Los Angeles Internet Marketing

Two Ways to make a couple of bucks on user testing / crowdsourcing

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 01:34:00 +0000

Just a quick not on two cool services that pay users for QA'ing sites / software:

1) Utest.com - they pay you per bug found, which is deposited into your' debit card they send you.

2) Usertesting.com - they do cheap usability tests.

The skinny on Twiistup's contestants...

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 06:36:00 +0000

So Twiistup 2009 is Socal's latest and greatest event, and the lineup really looks exciting! They are renting out a hanger by Santa Monica Airport to host everyone, and it's going to be a real great event. Twiistup just posted a list of the Twiistup finalists on their blog, with Andrew Warner from Mixergy giving each one the rundown.

Screencast of the companies showing off at twiistup from Andrew Warner on Vimeo.

Being the ~~brilliant~~ opinionated person that's me, I've decided to post my own rundown on the final contestants, and who I'd love to meet this year. The 10 finalists are: Causecast, Cogi, eHow, Fixya, GoGreenSolar, Meebo, Robodynamics, TheScene,Viewdle and Yammer.

A couple of things before I start a caustic article:

1) I'm tired and I'm having fun. All of these companies are great, and I'll have a bunch of positive energy when I meet them at twiistup.
2) The companies that get me turned are those that have the potential to revolutionize the industry, and have left their competitors behind.
3) Content Companies don't really excite me, unless there's a technology behind it that I actually appreciate the demand for.

Causecast

Summary: "Causecast, dubbed “a one stop philanthropy shop” by TechCrunch, is a platform where media, philanthropy, social networking, entertainment and education converge to serve a greater purpose."

I don't really appreciate companies that stand for causes online, unless there is really a unique need that they fill. At this point in my life, while I donate to different charities (and often online), I don't really feel motivated to involve myself in the actual issue. Do I care about many of the social issues? Yes! Do I feel that it takes the most priority in my life right now? No. So if someone explains to me what unique need it fills other than being "just another social network, I'm not that interested.

Cogi

Summary: Cogi set out with a simple goal – give professionals a way to effortlessly recall and track everything in their important conversations through the use of an intuitive, browser-based service that seamlessly transcribes the important parts of conversation – the ‘COGent Ideas’ or Cogi.

I love Cogi! In addition to the fact that I actually do spend time writing down stuff from meetings, I've been dying to have a service that will transcribe phone conversations for me automatically. As a social media marketer, and SEO person, you quickly come to realize that it's extremely important to be creating as much media as possible, and sharing whatever thoughts you can. (Most of them are pretty good, k?)

I've been dreaming of hiring a transcription company to record my phone calls and transcribe them, but this type of pricing really blows that away! I'm genuinely hoping these guys get on Twiistup's showcase, and I'm looking forward to meeting the founders.

eHow

Summary: "More than 27 million people visit eHow.com each month to search more than 300,000 articles that are professionally written with clear and concise directions on how to do things. It also has a rapidly-growing library of articles created by eHow’s members and a large library of professional instructional videos."

While creating a content destination site and making it sticky is a challenge, and any company amassing that amount of visitors truly deserves credit, I don't really think of it as a "web 2.0 startup" that fascinates me. I'd love to learn more about what they do to cultivate and promote community, how they maintain the quality of the site, and what "secret sauces" they've used to make it sticky, it doesn't get me fired up. Sorry.

Fixya

Summary: "FixYa empowers individuals to repair and improve upon their already-purchased possessions. The company also offers business services to manufacturers and retail businesses through its custom partnership opportunities."

As I said, I'm not that enthused by content sites. The thing that does interest me is the way that they've created a community of paid experts. The company I work for currently has a couple of sites with a similar business model, so I'd love to learn more about what them. Mediocre.

GoGreenSolar

Summary: GoGreenSolar is global group of professionals dedicated to improve the distribution of renewable energy products, services and financing for people everywhere.

Green tech is another thing that doesn't interest me all that much if they aren't a game changer. Take me to Tesla any day! Go Green Solar looks like a typical website that sells atypical products. Whether they are a manufacturer or just a distributor, it doesn't count as a game changing startup. Hey, I still wanna meet them (maybe they'll hire us to do the marketing:) ).

Meebo

Summary: "Meebo is a new communications and media company that’s re-writing the way people have conversations and communicate on the Web."

Meebo use to really fire me up. In fact, I was running it for a while, and it was one of the first companies in the IM aggregation industry. They have also managed to change it into a destination site, and enter into social media marketing rather quickly. They really are a leader, both in the startup and social media world.

