Posted by Jason on February 28th, 2007 — in Forums, Online Business
Anyone who goes to Google to search for information these days probably ends up at a forum at some point. I have covered many times the power of forums when it comes to promoting a business and the funnel effect you can achieve for conversions.
On a related topic, I am currently auctioning off a spot in my signature at a major forum called Digital Point. For those not well versed in what a signature is, it is the small bit of sales copy and links that appear under every post made. What I suppose is signifigant in this case is that my signature appears on nearly 14,000 posts.
This translates into two things in my experience. The first is publicity or promotion. If you offer a service that would appeal to the target market, you can convert at a decent rate. I know for instance many people who submit sites to directories or sell articles that do quite well advertising in signatures. The other aspect is that sites listed in signatures with that many posts will always get fast indexing and benefit from deep crawls. I have routinely gotten new sites indexed within hours by throwing them into my signature and had “problem sites” with only a few pages indexed jump to thousands after placing them.
The last area a signture link may help is with SEO. This is to a much lesser extent however. It seems to boost PR especially with new sites however it doesn’t do a whole lot to help rankings. I can usually get a PR5 in the first update using my signature but again, this has never been a sure thing.
So, if you are interested in bidding, the auction is on until Friday and the money is going to a charitable project so bid away. All of the details are in this thread:
Check Out the Signature Auction
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Posted by Jason on January 12th, 2007 — in Online Business, Search Engines
I got a great email from a Photographer that I really respect. I had sang his praises on this blog some weeks back and he wrote a short email to thank me for that and ask for a bit of SEO advice. Now he threw around words like “expert” which I am always uncomfortable with as Business is my area of expertise, not SEO. (Guys like Rand Fishkin are experts in my opinion and I couldn’t be in that company on my best day with years of study). Regardless, SEO has always been a hobby of mine and I was asked just for the basics based on their site and industry so I had at it.
I have removed a few of the details (That is what the ***** indicates) so I don’t start ranking for his keywords but I thought the advice below might help someone in a similar situation to him. Basically he is a kick ass artist and like anyone who has a primary expertise but not a lot of time to be learning PHP or SEO, he needed some things to try that didn’t eclipse his actual work.
Here is my advice:
****Personal Pleasantries****
Firstly, you already know the importance of links in Search Engine Optimisation by your email. Industry links such as on art related sites and directories also give you “extra credit” so you are in the right frame of mind. Another aspect is to keep generating links. Google and the lesser search engines look at it as a popularity contest and a site that is always generating links is on they see as important and therefore rank higher.
The first thing you need to do is to figure out what keywords you want to target. If you are unsure if it is worth targeting, you can use a tool like a Keyword Suggestion Tool which will tell you how many people search for it. After all, it does you no good to rank for obscure terms if no one ever searches for them. On the flip side, although a term like “art” has 20,000 people searching a day, it is such a broad term and difficult (read expensive) to rank for, it isn’t efficient.
You are better off choosing keywords such as ”**Country** Art”, “Artists **Country**” etc as the person who searches for that keyword (a mere 125 a day in that case) is much more likely to already be interested in your product. You will notice with that tool that it also suggests other related phrases so its great to get the creative juices flowing.
The reason knowing what you are targeting is important is because what is called “anchor text” is a crucial thing to search engines. Anchor Text is the few words that are displayed in the link. Most people make the mistake when asking someone to link to them to use their name or website name (ie **His Name** or **SiteExample.com**). As you will notice you already rank #1 for these terms because they are very few **His Name** in the world with sites. Instead they should link to you (or when entering the info for a directory) with your keywords. Just be sure to rotate between your chosen phrases as Google and the other SEs like that variety.
