I Use Aggressive Hype & Obnoxious Tactics To Fool People

I just read a sales page for an information product

  • You had to read the words carefully to find the guarantee
  • No terms of service
  • No privacy policy
  • No mention of confidentiality expectations but suggestions of sharing candid information
  • No contact form, just a company name in the footer
  • No trust marks of any kind
  • The Third Tribe is a published book by Rob Chidley – maybe a brand/trademark conflict

This is the exact premise of the sales letter

One tribe is called the Internet Marketers. They use aggressive hype and obnoxious tactics to fool people into believing there really is a “get rich quick” magic bullet.

The other tribe is the Social Media Cool Kids. They reject hype and aggressive sales tactics in favor of relationships, community, and value . . . and yet seem to have taken a vow of poverty along the way.

Whilst some parts of the sales letter resonate, I am more internet marketer than cool kid, but my bank balance suggests the vow of poverty (not counting equity), at the same time I feel insulted… to the core of my being.

I am also in favour of being candid in public

Lets dissect the words:-

  1. aggressive hype
  2. obnoxious tactics
  3. to fool people
  4. “get rich quick” magic bullet

I am going to deal with these out of order

3. Fooling People

I don’t know anyone, certainly anyone I have promoted who sets out to deliberately fool people, no matter how much they are picked apart by R2D2’s cousin.

There are certainly various client problems

  • People don’t take action (raises hand)
  • Product fit
  • Time constraints
  • Not making use of communication channels provided to get problems sorted
  • Bright shiny objects (move onto the next one)
  • Ignoring what is taught and trying to take too big a step
  • Time management (my first blog post for a month… damn)

I realise evil marketers convince people to buy stuff who really shouldn’t – I like to encourage people to only spend a percentage of their earnings from their business.

On the producers side there is also:-

  • Failing to deliver most of what was promised (very rare) – there is talk of the occasional marketer who just took the money and ran, but there are often 2 sides to a story – there is an inherent risk in any purchase you make, online or offline, which is why you should use a credit card where possible – my builders still haven’t delivered on everything they were meant to do and I have been living in this house 2 years
  • Worthless content – products are aimed at various audiences – I ripped apart an SEO product in private which received testimonials from some of the Third Tribe trainers – I don’t know whether things were corrected in the final product – worth is relative
  • Technical issues – most notable among what I have recently promoted was part of the Stompernet package, Stomper Storm – I even took down my review pages as delivery dragged out and they eventually switched to another supplier – I don’t know the specific issues, but 5 months later a replacement is in beta testing.
  • Poor customer service – not too long ago I specifically told someone who purchased a product from my affiliate link to ask for a refund. His billing had an issue, and he just wasn’t going to renew as he didn’t have time to implement anyway. If he hadn’t asked for a refund, I might have still received $400 of the $1000 comission I was expecting. Obtaining a refund generally isn’t a problem
    There has also been one product I recently purchased that I almost promoted but felt had too many issues – I was refused a refund and fought tooth & nail behind the scenes to make sure anyone who wanted a refund could get it – it turned out to be a lack of communication behind the scenes, and one partner trying to “save the sale”.
  • Payment issues for affiliates – it hurts, but you learn who you can afford to buy traffic promoting – that being said if it is a choice between paying affiliates, and having the resources to deliver what is promised to the people who bought on my recommendation, I can wait in line, the English are good at that.

1. Aggressive Hype?

I spent a long time in the games industry – I have lived through over a year of initial development, then 2+ years of PR just to get a product sold to a publisher and another 2 year battle to get the product finally launched and get the money in after a legal battle.

I know hype… if the product delivers within the expected timeframe, fans eat it up – then there is Duke Nukem Forever…

I had a love/hate relationship with product launches even before I began marketing online in the “internet marketing” space, and there are real advantages with the efficiency of most launches compared to the games market, at least what I remember of it.

Many of them also provide significant “results in advance” if they are done right – you could call that a “freemium” model, “paying it forward” or “moving the free line”, but ultimately it isn’t too dissimilar to marketing of new software, online or offline.

What is the lead conversion rate for most blogs?

0.1% – 0.5% – maybe some get as high as 1-2% – certain pages might be much higher.

A squeeze page during a product launch which offers valuable information even before asking for an email address can achieve opt-in rates of 20, 30, 50… even as high as 75% – potentially the same free information.
I am not a fan of video squeeze pages that give you 15 minutes of promises of what is on the other side of the opt-in.

I suppose deliberately constructing an inefficient lead acquisition process has some benefits.

2. Obnoxious Tactics

I honestly have no idea what they are inferring to here

  • Email Bombardments? Guilty of having a successful affiliate program which lots of people want to promote?
  • Email Spam? – there are a couple of marketers out there who are almost impossible to get off their lists, but it is very very rare and just requires a single gmail filter, though they end up in spam anyway. Most marketers are using services like Aweber, Getresponse or Infusionsoft – if you don’t get value from what they send you, unsubscribe – it is called permission based email
  • Price Scarcity? – the price is going to go up very very soon… lets be honest, to a customer seeing a sales page for the first time, whether the price scarcity is true or not doesn’t really matter, though it does matter from a legal perspective, and long-term trust – price scarcity is being used on the sales page in question, so I don’t think it is meant to be one of the “obnoxious tactics”
  • Quantity Scarcity? – This could either be a high price to make it seem “exclusive” or a true/false limit on the quantity available often for a digital product. The FTC and other government organizations have rules about this
  • Testimonials – I have seen most of the trainers at one time or another giving testimonials of one kind or another for information products, and whilst how they are used has come under recent public scritiny by the FTC, I can’t see this being the “obnoxious tactics”

So what “obnoxious tactics” are they referring to?