However, I currently use Digsby, and am a happy person (if someone could only get me skype in there...), so it doesn't really fire my interest as a "winner". Sorry.

Robodynamics

Summary: "RoboDynamics is built by passionate people who want to use technology to shift the status quo and leverage state-of-the-art technology in robotics to change the way people live and work."

Robodynamics doesn't really seem to fill my own needs. I'd prefer to see my boss on Skype video, and spending the time moving my little video bot to the coffee room so that my employees can talk to me too, and look at the little 4" screen there doesn't sound so appealing. Then again, it's pretty cheap, it's cool looking, and who knows?

Truth is, it's such a fun sounding concept, I want to see them present, just so I can see it roll around Twiistup!

TheScene

Summary: "The Scene connects individuals to the hottest places, people and events in their area. The Scene’s trendsetting community is on the pulse of nightlife and entertainment in various cities throughout the world."

Being on the marketing team for a startup competitor (not really launched yet) - Your Social Plate, I actually appreciate the needs/potential for the site. So although I generally don't care for content sites (what's special about them anyways?), I'd like to learn more about TheScene.com.

Viewdle

Summary: "Viewdle is a facial-recognition powered digital media platform for indexing, searching and monetizing video assets. "

Viewdle is a great idea, and a way to make video's "smarter". Yet, I think the full potential for it hasn't fully been reached. There are privacy issue's, distribution issues, and a clear value proposition that I'm not seeing yet in order for a large change to take place. I'd love to see what they have in mind, how they plan on deploying, but not a high priority. Sorry.

Yammer

Summary: "Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: ‘What are you working on?’"

Arggh, Yammer! First off, I wish I could communicate with my boss and coworkers on twitter. Unfortunately, you will find that most people don't really care to do this yet. So I don't think you'll find wide adoption. How many CEO's are signed up to twitter, let alone looking at the steady stream of creative ideas coming in from the PR and marketing departments.

Second of all, even if they were interested, personally, I wouldn't use a service like Yammer. Why would I let private company data onto a third party site, trusting them to do the "verification". What happens if I have a disgruntled employee, who still has his login, or who started the whole company yammer network. What do I do then? Especially, since it's so easy to build my own private twitter network out of wordpress.

So while it's an awesome concept, and an easy revenue stream (uhh, twitter, why aren't you doing this?) - I wish I would have thought of it... I'm not all that impressed by implementation. Plus, what about integration into third party applications. Start tapping into project management API's such as basecamp, and then I'll start getting excited! Sorry.

This post is brought to you by David Jaeger, a Los Angeles Search Marketer, employed by SARBRO Solutions. You can see other Web 2.0 and Online Marketing Related events at Live Internet Marketing.

Using YouTube Sponsored Video

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:06:00 +0000

Instead of Hijacking David Berkowitz's post about how to use Youtube Video's Sponsored Campaigns, I'll point you to his great post on Mediapost about it.

Los Angeles Mixergy and Magento Event, Nov. 6, 7-10 PM

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:40:00 +0000

Magento and Mixergy are putting on a mixer Nov. 6, next Thursday. I really appreciate Andrew at Mixergy's events, as they allow all of us scattered LA web 2.0 people to gather together and meet.

Magento is a great ecommerce platform that is Open source. Knowing many of the alternatives, both open source and proprietary, Magento is currently the best solution out there - in my opinion. I met them at a twiistup a couple of years ago, and the features they offer rival what the best ecommerce solutions (I think of Amazon) use. Whether it's split testing, cross promotions etc., they really are unique. I look forward to going, and hope to see you there.

You can sign up for the event at Mixergy, by clicking the link.

About Results Marketing is an Search Engine Marketing Company in Los Angeles. If you had an opportunity, where every dollar you invest would turn into $2 within 30 days, how much money could you spend?

Well, Pay Per Click Marketing is like that. If you would like some help setting up your PPC Campaign for that type of success, call us at: 866-539-3549.

64 Tips for Getting Started with Google Website Optimizer

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 03:39:00 +0000

If you are looking for a quick place to find elements on your landing page to test, this article from futurenow is amazing
64 Tips for Getting Started with Google Website Optimizer

WebMD is ready to SUE ME...

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 21:32:00 +0000

I'm doing some of my lovely keyword and competitive research, when I come by WebMD's "link to us" page. I'm always interested in those pages, because in some rare cases, a respected company can still have a forgotten link exchange page.

