Some Thoughts on Google’s TV Ads

Posted on April 22, 2009 by admin

I for one haven’t had much use for advertising on TV. It has typically looked like more trouble than it’s worth for me. It’s more money than I’m typically willing to spend on advertising. It’s also altogether too easy to just be used to fill dead air. All in all, I have seen it as a waste of money, and I’ve done quite well without it.

Now I see that Google is offering a TV advertising service called, without any originality, TV Ads. That’s right, they’re providing a service online to advertise on TV. Now, I have to check this out.

The interface for TV Ads is familiar territory. It’s based off of AdWords. They advertise that you can pick and choose how you work your TV ad strategy. You can also negotiate the cost of their service. Interesting, but does it work?

Once you’re in TV Ads, you do your keyword research to narrow down what shows are most relevant to your target audience. I’m not entirely sure how they figured this out, since there are so many ways to do it. It could be a matter of tracking users searches on Google, or they could have gotten survey information from the Networks. I’m betting that they tracked user searches.

After you do this research, you theoretically have an idea of what shows you will want to advertise in for maximum traffic. They will even add an estimation of how many impressions you might get in a given time slot.

Once you’ve figured out your ideal slot, you upload your video, assuming that it fits the technical specs. The good thing is that at this time, TV Ads technical specs aren’t terribly complicated. That’s probably because it’s new, and they haven’t found new ways to limit your ability to use it…yet.

If you don’t have a video to upload or the inclination to make one, then you can, of course, use their Ad Creation Marketplace to get someone to make it for you. Obviously, it’s not an option I would choose, since I’m sure I can find someone cheaper to do it for me if I’m not game for making it myself.

After these steps, then you work on your budget and prepare for an auction format such as eBay. Considering how many people would be competing for certain time slots, this is the only way that would make sense.

After you win an acceptable slot, you can track the success of your ad and tweak it around as you need to. Google, naturally, will supply the tools to do this. It doesn’t look like a bad package deal, really.

So, how do I really feel about TV Ads? Like I said before, I don’t personally have much use for advertising on TV. I’ll probably give it a spin, though, since I like new and shiny technology. For the newbie, I would suggest a few things, though.

First of all, you might want to have some experience with AdWords before trying out TV Ads. If you don’t know what you’re doing with AdWords, you can lose a lot of money. I’m willing to bet that more money’s on the line with TV Ads.

I’d also get some auction experience on eBay first. There are ways to win an auction with minimal expense and you have to know what these are. Otherwise, you could be throwing more money than you need to at TV Ads.

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YouTube as a Promotional Tool

Posted on April 18, 2009 by admin

As you may have guessed at some point, nearly every venue imaginable can be used for internet marketing. One venue that is always there for the pickings is video websites like YouTube. Many internet marketers aren’t making as much use of this venue as they could, and they’re certainly not using it as well as they could. That’s tragic for them, since these sites are only getting more and more popular. Also, unlike the so-called stars of internet video sites, you won’t be making “theoretical money” from YouTube, you can make real money when you direct traffic back to your site!

One major problem that many of these marketers are probably encountering is that they may be feeling overwhelmed by the idea of making a video. Have they seen some of the stuff that’s on YouTube? It’s not like we’re talking about anything that’s going to win anyone an Oscar. When Guitar Hero players have fans…yes, I said fans, of their game playing skills, what do you think you could do with your business on one of these sites?

Okay, so maybe you’re a little camera shy to be showing off or even appearing on camera. Nobody ever said you had to be what’s in the video. Sometimes people post slideshows of their baby pictures on these video sites. Other people create actual television commercial style advertisements on there, with greater and lesser levels of ability. There really is no accounting for taste.

Okay, so maybe you don’t know how to use flash or some other video software. Maybe you’re too shy to appear on camera, don’t have anyone else to do it for you, don’t think you have mad skills at animation software, or much of anything else. Let’s fall back on what you can do. Can you use Power Point? You can, in fact, make an internet video out of a Power Point presentation. Now that we’ve included this as a possibility, can you think of other things you can use this way? Think outside of the box and use what you can do. Of course, it wouldn’t hurt to learn the other ways of making video, too. Remember, you should have your website’s URL showing, perhaps as a subtitle, at least for a good portion of the video’s time. People do need to know where to go next.

Okay, so now that you’ve made a video advertising your product, how do you get it up on the net? That’s where the tool called TubeMogul comes in. It can submit your video to several of the top internet video sites. Oh, and remember to use those keywords when you post your video!

