]]>Last year, Reznor released two versions of an album on the Web: One which fans could download for free and a higher-quality version that cost $5. More than five times as many people opted for the free version, leaving Reznor disappointed.
But rather than abandoning online distribution, Reznor rethought his model. This past weekend, he surprised fans by releasing a new album on his Web site. This time fans have five distinct options, including a free downloadable version which only contains nine songs, a $5 downloadable version with 36 songs, and a $300 version that comes with autographed vinyl records.
And if you’ve ever wondered about why Alexa stinks, this guy has some thoughts. But some people really do use it as a tool to estimate traffic so if you can get your rank up cheaply, it’s worth it.
]]>I visited a blog at LifeLearningToday yesterday and left a comment. Give Yourself a Raise Today!. Later last night, I received an email from AgentSully starting as follows:
I just wanted to send you a quick note and thank you for taking the time to visit my blog recently. Since my goal is to help my readers, I hope you found value in your visit.
Has that ever happened before? She thanked me for my visit and went on to invite me to subscribe. She isn’t profiting from me… just appreciative that I took the time to stop by. This is the way to build loyal customers. Surprise them by taking the time to touch them. You think the Washington Post would personally type up a note thanking me for reading their piece on the Supreme Court decisions yesterday? (FYI, I didn’t receive such a note). I read an article but by the end of the day, had interacted with a person. If you are struggling to rise to the cream of the crop in whatever you’re doing, treat your ‘customers’ surprisingly well and you’ll do great.
]]>]]>Ideas are the precious things. Most entrepreneurs are bursting with unconventional ideas: Maybe you think an ad-crazy Silicon Valley has lost its nerve; maybe you’re a grown woman delivering pizzas to diffident recruits in Stanford’s computer science lab; maybe you’ve always wanted to meet the hairy guy living in a trailer park who sends you the inspired spam about mail-order pheromones. These are the kinds of ideas that journalists love.
Imagine how you would finish this sentence if you having two beers with your best friend: “You know the strangest thing about what we’re going through is …” What comes next is your best story idea. Even if the story isn’t about your company, you’ll be a part of the conversation. The rest will come naturally.
Due to an annoyingly high volume of people accidentally clicking on their own links, Google has asked that folks stop reporting it to them. Google feels sufficiently confident in their click fraud detection algorithms to catch occasional publisher-generated blips and not bill advertisers. It’s still worthwhile if in doubt to let Google know, as they often cut publishers off without payment, resource or explanation.
]]>One great thing was that the topic of the linkbait: “8 Diseases That Give You Superhuman Powers”. You can completely see how this would garner attention. The page was buried on an inside page on a car dealership website. It was posted on Reddit and Digg and within five days, the site received almost 234,000 unique visitors.
“We knew from the beginning the traffic would absolutely be worthless… The purpose was to help a site that was relatively unknown get a little bit of authority. It was the backlinks we were interested in,”
Look at the links the site received…
Before the Digg: 207 backlinks
3 days after Digg: 1,270 backlinks
5 days after Digg: 2,642 backlinks
7 days after Digg: 3,545 backlinks“We already know that untargeted backlinks are not nearly as effective as targeted ones from authority sites with similar content. The Digg did, however, produce links from many sites with authority in areas that are not entirely unrelated, and in some cases, from some sites with very high traffic and trust…
Google’s latest crawl (7 days after the Digg) resulted in a huge increase in our rankings for our targeted keywords. We jumped up anywhere from 20-300 places, with most of our most important keywords ranking in the top ten (many in the top 5). Furthermore, Google has increased its rate of indexing, has increased the number of our pages that appear in the index, and have released over a dozen important pages from the supplemental results.”
That really does validate all the talk SEO heavyweights give to linkbait. I need to get cracking…
]]>]]>Can a poker Web site rank high on a Google search using purely white hat tactics — meaning no spamming, cloaking, link farms or other frowned-upon “black hat” practices. Fishkin answered yes, provided the site also added other marketing techniques and attracted some media attention.
The rest of the panel scoffed. “Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight,” one chided. After all, this is the cutthroat online gambling sector.
But one poker Web site owner was intrigued, and he later approached Fishkin. “He said, ‘If you can get us a search ranking in the top five for online poker or gambling [using white hat methods], we’ll buy that site from you for $10 million,’” recalls Fishkin, president and CEO of SEOmoz in Seattle. Intrigued but skeptical, Fishkin consulted other gambling site owners at the conference. “They said, ‘If it really does rank there, we might be interested in paying you $10 million more.’”
Turns out, a single online gambling customer brings in at least $1,000 in revenue. With a recent Google search of “Texas Holdem Poker” yielding 1.64 million results, it’s easy to see why site owners would pay millions to crack the code for Google’s PageRank algorithm — the elusive Holy Grail of online marketing.
People manipulate search engines because they are trying to get around creating what the engines want. The goal of search engines is not to make manipulation impossible, but to make the cost and complexity of manipulation prohibitive to where it is cheaper to rank by winning the hearts and minds of other webmasters.
If you just create good, original content, search engines will be working for you as they refine their algorythms.
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