What MTV’s Jersey Shore can teach us about Internet Marketing

It’s not all fun and games at the Seaside house. The cast of brazen characters on the Jersey Shore are a wild bunch of misfits that can’t seem to stay out of trouble. Whether it be toxic affairs, overly dramatic rivalries, or local xenophobia; this young crew’s frivolous management of relationships and their own personal well-being opens a window for the outsider to build a guide on how-to not ruin marketing campaigns. If you’re not sure how the two match up, keep reading…

MTV's Jersey Shore Snookie

Snookie- The lovable, sassy, self-proclaimed guidette loves nothing more than tanning herself and making out with boys, but she also has a bit of a Napoleon complex. Being slight of stature but unafraid of a fight, she’s been punched more times than Kool-Aid. For some reason, the poor girl isn’t aware enough to know when trouble is brewing.

Learn from Snookie- It’s important to have a certain amount of real self-realization when considering online marketing channels. In SEM there are plenty of instances where you’ll simply be too outmatched to engage in a battle. The competitive landscape in both PPC and SEO and maybe such an uphill climb for newcomer businesses that lower barriers of entry can be found elsewhere. This wouldn’t mean abandoning either tactic, but simply revising it so that you are leveling the playing field. You may consider going strictly long-tail if your keyword sets are deep enough and using the same optimization practice to wage war against lesser opponents. This would be the equivalent of Snookie picking a fight with midgets and kindergartners rather than strung out hookers and roided out monkeys.

MTV's Jersey Shore Pauly D

Pauly D- The ladies man known most commonly for his signature blowout haircut. Pauly had a pretty successful time meeting girls at the bar for later conquest. His total operation is centered on meeting easy women. The Ed Hardy gear, the gym regiment, the haircut, it’s all focused on one goal.

Learn from Pauly- What Pauly might not realize is that his product is too geo focused to ever have success out of his home market. In order to scale nationally he would need to substantially overhaul his approach. It’s important to realize that different markets will not only react differently to marketing cues and product benefits. This can differ in regions as tight as neighboring cities. Thankfully geo-locatable advertising mediums online give us the ability to isolate and exploit. Marketers fall in love with national level A/B testing, which is imperative, and forget about regional testing. A/B testing can and should be separated at a regional level and independent markets should dictate their own testing schedule. Think about the local influence of broadcast news and how coverage may differ from Los Angeles to Boston.

MTV's Jersey Shore Mike 'The Situation'

Mike ‘The Situation’- Shortly after meeting Mike, you’ll be bound to know why he is the best thing to hit the Jersey Shore since spaghetti Bolognese. His callous desire to be the center of attention at all given times wears on everyone’s nerve. You can only take so much of ‘The Situation’ before you’re thoroughly sick of him.

Learn from The Situation- It’s plain and simple; there IS a sweet spot for ad frequency. Over serving ads, saturating channels, and riding a single set of creative for too long will not only erode short term returns, but erode brand equity you’ve built over time. Moderation is the key to all sorts of nice things: growing old, not getting too drunk, staying out of jail, and keeping your advertising fresher longer if you don’t have the luxury of an in-house creative team.

MTV's Jersey Shores Ronnie

Ronnie- The bear-like young man that tears up dance-floors and opponents faces like a ravenous…bear. Though he exhibits a tender and caring side, Ronnie’s testosterone get’s the best of him at times and he can’t control getting himself in dangerous situations. He naturally spends some time in jail.

Learn from Ronnie- Karma is a b**** sometimes. Maybe you’re not the only party at fault, but if you are getting pulled into affiliate programs that don’t give you any active voice in the management of your brand identity, then you could have your hands full. I’ve personally negotiated CPA based deals with networks only to find out that publishers were allowed to run wild with unapproved creative. Imagine the punch in the face I received when I checked my voicemail and had messages of people calling me a racist. You think that management fee and flat rate agency relationships are a gamble? Relinquishing all of your moderation authority to someone motivated by the almighty dollar could be a bet made with really unfortunate odds. Take that chance and you may get burned.