But this one's good... Here's WebMD's Links Page:

"Thank you for your interest in linking to WebMD's in-depth health and wellness information. WebMD is pleased to offer you and your web site visitors access to our disease-specific content, offered in an easy format that is simple to implement on your web site.
Did you know that it is illegal to link to any of WebMD's content (other than our home page) without accepting our terms and conditions? WebMD is eager to provide you with a convenient and simple way to quickly review and accept these terms.

Here's how:

Simply fill out the form below and review the Terms and Conditions box before clicking the "I Accept" button. (This part should only take a few minutes.)
You will then be given a list of hundreds of our disease-specific content pages, along with titles, descriptions, and URLs.
From this list, select as many areas as you wish to link to. Copy the title to use for the linking text, the URL to link to, and the description if further information is needed.

How simlple, easy and user friendly...

About Results Marketing is an LA Marketing firm dedicated to helping large and small businesses alike increase their revenue by online marketing.

Google Chrome Browser - Yawn...

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:15:00 +0000

OK, so am I the only one who isn't that impressed by Google Chrome? I mean c'mon. We've got some great browsers, including Firefox, Opera and Flock (Built on Firefox).

I'm personallly committed to Firefox - it's got some real great SEO / SEM tools that I just can't live without. Otherwise I would have gone to Opera, thanks to it's lightweight loading.

I'm a little bit disappointed in Google as well. Why do you have to create a new experience, and split the coders between Firefox, Opera and Chrome? Couldn't you just have left it at Firefox and put your improvements there?

Non Scientific Facebook Rant

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 08:59:00 +0000

Using the Visa Facebook Credits, I've managed to spend $110 on a marketing campaign on facebook. Unfortunately, it fell completely flat. I figured that sending them to an external site would not generate much results. So, instead, I had them join a facebook page. The facebook page was pretty "immature", but it did have something.

Nonetheless, it didn't work. I spent $110, got two signups, and that's it. I didn't even monetize those signups. I'll have to try something else next time around...

David

Free $100 Facebook Ads Credits - Just add the Visa Business App

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:40:00 +0000

Just read an article in Mashable that Visa Partnered with Facebook to offer small business owners who sign up with them with $100 in facebook ad credits, so I figured "hey, let's see if this actually works?"... So I added the VISA app - and who knew, but I received an email from facebook telling me how to get my coupon! Sweet!

The question is, what do you do with $100 in facebook credits?

First off, I've been playing around with facebook ads for a little while. First thing I did was watch what everyone else is putting on facebook ads, and seeing what lasts. The rule of thumb about advertising - even in new markets, is that advertising that's working continues runnning. Not always true, but you need deep pockets if it's not working!

Unfortunately, in my demo, the most common facebook ad is a dating one. So I tried seeing what the response for a dating ad would be - using an affiliate program. Facebook nixed it, so I didn't bother trying to get it approved again.

I tried a financial one, which unofficially has been getting no clicks, but I am getting credit for leads coming in, so I assume it works - which is nice not to get charged for clicks and still get them

That's been a little of an aside. It seems that the goal of the visa / facebook partnership is to push the platform as one that is optimal for small businesses to use. That being said, it sparked my imagination, and I plan on putting one of my business offers on a facebook page, and then advertising that facebook page...

Thanks for the $100 bucks guys - I do plan to use it :)

The in-house agency vs. outside agency debate gets settled for once and for all!

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:13:00 +0000

While working at a comapny doing paid search, I went over the debate of whether to hire an outside firm to do the paid search, or to leave to an in-house team.

It seems that Dave Pasternack has p*wned me, claiming that there is no situation in which an in-house agency will beat the outside agency. In a way I understand where he's coming from, as an independent SEM practitioner, I have much more access to general knowledge than I did in-house. However, that was waay to generalized, and everyone else in the comments have jumped on him for making that type of generalization.

Sweet.

About Results Marketing is a Los Angeles Internet Marketing firm dedicated to helping businesses market themselves online effectively.

Google Trens Adds Website Search

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 04:56:00 +0000

Google just released their "website trends" data out to the world under their trends product.

Basically, google uses the data from opt-in google analytics accounts, their click through data and who-knows what-else to estimate traffic.

Up until now, I've been using compete.com to do competitive research. You can enter in your (clients) sites and the competition, and see the traffic stats. Now, this data is a bit inaccurate, but it does give you a really good idea of where you are holding. Additionally, you can get the keywords that are driving the traffic to those sites - forreally cheap. It's alot better than paying hitwise $695 for probably more questionable data.

Well, now Google trends shows alot of easy to use data in a simple format.

#1 - traffic stats. If you are logged in, you can see traffic stats for each of the sites

#2 - top keywords searched

#3 - locations in the world, and country of visitors for each site.