When it comes down to it, anybody can post demonstrations of anything on internet video sites. If a shut in kid can develop a fan base by playing games on his playstation, you can generate sales on your website from these sites. Make a slideshow of your products or services. Use a power point presentation. Do whatever it takes to get on these sites. It’s worth it.

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Reciprocal Linking: Not Worthless, But Not So Hot

Posted on April 14, 2009 by admin

I’m hearing a lot about how reciprocal linking is absolutely dead.  They’re saying that one way links are the only linking scheme with any value.  I disagree.  Reciprocal links aren’t quite as good as one way links, but they’re not dead horses yet.

Reciprocal links have value depending mostly on where you make them.  The name of the game anymore is relevance.  The links have to be related to your niche market, or they’re not really worth much of anything.

If you exchange reciprocal links with directories that aren’t relevant to you, or if they have low or no authority, they’re not going to help you any.  This much is true.  The thing of it is, though, it can bring in human traffic, so it helps your SERP ranking indirectly.  But you’re going to need more than that for your rankings.

When you do reciprocal linking that’s relevant and natural to your niche, it’s a whole different ballgame.  Look at it like this:  If, say, you’re running the Teamster’s Union’s website, there are probably going to be reciprocal links to the members’ pages.  These links actually have value.  Just don’t be linking to, I don’t know, the LOLCat’s website.

While we’re at it, there are other things that play into the value of reciprocal links.  Relevance counts, of course, and so does the authority of the websites you link to.  It’s a matter of common sense.  If you link to some crappy, low ranking page, it’s not going to help with improving your ranking.  Many webmasters tend not to link up with new websites because of that one thing.  It’s not doing anything for them.

With this in mind, a thousand links to crappy websites aren’t going to do jack for your website.  Not nearly as much as linking up with one quality site.  Don’t think that having a huge reciprocal link directory at the back end of your site is going to work.  Having friends in low places won’t get you to the top, and bringing them up can drag you down if they suddenly outrank you.

Naturally, you’re going to have to be picky about who you trade links with if you expect to get ranking.  Indiscriminate linking with any and every site that wants to trade links is a waste of time.

Of course, just putting up content and crossing your fingers isn’t going to get you the links you want.  It’s always nice to actually get unsolicited quality links, but don’t hold your breath for them.  You have to go out and get them.  If you don’t have friends in the industry yet, you still have options.  Web 2.0 properties will be your friends.

All you have to do for this is set up a bunch of blogging, YouTube, Ebay and other such sites and point them at your page.  You can, in turn, point your page at them, and you have a nice collection of reciprocal links.  This technique works.  I know because Chase Manhattan tells me so.  In the end, that’s all the justification I need.

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Mythbusting: The Legend of Duplicate Content

Posted on April 10, 2009 by admin

I’ve seen a lot of misinformation being circulated around the Internet among SEO providers.  They purport to be updated information, but they’re inaccurate at best, and at worst, flat out wrong.  One of the biggest myths I’ve seen is that you can get the Google slap for having duplicate content.  I want to correct this.

The basic assumption about Google wagging its finger over duplicate content is that it’s plagiarism.  Either you’re plagiarizing yourself by having the same content on more than one page, or you’re plagiarizing someone else’s content by copying it on your page.  Honestly, Google doesn’t care about plagiarism.

I’m not actually much of a video gamer, but I’ve looked into it as a niche to penetrate.  One thing I saw is that regularly, you will find the same exact content being posted on different forums.  This is one form of duplicate content, and yet, these pages rank just fine on Google.  This keeps going on like this month after month, so there’s only one conclusion you can draw:  Google doesn’t care if you take content from other pages.

Consider also the article directory sites.  These sites were pretty much made so that Web developers can swipe the content for their webpages.  Don’t you think that these sites would get the ol’ smackeroo?  The funniest thing is that they don’t, and neither do the sites that lift their content.

Another aspect of the duplicate content myth is that if you have two pages with the same content, you lose rank for it.  This isn’t exactly true, but it can sure seem that way in some cases.  This is actually more of an SEO issue than a content penalty.

You see, if you have content on two pages, Google will only count one of them as a page.  No harm, no foul, it just doesn’t count them both because of redundance.  If the SEO on one page is better than the SEO on the other, naturally, one will rank higher than the other in the SERP page.

Now, the big question is which page is Google going to see first?  If it sees the page with the better SEO, it will count that one.  If it sees the one with the not as good SEO, it will index that one.  It really is a simple matter of it being a toss up.

