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Alex Schultz

Category: internet marketing

  • 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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  • Loving Facebook Ads right now

    I know I am biased but my recent experience of Facebook ads have just been getting better and better and better. Below is a sample from my “more ads” page which shows a random selection of ads being shown to me recently.

    For those of you who don’t know me internet marketing is my chosen career and my passion so it’s just awesome to get a list of cool interactive marketing jobs and agencies in front of me. On top of this I am getting ads from a local rowing club and a bunch of moveon.org ads.

    Anyway my main thought on this is that marketers are going to be early adopters of new marketing products but if I can have this relevant and high quality set of ads it’s possible for that to happen for anyone on facebook so come on marketers, prove your worth and get more great products and services promoted on the facebook site to the right people. The tools are there to use so give it a go!

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  • Brand Keyword Bidding

    Brand keyword bidding is big business and it’s becoming bigger. For anyone in the internet marketing industry it’s crucial to watch this trend and esp the decisions Google is making around it.

    Within the affiliate industry brand bidding initially was a quick way to make a buck. In 2003-2005 affiliate managers were often slow to realize affiliates were making money for essentially no work. Even now many affiliates use a combination of geo-targeting and day parting to work around affiliate managers and get away with brand bidding.

    As that loop hole was closed and brands took their brand name bidding in house worldwide and affiliate networks policed out the majority of the affiliates doing brand bidding Google made two changes which made brand names far less lucrative for them in many countries (esp. the UK). Google stopped allowing multiple ads for one website to appear on the same search result and Google also allowed companies to claim their brand so that no one else could bid on it (in the UK). On April 4th Google changed this second policy and that angered a lot of brand owners in the UK.

    Two things make this policy change an excellent way for Google to make money: 1) Branded search made up 76% of searches in the UK in 2007 according to some studies. 2) Having only one person bidding on their own brand can result in their bid being as low as $0.01 – just adding another person into the auction can push that up tremendously giving a huge boost in Google revenue.

    I can’t really decide what to think about the way Google is acting here. Would it be fair for companies who sell NorthFace clothing not to be able to bid on the word NorthFace? On the other hand is it fair that Google essentially extorts brands to spend in some cases $100k’s a week to simply ensure that someone who was looking for them comes to their site?

    This little post is just a thought starter BUT as an internet marketer it is crucial you have to have a branded search strategy covering both SEO and SEM. Google won’t let you get away without it.

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  • A little bit of an update on the Stumble Testing

    Using Stumbleupon buttons on my paper airplanes site was an interesting idea that I tried a few weeks back. It seems to be working pretty well. Below you see the graph of traffic I am getting from Stumble over time from the last big stumble spike (following which I added the stumble button).

    For November (i.e. not including the spike in october) Stumbleupon now makes up 10% of my site growth and approx. 1% of all site traffic. I have a fair few ideas for how to boost this source of traffic even more and am really keen to give it a go soon!!!

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  • Stumbleupon Traffic Source

    As many people have noticed stumbleupon has become a pretty good source of organic traffic. For me stumbleupon is 10-20% of the growth of my paper airplanes site at the moment and I know I am by no means the most popular paper airplanes site on stumbleupon right now.

    I may not be the top paper airplanes site in stumbleupon and it certainly isn’t my biggest source of traffic but it is now a significant enough contributor with lots of potential that I want to spend some time on it. The main issue as many people have seen is that traffic from stumbleupon is very bumpy indeed.

    What is interesting though is though each bump is adding up to hundreds of visitors (sometimes near 1000) they are interspersed with long periods of zero (or v. low) traffic. The last spike you can see was followed by some level of sustained traffic, not huge but a significant part of my daily unique visitor growth. The main reason for this growth seems to have been adding a stumbleupon button to every page of my site.

    I guess I will see how this sustains but for now things are looking pretty good for a new sustained source of traffic to paperairplanes.co.uk. Why don’t you give it a go too?

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  • Google Analytics Regular Expressions

    I was using Google analytics regular expressions on Saturday to try and understand how my cocktail making relationship engine had worked out. As I was using the regular expressions I noticed that there were very few resources to help you get them right for Google Analytics so in case you are interested here are my tips.

    First the regular expression variables supported by google analytics:

    . match any single character
    * match zero or more of the previous items
    + match one or more of the previous items
    ? match zero or one of the previous items
    () remember contents of parenthesis as item
    [] match one item in this list
    – create a range in a list
    | or ^ match to the beginning of the field
    $ match to the end of the field
    \ escape any of the above

    Some real examples:

    If you are looking for the page index2.php then your regular expression should be “index2\.php” you want to escape the “.” with the / since that will make the regular expression run faster as Google will now only look for the “.” character and not “any character” which is the special meaning of “.”.

    I have a regular expression “displaycocktail.php” within all my cocktail recipe pages. For the test group I was passing ?test=test on the end of that URL to google analytics and for the control group ?test=control.

    If I wanted to see just the control group I would use the reg exp “displaycocktail\.php/.*test=control” where the “.*” means match any number of characters at this point in the regexp.

    Hopefully this (esp. the working examples) are useful for you to get started.

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  • User Targetting Rocks

    DVD play and Safeway’s just got a massive thumbs up from me for awesome and timely user targetting that just set me thinking. I am a regular purchaser of DVD play dvd’s for 99c. Directly after shopping I often go to one of their machines and I take a movie home I chose not to watch in the cinema. I then return it the next day when I pick up milk or dinner or whatever.

    I haven’t used the machines for a month or so due to being away, watching some stuff from google video and so on. I went into Safeway and bought my usual groceries and got a token that gave me a free movie rental. I used it immediately… took out the shooter (an awesome movie where Mark Wahlberg acts instead of just taking his shirt off). I loved the movie and have been reminded I love DVD play and will totally go back again for another movie next Sunday… GREAT JOB on user targetted advertising.

    Now I guess this isn’t internet targetting but I can totally think about how this could be amazingly well used by all manner of ecommerce websites when someone completes their checkout… the majority of the time I checkout I get no cross selling, upselling and certainly not targetted based on my past actions. So come on guys… pick it up. There are a lot of sites I use regularly who could do a better job 🙂

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  • PR is a beautiful thing

    This month has been amazing for me in PR. The image above is an article from the “connected” section of the Daily Telegraph in the UK telling people to try out my cocktail website this summer. I did nothing to prompt this and yet it is worth thousands of visitors to me AND the back link in the article is a really positive natural search boost. I also managed to get featured (only offline) in FHM Australia this month for my paper airplanes book.

    Over the years PR has been great to me and so finally I am starting to think about putting together a bit of a pr plan to seek out some press for my websites rather than just wait for it to happen. Here’s hoping that will work out!

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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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