Think I’m way off? Go ahead and make a marketing parallel with J-Wow, Angelina, Sammie, or Vinny and post it below.

With the fairly recent buzz around the new Google Caffeine search engine we figured that it would be nice to be able to check where you rank in the new Google Caffeine playground as compared to the actual Google results. After all, we are a search engine marketing company so we are concerned with where our keywords might be showing up in Google’s future plans.

In case you’ve been in a cave for the past few weeks you know what Google Caffeine is. For you cave dwellers here it is in simple terms. Google have given the world a peak into a new architecture for its organic results. These changes will affect crawling, indexing, results of search queries, and probably a lot more.

Google wants people’s feedback on this new architecture. Ahhh, free labor. So for the first time ever they have released it into the wild. Here’s our chance, a real sneak peek. Finally! Actually it’s pretty cool to play around with. Early reports are that it is faster, and that it indexes more pages. Only time will tell what the future will bring. Matt Cutts notes that the changes are in “primarily how we index,” as noted by Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land. Wow, that means there will be some pretty big changes coming around soon.

Now back to that tool I mentioned earlier. We noticed many tools that compare Caffeine results with normal Google results. That is fun and all but we wanted to look at specific keyword rankings for specific sites and how they match up. I mean who knows where you rank for “yellow widgets?” It might be page 1 in Google and page 10 in Caffeine! And we don’t have time to sift through the search results.

So, we created this nifty Google Caffeine Keyword Rankings Checker.

It will allow you to type in the keyword of your choice along with a URL in order to check where a given site ranks for a given keyword in both engines. It’s our first free public tool so be nice to it. We hope that you find it useful!

Related Articles from Around the Web:

http://searchengineland.com/two-tools-to-compare-google-with-google-caffeine-23917
http://searchengineland.com/caffeine-googles-new-search-index-23823
http://mashable.com/2009/08/10/google-caffeine/
http://www.seobook.com/google-caffeine

So, last week at SMX Advanced, Matt Cutts mentioned that the nofollow tag no longer works as we once thought it did. He mentioned that the nofollowed links actually flow PageRank.

Well today Matt Cutts made his official statement: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

Summary: Page rank sculpting using the nofollow tag no longer works to our desired effect.

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

So, before you could take PageRank from other pages and transfer it to you more important pages in hope of getting them to rank higher. (See Below)

Read the rest…

I was hired in the middle of Q4 2008 for a sales position at eVisibility, and I wanted to write a little about the experience of coming from a place where I thought I had a good grasp of online / search engine marketing to joining this group who actually lives and breathes it. My previous job was with a company that put design first, where I had to learn fancy acronyms like LAMP and try to decipher the limitations and functionality of programs like Drupal and Joomla, and development tools like CSS, PHP, HTML and Ruby on Rails.

When it came to online marketing, it was a highly nebulous concept for me; and the training that I really needed was not forthcoming. I read some things about SEO and Paid Search, but I did not have enough foundational knowledge for it to really gel. Nevertheless, I was able to sell it somewhat successfully as part of a project because clients were completely lost on the subject. Flash forward to now, and a quick discussion about SEO and what I see in my job.

Now, at least, I know what I don’t know. SEO in and of itself is fantastically complex, although now I have a strong conceptual understanding of it, and a much tighter grasp of the value of the moving parts which all coalesce to create results within a well managed campaign. I can talk on and off page and give you articulate explanations of each facet of organic optimization as they relate to the way we have our deliverables and pricing set up. This is a huge departure from “yeah, we can do SEO and PPC, and we will just roll it into the price for development.”

Unfortunately, my world is complicated from a sales perspective. Potential clients coming to us have very often been burned by some company (and there are many out there) which has taken significant money and given the client results ranging from nothing to almost nothing for their investment. This happens for two reasons, the first being that there tends to be an attitude from the customer perspective that SEO is SEO, that it is a commodity like groceries or gasoline. This leads to a lot of price comparison but inexplicably almost a total lack of focused effort to really compare the deliverables from one company to the next. The devil is really in the details when it comes to organic optimization, and Internet marketing in general.