The site will then get ranked based partly on which of the two pages got indexed.  If this duplicate content is newly placed on your site, and Google indexed the page with the worse SEO, yes, you might lose some rank.  Not because of any penalty, just because the indexed page’s SEO wasn’t as good as it could have been.

If you honestly feel a need to have duplicate content, there are two ways to avoid this loss of rank.  One is to make the SEO of your site equal all the way through.  The other is to include the better of the two pages in your XML site map.  This way, the Google spiders will only see the page that you want them to see.  That’s all there is to it.

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Monetizing Your Website

Posted on April 7, 2009 by admin

It’s a trap that many people are in.  I know, because I used to be in it.  That trap where you do things in a certain order, you know, you start off thinking that you’re going to generate traffic, you’re going to promote, you’re going to bring in all this traffic and–Oh, yeah, I’ll make some money, too.

Attitude, of course, is important, but if you only think “I’m going to make money off of this,” while you do the same tired procedures, guess what?  It’s not going to magically change anything.  Your actions have to follow your mental focus.  Something else about this little mantra, it’s really not going to help because it doesn’t propose exactly HOW I’m going to make money off of this.

Wishful thinking is just that.  Guess what?  There will be no genie appearing; no fairy stepmother is going to help you.  It’s all on you.  Now let’s think, “I’m going to make money off of this by…”  Now you just need one or two more words and you have a plan started.

Because most people have only a linear perspective–one avenue of traffic–on monetizing their site, they miss the most glaring clue about doing business on the Internet.  It’s a World Wide WEB.  To become unstoppable on the Internet, you have to build a web around yourself; bringing traffic in from several avenues.

Another way to look at it is like the Hydra.  It was such a scary monster because it had several heads, and every time one got cut off, two more grew in its place.  Now, especially if you’re really being aggressive, you HAVE TO do this.  You can expect at some point that Google will smack down one of your sites, but that’s okay.  You have ten others.  You also have two more ready to go to replace the one you lost.  That’s how it works.

It goes even deeper than this.  Let’s not just stop with how many websites we have, how many avenues of traffic, blah blah.  How are we going to monetize this?

Again, we can’t think linearly.  Remember, it’s a WEB.  You need several payment vendors.  Don’t just use Paypal, look at Clickbank also.  Throw Authorize.net into the mix.  The more options you have for payment, the more ways people can pay you, the more you have monetized your product!

What you’ll see from all this is that traffic comes in at all different angles.  People have different ways of paying.  You have just opened up more ways they can come in and pay.  Now, what’s the draw?

Guess what, kids?  It’s not just one media style.  Text alone isn’t doing it.  Podcasts are only moderately better.  Just as we have multiple points of entry, we have to have multiple angles of attack.  Start with making videos.  From there, you can easily make your podcasts and text.  You can also make stills of the video and you have images.  There, I just streamlined a whole lot of your marketing right there.

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Ustream.tv can be a valuable tool for internet marketing

Posted on April 5, 2009 by admin

Many people would like to believe that they are buying goods and services from real people, not gigantic, impersonal corporations. The distrust many people have towards Wal-Mart is a shining example of this. Despite their efforts to show community awareness and that they’re all around decent people, there will always be people who protest Wal-Mart. They will protest, if for no other reason, than they’re just too big and seemingly impersonal.

You can take this lesson and apply it to your marketing campaign. Sites like Ustream.tv can not only give you an online advertisement venue, but it can also give you the chance to actually interact with customers and potential customers. It gives you the opportunity to put a human element into your business like few other venues can.

One way you can use Ustream.tv is similar to the infomercial format you see on television. You will essentially be on live television talking about your product, and possibly demonstrating it. You can have a countdown for the time frame that a special deal is being offered. You can also have an open question and answer session at any point, as this service comes with a chatroom. You can basically do what you want with it.

You can also use Ustream for press releases. Maybe you want to announce a special sale or service, or a new line of merchandise with minimal expense. You can do that here. You are literally limited only by your imagination. Ultimately, as long as you’re putting a human element to your company, you can spin this thing however you want to. Just make sure you will be able to answer questions, or at least know how to say “I don’t know” without looking like an idiot. Of course, this is going to be challenging, but anything worth doing is, isn’t it?