#4 - other sites that visitors of these websites visit. This is really sweet - basically, you get to see who all of your competitors are!

Some other articles on google trends:

Google Blog Post

Matt Cutts Article

Mashable's article about Google Website Trends

Search Engine Land's Website Trends Article

Microsoft's Zune - social???

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:19:00 +0000

I just bought a Zune. Why, you ask? Well, two reasons:

1) I was in the mood of a high end mp3 player - and was going to get the ipod - except that Fry's didn't carry them

2) I kind of hate Apple. The "we're the best in the world", so we can charge a premium, lock out other manufacturer's, and keep the price of our hardware stupidly expensive just pisses me off...

Just to spite myself - I was going to get the Ipod. Unfortunately for Apple, Fry's isn't an Apple reseller, so the zune it is.

I have to say the zune isn't a bad piece. Their dial, while not as intuitive as Apple's, is absolutely amazing from a Microsoft product (their UI's always suck)!

So I'm looking at my zune, and I realized that they're really trying to stress the social element of the zune... Their tagline is "welcome to the social"... Huh? This is microsoft making a sad attempt to get into the social scene?

I mean adoption of the Zune is pathetic compared to the other players on the market - and yeah, the wifi sharing with friends is cool - but c'mon; it's not in the advertising, and microsoft's sad attempt at making the zune a software a social medium is exactly that.

Here are a couple of suggestions for you guys at Microsoft:

1) Make a Facebook (and Open social) App revolving around the zune... Heck, buy out the rest of Facebook - we know you want facebook. You're live spaces just sucks.

2) Add the ability to import your friends from other places in the zune interface... Oh, and make it easy for friends to buy the zune as well.

3) Explain in your advertising that the idea of the zune is social??? I mean, that could have been a major competitive advantage. The Ipod (even the touch with their wifi) doesn't really create an interactive community around music. We know that the concept of music as a way of connecting people works... Think Myspace, Bebo etc. There's also no-one that integrates with mobile players like the Zune does.

Sorry Microsoft, that was a brilliant concept, but in my marketing books, you've gotten yourself a "C" on the zune "social" concept.

David Jaeger is an online marketing consultant in Los Angeles focusing on search engine and social marketing.

5 Sources for Search Marketing Webcasts...

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:33:00 +0000

I'm currently listening to Chris Sherman from Searchegineland on SEO for large sites. These webcasts are very useful, and also don't require you to be somewhere at a specific time. Here goes:

Search Engine Strategies Webcasts - SES is most well known to host one of the largest search engine conferences in the industry.
American Marketing Association's Webcasts.
Iprospects list of whitepapers and webcasts.
Insight24 - they host webcasts in many different industries. Here are the Internet Marketing Webcasts.
Web Analytics Association webcasts - they have a number of webcasts, and other information as well, however, most of it requires you to be part of the organization.

How can alternate search engines gain market share on Google?

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 07:12:00 +0000

This question has been riling up the search marketing world. We are all afraid of a dominant engine, but right now, it looks like there is only big player - Google.

France doesn't like the idea of an American run company dominating search (and neither does the rest of the EU), so they've put around 100 million euros into a competitor. (Losers with their nose stuck up their asses in my opinion. Can I get 100 million euro's too? I'll become a French citizen with the stupid accent? Pretty please?)

Either way, there are hundreds if not thousands of other search engines looking to compete with Google and unseat them by beating on the technology front. Visual search, semantic search etc. ("What do those terms mean again?").

Nitin Karandikar wrote an interesting column over at Altsearchengines.com on the three reasons that Google wouldn't easily be unseated as the market leader.

1) Google's already superior algorithm - Google has been spending millions (if not billions) of dollars tweaking their search engine. Noone else has that experience.

2) Sites are already ready to deal with Google. They therefore help Google get better optimization of quality content.

3) User inertia - your average non-techie user uses Google now, and they aren't going to be quick to change. You are going to need a significant userbase of first movers to get it going, and build from there...

Here's my comments (Nitin is obviously much more well versed than I am in Alternate search engines)

1) Google's superior search mechanism - I think that search engines still have a long way to go. Right now they are just dumb bots that can't figure out user intention. On my average deep search for specific information - even using google's operands (Yahoo, where are your's, I don't even know them!), I still have trouble finding the right information. For example, searching for google operands doesn't get me the page with all of that information on Google. I've used the site search etc.

(I turned on a friend who uses google for homework research - usually called plagiarizing, and she was having trouble finding specific data on google. I turned her on to Chacha, and she is a rabid fan.)

