Alex Schultz

Blog

  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • The new browser frontier is finally important

    One of the things I love about running my little websites is they help me get my head out of the valley environment (or my ass depending on your point of view) since it is a hugely skewed demographic. The users of my sites are not valley types at all. In paper airplanes it’s mums, dads, kids and teachers. On cocktail recipes it’s a huge wide ranging audience… mainly non-US and over a huge age range but generally skewed towards a lower income demographic.

    Trends that are big in the valley sometimes take a decade to bust out of the valley into the broader consciousness; for example RSS or Blogging. Some bust out of the valley seemingly instantly and find their main life outside; for example social networking or online classifieds. It feels like the mobile internet/internet everywhere is an example of the former and has been called out as the next big thing now for almost a decade.

    There is a burgeoning microtrend happening across my websites in an area we have been talking about in the tech industry for seemingly eons. I am seeing all kinds of new operating systems appearing on the list of operating systems my users are using to access my site. The big 4 in order are: iPhone, Danger Hiptop, Playstation Portable and iPod. These new operating systems are now just shy of 1% of visits to my sites.

    That 1% number is pretty important to me… think 1% of internet advertising revenue being $300MM annually (ish) or 1% of goods sold on eBay being $600MM annually (ish). This is important to me since a $30MM market isn’t really big enough to make the big guys look at it but this volume of potential is finally proving worth the effort.

    Maybe I am overhyping the importance of average websites as canaries in the coalmine but I feel these sites are not a tech savvy demo, not designed with mobile in mind and if they are still getting c. 1% of visits from mobile this is a good indicator of a base line of mobile interest.

    I have always loved the ideas of mobile internet transforming the world but I never saw how there was enough revenue there to really support a company. Now I see it and I am very excited about seeing what all the clever folks around here do to use the internet everywhere.

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  • mysql copy table

    Continuing my chain of blatantly obvious mysql queries that I nonetheless didn’t know at one stage 🙂 copying a table isn’t an obvious function in mySQL. So here’s how to do a mysql copy table

    Say you have a table called “tbl_theoriginal” which has the perfect, ideal, wonderful table structure for a new table you want “tbl_thenewone” and you would like to create it the query you would create is as follows:

    CREATE tbl_thenewone SELECT * FROM tbl_the original

    Simple huh! You can put in any WHERE clause you like and even a limit 1,1 or whatever if you don’t want to transfer any content but just the table structure.

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  • mySQL rename table

    One of the (few) downsides of phpMyAdmin (at least the version I use) is that it doesn’t support the mySQL rename table function.

    It is very simple to use this function through the SQL tab in phpMyAdmin (or any other direct interface with mysql). Say you want to change the name of the table from “tbl_oldtable” to “tbl_newtable” then this would be the code:

    RENAME TABLE tbl_oldtable TO tbl_newtable

    Simple huh! Right with that duty to my readers and hopefully my natural search traffic… (these mySQL posts tend to do pretty well) I am off to drink more cabernet sauvignon 🙂

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  • New Site Launch Huge Success

    I have been working on a new design for my cocktail recipes site for about 2 months now. The company I selected to do the design were 2 pixel solutions (based in India) who I found through elance.

    I have been really pleased with working with the 2 pixel team. They were really good in making the changes I asked for and simplified the design extremely well. I would highly recommend anyone using elance to ask for an outline mock up of the design a company is thinking of creating ahead of time for your site. I certainly benefitted from that.

    Having launched the site yesterday I took a look at the very early results and am over the moon. All the visitor level metrics are looking great. Visitors are spending nearly 25% longer on the site and viewing 30-40% more pages on each visit. I also found a number of features that were broken as I recoded the site (and honestly broke some more myself) so I have some fixing to do but bottom line the new site ROCKS 🙂 and my users (most importantly) seem to love it.

    For the rest of today I am working on getting my facebook application up and running again.

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