MediaWhiz Blog: Archive

Who are you?

I’m ReviewMe Roy.

What are you?

I’m the official mascot for ReviewMe.com.

What is your inspiration?

I wake up every day and the first thought in my head is, “how can I provide both valuable feedback and buzz to advertisers in the blogosphere, simultaneously allowing bloggers to increase their revenue while mainting their editorial integrity and true voice?”

That’s what drives me, and that’s what we’re trying to do here at ReviewMe.

What’s your favorite part of the job?

I enjoy traveling to exotic locations. I do this as part of my duties to increase ReviewMe’s brand awareness. What happens is, for instance, I go to Tahiti and walk around on a beach and people go WOW! look at that guy who looks like a giant ‘Me’ with legs and arms, he’s so cool, let’s go to ReviewMe.com and check it out!

Any favorite blogs?

I really like reading Chartreuse.

Opportunity: Marketers want to reach those who read blogs.

Problem: Many blog readers ignore ads. (Either they’re banner blind, or they’re getting the feed.)

Solution: Make the “ads” into content.

Now for a reality check.

How this could really stink:

1. It could stink for the visitor if the “ad” content is annoying or irrelevant to the subject of the blog. (”Gee, great, another form of spam. *unsubscribe*”)
2. It could stink for the blogger if the ad doesn’t reflect a true recommendation, or is inconsistent with their actual blogging voice. What blogger wants to gain revenue at the cost of their trust and reputation?

How it could work:

1. The blogger only writes about products/services that he/she chooses (and are relevant to his audience).
2. The blogger writes about said products/services with his/her true voice.

The advertiser is paying to get reviewed — not paying for a positive review.

Of course, success in the latter scenario assumes that advertisers are willing to take a small risk and engage their audience, even if some of the feedback they get is negative. Depending on who you talk to, honest feedback from the blogosphere is a bad thing, or a very, very good thing. Guess which one I think it is?

Welcome to the ReviewMe Blog! Along with Roy and other members of the ReviewMe team, I’ll be posting on official ReviewMe announcements and support issues, as well as ideas and tips for reviewers (bloggers) and advertisers. I’ll also be asking for a lot of feedback here, as ReviewMe is a work in progress and conversation with our users is going to be key to make our system as good as it can be.

Anyway, Roy is calling me to his office, so the rest of this post will have to wait a bit. Cheerio and don’t forget to bookmark the the ReviewMe Blog!

About Andy Hagans: He lives and breathes online marketing. ReviewMe is his Mona Lisa.

About ReviewMe Roy: He’s the ReviewMe Mascot. Read more about him here.

About ReviewMe: Aims to provide both valuable feedback and buzz to advertisers in the blogosphere, simultaneously allowing bloggers to increase their revenue while mainting their editorial integrity and true voice.

*Minus the buzzwords: Advertisers, you pay to get your stuff reviewed by bloggers. Bloggers, you get paid to review their stuff. And it’s not payola.

Publishers using Ruby On Rails looking to monetize their website can now use our new ad script to sell Text Link Ads!  Special thanks to Pascal for his help on the development of this ad script.

TLA Publishers, we are excited to have added a script exclusively for Serendipity Weblog System users and also a Drupal module for our publisher script!  Special thanks to Garvin Hicking for his work on the Serendipity script and special thanks to Robert Douglass for his work on the Drupal module.

We still are working on pushing Ruby on Rails and also .NET scripts out for TLA publishers.  Are there any other specific scripts that you would like to see?  Thanks again!

You know me by now. I’m a link lover, link builder, link swapper, link whore, link monger, link monkey, link-link-link-link-link-link-link-link link-link-link-link-link-link-link I LOVE LINKS.

But there are two situations where I like slowing the linking waterfall down to a small trickle.

1. The new site launch - I grab it a Yahoo! directory & bcentral listing plus 1-2 Premium TLA links, then let it bake for a bit… under no circumstances should you push it in Google with tons of low(ish) quality links, as when a new site goes beyond ‘the threshold’ it appears it’s pretty unlikely it’ll ever come back (this year, at least)
2. The old domain aquisition - You know the scenario "I just scored the ol’ 2000 pr4 domain (transfered not expired) and bwahahaha boy is it gonna rank" - but in the first 3 months I only go Yahoo & bcentral listing plus 1-2 Premium TLA links, then let it bake for a bit… (why risk the trust you just bought?)

MSN still loves the sledgehammer approach but sometimes in Google you have to think more like a surgeon.

Ok Alexa data is not the most accurate traffic measuring tool in the world but it is very good at showing traffic trends.  One of my favorite sites to play around with and compare trends against other ad systems is Alexaholic.  Here is our graph.  This graph represents Text Link Ads compared to other top blog ad systems.

As you know the end goal of building links to your site is increasing your site’s traffic.  This can come from the direct traffic from the links and from the indirect benefit of higher natural search rankings through the increase in link popularity.  Try comparing your site’s Alexa data to some of your competitors and see if you are seeing the right kind of trends, if not, it may be time to get your link building in gear!

I have seen some recent success with building links to secure a second indented listing on Google’s first page of search results.  Here are some tips for that can cause Google to grab a second page from your site and indent it as a second result giving you two results ranking for the same search phrase…

- Do a search for "your keyword phrase" and find the second page on your site that is ranking for this term.  Hopefully it is somewhere within striking range, let’s define that as the secondary page ranking currently in the top 50.

- Build external links directly to this secondary ranking page using mainly the link text "your keyword phrase" that you are trying to rank for.

The result you are looking for is Google grabbing this secondary page and indenting it below your primary ranking page which Google seems to like to do.  This link building strategy seems to work well as Google seems to favor ranking a second page from a website that is already ranking for this same keyword.  What has your experience been with securing a second listing on Google?

One of the biggest changes in the seo world in the last few years is the time it can take to rank a website, particularly in Google.  A bit back Rand noted that even established "trusted" domains were taking 10+ weeks to see some traction in terms of higher rankings after building links to these pages.  The amount of patience needed to see results is even greater when talking about new domains.

Our own LinkBuildingBlog.com has not earned top rankings in Google until just the last few weeks when we have spotted our blog jump from out of the 100’s for "link building" all the way to the top 10 on most data centers.  We registered the domain May 12, 2005 and our first post was May 16, 2005.  Our blog was a site that seemed to receive all the right links since the first day Andy and I started posting.  A quick search on Yahoo shows over 20,000 links into our domain!  Even with this nice linkage from many quality sites it seemed we had to wait for our domain to age past that magic one year mark before we saw what we thought made sense for our blog… a top 10 ranking.

The good news for new sites is I have personally seen three unique sites (12 to 14 months old) that I track recently break out of no where into the top 15 on Google with their latest index tweaks.  Andy is also reporting some sites that were created much more recently showing signs of ranking in Google much faster than what we have seen in the last year.  Now we all know results can be seen in MSN and Yahoo much faster but the holy grail is top Google rankings for most sites.  As a very general rule for link building (always exceptions of course)…

Established Domains (domains that are over 1+ year old or are already ranking for many terms)   
*build links -> 10-12 weeks later see results.

New Domains (domains under 1 year old and are showing no strong ranking results) *build links -> 12 weeks to 16 months later see results. 

There you have it, I have oversimplified a very complicated issue.  Readers, what are you seeing in terms of time it is taking you to see traction in search rankings after building new links?