There are many times that the search doesn't help me. I think that the first company that makes visual search - or assessing user search intention easier, gets enough traction for it, has a chance to unseat Google. Not really, but my point is that Google's search algorithm is not that great, it's just the perception that it's great. In my opinion, it's passable.

Google is taking risky steps by pushing out personal search and universal search, as ways to figure out a better way to provide answers to users. I still think that there's a chance for someone else.

2) Sites are already ready to deal with Google- I don't think that is a big deal. Yes, it helps Google get a better algorithm, but it's a constant fight. SEO companies try to arbitrarily make their site the most valuable, and search engines try stop those cutting corners. The bottom line is most SEO companies are cutting corners, and I don't think the user is always served by the best search result - just the most relevant that Google could figure out.

It is true that Google - through their algorithm trying to catch every SEO trick has forced most SEO's to do much more white-hat stuff, but all of the search engines benefit from better content. It helps everyone.

3) User inertia - This is probably the biggest issue. So far, many big companies have tried to change user inertia in big ways. I think there are a number of reasons that Google has changed user inertia, and I think that there have been a number of high profile stabs at competitors that tried different ways of changing habit's that failed.

1) Perception - You need a rabid mass of fans before anyone starts saying "xxx search engine is better than yzz search engine". For example, Yahoo and AOL used to have a large start on the market because they were the start pages. However, Google gained alot of traction in the tech world as the best solution - and that perception quickly spread.
In blind testing, Yahoo has better search satisfaction than Google! (Regardless, Yahoo is still perceived as the worse engine.)

Once people started going "ga ga google", the perception became that Google is the best, which quickly eroded market share. Yahoo and Microsoft simply can't compete with the perception right now.

2) Partnerships / being in front of people - Google powered Yahoo and AOL's search, which boosted their brand. Yahoo had since played catchup (by buying both two natural search engines and a paid searh platform - and focused more on human editing - which is their strength, rather than just the algorithm itself.

Additionally,my theory is that Google has gained a huge amount of traffic through their partnerships. Their first partnerships with AOL and Yahoo brought them to the forefront. However, their continuing relationship with Mozilla and Opera - offering Google as default search engines, and giving the open source foundation money, as well as powering sites search with google mini's, has really made them a household name.

So anyone who wants to win the search engine war needs to have both "branding" -

1)a growing amount of people seeing the new companies search platform and becoming familiar with it
2) rabid fans promoting the site as being the best (Perception) - and having that spread almost virally.

as well as "direct marketing" - allowing people to take that motivation and use it to test the search engine.

Here are a couple of companies that have unsuccessfully tried to get into the search door using direct marketing or branding:

1) A9.com - Amazon's search engine. Amazon ran a promotion a while ago that offered anyone who used a9 a certain amount of times per month a discount on amazon products. This obviously didn't go anywhere, as they haven't continued it. - no perception of "we've got a better engine", it's more of a "we need to bribe you to test our engine"

2) Microsoft live - They offered free prizes to people who tried the search in terms of software... that also failed horribly, as far as I know the only people I know who did that were geeks who were trying to game the system! - no viral marketing there.

3) Ask.com - interesting idea, spectacular lack of skill in implementation, and terrible choice of medium. We all know about Ask.com's brandning campaign across the UK. As soon as I saw I thought, these guys either have way too much money to blow, or they absolute morons (or their ad agency... or both). It turns out that they were absolute morons, and the $100 million dollars went to waste, and they are now focusing on the african American niche.

There was no call to action on this... no-one is going to use ask to search when seeing the billboard. So even the people that "got" the idea, had no motivation to try it.

Besides for that, the campaign really sucked. The ad wasn't direct, when it was, it was taking a hit at your intelligence, by suggesting that Google's results sucked - which people didn't believe, and most people probably wouldn't really appreciate the line.

If Ask had really wanted to succeed, they should have done online rich media buys, and shown qualitatively how they are different than Google, and encouraging people to try the search results. This would have allowed people to actually start changing their habits, and made a much bigger dent in search habits (and minimized the one on their pockets.

Sidenote: (I don't like the IAC anyways, I think they are stuck up jerks... just like the stupid frenchies that think they'll beat Google. Oh,and the frenchies are pretending that they're not in competition. Get your balls together, be honest that you are horrified that it's a non-french product that has so much market share, and go start an anti-google campaign! I am sure that your fellow french heads-up-your-ass buddies will nationalistically stop using Google. Just be straight about it. Yeah, I'm gonna get slammed by this in the blogosphere, haha. Oops, my ego is overestimating my value. Sorry guys ... sneaks back into hole :) Back onto the search engine rant...).