Maybe I am lucky being in Poland I never get “telemarking” pitches to “fleece” me of all the money I can draw on a credit card as I have heard some people claim on various negative opinion sites. I am also an affilaite of most products I buy (or at least I join the affiliate program and don’t necessarily promote), thus I might get filtered to not see such offers.
I know people who have gained significant value from some of the high-end coaching that gets offered, thus the fault is either the person pitching misrepresenting, or the customer in some way misunderstanding, misrepresenting to themselves the benefits etc.

4. “Get Rich Quick” Magic Bullet

This part of the sales letter is actually quite subtle, in an apples to oranges manner.

  • They are clearly not trying to target “Joe Sixpack”
  • There is no system on offer, just a series of training of an unspecified nature
  • Whilst there is mention of “make money online” this clearly isn’t a “make money online” product

Ultimately it seems to be a different product for a different audience, not necessarily a “better bullet”

Emotion In Sales Letters

Emotion is very powerful in any sales letter, and in this case it is a huge spiked trap

The line I highlighted is meant to grab the attention of anyone who has a gripe about anyone, whether it be a customer support issue or receiving one too many emails pitching something.

For some reason the only emotion I felt was… revulsion – a strong negative that I didn’t want anything to do with the marketing message, and a strong enough emotion that I wanted to write something about it.

There are tons of sales letters that include words along the lines of “if you have bought tons of products and never had success, this will be the answer”, but none went as far as claiming that other product producers had deliberately used “Aggressive Hype & Obnoxious Tactics To Fool People”.

It is quite possible the sales letter is intended to appeal more to “Social Media Cool Kids” who haven’t worked out how to make money from their online activities, and not to someone “somewhere in the middle”, though most certainly not the target audience.

I am not saying everything is perfect in “internet marketing”, in fact there are some serious issues, and customers often need to know their own budget and learn to say no to offers they can’t take full advantage of.

That being said, many internet marketing products don’t try to cherry pick their audience, and try to provide “systems” that can be followed by people of varying backgrounds and skillset.

A marketplace like Clickbank has a certain level of quality control, policing sales lettters and delivery process, and of course holds the cash and issues refunds.
Refunds do happen – in the “make money online” niche I have seen numbers quoted in the 30-40% range on occasion for Clickbank products – refunds are high because people know they can, thus they do, and often they also purchase with their own affiliate link.
Refunds on products sold via merchant accounts also happen, and new terms from the merchant account providers will make that progressively easier. Why? Chargebacks – it only takes chargeback percentages above a fraction of 1% to face significant penalties.

My Problem Is With The Sales Message

Sorry Brian, Darren, Sonia, Chris & anyone else involved, but the sales message is wrong.

The Third Tribe

In the past I have defended the sales message of Teaching Sells, despite harsh criticism.

When it came to finally buy Product Launch Formula (some might claim that is the source of much of the agressive hype and obnoxious tactics) I used Brian’s link, as I thought the high end copyrighting course he was planning would be an ideal leverage point… whatever happened to that?

I can’t fault the Third Tribe product, I haven’t seen the content and it comes with “pedigree” – it is effectively the method I was defending – guest experts or partners, you don’t have to create all, or even any of the content of a membership site yourself. I might not agree with the product but that is irrelevant.

I have also promoted similar products that I believe added value.

I do realise you have to have paying customers to get complaints and no one stays in business if every customer complains and asks for a refund.

Who Isn’t Going To Join?

Just like a call for volunteers and everyone in the room takes a step backwards, who is going to be the person who still calls themselves an “internet marketer”.

The silly thing is the online marketing space isn’t fragmented into just a few distinct groups – if I put my mind to it I could probably come up with at least 100 significant but overlapping groups, many of which have a very poor opinion of their colleagues.

I am still an Internet Marketer, but I don’t belong to any tribe

Posted in marketing, news | 12 Comments

MyBlogLog R.I.P Long Live Blogcatalog

I have long been a supporter of MyBlogLog and in many ways it was the many articles I wrote about how they could improve their site that led me to doing some limited consulting with Blogcatalog.

So news of MyBlogLog possibly departing saddens me, and will affect the web materially.

In many ways the only reason I still have a Yahoo account is MyBlogLog as I still log into their stats daily. The other reason is for Site Explorer and other webmaster tools – I don’t do paid search advertising with Yahoo.

The silly thing is MyBlogLog whilst it has never lived up to it’s promise isn’t in decline among people who actually use the site so much as it has been in decline in the mediasphere.
There might be a reduced number of widgets installed, but that is something hard to measure externally.

MyBlogLog-Blogcatalog-Technorati

Using a comparrison that ignores widget installations such as Alexa clearly shows that in many ways MyBlogLog has been growing – even their search traffic has been pretty stable.

It is important to ignore widgets, as for instance with Compete it throws the numbers off totally giving Technorati some semblance of growth due to advertising widgets. (look at Quantcast for real measured numbers)

Technorati MyBlogLog Blogcatalog Compete Data

At the same time I would ignore Quantcast numbers for MyBlogLog, as they are not Quantified.

The Read Write Web article on the demise of MyBlogLog discusses the possibilities of the MyBlogLog API which has always been very feature rich – Blogcatalog has had one as well, though it probably needs a way to pass data back to a hosting page based on a visitor, and social graph data exposed.

