Easy SEO Tip

October 12, 2009

Here’s a quick tip for you – and it works nearly every time (although, it wouldn’t if everyone does it, so I’m wondering why I’m telling you!).

Anyway – I’ve written about Product Comparisons as a content generation strategy before. Here’s a really simple way to ramp up your results from that:

Just put a “Vs.” in the title.  As in “Red Widgest Vs. Blue Widgets” – you’d be shocked how important that “Vs.” is to search engines, and how few people have optimized for that.

Just don’t do it for any niches I’m working in. Please.

New FTC Disclosure Rules

October 8, 2009

You can imagine my pleasant surprise this morning when I read @shoemoney’s tweet about new FTC disclosure rules. Here’s his take on the updated regulations.

There is the chance for some gray area (from what I can tell) – but it seems like the focus is on bloggers endorsing products “in post” – so I’m going to guess that items that are clearly ad units are exempt from this.  Most everything I have out there is labeled “Advertisement” anyway. This leaves me with some products I’ve recommended on this site.

I have never accepted products or money to make a post on any of my current sites.  However, in an effort to maximize revenue, I have established affiliate relationships with products I’d recommend anyway. While the ads/offers on my other sites should be pretty clear cut as to their nature – things here are a bit different. I make recommendations to readers of this blog (both of you), and my 7xo Academy members. I have been up front that the products I recommend offer me a commission of anything I might sell (nada so far, for what it’s worth).

My take on recommending affiliate products in the online marketing realm is simple – I have to use them, and they have to work.  I have been plugging all these things for a while – and finally decided to try and make some latte money off it if folks decide to purchase because of me.

This lead me to update the “About Us” with a disclosure of marketing relationships – and I’ll be careful going forward to make sure that I disclose any sort of affiliate relationship on a blog post (that isn’t a clear advertisement – like the Thesis Theme ad blocks).

On my other sites – ads stay labeled pretty clearly. I feel that more than a legal issue, it’s also the right thing to do – although now that I think about it – I’ll probably go back and make sure that is clear as well, because I am paranoid.

Besides some minor annoyance in having to take the time to do this – I’m ok with the ruling. I’m hoping this slaps some of the “big dogs” that peddle their snake oil internet money making schemes, and slaps them hard. I can thing of a couple guys out there right now that I’d love to see shut down (I’m looking at you, Fats) -both because they are scamming good (if not overly committed to due diligence) people out of hard earned money.  They are also clogging up marketing channels for guys like me, that might make a few bucks off recommending stuff like ShoeMoney Tools – which is really high quality stuff.

(in case you’re completely oblivious, the link above is an affiliate link, and on the less than 1% chance you click it and make a purchase, Jeremy will send me some monies)

Quick Tip – Using Video on your Blog

October 7, 2009

Any marketer you ask will tell you that you should be using some sort of multimedia on your blog – and the mulitmedia of choice is, of course, video.

Why? Well, it looks cool.  It’s easy to add, and it comes with a built in distribution network that is off the charts. Since this is a “Quick Tip” I’m not going to go into how to make good videos, or what you should use to produce them – that’s another post entirely.  I have two big points for you:

1)If you want to add video to your blog, you should be using Thesis.  The multimedia box makes for the easiest integration you can have in a Wordpress theme.

2)If you don’t want to tick your users off – don’t JUST offer video.  This is another reason Thesis is great – there’s no way to just offer a video without looking silly. People DO like video, but a lot of people don’t as well.  And, even folks that do like video don’t always feel like watching it. So, make sure you add some coherent, relevent, and scannable copy on the page as well.

On a side note – occasionally, for entertainment purposes, we’ll sit around and check out the new landing pages of all the overweight “Get Internet Monies” gurus out there, shooting videos from their mom’s basements.  Especially the ones that point to a conversion element on the page – hilarious. In fact – if someone is pointing to a conversion element on their page from a video…they’re going to rip you off. That’s a free “quick tip” :)

Interesting Marketing Articles

October 7, 2009

Despite my already mentioned disdain for a lot of agency blogs – there are a lot of brilliant folks out there that are sharing lots of great information. I tend to scan this information, bookmark it, and occasionally come back to it during brief spurts of downtime. I draw on it and provide info to Academy members, but rarely just link out from my blog.

It is also a lot easier just to link you out to folks that are much better than me at sharing this info :)

Here are some good articles to check out:

Turning non-customers into customers (SEO specific, but still good theory for anyone)

SEO for Public Relations – Good info on how SEO and PR interconnect

PPC Copywriting for Quality Clickthroughs – Vital for PPC Conversion Rates

I could seriously go on all day – but you’ll have to join the Academy to get more.