An interesting success (to be?)...

Snap.com started a couple of years ago, the brainchild of one of the founders in Overture. They figured that they had a way that they could save users time - and be a better search engine than google, without actually competing with the algorithm. Many people would click on a result, and then if they got an annoying result, they would click the back button. Snap originated a light technology that would preview the search results. (You can follow their progression by their press releases, makes for an interesting read).

However, at this point in time, they've really given up on the search game, in fact, they don't even have a search engine anymore. Instead they are focusing on using the preview pane technology to power sites "preview function". They've also initiated an ad exchange where they display contextually relevant links in the preview "popup" (for lack of a better word).

In a roundabout way, if they ever decide to get back to search, they would have a database of people using their services already under a revshare program, people would already be familiar with their brand and the (hopefully) more superior user experience (although I find it annoying).

I hope they leverage that to compete with Google's customized search engine that splits the profits through adsense.

There are a number of sites that power blog search, and I think that is a method of gaining familiarity, afterwards, they need to work on the perception.

Good luck to all of the google killer wannabee's.

Followup on the Webtrends Rant....

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 08:12:00 +0000

On my webtrends rant, Chris Grantski had issues with the fact that I complained about webtrends. Here are the twitter thread...

Why I sometimes just sit and wonder. User apparently misses whole sections of features then complains. http://tinyurl.com/68zbxl

Mymo's response:

That article is ROFLCOPTER funny. But sad too. But that is WT challenge, making their product so that this guy can use it.

Julien Coquet Answers

links to comic mocking us stupid non-technical guys :)

JeHawker responds

Agreed. WT has a learning curve and some usability issues. Blaming the user is not usually productive.

Chris G replies:

- i realize i blamed the user. I usually blame usability issues. But sometimes arrogance is just ... there.

Now now, my ego has been hurt. Someone has called me arrogant. He's actually right... I am arrogant, I just cover it with valuable content, and sometimes a rant is called for... While webtrends is extremely useful for enterprise level stuff, there is alot that does need to be improved.

It took over 10 hours of work sitting on the line with a tech rep from webtrends (3 actually) for my client, to find the problem among all of the settings. I also don't like the fact that the reports are way to general...

1) There's way too much work to file out a parameter and see the differences. For example, separating paid from natural search (unless it's because I'm too lazy to read all of the documentation... which I am. I do have it on my todo list...) I know where to break out parameters, and create a custom report... but it's just work. It's drop dead simple - and in beautiful pie and flow charts once it's created, but creating it is a hassle, and I need to be able to customize alot of things for different clients, with changing needs. It's a big time waster. I have done it in the past with clicktracks, and I think the process was a little simpler.

2) I just don't like their UI - I should be able to "get it" the way I "get" weblog analysis (fine, I don't), online marketing, and business strategy, without having a formal college education, or specializing in the field, and still charge my consulting fee (and without having to read the whole manual! I know, I know, I'm lazy)

Webtrends is a technical company, after all, it's software, but I think clicktracks has their butt kicked in the above areas, forget about their overlay onto the actual site, which I love (although clicktale has taken their concept to the next level.)

Chris, I do appreciate your input, and I'm actually looking forward to meeting you, as I see that you know a hell of alot more about web analytics than I do, but I think that webtrends has a ways to go...

Richard Branson - Founder of Virgin Companies, a lesson in Entrepeneurship

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 05:28:00 +0000

I was researching the peer to peer lending industry, and happened on Virgin Money US, and I was reminded of my fascination with Richard Branson , who's supposedly A.D.D. I am A.D.D. myself, and I love stories of successful a.d.d. marketers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Branson
Here's a cool interview between Joe Polish and Richard on Youtube:

His newest idea, launched with Sergey Brin and Larry Page on April 1st (is this an April Fools joke?) is a partnership between Virgin Galactic and Google, appropriately called Virgle; which is a project to populate Mars with Humans.

You can submit your questionnairre answers + youtube videos at Google's Virgle page.

Webtrends vs. Clicktracks. Clicktracks Hands down so far...

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:19:00 +0000

Being in a data crunching environment - and I have no lack of passion for data crunching, I am disappointed in the customization and time required to work with webtrends. I've worked with Clicktracks (software) in the past, and while I wasn't happy with the performance of the software version (as far as speed), I was extremely happy with the data it gave me - and hope that if I can migrate to the hosted version that I would get the necessary speed.

Visual overlays on the webpages of where visitors go from the start were extremely useful. As were the splitting between the Natural Keywords from Search engines (specifically Google. Yahoo wasn't split for some reason) to the paid search, which we did alot from both.