The news doesn’t surprise me, the last post on the MBL Blog was a year ago. The next post is most likely to say they are shuting down.

APIs are important but ultimately you can get most of the demographic and social graph data you need without it as Tim can happily demonstrate.
I am not sure whether Tim ever used the API in anger for his commercial clients, but it had huge possibilities.

From a search context the loss of MyBlogLog will be missed – it was a good source of links from members of your community, and the pages in some ways were more favored than Technorati’s (more pages in primary index) but ultimately MyBlogLog has been infested with spam for years.

For me the biggest mistake by MyBlogLog was their implementation of user generated tagging.

Here is the user generated tag page for this blog – MyBlogLog tag pages have been infested with web vermin for 2 years.

The tag pages were introduced whilst the original founders were with the company.

Update From Yahoo

Yahoo on the YDN Blog have posted an update on the future of MyBlogLog. Nothing decided yet.

Hey YDN team – if you do finally axe MBL, can we get access to Yahoo Web Analytics instead?

I also find it a little strange that the post was on the YDN blog, maybe they forgot the MyBlogLog blog login?

Posted in SEO Blog, blogging tips, news | Tagged , , , , , | 30 Comments

Vimeo – Remove Your Videos & Links Now

vimeo-commercial-use-2Paul had a nasty Christmas present, an email notifying him that his training videos were in breach of Vimeo’s no commercial use policy.

You could believe his shock, with so many popular tech, web design & SEO blogs being allowed to flaunt the rules.

A couple of months ago I pointed out that Vimeo isn’t for commercial use, but that message seems to be largely ignored.

To me it seems that any large commercial undertaking using Vimeo fits one of the following scenarios:-

  1. Walking a tightrope with a demand to take their content down imminent
  2. In some barter arrangement for link juice worth far more than any blogger has probably ever received for a paid post – I wonder what the FTC would think? It certainly influences a lot of businesses to use something they shouldn’t
  3. Blindly walking a path of ignorance having not checked terms of service before signing up

The most prominent I have seen using Vimeo are Read Write Web, Techcrunch and in the SEO community Seomoz

There are tons of commercial funded startups who use Vimeo on their home pages.

Over the Christmas quiet spell I would suggest taking your videos and links away from Vimeo, and let Vimeo stagnate in a non-commercial world.

I have never really understood why anyone creating public facing videos would use Vimeo anyway, their primary saving grace are their privacy controls which would be ideal for membership sites if not for the commercial use barrier.

Posted in SEO Blog, Video SEO & Marketing, marketing | Tagged , , , , | 25 Comments

Warning: Amazon Blogger Integration Broken

Blogger (Google) and Amazon it seems have collaborated and introduced a way for people using Blogger to monetize their blogs using Amazon.
I wonder if Google is making some money as a 2-tier affilaite referring so many affiliates to Amazon

Anyway the implementation is broken for average users

This is what the interface looks like

amazon-blogger

Seems very simple

  1. You search for something
  2. Click buttons
  3. Code is inserted into your post

Perfect… not!

Average Users

An average blogger blogspot user will see

This as a nice text link

Kindle Wireless Reading Device (6" Display, Global Wireless, Latest Generation)

This as a nice image link

Kindle Wireless Reading Device (6" Display, Global Wireless, Latest Generation)

This as a nice text with image

Update: it doesn’t get stripped out the same way with WordPress but leaving it “broken” here anyway (in the feed)

Oops!

If your readers are reading from an RSS Feed that nice text with image gets stripped out, and the same would be true of emails created from an RSS feed.

This is just the same as happens with Javascript, which is why Google had to implement Adsense in a different way for RSS feeds. Amazon & Google need to do the same for Amazon ads, or use an alternative method such as flash embeds.

This is the code they currently insert


<iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=freeadver0cef-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=B0015T963C&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align:left;padding-top:5px;width:131px;height:245px;padding-right:10px;" align="left" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>

Which is meant to appear like this

amazon-kindle-iframe-image

Blogger & Amazon should really get rid of the link+image option, or code it in such a way that something appears in the RSS feeds, even if it is just a link back to the permalink of the post to suggest clicking through – better would be a dynamic image which Google certainly know how to create for Adsense for Feeds.
At a minimum tell bloggers that it won’t appear in feeds and they might need to include alternatives of their own.

If you see someone using this code on Blogger / Blogspot, warn them about this as it might be costing them revenue

You can link to this post with the following code

<a href="http://andybeard.eu/2609/amazon-blogger.html">Warning: Amazon Blogger Integration Broken</a>

Update: hopefully code fixed in my RSS feed

Update 2

I have just received this comment from Rick Klau formerly of Feedbirner and now Program Manager for Blogger

Andy – you make a valid point, namely that if a large number of your readers read via feeds, then the iframe will not render in the feed reader. But “broken”? This is how Amazon’s Associates program has worked from day 1. That is, these are the same options an Associate has had from Amazon directly for incorporating Amazon links into their content. And it’s not at all hard for the blogger to insert a link (or image) independently of the iframe so that it will show in the feed.

–Rick Klau
Blogger PM

I have major problems with this logic

Google have their own very well known Adsense product – it is javascript based either direct calls or in the case of Adsense for search, divs which are replaced on page load using javascript.

For years it was known that you couldn’t include Adsense within the body of blog posts unless it was limited to only display on a blog, and not within a feed. WordPress has lots of special plugins for inserting Adsense code specifically to address this problem.

