Alex Schultz

Category: general comments

  • Yelp linking to Yahoo!

    I hope I am not slow on the uptake spotting this but are yelp and yahoo working together on local search? At the foot of a las vegas steakhouse review (this is my favorite steakhouse in las vegas by the way) there is a link to Yahoo! local.

    The link is not “no followed” and points to Yahoo local’s las vegas steakhouse page which is currently top ten in Google for a search for “las vegas steak houses” and is actually ahead of Yelp! I can’t see any reason Yelp! would be doing this unless it’s some kind of business relationship.

    Looking at the link profile for the yahoo local steakhouse page all 90 back links come from Yelp. It would be great if Google is ok with this for big companies since that would totally alter my backlinking strategy but I guess that the better user experience would be for Google to contain the links to the main web location for all the las vegas restaurants that yelp or yahoo have on their search results pages. I’m going to keep an eye on this one.

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  • One of the most successful viral campaigns on Facebook yet

    The election has been a watershed in interactive and social marketing with the first really mainstream multi hundred million dollar use of social media for one campaign. There is a lot to be said about this (beyond hero worshipping Chris Hughes and co.) and I intend to post a few comments about this here.

    The best recent completely novel use (that simply couldn’t have existed 4years ago) was run by the causes application. They asked users to donate their statuses to the vote and changed the status to a link and a message to promote an issue in the election or the election itself.

    My understanding is that 5MM plus users donated their status to promote something to do with the election. I am not going to comment on the impact of that on the election but the impact on Causes is incredible. Every one of those status updates (whichever candidates or propositions were being pushed) promoted the causes application. Given the prevalence of status updates in the newsfeed it is almost certain that every user in the US will have seen the causes application promoted on election day and that real estate was immensely valuable.

    There are more ways to game this system and that is in fact a pretty scary spaming opportunity now the idea is out there but this was a truly viral campaign using something that is unique to facebook. Great job causes even if there are debates about whether this is a fair or genuine use of status updates.

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  • How to be an effective seo within your organization: PubCon 08 – be positive

    This year was my first presentation at pubcon and I was super excited to get the opportunity to participate. The area of my presentation was to evaluate how to be an effective in house SEO and I was lucky enough to be on the panel with Aaron Shear, Tony Adam, Jessica Bowman and Scott Polk.

    The main topic of all our talks was how do you convince your company to support you in doing SEO and the talks split into two fronts… play company politics or push positive results and momentum. I was definitely in the second bucket.

    I essentially had 5 points:

    1. alignment – You must be aligned with your companies #1 goal in SEO. Discard everything but that target: eBay = ROI, facebook = user growth
    2. measurement – sometimes you can get support just by measuring how much value seo is generating. Whatever happens you are in a measurable field, you can quantify your impact and so be that guy, measure your results and hang your hat on them
    3. results – do something simple and get a result to build credibility… for example a really small thing like swapping “<company name> | <page title>” to “<page title> | <company name>” can drive results
    4. double down – you got a result… now get more. Keep it small, keep it coming and show that you are an expert. I think this momentum building is 10x more positive as an approach rather than going out and producing a powerpoint strategy deck
    5. share – now start to share your success, start to teach people how to do it themselves. Build that powerpoint and let the senior folks know what you need to do even more.

    I think this is the secret to be successful in almost any internet marketing role to get success. You can be the person who says “I am positive”,”I can do more with less than you believe” and above all let your work speak for itself and you can do no wrong.

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  • Recovering from the Hack

    Getting hacked was one of the most traumatic things that has happened to me since I first launched a website in the 1990s. My traffic was completely pulverized dropping 60% year on year when I had been growing at a nice 20-30% rate, I have lost a tonne of repeat visitors who have lost trust with the site, my search rankings seem to have been adversely affected which really sucks and all of my social media marketing is shot. The bottom line is now that I am over the hack and clean and all the major places that were blocking me have opened up again my traffic is down 20% year on year and roughly 1/3 from where I would have expected it to be.

    Rebuilding is going to be tough but I am planning to do some of the things I have been holding off of for a long time:

    1. redesign the site – I am stuck in 2004 with design and need to fix
    2. move the videos back to youtube – revver isn’t worth it for the money any more and youtube generates traffic when used right
    3. work out a way for users to contribute more easily – cocktailmaking.co.uk has benefited tremendously from users contributing, paper airplanes could do so too.

    Wish me luck in this new endeavor, as always I will try and post progress on the project to this blog and would be keen to get your advice on how to proceed.