Now I am working on a clients version of webtrends analytics 8, and I am not getting much of that data. In fact, I am not getting much actionable data beyond the basics. Keywords searched, popular pages, amounts of hits and visitors etc.

I don't have the analysis of where visitors go from one page to the next. I don't really know the conversion rates from pages to the next page. This is a very sad person here. Ohh, and yes, I've spent over 6 hours on the phone with tech support, and the final response has been to either upgrade to the warehouse version, or to hire webtrends specialists to customize the queries. Exactly what the doctor ordered.

Add Reachlocal to the Local Search Providers that SMB's Hate?

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:18:00 +0000

This is a continuation on the Yodle experiences post... We're trying to figure out how well the local search companies perform.

I had an interesting meeting with a client. She burned through two different PPC providers, and is currently being screwed by an SEO firm doing the "top 10 on an insignificant keyword" crap. She wants a company that specializes in SEO for criminal law firms. Anyway, dealing with that is a sales skill :)

She asked me if I outsource any of my work. I told that depending on the type of project I do outsource. I gave the example of clients that have too small a budget - where I give them out to local search companies - like Yodle or ReachlocalThe thing was that she had used reachlocal - and wasn't very happy with them. She'd dumped them 6 months ago.

She is a lawyer - running solo, and she had been getting phone calls for things that she doesn't do. This quite sad, as from what I see, the concept of Yodle and Reachlocal, and they should be good. Maybe because they undersell their products, they can't give individual attention (or they are hiring incompetents).

I noticed with Yodle as well, that they missed a whole category of keywords for accounting - CPA keywords. That is simply unacceptable. I shouldn't be having to fix that for them.

These things shouldn't happen in companies focused on Paid and Natural search. Not if they are assisting (supposedly) thousands of clients.

I'm very disappointed in them. They should do better, and I really wish I could outsource smaller clients to them, and allow people who can't afford $3,000+ a month to advertise online. Meanwhile, I think I'll be sticking to doing the dirty work myself. :(

For the sake of my sanity, someone please share with me a positive story? I want a good company to give smaller clients to, and feel good about it.

A Sphinn User's Opinion about Gaming Sphinn

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 05:56:00 +0000

As it's well known, Digg, Youtube and many other social sites are "gamed" by marketers looking to drive traffic from those sites, or gain rankings on Google. However, many people resent when search marketers try to "game" a search marketing social site - a la sphinn - and take some strong steps to encourage "good behavior".

Karl Ribas posted an interesting article about the wrongfulness of gaming the Sphinn system. He feels that good content will get there by itself. Below is my own opinion.

I'm not sure I agree with you 100% about not "gaming the system". Every system is there to be played. Politics, business, search marketing you name it. Everyone wants to be top dog - or be the expert, listened, be able to rant, generate "engagement", whatever the metric.

The goal of sphinn is to get relevant information to the right people. As people that are involved in SMO, we all know that the more we have connections / relationships / links / authority from other people in our industry, the more we can do.

While I can't sell my search marketing services to a search marketer, I can refer an SEM client, if I only do SEO. Or he can license my software, I can learn his technique regarding Log analysis, subscribe to his feed, get a reference and so much more.

The best way to gain credibility is to get a referral from someone else. I see nothing wrong with "gaming the system", as long as the product / information you are providing actually provides value to the end user.

(If my goal was to gain more friends to game the system, I just messed myself over!)

I do believe that Karl probably wouldn't argue with most of this. It's more a matter of a bunch of idiots that don't know how to provide valuable articles to sphinn, and would rather spam a tech savvy audience (idiots).

Andrew Shotland Wants to know about Local Search Providers. The Yodle Story:

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:23:00 +0000

Andrew Shotland at localseoguide wants to know about the local SEM providers. So here's a little yodle story for you guys. I think they are a great company - and do a pretty good job - although my hard-hitting client wasn't so happy. I ended up doing the work myself :(

I used yodle.com for a client - an accountant. I promised them that if it worked out, I'd send them more business. I had built my own marketing campaign to compare, and there were a couple of differences.

1) They didn't do any geo targeting - just stuck to geotargeted words
2) They had it on 24/7 - while I had mine set for business hours.
3) They missed an entire segment of keywords (cpa etc.) which is more profitable.

At the end of the day though, they also were spread out across all of the engines, I had only started with Google, and their cost per action was a couple dollars less than mine.

However, my client wasn't happy with the amount of cancellations that happened via the yodle website. Most of them canceled before coming in. The yodle rep just told me that "for some reason accountants get the lowest conversion rates"...