On Blogspot you don’t have that option with Adsense, you have 2 options for Adsense

  • Within template areas, which can include at the top or bottom of a post, but not within the actual content, in the sidebar etc
  • Special Adsense for feeds via Feedburner which is image based, as was Feedburners own feed monetization platform before it was purchased by Google 2 years ago.

A button to insert Adsense within post content would be broken functionality, but in some ways the Amazon integration is worse.
Adsense is never the focal point of a blog post, in fact you are not allowed to encourage people to click Adsense.

If someone was writing a book review, they would want to include an image and/or link to Amazon to hopefully make some money. If they chose the link+picture option, anyone reading from a shared review isn’t going to even see a link to buy something, or even that there is one on the page if they click through to the blog.
This is not only when the content appears on Blogger, but when it gets reposted maybe to Facebook, other syndication, shared with friends, in emails etc.

Blogger is mass market – the average blogger user wouldn’t have a clue that when they inserted an Iframe within a post, it wouldn’t appear within the feeds and emails.

Anything that works contrary to what an average user might expect is broken and either needs to work a different way, or to have the functionality limitations explained clearly in the interface.

Posted in Google, blogging tips, marketing | Tagged , | 10 Comments

Google Real Time Search Too Personal?

I think Google have got their priorities wrong with Real Time search, though I haven’t seen this on other “ego search” terms. I checked with Danny Sullivan and Michael Arrington to start with.

andy-beard-realtime-search

As I have mentioned before, I could understand and even encourage Google to somehow decide to pull in my most recent blog posts as part of their real time search. Most people searching for me it is most likely a regular reader doing a navigational query looking for my latest blog posts, not my latest tweets.

I see this with both a UK and US search, personalization switched off in the query, and logged out

http://www.google.com/search?q=andy+beard&pws=0&gl=US
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=andy+beard&pws=0&gl=UK

This is an “Anytime” search – no need to select “latest”

andy-beard-anytime

Update – Chris Brogan Too

chris-brogan-realtime-search

I wonder where Chris would prefer the traffic to go, blog or Twitter?

I can’t track search traffic to Twitter

Posted in Google, SEO Blog, blogging tips | Tagged , , , | 25 Comments

Blindsided By Chris Cardell

chrisbgLiving as an expat, you don’t always have the benefit of exposure to a complete marketing ecosystem, thus when you hear of a marketer who seems to be “doing things” for the first time, with a huge following, it can shake you up a little.

Up until a week ago I hadn’t really heard of Chris Cardell, thus I have been a little blindsided.

He seems to be supremely confident about what he teaches though I think this claim (from an email newsletter) would require a huge amount of supporting evidence.

I am, modesty aside, Europe’s leading authority on Pay per Click Advertising and Website Conversion

You see in my mind just because someone teaches the most amount of people about a topic doesn’t make them a leading authority.

Here are some more quotes from a seminar sales page

Europe’s Leading Authority on Entrepreneurial Success

I am Europe’s leading provider of Marketing, Internet, Sales, Business and Advanced Thinking information to Entrepreneurs.

I believe this video was intended for a squeeze or sales page, and then syndicated on Youtube

Chris Cardell Presentation

Chris Cardell Reviews

Chris Cardell – A client’s view
A review from a happy customer who also works with Lee Duncan, a guy I met through the Stompernet forums.

Chris Cardell Essential Profit Strategies Review
A review of one of Chris’ products by Paul Simister – Paul comments here on my blog fairly frequently and we follow each other on Twitter – in many ways Paul is one of my competitors in the SERPs for many products and product launches, but I trust his reviews without question. He has mixed feelings about the value proposition for someone experienced in online marketing.

Chris Cardell PPC Expert

My initial research regarding Chris on his PPC expertise came up a little blank, as for instance I didn’t see him advertising on terms that would be best suited for his coaching program, or his own name.

That being said he does provide a module for Parry Marshall’s Adwords training on the difference marketing to a UK audience, so I would assume by inferral he does have some significant experience,

Innovative Offline Marketing

From what I have been able to track down from internet sources it seems Chris takes a very much Offline >> Online approach to direct marketing with great success.

Beermat Advertising

Small business owners love the odd tipple
chris-cardell-marketing-guru-1

Conferences

Chris Cardell seems to run yearly conferences with headline speakers such as former & current “Dragons” from the popular BBC TV series “Dragon’s Den”

Summit5sm

Here is a link to his conference in 2009 – I don’t know whether they are high content or a pitch fest.

He was also a recent speaker at the Glazer-Kennedy Info-SUMMIT

Jackie Ewing had some nice things to say about his presentation

Chris Cardell As Seen on TV (inc BBC)

This is something I haven’t been able to verify – there are constant messages about being featured on TV, possibly as a “halking head” subject matter expert but I haven’t been able to find any video clips.
If you search the BBC archives for Chris Cardell there is no mention at all.

Chris Cardell In The Sunday Times

There is mention in much of his marketing about being featured within the Sunday Times. Searching The Times Online I did find one mention of Chris Cardell in a resource post covering online resources of wannabe entrepreneurs. Paul did mention half-page adverts in the Sunday Times which may be his more visible presence.
I have been cited in The Guardian once, so maybe we are on a level footing ;)

Chris Cardell on Twitter

There is a Chris Cardell twitter account and at first glance I wasn’t too sure whether it was legitimate.
Whilst I haven’t confirmed directly, various recent references certainly seem to tie up with his offline activities, so whilst it could be faked, I am currently looking on it as being legit, though not heavily promoted.

