Adam Taylor » Marketing

Welcome to 2009 – Conversion Matters is dead, long live Conversion Matters

Adam — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:22:43 +0000

[I wrote this six months ago but it has taken me six months to sort out servers and generally find some spare time - sigh...]

Hello everyone; welcome to 2009. Conversion Matters has evolved!

This blog has been dormant for a few months now while I’ve been busy learning about software engineering and as such have become less interested in internet marketing and more and more interested in programming and software engineering. It is for this reason that I have decided to reorganise and restart this blog.

All the old content is still here and I will continue to write about marketing, analytics, blogging and such when it’s relevant or interesting but there will start to be a much larger focus on software engineering and programming.

If that scares you, or sounds really boring: fear not!

Nearly all of the old content has been moved into a category called marketing – side note: due to the more varied nature of the blog categories will become a less specific form of navigation and tags will start to play an important role for finding articles on particular topics. – and I am going to burn the feed for the marketing category only to what was the old Conversion Matters feedburner feed. So if you just want to continue reading my sporadic posts on seo, analytics, social media, and blogging then continue subscribing to that feed.

If, however, you’re ready to embrace change and join me on this journey of software engineering, marketing and business then you should subscribe to the new feed in order to get all the posts delivered to your inbox or feed reader.

Also, I’ve moved domains: conversion-matters.co.uk was almost obsolete as a name as soon as I’d started as I quickly moved the focus to analytics and seo. Now this site lives at adamjctaylor.com. Why adamjctaylor.com? Well aside from that being my name, I didn’t think adamtaylor.com was worth $2400 – the amount the owner wanted to sell it for. And someone already has adamtaylor.co.uk. Curse having such a common name. I’ve done my best to redirect all the old links to the new locations but I’ve made it more complicated for myself by changing all the categories, so if you notice anything broken or wonky please let me know and I’ll get it fixed up ASAP! [I actually haven't done this yet, currently there are no redirects and this is robot.txt disallowed but will do shortly..]

Anyway, myself and adamjctaylor.com wish you a great 2009! [I hope it's been good and continues to be..!]

Are Madlib Sites Whitehat?

Adam — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 01:43:34 +0000

I’m never really sure what to write about these days, so I figured it was about time I checked my logs to see what people were looking for, I mean hell, it’s what the gurus suggest (damn I was looking for a relevant link but couldn’t find one; still I’m sure that’s what they suggest)!

What the hell is a madlib site?

Madlib, or mad libs as Wikipedia refers to it, was a children’s game where you had to come up with alternative words and then fill in blanks in a story. Something like that anyway, I’ve never played it, I’m not American.

How does this relate to a website? The idea is usually implemented in such a way that one can spin large amounts of legible, legitimate (? – we’ll get to that later) content from a small amount of content.

So for example, the title of this post is ‘Are Madlib Sites Whitehat?’. If you wanted to ‘madlibify’ that title you may come up with something like this:

1. Are Madlib Blogs Whitehat?
2. Are Mad Lib Websites Illegal?
etc.

Now you could fire this through your madlib function and you have a load of unique titles for a small amount of input.

Take this idea further, and you can see how it could be used to create 100 blog posts instead of 1 blog post. Or alternatively, let’s say you have a massive database driven website, you might ‘madlibify’ what would otherwise be static portions of each page to hopefully get more pages indexed.

Madlib sites are almost certainly not whitehat

Nearly every method of content creation that involves some kind of automation is pushing or breaking the limits of what search engines consider to be legitimate, whitehat content.

I think it’s a pretty safe bet to assume that if a search engine engineer came across a blog of yours with 100 very similar posts they would nuke it regardless of how unique/readable/whatever the content was.

Depending on your goals, it may be a fine option, makes a change from the usual scraping at least.

If you are genuinly interested in a fully fledged system involving madlibbing/content creation/automatic posting/blog farms etc I’d take a look at datapresser.

Creative Technique For Master-Link-Baiters

Adam — Sat, 10 May 2008 11:03:57 +0000

I was in the shower and an idea popped into my head, not something I’ve heard explicitly talked about before. I can only assume this is due to one of the following:

It could be a completely rubbish idea
It may be being used by sneaky people who don’t want it revealed
It could be a unique and creative idea not thought of before (unlikely but one can dream.. ha!)

Eitherway, I don’t have the required skills to test the technique so I’ll just talk about it and let other people decided whether it’s awful or not.

I saw a tweet by Lyndoman about a piece of link bait he’d written on the subject of credit cards that hit the front page of digg.

Then my brain went on a random path of thoughts, something like:

‘eh front page digg -> wonder how much he makes -> maybe he should bait and switch or use social media to promote his own affiliate sites; could make some nice extra dough -> hey, how about bait and cloak?’

Introducing Bait and Cloak

I imagine someone has already thought of this idea but it’s just possible that it has never been executed; the time and effort required to pull it off would probably off-put many black hats who might be tempted to try it.

What’s the frigging idea Adam?!

