MediaWhiz Blog: Archive

We are very excited to announce that TLA has just released a
brand new RSS ad technology called Feedvertising!

This is a big step forward for us and we think we have
developed a special product because of itâs flexibility. Feedvertising is 100% free to use and allows
you to:

• Add your own ads that may: promote your other sites,
  promote your own affiliate deal, promote a job opening… you name it.
• Opt in to allow some of your ad spots to be for sale
  through the TLA marketplace.

The key to our technology is you can use it
to monetize your feed yourself or to opt in to selling some or all of your ad
spots through TLA; its your call!

The guys at Tubetorial.com put together a great tutorial
video on Feedvertising.

I owe a lot of people a big thanks for helping out on this
project.  First and foremost, Justin
Klemm of Rusty Brick, he was the brilliant developer behind it.  Our beta testers and consultants were great too, they put up with a lot of bugs and came up with some great ways to
make this thing better, big thanks to:

Mark Ghosh, Michael Gray, James Martin, David Krug, Matt Craven, Darren Rowse, Nik Cubrilovic, Scott Karp, Philip Lenssen, Lee Odden, Brian Clark, Raj Dash, and Jim Boykin.

Check out Feedvertising here!

*Feedvertising Reviews Here:  TechCrunch, Problogger. 

By Andy "Organic-Is-My-Middle-Name" Hagans

The sandbox is no longer the pink elephant in the room. As webmasters, together we’ve cried about it, argued about it, and fretted over it. We’ve gone through the emotional steps, too; first there was grief (waah waah my site won’t rank), then bargaining (I promise I won’t spam if you un-sandbox me), anger (darn it, greedy Google just wants me to spend more at AdWords!), and finally, acceptance (OK, how do I beat it?).

Over a year ago, I wrote my Guide to Beating the Sandbox at WebmasterWorld (supporters forum). I think my post mostly stands the test of time, but there’s a lot more that we know now, so I figured it’s time for an update. I’m also going to try to make this guide as detailed as possible, because it seems the solution everyone (including me) constantly refers to is to build trustâwithout saying exactly how. So let’s get short on theory, and long on details.

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We are happy to announce TLA’s newest hire: R. Marie Cox.  She will be doing web development/design work here at TLA.  No we didn’t really steal her from SEOMOZ but the cool part about Marie’s background is her own personal project, Side Job Track, won third place in the "Business, Money, Ecommerce" section on SEOMOZ’s Web 2.0 Awards. 

Marie will be working on some cool link bait projects as well that are destined to push Rand off the first page of Digg and Del.icio.us once and for all. 

Welcome aboard Marie!

Matt McGee put together a piece that did the impossible, made us laugh about bad seo jokes.  The sad part is so much of this list is true.  Some of my favorites:

"You giggle like a little girl every time you tell the butcher youâd like some pork Cuttlets."

"You feel uncomfortable and out of place at a minor league baseball game because you donât see a Text Link Ads advertisement on the outfield wall."

"When your daughter brings home a new boyfriend to meet you, your first thought is to check his backlinks."

Check out the full article here.

While ReviewMe isn’t exactly ‘product placement’, the theory behind the service is similar: get a relevant product into the content without annoying the readers (or viewers). I’m not surprised at all to hear that product placement growth is outpacing that of ‘traditional’ advertising; as users become more savvy (and ad-blind), smart marketers are evolving their strategies. From the report:

PQ Media forecasts that global paid product placement spending will grow at a compound annual rate of 27.9% in the 2005-2010 period to $7.55 billion, as product placement growth continues to significantly outpace that of traditional advertising and marketing. The overall value of the worldwide product placement market, says the report, including the barter/exposure value of non-paid placements, will increase 18.4% compounded annually to $13.96 billion in 2010.

Those are some pretty big numbers they’re throwing around!

So you’re launching a site on a brand new domain?! What are you, a masochist?

And you haven’t even made any major link bait yet? What are you, trying to fail?

Just kidding Beating the sandbox and gaining trust is no easy feat. In my experience, the hardest part is getting started. Well if you can clear out a few hours in your afternoon, here are four easy trusted links you can get that new domain today. (Actually, there are two bonus links, that makes six easy trusted links!)