Chris Cardell V.I.P Club

Paul reviewed this extensively, but I took interest when looking at the sales copy to the Chris Cardell V.I.P. Club which included something about new PageRank updates and penalties about paid links.

The phrase I take exception to?

New This Month: December 2009

Click image to see full size screenshot of December 2009 Chris Cardell sales page

Click image to see full size screenshot of December 2009 sales page

My personal opinion is that if something is stated as new information, it should be new information.

On first glance Chris doesn’t seem to have blocked internet archive crawlers, but here is the last captured version of his sales page from August 2008. Maybe the crawlers have determined that the page hasn’t really been updated in a year.

Most of the content is exactly the same.

I have no problem with continual continuity sales models and access to his V.I.P program is using a fully upfront free plus shipping trial offer with continuity, though the continuity is forced and refer to Paul’s review if you want to cancel.

The offer as you might expect if you have seen similar offers is compelling offering a huge amount of value up front.

When I take exception is the expectation that the content is brand new. The paid link PageRank penalty fiasco was October 2007 – I was right in the middle of it. Chris might be using a variation of Ryan Deiss’s continual launch model, but it is also possible all the material is available as soon as you sign up.

This doesn’t invalidate the information, it isn’t new information (though it might be for new members)

I haven’t joined the program, but this does taint it for me.

Chris Cardell Affiliate Program

Before writing this post I did hunt around for an affiliate program – Chris seems to be using 1ShoppingCart so there is an affiliate program built into the platform, but I couldn’t see any evidence of him using it proactively – it could well be that it is used as a private program, especially when he is speaking at public events, or as an affiliate for himself to add an extra layer of tracking. There are currently no affiliate links in this post.

Chris Cardell Overall

Chris seems great at presentation, he used to work for Capital Radio thus if he can present information to people in a way that help them understand it better and take action, that is a valuable skill.
That would make him a “leading source” in my mind, not “the leading authority” though maybe I am picking up on something which is more semantic.
The value provided by a “business guru” is being able to communicate and teach, and Chris Cardell seems to be able to do that with distinction. It seems what he teaches is a cross between Stompernet (inc their F5 taining with Paul Lemberg) & Rich Schefren, though claiming “leading authority” status in the vast range of topics covered is in my mind probably stretching things a little.

Chris is doing great with authority by association – Perry Marshall, Frazer – Kennedy, various BBC Dragons, and I believe he is now doing a PPC teleseminar with Jay Abraham (Wed 16th December & Thurs 17th Deccember 2009).

That is the current state of my research, I thought I would publish it for the benefit of others and as stated this overview doesn’t contain any affiliate links, I just found it interesting as an industry observer, and I thought in publishing it my UK readers could add some further perspective. (I would love a scan of the half-page adverts run in The Sunday Times for instance)

p.s. This doesn’t seem to be the same Chris Cardell who was formerly Jupiter Media President & COO. Jupiter Media is now known as WebMediaBrands. I spent a long time trying to work out if there was a connection.

Posted in Google, marketing | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Is Quality Content Needed To Make Money?

I first published this post under a different title almost 3 years ago (Jan 17, 2007 @ 6:55), but over the last couple of days it has become specifically relevant.
At the time Jack Humphreys was offering a training program combined with high end blog hosting called “Authority Site Center” which was the successor to his previous offering, “Content Desk”.
First of all I was just going to post it with a quick introductory paragraph, then I decided it really needed some additional examples.

A couple of days ago Darren over at Problogger highlighted why he didn’t feel good about a specific type of Make Money Blogging training product.

Even though it wasn’t mentioned in Darren’s post, it was quite clear from various references in the post that he was referring to Jack’s latest offering Blog Success.

I am going to turn this on its head a little as I spent a few hours browsing around various B5Media blogs. B5Media is being highlighted as Darren was a founder, and his primary role was training the bloggers, though I am not sure about his current involvement or influence on content strategy.

I understand that they have been going through a lot of mass consolidation of their blogs, and there are tons of redirects from one domain to another, and my taste in content may be different to the general public.

Thus I thought the best way to judge overall content quality would be to use retweets, as recorded by Topsy.com

I am using Topsy as from what I have seen they at least handle internal 301 redirects fairly well, although they don’t seem to do the same for when content gets moved between domains – Tweetmeme doesn’t even handle small changes in permalinks.

Everyjoe.com on Topsy
Blisstree.com on Topsy
Splendidcity.com on Topsy
Bizzia seems to have been recently consolidated into Everyjoe

I also went through a number of their celebrity blogs which haven’t been consolidated, but didn’t see anything that suggested a different emphasis, level of quality or audience engagement.

Only BlissTree seems to have really knocked anything “out of the park” since B5 Media had their site consolidation – wait a moment, that was a post from 2006 on the effect of Coke on the body, and there is another great post on what happens to your body after giving up smoking with 3000+ comments which is also old content.

Even with an army of authors, plus the occasional mention in Darren’s twitter stream the overall public reception of the content is a little bit… muffled.

I am not knocking the strategy or the authors. The authors get paid to write content to specific requirements but ultimately the aim of the current content isn’t to get book deals or speaking engagements, though I do realise some of the B5Media writers are already published authors.

There was no attempt to sell an ebook of “Halloween appetizers” despite Alexa showing it was a recent top search term.

Here is a link to the blog Jack created about Environmental News and dog treats

I have nofollowed the links as I don’t want to have too much of a positive effect on their rankings. To be honest I would have done a bit more work in making things unique, adding a point of view and personality.
I am 50/50 as to whether I would allow the links from my comments though that could be easily fixed by making the sites more personal. When Jack comments with links to the sites, he does do so as himself.