Bottom line is though, there's alot of garbage going on in local search. Alot of people that aren't willing to plop down $1,000 / month on me, have been sold on the "we'll get you number one on the big keywords and give you a free website for $100 / month".

Yodle is a great company, and although it didn't work out for my client, I'm sure they'll do great things. It's a shame that I burnt a bridge because of a client. I'm also interested to know how Reachlocal is doing though. They were another company I wanted to test and see how well they do, what their minimum's are etc.

Yodle's official cost is a $1500 setup fee and $550 / month + phone minutes. (I got them down to a $400 setup fee).

Rockstartup.com - Ted Murphy "Business Reality Show"

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 06:43:00 +0000

11:45 at night, and I've found probably the first (reality) show I actually appreciate - Ted Murphy founder of controversial payperpost's rockstartup. Gotta say, I love the idea!

Here's Episode 1:

More Spam - The Pay For Spam Model!

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 04:12:00 +0000

Someone emailed me via my "contact me" form on my blog telling me about a site that gets "100's of visitors" with no problem with fraud... Haha, that's spam...

So I checked the website (removing the affiliate link)... and they promise:

"WideCircles is one of a kind internet viral marketing delivery platform that avoids the issues related to pay per click fraud. Our publishers form and convey the message about advertiser's product or service including a link to advertiser website on variety of highly related and visited forum, blog, classified ad and other types of websites. Publishers carefully analyze the rules and regulations of each website before posting their message there to see whether posting such message would be allowed and to ensure that posting is completely relevant to the target audience."

Yeah right "relevant". Hey, at least us honest joe's can farm out the dirty side of SEO to others.

Spammy Competitors teach how to get backlinks using Google Blogsearch!

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 07:16:00 +0000

You know you are successful (Yeah, right) when:

1) You're competitor has the balls to create links from your site back to theirs without adding value
2) You're competitor has the balls to create links from your site back to theirs without adding value
3) You're competitor has the balls to create links from your site back to theirs without adding value
4) All of the Above!

As you can see, I'm really annoyed at one of my competitors. Normally, I would have no problem if a competitor (Local Search Los Angeles) would post on my blog with a link back to their site. However, if they are blatant about it:

This guy searched for: Los Angeles SEO "post comment" . Obviously, they are trying to gain backlinks from me... I don't mind giving backlinks if you add content that has value - even if you are a competitor of mine. That is the flawed theory of Page Rank.

Instead, this guy creates a post that looks like a trackback...

[…]Nice plugins.. I’d added some of your plugins to my list of plugins. I’ll just try it if it is really effective, and if so,well! many thanks[…]

The evil truth though is it's not. The idea of trackbacks is to allow users to find other places where the author has contributed... this one has not.

The evil perpetrator is emark***.com. The funny thing is that the IP address of the poster is in Australia. Little perps. All they had to do was to post something useful - or even give me a trackback with a nofollow. Now their post is being deleted.

Maybe I'll do some paid link buying on their behalf - and report them to Google... hehehe

Bottom line - for the time you spent spamming my blog- you could have actually added value - or even stroked my ego, and would have gotten the link.

You've also not covered your tracks, and showed me a new trick to add to my arsenal of link building tips. Thanks!

Need Some help with your online marketing - drop by our Los Angeles Internet Marketing Blog, and see what we can do for you!

Persuasion Architecture - Better than Behavioral Targeting?

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 06:57:00 +0000

Mark Walsh summarized an interesting webinar hosted by Google and Future Now, Inc. Cofounder, Bryan Eisenberg titled 'Marketers Must Focus On Site's 'Persuasion Architecture'.

Heres the important points in the article:

1 - The four types of website visitors and how they interact with a site... The four types are: competitive, spontaneous, methodical and humanistic. Each of these interacts with the site in a different way, and wants different features.

2 - "Mazlows' Hierarchy of needs for websites", where the basics are a functioning site up to meeting the customers fears desires and needs.

I love Bryan Eisenberg's stuff. He's one of the only people to systematically look at conversion optimization - and publish. If you didn't yet, you probably want to get his book, "Call To Action".

Local Search For Small Business Resources...

noreply@blogger.com (About Results Marketing) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:56:00 +0000

Two good lists of resources for small business owners that are trying to get leads from the internet are:

http://www.locallytype.com/pages/submit.htm

http://www.convertoffline.com/internet-advertising-matrix

A great local search blog is: http://blumenthals.com/blog/

My biggest issue with local search is that it's much harder to optimize for. I am in middle of creating a media plan to have clients' happy clients do reviews for their site :)