marketing: December 2007 Archives

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.

A client contacted me about setting auctions for little paintings - 4x6" and 5x7" original oils.  So we put together a marketing program that allows her to quickly (under one hour per painting) set up an eBay auction, promote it on a blog and announce it to an email list.

If you're an artist, and would like to give this a try, the mechanics of it work as follows.  It will be most effective if you have a decent email list of perhaps 300 or more clients, patrons, friends and family.

So you've started a business, and need a logo.  You've got a limited budget - 400 bucks is burning a hole in your pocket.  What do you do?

There are hundreds of online custom logo design services now available.  For as little as $25 you might get an interesting logo for your business.  The way most of them work is that you receive a couple of different looks from x number of designers.  For example, $400 might get you 8 looks from 4 designers.  Many services now offer unlimited revisions.  The services also will deliver a logo in a number of different graphic formats, for use in print and on the web.

Following are a few services to check out - none of these are explicitly endorsed nor are they clients, but all of them seem capable and have some noteworthy clients.

Logoworks
The LogoLoft
LogoBee
LogoDog
Logo Design Guru