The sites are nothing special, mainly built around niched 3rd party articles, press releases etc sourced through Jack’s custom tools, and using Zemanta in some cases to provide links to 3rd party resources including sites such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

I personally don’t think it is a worse user experience for a search visitor landing on one of Jack’s niche sites compared to landing on a B5 Media blog, though there would probably be less inclination to subscribe.

Can the content Jack uses rank? Probably depending on search queries, linking etc.

With some long tail queries for snippets appearing on his home page he already outranks the original article author, though that isn’t necessarily the goal.

3rd-party-content

It is too early days to see the full effects of Jack’s linkbuilding efforts, but both sites have 5-10% of content in primary index.

An alternative goal might be to use lots of this kind of site to help rank other higher quality money sites. To be honest when B5Media had 300+ blogs I always assumed they would eventually move to a more solid revenue model such as eCommerce.

B5Media blogs seem to have 5-10% of their indexed content within Google’s primary index, which can easily be achieved with 100% duplicate content.

Blog Success (on the surface) certainly isn’t the authority blogging model Darren is advocating for Problogger readers, but Jack has taught that model in the past with a fair number of his students achieving success, and also teaches that model as a consultant. I would think some of that also carries across into Blog Success.



(highly targetted display advertising)

Update 14/12/2009

Techcrunch had an interesting piece about quality content on Sunday highlighting a post on Wired that descibes the content creation process on sites run by Demand Media.

I am not suggesting filling up the web with junk content – I have always maintained there are ways to aggregate niched content in ways that add value and create a useful end user experience, even if it might not retain long-term subscribers.

Original Title: Speed Linking Slow Linking

First posted Jan 17, 2007 @ 6:55

I don’t like the term speed linking. I like it even less on some blogs that use the “more” tag on a speed linking post, so you don’t even get to click straight through from your feed reader.

I know it helps with traffic numbers, especially if you have a large subscription, but I find it just annoying. Higher traffic that isn’t going to click an advert lowers your CTR.

Another factor to think about is how long people are on your pages. There has been lots of speculation about how long a visitor stays on your site affecting search results. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, maybe it just doesn’t… yet.

Linking

I write a fair amount about linking… hmm so does Jack Humphreys. Actually Jack writes a lot more than me about linking, and has done for years. In fact, come to mention it, if someone was to ask me to name one person as an expert on linking, Jack would be a good choice.

Jack has just written a great article “Give Links to Gain Authority Status

Jack might even agree with this next part.

Speed Linking = Bad Blogging?

  • Unique Relevant Content – Quite frequently, a speed link post doesn’t have much unique content on the page, other than a few links. If you want a page to be unique, and have some value, it needs to have content. One piece of content linking through to another adds value and relevance to both.
  • The Fire Exit – Linking through to others is great, but a speed link page is like a Fire Exit. I could understand it if it was an affiliate link… call it a minimalist approach, you don’t write anything to persuade the reader to click through, you just present them with a link and a choice, which pill? We are in a world of tabbed browsers now, but do some justice to the links, even if it is only including a few excerpts and links to related posts.
  • Create a reference – If you present a document with lots of useful tips that can’t be totally digested in 30 seconds, there is a higher chance for the post to be bookmarked and saved for reference. That isn’t an excuse for not breaking up your writing with paragraphs, bullets etc.
  • Add value – if you write something useful related to someone else’s work, there is a high chance they will link back to you either now or in the future. Are you just a fanboy or do you have a brain and a real opinion?
  • Advertising – I mentioned near the start of this article about CTR

    Jack wrote:-

    My advertising rates continue to go up because advertising today is based almost completely on page views. I get new visitor page views, but remember the 37% return visitors? My advertising is affected by that greatly.

    Maybe he needed to make this a little clearer. Repeat traffic and repeat views for the same advertising message is more valuable, because consumers need to see an advert multiple times before it even registers as something interesting, or something they might be looking to buy.

Here is an example of a speed linking type post on Jacks site.

Now first off, Jack publishes full feeds – I am not forced to visit his site to use the links. Thus the links are there to be useful, and not to create supplemental traffic that won’t help CTR.
He does include some comments about why they might be useful to me. I would actually prefer him to write a little more, or to interweave the speed links with references to his own writing on similar subjects.

Back Scratching

Speed Linking can be good for back scratching – links are better if they are surrounded with lots of related keywords, not just for the person you link to, but quite possibly also for yourself.



(highly targetted display advertising)

Posted in SEO Blog, blogging tips | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 23 Comments

Has Mike Filsaime Flipped His Lid? (& how I screwed up)

Yesterday I spent a little time trying to explain to a relative layman the difference between Affiliate Marketing and CPA.

Both are performance marketing, the people sending the traffic get paid if someone takes a specific action.

Affiliate networks often carry offers which are effectively the same as CPA – email submits, trial offers etc.

I highlighted that you can buy Acai Berry products on Amazon, and then compared it to a few more aggressive landing pages currently advertising on Google using review offers etc.

Mike Filsaime – 7 Figure Code

7figurecode-product
Mike Filsaime is relaunching his 7 Figure Code promotion and this time around he is doing it “CPA Style” – I think it would be wrong to delve into all the financial details and a little complex but for anyone promoting it is a very generous offer, especially for smaller affiliates.

Flipped His Lid?

CPA has risk, because quite often you are making a payout to an affiliate before potential refund requests and problems with credit cards – there is often a higher level of fraud when processing.
Mike will certainly have done his homework and he knows his previous conversion rates on both the front end and back end offers. So he is taking a calculated risk.