Vigilance on the part of the customer within this aspect of the sales process would almost certainly eliminate the second reason that this happens. A large number of companies in this space are either unscrupulous or they just do not have the human capital assets or top level expertise to do everything necessary to create results that justify the customer expenditure, and more of them would be eliminated if potential customers were more informed, knew what to look for, and were prepared to pay a fair price for the actual value of the expertise and deliverables that achieve results.

At the end of the day it really pays to deal with a company that trains its front line sales reps to understand this stuff at almost the level of a sales engineer. From this one can extrapolate that the people involved in the actual day to day campaign administration are extremely qualified, and well worth the $2,000-$10,000+ per month they are asking for. With the right exposure and placement, your ROI will eclipse those numbers anyway. Never has the phrase “you get what you pay for” been more appropriate.

Warning Warning: The following post might get a little nerdy!

The other day I was running into an issue when I was trying to redirect a page with a URL that contained a question mark (?) to a new search engine friendly URL.

Example:

http://www.domain.com/category.apsx?id=1 to http://www.domain.com/keyword-category-1.php

Doing a traditional style line by line redirect in an .htaccess file was not working:

RedirectPermanent /category.apsx?id=1 http://www.domain.com/keyword-category-1.php

Long story short the question mark in the old URL was breaking the 301 redirect and making it useless.

The solution is a Mod Rewrite with a 301 redirect:

After some in depth searching of the internet and testing I figured it out.

Below is the code that you need to use:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} id=1
RewriteRule category \.aspx http://www.domain.com/keyword-category-1.php [R=301,L]

Click to view larger image

Hopefully this will help people looking for this very specific 301 redirect issue. If you have feedback or input please comment below!

As we all know, creative content does the best in the social bookmarking realm. Photos seem to have a very high success rate. This could be due to the fact that they do not take long to process, they can be shared quickly, and everyone likes looking at art (I think so?). Outside of direct keyword searches, photos have historically been the #2 item searched for on the web, of the 4 Google verticals. News comes in at #3 and Videos are #4. With blended search results, news and video searches are definitely on the rise, but photo searches still dominate the web.

So, you promoted your image to a social bookmarking site, it hits the homepage, it sends a large amount of traffic, and you might even get a few links back to your site. Wow it was that simple! Well not really, getting your content to homepage of a social bookmarking site is very difficult and I will save that for another day.

Well what about all those people that now use your image in their blog posts or webpages, but don’t link to you? How do you find these juicy potential back links?

Simple you have two sources: Tineye and Google Image Search!

Tineye

Tineye is a reverse image search engine. It is amazing cause all you have to do is place the url source of your image and hit go! It does its thing and returns very accurate results of pages that have used your image.

Google Image Search

Google image search is a little bit tricker. You need to search for your image with various keywords till you see your image being used by another website.

Once you compile the list of sites using your image simple contact the owners or leave a comment if its a blog post asking for credit of the image.

I really liked your article about “…………”. I think “Say something insightful”…

BTW I noticed you used our “image name / description” in your post. “Drop link to your site that references that the image is yours”

Would it be possible to get credit for our image? A simple link back would do.

Thanks again.

Now, these website owners do not have to link back to you at all, but if you ask nicely 8 out of 10 times they will drop you a link back.

It’s that simple!

Now for a quick real life example to show you that this actually works and is worth your time.

Last year we created a “Google Bot” that hit the home page of digg. YEA!! We got a bunch of traffic and some backlinks. Fast forward 3 months later we start ranking in Google Image Search for the term google bot. I then noticed that other website were ranking as well, but with our image! So, I contacted the webmaster or dropped a few comments and bam BACKLINKS!

Today I used Tineye and found even more potential links.

So, there you go folks! Have fun Tracking Down Your Lost Link Love From Your Creative Images!

Hey remember to follow us eVisibility and me(ImNotADoctor) on Twitter! If you need any search engine marketing services you know who to call!