Archive for the ‘article marketing’ Category
Happy New Year, Smojoe in 2010
Lots to talk about, here in January 2010.
Three photo contests ended on Lenzr on January 1st, and are slowly being replaced. The matches were not as dramatic as previous finishes, as the winners established an early lead and maintained it over the entire course of the contest. You can read all the developments on the Lenzr blog including our endeavours to make a better scoring algorithm. 
In the next session, the voting results should more accurately reflect each photographer’s skill, as decided by the people, and be less about his or her ability to promote the page to friends. We are rewarding comments now, and reducing earlier metrics that were set too high. Congratulations to members seguini and ve3bnw
Macro Photos of Life winner (right) was submitted by a prolific member named ve3bnw which sounds like a license plate # and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is, considering he describes himself as a commercial truck driver that’s interested in photography. The image titled Time to BEEHAVE magnifies a shiny wasp.
This member will receive an Eastern Ontario wine and brewery tour set for early next month and there’s more information on Locaboire. Smojoe will almost certainly accompany the winner on this journey and, of course, write lots of travel and wine related content afterward, for your reading pleasure.
New Photo Contests on Lenzr are slowly coming to life, and more challenges will launch next week. Already there is an offering entitled Everday Tangled Web which asks members to upload images of the most beautiful tangles in their life, if possible. Its a difficult assignment.
Sponsored by S.E. Telecom, a business phone systems provider in Toronto Ontario, the challenge hopes to showcase the messes we make, as individuals and as a society, when we run lines and make connections without properly organizing a system. But even an ordered network can look confusing from certain angles. There’s lots of chaos in my home, but none of it is very beautiful.
The Prize is a Plantronics Voyager 510SL+ Bluetooth Headset System with Lifter, retail Value $429.00
Enjoy wireless freedom in the office or on the go with the Plantronics Voyager 510S Bluetooth Headset. Ensuring lightweight, all-day comfort, the Voyager 510S delivers superior sound quality and provides WindSmart technology for clear voice transmission. You can read more about the reasoning and reward in the Everyday Tangled Web photo contest on the Lenzr blog.
Ruth Wilgress Begins Blogging
Ruth Wilgress is starting a business that provides expressive arts therapy in Toronto and will be blogging and updating friends and collegues as she advances in this discipline.
Ruth is working hard to perfect new programs and new methods of helping people through the practice of creating art. Here’s The Rat Race which is one of her best pieces. I absolutely love her colour choices she used. Who would have believed that lime green and pink compliment each other? I also like how the picture is punctuated by computer chips.
Lisa Charleyboy, veteran blogger takes up article marketing
Lisa Charleyboy is Toronto’s most fascinating native girl blogger. Graduating York University this year, she’s already a veteran author that has outgrown a blogspot and has advanced into article marketing as a hired gun for some big name fashion portals. Lisa has a very bright career as a freelance writer ahead of her. It was over a year ago that I profiled Lisa Charleyboy on CanadaBlogFriends.ca
Want to read her latest stuff? Her last year’s Top Five posts. Each of these articles probably got more readership than my Smojoe blog did all year, but I’m not jealous. Its a different audience.
1) Holy Cowichan
2) Native Model in Bazaar Spread
3) Urban Warrior: Anthony Collins (aka Thosh)
4) Could Canada’s Next Top Model be Native?
5) Urban Warrior: Tatanka Means
Abel DaSilva shares a hole lot of secrets with Dumpdiggers
Just after the holidays, I wrote and published two stories about a Sunday Jan 3rd afternoon spent with Abel DaSilva, who is Toronto’s foremost excavation site bottle merchant and also a knowledgeable antiques aficionado on eBay, and power seller and prolific discussion forum participant.
Shopping for Antiques at the Sunday Market in Toronto with Abel DaSilva is an informative article that details the St Lawrence Hall, Sunday Market setting and chronicles the purchases of a wise man leveraging his knowledge of history. Abel understands tricky niche markets for collectibles and how to buy local and sell global using eBay and related Yahoo antiques collecting groups.
Sightseeing with Abel DaSilva in Downtown Toronto sifts through half a dozen stories about four different lots in the downtown core in which historically significant antiques glass bottles were unearthed. There were truckloads of antiques buried under just about every condominium building on the shoreline. What’s even more fascinating, is how Abel befriends the excavation company employees, site supervisors and heavy machinery operators by sharing his knowledge of the specimens they unearth in their digging projects. Abel was very generous sharing tips, but redacted some of the juiciest stuff after reading my first draft. My favourite anecdote is the King City car chase where Abel was followed by other diggers from one landfill site to another.
In closing, let me say the most satisfying metric that any freelance business professional could ever hope to measure is the amount of opportunity that he or she receives per week.
What is a Smojoe Centurion?
For three years, Rob Campbell the prime innovator at Smojoe has been experimenting with conversational marketing using the social web to affect Google search results for strategic keyword targets.
And now I, Rob Campbell am the first Smojoe Centurion, because I can deliver one hundred stories with links.
Smojoe Social Media Manual, version #3 outlines exactly how social marketers should engineering multi platform brand stories, and how they should measure results. It’s available right here for $19.00 CAN and is thirty seven pages of detailed information about how to market websites.
Social Media Marketing is without a doubt the fastest growing new sector of advertising in the world.
Each Smojoe Centurion is a one man marketing army and a respected contributor and member of one hundred different niche communities, and probably has one of the most findable avatars on the web. Grounded in their own expertise they are comfortable with, and indeed profit from being, internet celebrities.
Having so many different passions means a social marketer can influence different types of people by creating primary, secondary and tertiary media in different niches.
Using articles, blogs and discussion forums these Jedi Warriors are the best idea sneezers in the business, and their participation in any campaign yields valuable social capital for the client website.
Lenzr has been a terrific catalyst for trying new things, and writing final reports every sixty days necessitates regular patrols of the landscape.
The simple lessons that I’ve learned, and the hundred places where I can go talk about my clients with links and photos have made me a Smojoe Centurion.
Story Funnels To Buck Stops
The best online storytellers leave different bits of the same brand adventure in articles, blogs and discussion forums all over the web. The mechanism of this successful marketing ideology can be crystallized in one simple observation; they build story funnels to buck stops.
The search for experts drives the internet, but the search for stories rules the social web. Building story funnels to buck stops means hand crafting a dozen different hooks (things that people might find interesting) before publishing anything, and then using the bits of content to funnel readers toward the client’s website or primary conversion page.
The client website must have ‘conversion tools’ by which readers can be converted into customers. This is a magical place, and the subject of a different blog post. Right now we’re just building the funnels.
How to plant multiple platform brand stories on the social web
There is a method to Smojoe madness, a ritual exists wherein certain elements are planted first to build and compound with other elements. For example, pictures are posted on Flickr and Photobucket first thing so they can be embedded later in blogs and niche discussion forums. Little bits of text with links are prepared and assembled opposite links to photos on a HOT SCRIPT document.
Smojoe plants the content top down. After research and preparation, I start writing the most compelling stories as exclusive articles (or photo essays, factoidz, or videos) and then cycle down through four types of less exclusive user submitted content digesting ideas and leaving links back to clients. Second stage is blogging, third stage is discussion forums and it all ends with someone micro blogging and bookmarking the best content that was created at the end of each cycle.
The interesting thing is that readers usually encounter these story cycles from the back end first; they hit a blurb on Twitter, and then come to a discussion forum where they find a link to a blog post with a Flickr photo gallery widget in the sidebar. The Flickr images have descriptive text with links to an article in a popular niche eZine which links to a product page in the client’s e-store, the buck stop.
Story Funnels to Buck Stops is particularly effective when marketers can compel readers to follow their ideas across four different social media platforms to brand their minds forever. However, at the end of the day, the most measurable result is the increase in Google search traffic over the target keywords. This is because the Smojoe Centurion who started all the conversations was careful to target just one or two keywords in the link text back to the client. The increase in 3rd party links buried in rich media conversations positively affects the Google PageRank algorythme and the target site will appear higher in SERPS for that keyword after the next update.
How Smojoe Uses Squidoo Lenses
Squidoo Lenses have purpose. They’re a great way to mashup multi-faceted client goods and services (and ideas) together, all in one place. Any products sold on eBay or books and videos on Amazon can be seamlessly integrated into rich text stories and spiced with YouTube videos and Flickr photo slideshows where everything is reinforced with Google or MSN news bots and Delicious bookmarks that actively scrounge up the latest information to add to the mix.
More importantly, these pages can become powerful Google juice batteries for client links. Some veteran SMO people here in Toronto still believe that sharing Squidoo mashups with seven or eight premier web services transmits some of their relevance onto your target website , and the lens itself will easily rise in page rank with just a few simple tactics, which I’ll detail later.
After reading all these positives, I understand when newbie social marketers get so frustrated with Squidoo, because their lenses GET NO TRAFFIC WHATSOEVER.
Hahaha I’m still laughing. Imagine spending days or a week building a Digital Acropolis showcasing all of your clients good and services, only to find that nobody and I mean nobody visits the attraction. I know from experience that’s usually what happens, here are my Squidoo lenses listed in order of popularity,
Where in the World is Osama Bi…
Why does Smojoe build these Squidoo lenses?
Because it’s easy and it looks great and nothing says multi-platform brand storytelling better than a Squidoo lens, because its one of the few places where readers can get all the elements of the story at once.
Squid U: Learning how to properly create a beautiful lens on Squidoo.com is the first step to success, and that can be accomplished with one day of intense trial and error. It’s recommended that you enter Squid U at least once while your password is still fresh in your browser so its cookied, and then the path is paved for your future and inevitable return (Squid U requires a separate login wherein users must remember their name and password). Make the connection. Inside this sub destination you will find a discussion forum, and you will see another dimension of Squidoo as ‘lensmasters’ help newbies and post links to their own material in their signature boxes below each post. You will also find links to awesome lenses; check out this one on digital cameras for under $200. This is a perfect example of a useful lens that makes money.
Also of interest is a sub forum displaying all of the Squidoo lenses that for sale. The prices are laughable at about $10 each – is it worth it? If these pages were like the one on digital cameras it would be (that person is an Amazon affiliate, and I’ll bet that lens sells ten cameras a day for about $100 daily profit).
What does Smojoe do with Squidoo lenses?
I don’t think it makes much sense to promote a Squidoo lens which in itself was built to help promote a client’s goods or service. It’s a little counter productive. In each campaign, I barely have enough time to seed backlinks to my client’s pages let alone conduct link building exercises on my own promotional material. So I’m not going to waste time building fantastic internet works of art unless I can make it pay dividends beyond backlinks…
Seven tactics that Smojoe uses to funnel traffic into Squidoo lenses:
- Bookmark it! The very first thing Smojoe does upon publishing a lens is proclaim its existence on Twitter, and then Stumble it, Reddit, Digg, Delicious and Kirtsy the world. Make catchy headlines in these bookmarking services and be sure to leave lots of tags.
- Article Marketing - Smojoe writes articles for clients anyway, and in the author resource box or sometimes right inside the text, I’ll leave a link to a related Squidoo Lens. This would be positioned as ‘more pictures here’, or ‘Lots of Items for Sale on Ebay’, and they would link to the Flickr and eBay components of the target lens respectively. Depending on the quality and originality and overall appeal of the title, links in articles can be a powerful way to promote any business. These articles become a trail of breadcrumbs back to you client or your Squidoo lens all over the internet, as they are replicated and published on 3rd party niche ezines, hungry for content.
- Niche Discussion Forums – For Smojoe its counterproductive to promote a Squidoo lens and a client’s brand in the same discussion forum. The only advantage for Smojoe here is that sometimes it’s not possible to leave links to commercial websites outright, and so a circuitous Squidoo detour becomes the only viable option.
- Squidoo Community – Although it demands a lot of time, there’s something to be said for commenting on other people’s lenses and leaving valuable feedback. Go to competitor lenses and ask questions or offer advice. In many cases you don’t have to leave links to your lenses, the other lensmasters and even Joe Public will be able to find you, and perhaps even more motivated to do so. Get out there and socialize! Visit other lenses. Leave valuable feed back. Squidoo is a social site after all, be social!
- Squidoo Groups – The Stone Angel movie is my most visited lens because 1) it competes on SERPS, 2) I added it to a group called ‘Canadian Movies’ and another called ‘Canadian Authors”. Add your lens to some relevant groups here on Squidoo and you will see increased traffic, especially if your lens has a catchy title.
- Craigslist – This free online classifieds is a powerful tool. It can be used very effectively to bring a massive amount of traffic to your target if you are super creative and… a little devious. I intend to publish an entire post on Smojoe’s Craigslist Strategies in the near future wherein I will outlay all my techniques. Suffice to say that Squidoo can be used here to funnel clients down the chain of interest to the client, where it would be impossible to link to the client directly. For example, the previously mentioned Digital Cameras for under $200 URL could be hyperlinked as a resource in a Craiglist posting designed to sell an unrelated piece of used photography equipment.
- Lensroll. Smojoe just discovered Lensroll last week. Here’s a place to showcase your lens in category, free. Its also a great place to find other high quality lenses from which to learn advanced tactics. Look here ate the ones that have more than one view – these are usually the best of the best niche lenses.
Best Case Scenario: Original Content, Published Exclusively
The mark of a good interactive company is not how well they write content, but how well they distribute that content on the internet.
These days anyone can write and create original media; it’s not that hard to be original on any topic, especially if you know a thing or two about the category and take the time to cruise some discussion forums and blogs looking for rare and precious insights on the subject. And if you absolutely can’t put a sentence together, you can always hire help on craigslist.com for about thirty five dollars a page.
But the real question is, how to distribute the article so that it gets the most attention? Ask your marketing firm exactly how they will accomplish that task? What methods will they use to spread their articles across the internet?
Article marketers have three options, and each one corresponds to a different business model (with regards to how the author is rewarded for his work), but all three will earn backlinks and some click through traffic.
- Exclusive publication on high traffic online magazines, like Lilith Galleries and Prospere Magazine or any such highly trafficked well respected websites where you have made contact with the editor and submitted stories directly to the webmaster. There is no conduit for the public to submit their work. Leveraging exclusive relationships distinguishes veteran social marketers. The advantage to exclusive publication is increased Google search traffic, higher quality backlinks and therefore more claim to keywords found in titles, subtitles, behind pictures, in anchor text of outbound links, and in the tags of your articles.
- General replication in article marketing distribution sites - EzineArticles.com, Idea Marketers, and Amazines are the big three and the only ones to which Smojoe submits branded content. But there is a new player on the scene, slightly more exclusive, called Buzzle that is getting good reports. This type of marketing is all about the backlinks. It works. One good article can create about a dozen original backlinks from low page rank portals.
- Citizen Journalism that pays a share of the ad revenue: Digital Journal, Now Public, Orato.com and this includes the ad networks and user submitted content banks like MyLot, Helium and especially Triond.com These sites are great in that they pay some money (on average about 75 cents a year on each article), give one good backlink, and enjoy greater than usual traffic and readership. The only downside is that they are more strenuously moderated and some require invitation or assessment prior to registration as an author - but most don’t have any stipulations.
Pick One Distribution Solution - DON’Tcombine three different approaches
Although there’s a place for general replication in this world, Smojoe believes that wide base article marketing is inherently flawed and will eventually be made obsolete by an more evolved Google search algorithm. I can compare this message transmission system to the Pony Express in the 1850’s; at that time the mail delivery business needed to have a lot of horses to send a message across the west, but then came the railroad, then the automobile, and finally the airplane. We are at the railroad stage right now in digital media - leave the horses behind and put your message on just one good train.
Contrary to popular belief publishing duplicate content does not hurt the page rank of your link targets, nor does it dilute the value of the publisher, much. It just becomes a big waste of time as Google will eliminate duplicate results from the list.
When people ask me if they will be penalized by Google for publishing duplicat content, I reply that, “if you submit identical articles to multiple directories, duplicate content filters will spot them, and the links pointing to your website from those articles will not be recognized in Google search math.”
However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that submitting the same article to multiple websites won’t do you any good. Many times, the duplicate content filter will not catch every single one of these articles.
And some folks believe that duplicate content links still count in MSN and Yahoo? And they send traffic too. But when it comes to article marketing most of the benefit comes from the keyword targeted backlinks you acquire on just a few high PR portals.
Take for example,
Is honey good for you? When you type that phrase into Google, you will discover that an article with a headline that uses the same words is the first result on the first page of Google.
http://www.healthmad.com/Nutrition/Is-Honey-Good-for-You.29459
When I first wrote this article, almost two years ago now, I was dismayed to learn that Triond.com insisted on exclusive content. I remember that it was my intention to repost the same content on Helium immediately after it had been approved by Triond - I just never got around to it. And its fortunate that I didn’t, for that one submission has rewarded my account over $70 dollars, which is more money than the combined totals of every other article I’ve posted before or since.
So why has Is Honey Good For You? made so much money? Because its first on Google search for that same keyword clause. I can see in the site stats that it gets read about seventy times a day, as compared to fourteen unique visits for my second highest article, Deodorizing Smelly Shoes.
Why is this article first on Google for that keyword clause? Because it’s good original content, published exclusively almost two years ago, on a page rank three domain.