Another risk he is taking is declaring a break from information marketing – software in many ways has much more associated risk, especially within the Web 2.0 space such as he is attempting with Tweetglide. That being said he has some really solid services like PayDotCom that need his attention.

Here is that link again for 7 Figure Code – I think bloggers especially will learn a lot about sales process and it would be a great resource for startups who haven’t worked out how to monetize their websites and membership lists.

From an affiliate point of view, I really wish this promotion had a tracking system suitable for CPA offers with some way to get live sales reporting at a keyword level.

Update

Have you ever just totally screwed up an affiliate promotion?
Yesterday I posted the wrong links with the wrong screenshots and sent people to the wrong landing page.

It is my fault that I dropped the ball, but I am trying to think of ways to prevent this happening on my own promotions. Affiliate backends which contain multiple products mistakes can happen.

One thing I have noticed, if affiliate launch instructions are mainly in video form, I haven’t always got time to watch them, and most often I will just skip the promotion totally.
I also don’t necessarily like PDFs as browsing them inline often does nasty things to browsers, and something downloaded is going to be cast aside for later reading… and later never happens.

Some suggestions

1. Screenshots & words in a blog format of every stage
2. if it is PDF, use a flash based PDF viewer inline
3. If it is a powerpoint, again use a flash based powerpoint viewer

Posted in marketing | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Blog Success & Affiliate Tracking (pt2)

I love teasing Jack Humphrey as in many ways it is like the student testing his new prowess on the master that taught him. I learnt a lot from Jack in my early days and whilst when I first started online I couldn’t afford to join his then “Authority Site Center” that still didn’t prevent me emulating many of the systems that they had in place.

I even promote his launches sometimes without using an affiliate link just because I feel like it such as his recent launch of The Twitter Method.

twitter-method-serp

He has also finally overtaken me in the SERPs for the rankings for the predecessor of the course he is now running, Social Power Linking – I still get search traffic on that term.

social-power-linking-serp

He effectively gets that traffic for free as well as I just didn’t get around to changing the links.

Such is the longevity of blog content.

Jack currently has the latest incarnation of his blogging and social media training launching – he is a damn good teacher.

This is a raw affiliate link to Jacks course… Blog Success but I want to discuss this affiliate link with you a little.

http://www.blogsuccess.com/l.htm?w=btm&p=AndyBeard&a=blogpost

This is an Infusionsoft tracking link – a while back they introduced a way to have a redirect script on your own domain, but very few affiliate launches use this method.

The parameters

w=product code
p=affiliate ID
a=advert

Now the advert part is very interesting

In Infusionsoft it looks like you have to manually define these one at a time, but in fact you can define them on the fly

http://www.blogsuccess.com/l.htm?w=btm&p=AndyBeard&a=keyword1

http://www.blogsuccess.com/l.htm?w=btm&p=AndyBeard&a=keyword2

http://www.blogsuccess.com/l.htm?w=btm&p=AndyBeard&a=nUFFggh4hbdbheh5

infusionsoft-tracking

However ideally as an affiliate from a blog or landing page you would want to use a much cleaner link such as

http://andybeard.eu/Recommends/BlogSuccess.html

http://dedicatedaffiliatedomain.com

Lets add to the confusion that you might also be driving traffic to a blog using Speed PPC as I wrote about earlier and it is obvious there are some technical hurdles to getting effective tracking working with blogs & landing pages.

Paid or Free Traffic Source
>> Landing page
>> Set cookie based upon keywords
>> Modify page using SpeedPPC using keywords
>> Modify cloaking page to read cookies or parameters if cookies are off
>> Write data to custom database
>> Create tracking link with tracking software on the fly based upon parameters used
>> possibly still have a fully cloaked paged rather than just a redirect using iframes etc.
>> potentially jump through some double meta redirects, javascript & iframes to hide traffic source or other funky stuff.

This side of things is relatively easy, the problem comes with Infusionsoft when dealing with multiple products, multiple sales paths, different prices and quite frequently 5-10 different landing pages for one launch.
The tracking can become a royal mess, and there is no current way to export the data for affiliates.

Back To Jack & The Buzzworm Earth Blog

I have no idea where he came up with the name of that blog from, just another demonstration of how creative Jack is.

buzzworm-earth-blog

That is a screenshot from 1 of 4 free training vidoes you can watch right now without even having to give jack your email address.

Notice in the screenshot Zemanta – they have recently opened up their service to more blogs, which is going to make Jack’s system of generating $9000/month turbo-charged.
I have no idea how typical thoughs results are, but I regard Jack as an atypical trainer.

Here is another affiliate link

All affiliate links in this article come with 99.9% uptime SLA to take you through to Jack’s offer and potentially make me some money.

p.s. Jack has a $1 for 7 days trial

Update

Here is a direct link to the free training resources Jack provided in a run up to his relaunch of Blog Success

monetization-training

Posted in blog monetization, blogging tips | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Dell Better At Social Media Than SEO?

Lots of reports are out today about how effectively Dell is using social media marketing and especially Twitter to generate revenue, $6.5M in sales are the headlines, I wonder what that translates to in margins.