On the other end of things, you will have to advertise your advertisement. As always, use your Web 2.0 savvy to direct people to this event and time. You can post an advertisement for it on each of your blogs. You can send out advertisements to your mailing list. You can post it up on your website. Why not put it up on social bookmarking sites and blog carnivals? Announce it everywhere, and in every way that you can. The point is to get as many people to this live interactive session, where you can interact with them, and quite possibly drive them back to your site, ready to spend more money.

As you can tell by now, Ustream.tv and similar websites can be a useful addition to your internet marketing campaign. I’m sure that by now your wheels are turning out ways that you can make use of this technology. Of course, it’s going to take some preparation. Of course, it’s going to take some work. But think about it this way, the conversion rate can be massive if you handle this venue correctly. That’s what we advertise for, right?

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Google Was Hilarious Yesterday With CADIE

Posted on April 2, 2009 by admin

In case you missed the April Fool’s Day joke on Google yesterday, it’s a highly amusing commentary on automation.  Basically, they claimed to have been taken over by an Artificial Intelligence called CADIE.  While it was, after all, a practical joke, it’s pretty telling about Google’s mentality about automating your grunt work.

Wouldn’t we all like like to have automated processes for as many aspects of our Internet Marketing as we can?  Automatically generated web pages, automated chats, emails and blogs…these are all touched on by the “entity” known as CADIE.  It all seemed geared toward an “I, Robot” paranoia about automated processes.

CADIE had a home page, which was possibly the most awful thing I’ve ever seen in terms of SEO.  Of course, the page was made intentionally to break nearly every rule of optimization possible as a commentary on their opinion of automatically generated web pages.  It’s no secret that the search engines index web pages made with “organic SEO,” or hand designed ones, higher than automatically generated ones.

CADIE also provided GMail with an “Autopilot” feature.  This is essentially a quasi-intelligent autoresponder feature.  The examples they showed of this “product” in action had it responding affirmatively to the Nigerian Bank scam, suggesting to end friendships over facetious statements and other sorts of disastrous email responses.  Obviously, the idea of an interactive autoresponder terrifies them.  Really, that terrifies me, too.

There were many other parts of the CADIE hoax.  One involved YouTube and a video posted by CADIE, there was an alteration of Google Maps and Books, a “brain reader” feature from your cell phone, and apparently some special Easter Eggs if you use Google Chrome.  There was also a bit about “CADIE powered presentations.”

In the end, what does this all mean to us?  Of course, it’s a prank, and not even as funny a one as the “High Speed Internet through Plumbing” campaign they once did.  However, it can stand as a commentary of automation gone too far.  Worse, it’s them trying to drive you back to the stone age of Internet business.

Why are they concerned about automated processes?  Because automation is a large part of how I and people like me outsmart and exploit Google.  You see, every aspect of this hoax involves someone, an Artifical Intelligence in this case, exploiting Google to their own ends, and all aspects of it are meant to be unnerving until you get the joke.  It’s a pretty sneaky way of getting people to get traffic and do business by their rules.

Of course, it’s true that there is a lot of “organic processing” that goes into exploiting Google.  After all, there has to be the questioning of the Google page, brainstorming on how to use it, and the possible creation of a program to do it with.  The automated processes simply free you up to have new ideas; it’s not a dependence, as they would imply.  Without them, there’s a good chance that their automated processes will stay ahead of your organic reasoning.  There, I think, is the point.

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I Heard This Rumor About the Death of Web 2.0

Posted on April 1, 2009 by admin

Well, it has been a while since I posted.  What can I say, the holidays just swept me off my feet and I had TONS of stuff to catch up on.  Now everything’s settled down, I’m able to get back talking traffic.  Anyway, so there’s this rumor about Web 2.0 marketing going the way of the dinosaur.

I kind of have to laugh about this.  Web 2.0 isn’t going away as a marketing technique, it’s just changing.  Of course, I’m on top of things.

There are two projected changes in the world of Web 2.0 marketing.  One theory people have is that Google is going to weaken the strength of the back links from Web 2.0 properties.  Let’s assume for a second that this is true.

Some of you may remember the heyday of article posting.  That it was the best thing to use in marketing to promote your site.  Then one day, the search engines took away some of their strength.  Of course, they still work, but you have to know how to use them better.

Much the same could be said about the social media markets.  If the search engines lower the importance of these back links, we have to get around that, right?  I know of a couple of obvious ways to do this, and I’m already putting them to use.  It’s simple:  Diversify your Web 2.0 properties and strengthen their back links.

I’ve talked a lot about having a variety of Web 2.0 properties, so let’s focus on strengthening back links.  How might one do this?  You can do this by back linking to your Web 2.0 properties.