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  • I Got Hacked

    So probably one of the worst things that has happened to me online ever happened 2 weeks ago… my site was hacked. I hadn’t upgraded the version of adlogger I was using on the site and someone inserted some malicious code which then took over my site redirecting any visitor to a pure adsense page.

    Google spotted this and took action which utterly decimated my website traffic but I wholeheartedly applaud Google for doing… 100% the right thing to do and interestingly they spotted the issue at essentially the same time as I did and removed it from the site so great job by them!

    The one thing that does frustrate me about this is that Google funded the hacker. It’s obviously terrible I got hacked and I have revised my processes to hopefully make things better but it’s doubly terrible that hackers are now funding themselves via Google AdSense… Given the experience I have in this marketplace through my affiliate work over the years it is also clear that people don’t do this unless they are getting away with it, so Google can’t be taking the money from them fast enough to dissuade them from doing this… that’s the only way it works.

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  • Tickle.com – impressive revenue generator

    I am a little bit of a sucker for anything that makes me feel clever and so for the first time in a very long while I clicked on a banner ad yesterday. The advert took me to tickle.com and an IQ test.

    This IQ test was pretty cool and took 12 pages to complete. Once I had completed the test it through me into a string of 6 co-brand sign ups before I got the results of my test. Each page carried 3 cpm banners from rotating sources. I can get a $1cpm so I expect they should be able to get the same or better. Just the banner ads earned them $0.036 from me doing the test. Each of the 6 cobrands make >$1 per sign up so again low balling it let’s say 1 in 10 signs up to only 1 that’s another $0.1 a visitor from one test their earning is at least $0.14 and they claim almost 0.5billion tests served, that’s $70MM in revenue with the conservative estimates above.

    This however isn’t the end of the game. Today I received the following email:

    Another smart move, I clicked and visited their site, being pushed through multiple pages of co-brand sign ups again, returning to the site and being merchandized a bunch of other pretty cool looking tests, which the internet marketer side of my brain stopped me from taking but I strongly considered.

    Tickle.com is owned by Monster.com so it isn’t that surprising that they are really professional and good at what they do but it’s pretty cool to see such a smoothly operating affiliate/cpm business model out there where arbitrage traffic purchasing is a real opportunity. Great job Tickle.com and keep it up.

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  • Awesome Discovery

    A friend from work accidentally opened my eyes wide last week at eBay live in Boston by creating a potential new design for my cocktail recipes website.

    The eye opening event was using some stock photography from iStockPhoto (an example of which is above). The concept of iStockPhoto is simple photographers and designers offer up licences to use their photos and designs through iStockPhoto for a small fee and people like me can buy them for PPT use, posters (up to 500k reprints) and websites. The photo above cost me $1 and I just integrated another $1 photo into my facebook app newsfeed posts to have an even greater impact when my news feed stories appear.

    I am a terrible designer but a pretty good coder. I thought my websites would forever be doomed to look rubbish because of this but now thanks to iStockPhoto I have hope. Look for improvements in the future and even new projects!

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  • In the Facebook Directory

    So I have been working on my facebook cocktail application for a little over a week now having started it on the memorial day weekend. It allows you to do everything my cocktail site does and a little bit more including recommending a cocktail to a friend and seeing the most recently popular cocktails and the top 12 users yesterday. I actually have a bunch more ideas of what it could do like little graphs of the popularity of the cocktail over time and so on.

    What is exciting is that in 3hrs I have added 300users to the application, now obviously rates won’t stay that high but realistically most of the east cost wasn’t browsing facebook when the app was approved and neither was the UK. It will be really interesting to see how things go over the next 24hrs.

    The best news is I have log files tracking everything going on so I will be able to note down and describe what the growth of a facebook application looks like!

    More posts to come down the line but I want to leave you with a thought. For my cocktail recommendations engine I now have a track… at a user level… of every cocktail viewed and rated, and at what level (pretty much tied to demographic too if I can get my ass in gear and pull that data). This recommendation engine can get much, much smarter 😀

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  • A Beautiful Internet Marketing Experience

    This has to be one of the most beautiful graphic integrations I have seen. Smirnoff Black Cherry on Pandora. It really set me longing for a smirnoff black cherry and coke which I will be having this evening in the bar. Very cool indeed and I can only hope that I will be able to produce a calibre of IM similar to this as I progress in my career!

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  • The Cocktail Recommendation Engine is Live

    Finally with a month of data under my belt I launched an AB test on the cocktail recommendation engine on Friday. The cocktail recipe the test group will see is shown below. Early indications are great with initiall navigation for visitors entering the site on these pages clearly influenced by the cocktail relationships shown. I will give more details of how to produce an accurate AB test via Google Analytics in another post (cos I am still figuring out a few of the kinks).

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