However yesterday I read a post ranking cloud computing vendors based on mind share using a points system based on Google ranking for the term [cloud computing]

The winner was Rackspace, but we have some idea how they achieved that

But I was more interested in the result for Dell

dell-no-snippet

First off they are doing some funny redirects so the displyed URL in the snippet
www.dell.com/cloudcomputing
Redirects to their cloud computing page on a subdomain which I assume is some kind of CDN

http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/cloud-computing.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

Notice that there is only a URL displayed in the snippet and not an excerpt from the page or meta description. Google is just displaying the page as a reference, but for some reason couldn’t crawl the page.

Now before I show you what they have done wrong I did try to contact Dell about this yesterday. I sent a tweet to the guy who maintains at least one of their social media profiles, and since this tweet he has been tweeting on his account so I assume he has had a chance to read the tweet I sent.

dell-robotstxt

I didn’t receive a response, and as this is a significant problem I am blogging about it, mainly because Google seemed to be doing something contrary to what I previously understood (they weren’t if you read more) and have seen written by authoritative sources such as Vanessa Fox.

Here is the robots.txt of that Dell subdomain

User-agent: *
Allow: /at/de/home/
Allow: /au/en/business/
Allow: /ca/en/business/
Allow: /de/de/corp/
Allow: /de/de/home/
Allow: /hk/en/business/
Allow: /ie/en/business/
Allow: /ie/en/home/
Allow: /in/en/business/
Allow: /my/en/business/
Allow: /nz/en/business/
Allow: /sg/en/business/
Allow: /uk/en/business/
Allow: /uk/en/home/
Allow: /us/en/business/
Allow: /us/en/corp/
Allow: /us/en/enterprise/
Allow: /us/en/home/
Allow: http://content.dell.com
Allow: http://content.dell.com/
Allow: http://content.dell.com/au.sitemap.txt
Allow: http://content.dell.com/hk.sitemap.txt
Allow: http://content.dell.com/in.sitemap.txt
Allow: http://content.dell.com/jp.sitemap.txt
Allow: http://content.dell.com/my.sitemap.txt
Allow: http://content.dell.com/nz.sitemap.txt
Allow: http://content.dell.com/sg.sitemap.txt
Disallow: /

The page concerned us under /us/en/enterprise/ so should be controlled by this directive.
Allow: /us/en/enterprise/

As Vanessa states

If conflicts exist in the file, the robot obeys the longest (and therefore generally more specific) line.

So somthing is going wrong in between the URL displayed in the search results, and the final landing page.

Server Header Analysis

Search result
>> [302] http://www.dell.com/cloudcomputing
>> [302] http://content.dell.com/cloud-computing.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz
>> [301] /us/en/enterprise/cloud-computing.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

http://www.dell.com/cloudcomputing

GET /cloudcomputing HTTP/1.1
Host: www.dell.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: UTF-8,*
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&pws=0&gl=US&q=cloud+computing&start=20&sa=N
Cookie: SITESERVER=ID=6596edc940b547a0afe7a6a1db4e40ee; s_vi=[CS]v1|258EA06C05011703-600001124062905C[CE]; StormPCookie=pl=pl&pc=pl&bandwidth=NA

HTTP/1.x 302 Found
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Location: http://content.dell.com/cloud-computing.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0
Set-Cookie: stop_mobi=; path=/
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
x-ua-compatible: IE=7
Date: Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:42:34 GMT
Content-Length: 196

http://content.dell.com/cloud-computing.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

GET /cloud-computing.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz HTTP/1.1
Host: content.dell.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: UTF-8,*
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&pws=0&gl=US&q=cloud+computing&start=20&sa=N
Cookie: SITESERVER=ID=6596edc940b547a0afe7a6a1db4e40ee; s_vi=[CS]v1|258EA06C05011703-600001124062905C[CE]; StormPCookie=pl=pl&pc=pl&bandwidth=NA

HTTP/1.x 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:42:35 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Location: /us/en/enterprise/cloud-computing.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz
Cache-Control: private
Content-Length: 0

http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/cloud-computing.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

GET /us/en/enterprise/cloud-computing.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz HTTP/1.1
Host: content.dell.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: UTF-8,*
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&pws=0&gl=US&q=cloud+computing&start=20&sa=N
Cookie: SITESERVER=ID=6596edc940b547a0afe7a6a1db4e40ee; s_vi=[CS]v1|258EA06C05011703-600001124062905C[CE]; StormPCookie=pl=pl&pc=pl&bandwidth=NA

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Cache-Control: private,max-age=0
Date: Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:42:36 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Expires: Wed, 01 Jan 1997 12:00:00 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
X-Awesomed-By: Thundera RE-TJN
Set-Cookie: lwp=c=us&l=en&s=biz&cs=555; domain=.dell.com; path=/
Set-Cookie: dus=ci=cloud-computing&th=Default; path=/
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

Problem – Robots.txt Disallow Match

The inbetween URL redirect is blocked by robots.txt

http://content.dell.com/cloud-computing.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

It is actually matched by
Allow: http://content.dell.com/
Disallow: /

Google has decided to take the most restrictive version, to disallow the URL.

I haven’t checked how many links are pointing to that URL both from internal and external sources, but I would guess it is a fair amount and I am assuming at this time that is a page they would want to rank as in their line of business it is probably quite a competitive term.

At a guess without that one URL blocked by robots.txt, they would have been much higher on the comparison charts and ranking higher for cloud computing – most likely that is a 1st page result thrown away by robots.txt

I haven’t checked how many other key landing pages are blocked in a similar manner – I bet it is quite a few

This is just chalking up one more reason why robots.txt should be avoided as it is so easy to mess things up.

p.s. My niece is 18 in 2 months & I am sure she would love a Dell

Posted in Google, SEO Blog | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed