I was having a root around at SEO Black Hat and noticed that they had changed their template to an even lovelier shade of black, but the thing that struck me was the size of there RSS button. I wouldn’t be someone that keeps tads on things like the size of RSS buttons but I thought this was big and as a whole each new template I see has a massive button. So I’ve taken actions into my own hands to try and stop the RSS Buttons from growing.
Over the past few years we’ve had a few global scares that if they should be left alone would destroy the Universe in our life time, first we had Sars, then problems with genetically modified food and finishing up with chicken flu and global warming. How does Mr Murdock sleep at night?
Anyway while surfing the net last night in my 4×4 eating a KFC I noticed that there seems to be an epidemic of genetically modified RSS Buttons what are taken over blogs. If this is to continue to happen soon blogs will have no visible copy and only display a huge RSS Button and a blogroll. So to help stop this I’ve devised an International standard for RSS buttons, they should be no bigger than 2′ by 2′6″, this will help to combat any future war on RSS buttons as internet land becomes overrun by RSS buttons.
Please shoot or left click delete any RSS buttons that go beyond this measurement.
Everyday there’s a narrow window of opportunity to free think before the first cup of coffee of the day.
I get up pretty early to make the commute to Glasgow and as I drive a 4 X 4 sometimes this takes a while, there not know for being fast.
I’ve started to notice that I have my best idea’s of the day in this magical coffee free hour or so the commute takes and I’ve also decided that when I get into the office I’ll take that train of thought and try to brain dump it onto my Equator blog. So here goes with my first tale from a 4 x 4, please excuse the grammar, spelling and some of the crazy thoughts, it is pre 8am and I still haven’t had that first cup of coffee.
Merchants and Affiliates
While on the road today it came over me that Merchants and Affiliates don’t have the necessary feed back loops in place to make the most of this channel and the relationship companies have with their affiliates.
Firstly let’s look at both groups; I have been both at one time or another so I’ll talk slightly from experience.
The Merchant
The merchant tends to pick up on affiliate marketing while at a marketing or trade seminar and think to themselves “Why aren’t we doing that” and then they run off to a network pay the joining fee, make some banners and sit back thinking DONE!
Then, and it’s a big then, the ppc based affiliates are brand bidding and seo affiliate are buying up misspell domains and domains the merchant should own but was probably to busy glowing in there own success to think it was important.
Here it comes the relationship killer, updated terms and conditions, no ppc bidding, no domain buying, no use of brand in URL structures, the relationship is dead, the affiliate hit the A4U forums and your program dies a whimpering death. The merchant then tells everyone in the company and any one that will listen that affiliates are just robbing bas*ards and it’s not successful.
The Affiliate
These guys are at the forefront of internet marketing everyday, they don’t go to SES conferences to learn something new they go to meet their affiliate buddies and get drunk, they already know what works. Ever think an affiliate would buy advertising space of my space, I think not.
Most affiliates work on a bang and bust theory, when something works and they find a winning strategy, get the maximum out of it, when it’s slows down, drop that idea and move on.
So how can the two work together and work together well.
Firstly merchants have to see affiliate marketing as an opportunity to get the best online marketing people to work for them and then only pay them when they sell something. Think what would be if you could employ all your staff this way, your company would grow faster than any of your competition and probably faster than GE or Ford did in there heyday.
Help the PPC guys.
OK, they all know the brand bidding rules but these guys will probably uncover a niche market for your service or product that any marketing grad you ever hire couldn’t think of in a million years. As I said early this guys are at the forefront of anything that involves pay per click marketing, they think about it in their sleep - so engage them, work with them.
Try these:
Do they require specific landing pages for campaign?
Is there copy better, do they want their own copy on a landing page?
Do they have suggestions to improve conversion?
Do they have any long tail key terms that your company could expand on?
Helping the affiliate to get better at what he does can only be good for your business, many merchants will think “I’m using my resources to help this guy make money with our product” YES you are, but engage the affiliates and constantly improve the relationship and make them a part of the team and the long term rewards will always outweigh the spend and time on resources.
Help the SEO guys.
A different kettle of fish, you’ll never know whether you like what these guys are doing until they’ve already done it. The best method for helping the SEO guys is to give them the tools they need.
Data feeds
RSS feeds
Widgets
White label booking engines
White label websites (even better)
These guys are always looking for content of any kind, give it to them, work out the duplicate content issues before hand and let them go.
There also probably your best way into the social media playground, ask them what tools they need and again, make them available.
Help the cash back and voucher guys.
These guys are a hybrid of the other two, they know abit about ppc and enough about SEO to get their site ranking, they don’t need much but constantly involving them in your marketing can have a great impact on your sales and traffic to your site.
Have affiliate only voucher codes
Make them co branded banners and buttons
Test products on there sites
Test promotions with them
Use them as you’re A/B testing ground
Just remember that feedback is the key to making this channel work, give the affiliates your information in return for there feedback, the feedback will allow you make changes that will help your affiliate program flourish. It will also help you to improve your own internal ppc and seo campaigns.
Over the past while many SEO and Online Marketing agencies have started to offer Social Media marketing as part of the the marketing mix, on further inspectation they all seem to be promoting the same product, Brand Protection.
So what is Brand Protection?
We all know that there are 10 natural listings on the first page of a search engine and we all know that a brand usually ranks in postion 1 and 2 for the branded terms, what about the other 8 positions?
For some brands particuliarly in the travel industry bad pr is always floating around on trip advisor and other review sites and for some brands this bad pr occupies some of the position of the first page of the search results.
In terms of a brand trying to deliver a message to new and existing visitors it must be able to control the messaging that is displayed on the search engines, a brand can’t say how good it is, people don’t believe self promotion. What new visitors are looking for is reveiws and testimonies meaning that the brand must control the messaging on postions 1 throught to 10.
How can this be done?
By using social media networks such as Wordpress, Xanga, Facebook, Bebo and Myspace to name a few, brands can interact and engage in conversion with customers through these channels. By promoting these channels in an effective way via customer feedback and special offers the brand pages on these social networks will start to rank in the natural listings with in the search engines and start to rank above the review sites and bad PR.
Does it work?
On many occassions we’ve been contacted by clients asking for this service although we never really called it brand protection and in many cases we succesfully promoted social media sites to out rank negative PR.
I wanted the images on my poster website to have an Apple itunes style reflections on them, I’m not sure if they help conversion but the reflections do make the boring flat images sort of come to live. So I got some tutorials and messed around abit untill I had something that I like. It was very easy and the final effects are quite good.
I have cd’s lying around with thousands of images on them that I never got around to including on the website, so another quick tutorial on Photoshop Action Scripts, 3 or 4 ammepts at make the image in diferant ways and it was ready or batch automation.
I thought I’d share this script, I have no idea if it’s usefull to anyone.
If you want the script simply leave a comment and I’ll email it on the address provided
I’m not the sort of person that sits down a types stuff for the sake of typing it. It has been pointed out to me be clients and the other guys in the team that I’m a sort of straight to the point sort of person. The only problem I have with this is that I can’t think of new idea’s when I’m writting about the last one I had and then the thought process slows down and the good idea’s start to slip away.
So what’s my solution?
Well Mindmaps of course!
A few years ago I had the pleasure to meet with Tony Buzan while helping a family member with some marketing activity for Scotland-based Gael Ltd, while they developed the Mind Genuis software.
At the time Tony Buzan was being filmed drawing on a large piece of paper with lots of differant coloured pens, I had no idea what it was all about. When someone tried to explain to me how it worked glaced up to the left and let it pass by.
Meanwhile in the Future:
I don’t now how it happened but will looking through google images I came across an image that looked as though it had an online marketing plan on it, on closer inspection it was an ad for MindMeister.
This new thing looked cool and web2.0′y. So I gave it a go, what a dream piece of software. Already this morning I’ve knocked out 2 online marketing mind maps for clients and I’m wanting more to do. It seems that I have sort of explosive idea’s, they all come at once and this lets me get everything down where I can see it. And I can share them, account managers are getting invited to look at strange drawings on a German sounding website but I love it. And feed back is easily implimented.
The downside, it’s a web app, a very nice web app indeed, but sometimes the net connection isn’t that great and resizing the page can take time (about 30 seconds, but far to long for me, remember “explosive”) so I looked around for something that can run locally on my machine and interact with MindMeister. And FreeMind does just that, now export the MindMeister mindmap (I have to export it in MindManager format as FreeMind does accept the maps exported as a FreeMind file type, strange but true) and import via the import fuction on FreeMind and now I have locally running mindmaps that I can upload and share via MindMeister, ideal for remote working or interacting with a client over long distances.
It’s not every often I talk about Art, the designers in here think the marketing team are all keyword stuffing morons, which is fair. Most of the time we sound like that.
Other stuff that interests me is unusual marketing like the gorilla playing the drums to Phil Collins tunes. If it was Phil Collins in the costume then that would be class, maybe I should start a rumor.
Other then me be being indulged in marketing, Seth Godin books and the Wii, I sometimes look at art. Is art marketing? In a way yes, it’s promoting the artist. George Orwell said “All art is propaganda, but on the other hand all propaganda is not art.” but what did he know! It’s the same for marketing, art delivers a message, marketing is just taking art one step further.
What if Banksy was a marketing guerrilla instead of a guerrilla artist, would he be the UK’s version of Seth Godin or Greg Boser?
He creates unusual art pieces that stand up, stand out and shout a message.
We had an idea, we wanted to test every element of the social media sphere, blogs, ,networking, bookmarks, video, images, anything that’s considered new.
What we came up with was Equator Live, a lab environment where we could test anything, try new things and have a complete understanding of all the new technologies and now they integrate.
And the most important part, have some fun.
The first new thing that we want to do was to engage every member of staff in the world of blogging. While the marketing team have there own personal blogs and some people within equator use myspace and bebo we want to get every member of staff up to a reasonable understanding of how blogging works. Already we’re getting departments interacting to come up with idea’s and to help each other out. Within a short period of time we can expect every member of staff to be proficient in blogging (if the gold fish could type they’d have a blog).
We’re now at the point when a little bit of training wouldn’t go a miss, so for Equator staff this Friday about 4 o’clock we’re going to be having a training/overview/ask us questions session.
Over the past while many SEO and Online Marketing agencies have started to offer Social Media marketing as part of the the marketing mix, on further inspectation they all seem to be promoting the same product, Brand Protection.
