - an artist is better off seeking the communities where people are looking for art.

I did some research and found the following online communities that are chock-full of artists. 

Maccaca
Amateur Illustrator
MyArtInfo
ArtUproar
deviantART
Saatchi Gallery
Bebo
Ning Artist Search
Social Media SUPER List
ArtFlock.com (added 01/25/08)
Folio Link (fee)
ArtSpan (fee)

For an artist's own site, even without a lot of text, there are still some opportunities for visibility on the web.  Be sure to name the files intuitively, and use the available attributes in the image tag (alt="" and title="").  This should increase visibility in Google Images and other image searches.

A friend asks: If I want to register a domain name for a non-profit idea of mine, and build a simple inexpensive website for it, what service do you recommend for registration?

Websites these days are commodities.  For a simple "brochureware" website, I'd first look at whoever you already have domain(s) registered with (your "registrar") to see if they have anything you like.  That would make it easier.

If working with your current registrar isn't a concern, I think godaddy.com, 1and1.com and register.com are good choices, based on their prices and templates offered.  Following is a box for GoDaddy, where you can search for a domain, and select an appropriate hosting service.

.com .org

And here's a link to 1and1.com, which a number of clients have been happy with, particularly considering their low prices. They have a really nice admin area for managing domains and emails.
 

A comment on The Ojai Post asked about Technorati.

Technorati is a blog and media aggregator.  In other words, they are a central location for finding content, viewing trends and just keeping an eye on what people are blogging, vlogging and talking about.  One might also classify them as a Social Bookmarking service.

Over at The Ojai Post, if you have a Technorati account set up, you can click the "Bookmark" image at the bottom of any entry on the home page, and then click the Technorati link in the list of Social Bookmarking services to bookmark that particular entry in your Technorati account.  The more people do that for an entry, the more visibility it has.  The Technorati homepage aggregates news stories, blog posts and photos by attention, meaning that as web users use Technorati to bookmark stories of interest that they find around the web, it creates more visibility for that story to casual news and blog viewers.

An important way for bloggers to create visibility in the first place is to make sure that one's blog is properly registered with the multitude of blog directories out there.  Many of them will visit, or ping, the website on a regular basis, or monitor the site's RSS feed, and automatically update new content into their directory.

Following are a couple of lists, for any blogger that wants to register their blog in as many places as possible.
Top Rank: RSS - Blog Directories
Search Engine Journal - 20 Essential Blog Directories

A client has two domains pointed at the same website.  My company recently did a couple months of link building on Domain2, which should continue to add backlinks (incoming links from other sites) over the next few months.  A little comparison:

Domain1
0 backlinks - Google
11 backlinks - Yahoo (try Yahoo Site Explorer)
27 backlinks - Altavista
Pages indexed in Google: 2
Google page rank: 1
Time online: 8 years, 8 months, 27 days

Domain2
1 backlink - Google
33 backlinks - Yahoo (try Yahoo Site Explorer)
59 backlinks - Altavista
Pages indexed in Google: 2
Google page rank: 1
Time online: 8 years, 8 months, 27 days

The second domain (remember, same site, same content) is stronger in terms of its ability to rank for targeted keyword phrases.  But Google doesn't look kindly on duplicate content, and so it appears both domains are being penalized to a large degree.  A site that has been around 8 years and has a nice handful of incoming links should be (1) fully indexed and (2) competitive for some key terms if the site has even a modest bit of optimization working (which it does).

So what's the solution?  If the client were to "permanently redirect" (aka 301 redirect) Domain1 to Domain2, then all of those incoming links would be combined into one domain, and Google wouldn't see duplicate content, which should lead to a fully indexed site fairly quickly.  From there, a greater effort can be made to create new content for the site and to do some search engine optimization.

Also of note is that Google distinguishes between www.domain.com and domain.com.  Applying a 301 redirect to one of those (i.e. directing domain.com to www.domain.com) would also help consolidate incoming links and "Google juice."

Some more reading on the subject:
Using multiple domains can screw up your search engine rankings
Ethical SEO
Merging Sites (Search Engine Watch Forums)
Duplicate content in the search engines

FreeRice.com is an innovative little site where visitors participate in an endless vocabulary quiz.  A project of poverty.com, FreeRice re-loads a new page, with a new advertisement, every time the user answers a new question.  That cost-per-impression-based ad revenue is used to "end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free"  through a United Nations program.  Each correct vocabulary answer nets the program 20 grains of rice.

It's not much on a per-page basis, but it adds up quickly - over 11 billion grains of rice in the first two and a half months since the site launch.

The site is a loose derivation of one of the giant viral sites on the web, HotOrNot.com.  There, users upload their photos and visitors rate a random photo on a scale of 1 to 10.  Cycling through photos, visitors generate a tremendous amount of page views, ad impressions and presumably ad revenue.  HotOrNot boasts over 13 Billion votes counted and 32,649,000 photos submitted. 

Innovative marketing ideas are by themselves generally neither "good" nor "bad".  The intention and execution, however, is the difference between a vapid, narcissistic cash cow and a philanthropic, educational socially conscious contribution to society.