1) A lesser-known Wikipedia page: Do you have an investment-related site? Do not try to add your homepage link to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment or en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock. Instead, add the deep link to your "The Forward P/E Ratio Explained" page from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PE_ratio… it’ll have a much better chance of still being there tomorrow.

2) The Squidoo lens for your site’s topic: Parasite SEO at its best. The Squidoo domain is gaining IBLs and trust quickly, and any page on the domain will inherit some of its trust. Bonus points if you actually take the time to make the lens useful, and link out to other authority sites. Caveat: You only take full advantage of this trust by building a few links to the Squidoo page itself, giving it a bit of link pop independent of the root domain.

3) The three ultra-trusted directories: They charge for an editorial review, not a listing. One is specifically recommended in Google’s guidelines for webmasters; I’d bet my [insert valuable appendage here] that the other two are highly trusted, too… Yahoo!,  MSN bCentral, Business.com

4) A juicy TLA link: I really, really like the publishers in TLA’s inventory that currently have zero or one links sold… why not get in there and gobble up the lion’s share of the link pop?

All done? Don’t rest on your laurels! Now that you’ve gotten the seven easy trusted links, you’d better go chase a hundred more hard ones. So get crackin’ on that link bait!

In case you missed it, Jim Boykin wrote a great post this week, Why that site with 50 backlinks beats your site with 1000 backlinks. I think we all ocassionally tend to overcomplexify SEO and link building, focusing on numbers or other mostly meaningless data, when instead we should be focusing on macro-trends (in this case, the trend is quality over quantity).

I would also like to use this post as a time to start a little petition for one of Jim’s former projects that he canceled:

That is all, please resume your weekend relaxation.

Readers, if you wanted to read more about TLA, you might want to checkout an interview I did with James Martin of WorkBoxers.com  One thing I learned is James is loved by many bloggers and getting linked up by him got me all sorts of links.

You got to respect a man that has been "making money since 1891" like James has.

Interview here.

Yes, yes, yes — online reviews are very important. Heck, Web 2.0 sites seem to live or die by their TechCrunch review. The same phenomenon is observable many other industries on the Web.

Lest you doubt the importance of online feedback, Guy Kawasaki has written a post encouraging companies to embrace online reviews:

• Use reviews to improve your operations. Some negative reviews are off the mark, but most provide at least a kernel of truth about problems in your business. Take steps to fix these problems.
• Encourage your customers to post reviews. Mention these review sites to your regular customers, and tell them how much you would appreciate them posting an honest review about you.
• Use positive reviews in your marketing. Just like a Zagat’s write-up or a newspaper profile, a good online review can be posted in your shop window or on your Web site.

Hmm, I wish there was a company that specialized in these points… oh well…

One of the most sought after links is a "link embedded within content" of a page.  The theory goes like this: search engines will be able to identify what links are in the content area of the page and which links are outside of the content area and "count" the links in the content and discount the links outside the content area as "commercial" links. 

I don’t think the search engines are there yet and it will always be difficult to divide a page and separate out commercial versus editorial links.  The main argument I have for in content links is that they have the best chance at sending you traffic which is a great thing.  Here comes the game plan for getting: targeted traffic and a permanent relevant link all at once…

1.  Sponsor a blog that reaches your target market.

- Sponsoring blogs whose audience is your target market makes sense on it’s own.  Also, many blogs set up banner sponsorships as direct links to your site which can help your rankings but not as much as a nice text link with anchor text.  Also, when the banner goes down, your link goes down with it of course.  That takes us to to the all important step two of this strategy…

2. Request that blog make a "thank you sponsors" post.

- This is important for many reasons:

a) You now can reach the rss readers of this blog that may not visit the actual website regularly.

b) You now have a link embedded in content that will be in the blog’s archive forever giving you a "permanent link".  This is important because while your banner link will disappear when your sponsorship ends, this link within a post will continue to link back to your site.

In summary one strategy for securing quality in content links that will send traffic and link popularity consider sponsoring a blog that is willing to make a post mentioning their sponsors in addition to the standard banner they will place.