Everyone’s heard of bait and switch I assume: essentially writing link-bait and then 301 redirecting to another page. The problem is, if people notice, some of them get a bit pissy with you.

The bait-cloak idea’s simple:

Start a blog
Write quality link bait for 3-6 months on various topics: credit cards, gambling, travel etc.
Start redirecting the post to highly targeted, niche affiliate offers to googlebot (based on IP of course) and to people who arrive via Google.

After many successful front-pages, the domain should have built enough trust and authority to be able to rank for these offers.

Also this way people visiting from ‘citations’, or from Digg/Stumble etc. still see the linkbait but others see the affiliate offers.

Someone would no doubt notice eventually, but if you keep it quite niche/long tail you could probably keep this going for quite a while (long enough to turn a profit I reckon).

Give it a go Lyndoman or Graywolf – I know you love the link-bait and the shadier side of SEO .

Good idea/rubbish idea? Your thoughts welcome as ever..

The Hottest SEO Trends

Adam — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:58:04 +0000

I just spent Â£10 on magazines – quite excessive for a poor student! I bought .net as well as a few others because a featured article caught my eye – ‘The hottest SEO trends. Starring: Google’s Matt Cutts, SEO Guru Danny Sullivan…’ (not to mention there was something about ‘Porn 2.0′ – porn and SEO, could you ask for more..?!).

Anyway, what do they think are the hottest SEO trends.? It’s pretty standard stuff really:

Matt talks about social media being important and therefore content needs to be interesting. He also thinks in the future blackhats are going to become (h/cr)ackers – I assume he means inserting links maliciously via XSS and other exploits.
Danny says that “having a blog is very important”. He also mentions the importance of social media for increase brand awareness and backlinks.
Links. Links are also important. And you can help boost your PageRank (who cares?) by submitting to geographic or industry specific directories.
Glossary pages, forums and YouTube marketing can also help.
Don’t rely on automated SEO tools.
‘Ensure your site is uploaded to Google Sitemaps’.

What not to do

Don’t cram your text into one page
Don’t focus on too many keywords
Don’t be insular

Okay so it really wasn’t that interesting or ground breaking but thanks anyway Mark Buckingham, gave me a break from my assignments.

I guess if you want to read the whole article you better buy this months .net but I wouldn’t suggest going out of your way to find it.

Domaining

Adam — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:19:30 +0000

I just purchased an ebook about domaining (affiliate link btw) on the recommendation of TheMadHat. I kind of see domaining as a dark art, something I don’t really know anything about and I’m hoping this book will change that.

I’m not really expecting to flip any domains for $xxxxx any time soon but I figured if I could at least purchase more valuable domains for my web properties I’m planning to build that in itself will be valuable knowledge.

Anyway, I’ll try and give a bit more of an in-depth review of it later when I’ve read some more. So far it seems pretty good though. Don’t get put off by the spammy sales page – you can get two chapters for free so you might as well try it out. It’s always good to attempt and diversify income streams.

No related posts.

Facebook dying? Only if you’re a sleezy marketeer..

Adam — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 21:46:48 +0000

So apparently ‘people’ are getting bored of facebook, reverting to simply using twitter, or giving up on social media altogether. Who are these people and why are they not enjoying facebook?

Facebook is not built for marketeers

Sorry guys, facebook wasn’t built for you. It was built for people to socially interact with their friends. I don’t market myself or my brand on facebook I just chat with my friends, colleagues, family etc.

It’s like an answer phone for instant messaging!

Using facebook for marketing is a bit like blogging on a topic your not interested in, purely for profit, it’s not interesting and more often than not you get bored and give up pretty quickly.

Should marketeers use facebook regardless of who it was built for?

I strongly believe that for any marketeer it would be a mistake to ignore facebook. Firstly, there are a few groups where marketeers/SEOs/webmasters etc. hang out and discuss things. Facebook Whores for SEO, SMO and SEM Awareness where you can chat to and build up relationships with other like-minded individuals if you’re so inclined.

Another reason to embrace facebook is if you work with clients who either already have a brand name or are trying to build one up. Strategic use of facebook as a medium for brands to talk to consumers is clearly going to be beneficial for both parties. One of the ways this can be done is through facebook pages. These are essentially sponsored profiles on facebook that allow a brand to reach out to fans (or haters) and interact with them.

There are also many unofficial groups centred around brands that marketeers should be aware of. They can paint a positive or negative picture of your brand depending on the nature of the group. It is important to keep tabs on these as you should be of the web in general as part of your reputation monitoring strategy.

For marketeers who don’t work for big brands there is also facebook flyers/advertising/whatever it is officially called now. Essentially, you can advertise down the sidebar:

Or you can advertise in the news feed or users:

These adverts can be target to specific categories of users but I’m not entirely sure of the exact specifics

There did seem to be a lot of talk of the facebook ads performing really poorly. I assume it varies on a campaign by campaign basis but I’d say it’s worth checking out, at least some people are having success.

Facebook is much more suited for people interested in social interaction

While facebook is certainly going to be more interesting for people who use it for what it was meant for, keeping in touch with your friends, it’s still a service you cannot ignore as an internet marketeer. There are so many ways it can be used, from brand building and reputation management, to advertising/affiliate marketing, to simply building relationships with other industry contacts.

Don’t ignore facebook, it’s not going away any time soon!

P.S – Don’t worry I don’t actually think you guys are sleezy marketeers ;]

You should realise that Wordpress is not right for everything

Adam — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:40:59 +0000

Whilst I agree that wordpress is a fantastic piece of software I think it’s important to realise that it has it’s place and that place is not everywhere.

I used to think that I’d probably end up using wordpress for every site ever unless there was a really obvious reason not to use it. I’ve now realised that kind of philosophy is wrong.

Think, for example, about a mini niche site – I’m talking < 10 pages kind of site – would you really want to use wordpress for this? Sure there are benefits, like being able to create content really easily with the editor but I think for a mini site the cons outweigh the pros.

For wordpress to be really good you have to download, unzip, upload, and activate at least a few plugins. That’s not the end of the world I know but couple that with creating databases, modifying name servers and you begin to realise that wordpress isn’t quite as simple as you initially thought.

And then the major drawback security risks. Wordpress itself is not an inherently insecure piece of software. However, not keeping up to date with the updates and patches is very risky business. From experience it’s enough effort keeping one or two blogs up to date. Imagine trying to keep 100 wordpress sites up to date?

Right now I’m in the process of creating, well, as many mini niche sites as I can, and I am not using wordpress. One day I’d love to create myself a centralised dashboard for upgrading and managing all my wordpress installs but at the moment that is not an option.

Fortunately with the tiniest bit of PHP knowledge you can still have some relatively easy to create websites. Head on over to the OSWD and find a template you like. Then simply split it up into header / footer etc and with a simple you have a nice easy to use template and don’t have to worry about security (so much).

I might release the template I’ve been using at some point when I’m done making my sites but it’s not difficult, anyone can do it really.

There is no right or wrong

Adam — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 23:42:13 +0000

I read something a few days ago that struck a cord with me. It was about a tobacco industry spokesperson who said to his son:

There is no right or wrong. There are just arguments. If you win you are right.

That’s kind of how I view SEO. There is no right or wrong – what is ethical SEO? There’s some kind of argument that it’s bad to spam or engage in blackhat techniques and therefore blackhat is wrong.

Is it ethical to be doing SEO for companies that rip off consumers with limited financial knowledge who don’t realise that 60% APR is not cool?

It’s not clear to me how you could say that is any more or less ethical than say a creating a splog?

I saw a comment on an article vaguely about blackhat SEO. I feel it’s kind of misinformed. He talks about how you can’t be open and honest while using blackhat techniques.

You could, you could say to your client: “Today we’re going to spam your website to no 1. and then after a week or two it will probably get banned”.

That’s open and honest it just might not go down that well. You have to accept that the techniques you use to promote or optimise a website have to be proportional to the risk/reward. Can you afford for the website in question to get banned or penalized? If the answers no then don’t do anything shady. If the answers yes then spam away.

When I was working last year there was a car insurance company we worked for where we did the SEO for some of their sites and they did some inhouse SEO on some of their other smaller doorway type sites.

They did some overly aggressive link buying and managed to manipulate some pretty high rankings for that site for a brief period before it got caught out. Then there was a small uproar: blah blah spam blah blah blackhat blah blah dodgy. Who cares?

If they looked at the risk vs. reward of spamming that website to high rankings for car insurance and decided they were willing to go with it and didn’t mind if it go banned then fair play to them. They still had their main site and their other smaller sites if it did get banned.

If I was trying to be successful in a highly competitive niche I wouldn’t have a problem with performing some dirty SEO to outrank the competition. As long as you were actually providing a useful service and had a reasonable website – I don’t see the customer caring. Obviously you’d have to except that you were likely to get burnt at somepoint and have your main brand/website totally clean and just slowly build that site up organically as best you can. While that sites hanging around in the sandbox you can be ranking these other mini sites.

I’m rambling a bit now, cya..

Dominating the SERPs

Adam — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 18:41:49 +0000

Right I’m bored of having two pages out rank me for a search for my name on Google UK.

Also I just saw a couple of posts on the distilled blog about getting your facebook profile ranking.

So I’m going to try and get that to rank as well the Adam Taylor page at Durham University. It’s a bit spammy so I don’t know how well this will work but hopefully I’ll be dominating the SERPs soon!

A proper PageRank update at last!

Adam — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 07:41:58 +0000

There appears to be a proper PageRank update happening at last – the front page of this blog is now PR4. Now I can starting selling text links to casino sites… !

How did you do? I only had a brief look around but was some what surprised I ended up with a higher (front page) PageRank than bloggingfingers. Not that it matters or means much; but there’s still the ego factor!

How did your sites/blogs fair?