I can put together a list of common ways to gain related links for you this week and email it off to you. Plus if you have any questions, ask away. ****This is true for yfs1 readers, feel free to comment with questions and will post specifics at a later date****
As far as doing anything on site, your site isn’t too bad. I’m not sure why it redirects from www.example.com to http://www.example.com/-/example/ when you go to it but sometimes if its not broke, you don’t try to fix it. You have a lot of related and natural text on your homepage which is good (Artists and photographers tend to have only pictures and super clean designs which may be visually good but really hurts when it comes to Search Engine Rankings and Accessibility for the Disabled)
Right now Search Engines seem to eat up fresh content. They love sites that are constantly updated and your type of site currently doesn’t lend itself to that. After all, you are an artist not a webpage coder so constantly updating the HTML or PHP code can be a job in itself. What I would suggest is to add a blog to your site. Your web designer should be able to add a Wordpress blog in less then 5 minutes and a simple custom skin to match your site can be had for probably less then €50. What a blog allows is for you to just type in text and hit and button to publish it. Their is no coding required and it is very easy.
The reason I suggest a blog is because you are very technical minded and probably would be well suited to contributing to it. Perhaps a post per week but the nice thing is you aren’t committed to any time frame. Great things to write about would be the technical aspects of developing or industry trends or basically anything photography related that interests you.
What you will find with that type of content is you will bring in a lot of unique visitors under different keywords which occur naturally. Your blog then works as a bit of a funnel as you will have links in your sidebar (the strip along the right hand side) or the header to different parts of your site. People read your thoughts and observations then look at the art that is produced as a result. Personally, I love writing for my own blog even though it doesn’t funnel to my retail sites. An added benefit of blogs is if someone reads something they really like, they tend to share it with others by linking to it. I have never traded a single link for yfs1.com yet I have thousands of people linking to me. I have those links because of my informative posts such as my advice on starting a web based business and a guide to getting unbanned with Google AdSense (a common problem Webmasters face and therefore quite popular)
The other content generator (have I said the Search Engines love content enough times yet), is a forum. These are quite popular and have the added bonus of getting others to add content. They are easy to install and set up but the real downside is they are very time consuming. I don’t suggest one in your case as the last thing you want to do is deal with tons of spammers. With a blog, you can control the comments made with the flick of a switch (They have great tools that wipe out 99% of Spam without any work on your part)
Hopefully this gets you started and like I said, I can give my opinions on more specifics or other ways to promote and help your site rank with very little effort.
All the best and don’t be a stranger!
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Posted by Jason on January 4th, 2007 — in Online Business
Probably one of the best tools a website owner has when it comes to promotion is the giveaway, yet so many people do it wrong it is painful. Rather then going on and on about the many intricacies of successful contests, I am just going to hit on a few points. If it proves interesting I will go more in depth at a later date.
Give Away Related Product
Don’t be tempted by the current trend to give away the latest and greatest toy such as an I-Pod to bring in people. Running a successful contest is truly about quality over quantity. If you sell baby clothes, what good is it to you to have a bunch of 16 year old males signing up for your contest if their is no way they will ever make a purchase. Always remember that the main objective is to increase the bottom line. The other side of that coin is that you most likely can get better value for your money as you will be able to get your prizes wholesale rather then paying what the average punter does
Collect Marketing Material
Try to collect as much information as possible from your entrants. A simple email address is fine if you are giving away a $5 prize but if you are putting up a signifigant prize, don’t be afraid to require an address or even have them answer some questions. I personally find contest where only an email is required useless as most people use fake addresses. Although you may catch a few later with a newsletter shot, the conversions are fairly low. My favourites are to have people write 50-100 words to enter which can be a Testimonial if they are an existing customer, a review if they have bought one of your products elsewhere, or something similar. What ends up happening is you get great honest content for your site for free.
Keep It on the Up and Up
This ones a big one as I know of a lot of contests I have seen where I am convinced no prize ever goes out. Use the opportunity to announce winners and get a comment from them once they use the product. Don’t be tempted to give it away to a made up person or just never end the contest. It sounds like common sense but this happens way too often and can hurt a business
These are only a few brief points as there is so much to running a great contest. I also talked only about running your own contest. One of the basics of PR work is to offer up prizes to magazines to give away. Many times you can get $1000’s worth of advertising nearly for free if you do it right. Again, even with those types of contests there are a lot of Do’s and Don’ts.
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