Does this mean that you will have to go back to the old begging for back links trick?  Is that, after all, the best way?  Hardly.  You just need a connection to a network of sites, and you don’t need to beg for that.  You could even, with the right technology, create Web 2.0 properties that back link into each other.  Don’t go running around spinning what could possibly succeed Web 2.0, fortify what you have.

The other trend is a tendency toward microblogging sites like Twitter.  This, along with the phenomenon of streaming videos, also looks like a trend with possibilities.  But I’ll have to save that for another post.

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Consistent Blogging for Consistent Web Traffic–Clearblogs.com

Posted on December 23, 2008 by admin

What site has an Alexa ranking of 28,007, incoming links from 1.6% of the sites that WordPress has–and can get you quick indexing and great ranking in Google? Clearblogs.com is the site I’m talking about–and it’s a good way to get consistent web traffic.

One of the great things about Clearblogs is its stability. Google gives and takes its love for websites on a pretty regular basis.

This is just part of the game when you market with Web 2.0 properties. Your Squidoo lens for one keyword goes down three pages while your Hubpages hub for that same keyword shoots from page five to page one. Your WordPress Blogg disappears into the sandbox for a few weeks while your Wists wishlist suddenly hops to number one.

This is one reason that if you’re using social media pages to get web traffic, you want to have several of them: 20-30 per keyword. It’s not just for backlinks–the Google dance constantly moves your pages up and down.

So it’s nice to have a blogging platform like Clearblogs that remains reasonably consistent. Blog use it on a regular basis, register it with Technorati, ping your RSS feed and tag feeds. Use it consistently and you’re likely to see consistent results.

This site is great if you’re not much into coding–and don’t want to hire someone who is. For funneling traffic, you don’t need to worry too much about appearance anyway.

But if you’re going for an “authority”, name-brand blog, you’ll probably want to spruce it up a bit. Clearblogs.com makes this easy with a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor.

One way this editor can be helpful–whether you want to make the blog good-looking or not–is that it allows you to easily add a picture to your posts. As you well know, a product image will almost always increase conversion rates.

(And while you’re at it, make sure your images have keyword-rich file names and alt-text.)

So there it is. Clearblogs is a site with very few users (but more than it used to have), pretty lousy Alexa ranking (but up about 12,000 from what it used to be), and incoming links from a pretty paltry number of sites.

But it ranks well with Google; just as importantly, it does so consistently. It also looks to be catching up steam. Right now is a prefect time to get in on this game!

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How WordPress.com Can Get You A Lot of Web Traffic (And How To Do It Right)

Posted on December 21, 2008 by admin

The best way to make money with most Web 2.0 properties, I’ve found, is to use them in ways other than the ways you are “supposed” to. That goes one step further with WordPress.com, because you’ll need to use it in ways that they actively do not want you to!

WordPress.com is a double-edged sword. Its post pages can rank extremely well for their keywords. I’ve used blogs there to get onto page 1 of Google without even adding any social bookmarking link juice.

The only problem is they’re not very marketer-friendly. Of course there are a lot of sites that aren’t. but the people at Word Press are marketer-unfriendly and vigilant!

So you may want to go a little more low-key with WordPress.com than you do with your other Web 2.0 pages. Or you may not. Sometimes being blatent will help you enough in the short-term that it’ll be okay for you to get them shut down early.

Social media pages are great, free ways to gain lots of traffic quickly, when you hit them hard enough. But even victorious armies accrue attrition. You should expect some of your pages to get shut down every now and then.

You can view your WordPress.com blogs as the elite front-end shock troops of your campaign. They have a good chance of getting in there first and hitting the hardest, but they’re also going to be under more fire.

And this fire is precisely why Word Press blogs can rank so well. WP’s administrators make sure that the content is fresh, user-generated, valuable content. Google respects this, and its rankings show this. Just keep in mind that the administrators at WordPress don’t always appreciate commercialism.

One good thing about WordPress blogs is you can pre-load content and set it to appear at the exact date and time you want it to. It’s a “set-and-forget” model that will easily keep you in Google’s pages.

As always, don’t forget your tag pages. You should have at least two tag pages for each tag: Technorati’s (because all your blogs are registered at Technorati, right?), and Word Press’s.

As you might guess, the tag pages and their feeds at WordPress.com tend to do pretty well for themselves (and whoever last pinged them). Pinging your WP and Technorati tags is a good double-barrel to ad to your precision rifle posts. Lock n’ load!

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