MediaWhiz Blog: Archive

Readers, we are excited to announce the arrival of Post Level Text Link Ads!  Post Level TLA’s offer many features that our advertisers are looking for including:

• The ability to target highly specific popular blog posts.

• Maximum of one ad below the post.

• Have a full 80 character title and 150 letter description.

• Be positioned directly at the end of top posts making it ideal for click throughs.

• Each ad will be on a single page only.

Check out this page for more information and to browse our marketplace of Post Level TLA’s!

Bonus amounts for the eBay US tracking outage have been posted to publisher’s accounts with a posting date of 4/30. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience this caused.

The success of content submissions on social media sites is often dictated by the tone of the comments that take place early on. Even if a great piece of content gets a few nasty comments right off the bat it will have a very hard time succeeding and making it to the homepage.

Users often view the first few comments before even clicking through to the content and begin to form their opinion based off of them. If the comments are bad they will automatically assume that the content is bad too, since other members of the community also feel that way.

The problem with this is that some of the social media sites have audiences that are generally very immature. Sometimes even if the content is remarkable someone will come along that doesn’t agree with it and start flaming it in the comments. Others will see this and follow suit and before you know it your submission will be buried into oblivion never to see the light of day again.

If this is something that you notice happening to your submissions then start asking some of your friends on these social sites to read the content and leave positive comments early on. This will help set a positive tone for the submission and keep people from voting your stories down.

On the flipside of this, bad content won’t make the homepage just because there are a bunch of positive comments that have been left. So it’s not a technique that works if you’re trying to spam your horrible content to the homepage.

What has your experience been with the tone set by comments on social media sites?

Over the past few weeks I have attended several conferences including SES NY, AMA Hot Topics and Ad:Tech San Francisco. Throughout each conference I have encountered tons of folks who are
interested in building or buying links, but most of them are going about it the wrong way. Here is what you should not do:

• Same anchor text – if the majority of your incoming text links contain the same anchor text you probably are not going to rank highly for those terms. Search engines are getting more sophisticated and they can usually tell when people are trying to manipulate their search results.
• Home page links – there is nothing wrong with having tons of incoming links to your homepage, but there is something wrong when the rest of your site has no incoming links. This does not look too natural so you should try and increase the number of links to your internal pages.
• Growth – many of us are impatient (including me) which is why we want to grow our links 10 fold within a few days. Usually massive growth of incoming links smells of search manipulation, which is why you should try and grow at a natural pace. Granted you may get a burst of natural links rapidly from social sites like Digg, but if that happens there is really nothing to worry about.
• Cross linking – linking your own sites together if they are related is a good idea if you want to increase each sites traffic, but not search traffic. In most cases all of your sites are probably owned by the same person or hosted on similar C-blocks. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t link your sites together if it makes sense, but don’t do it just to manipulate search results.
• Leveraging forums – one of the easiest ways to get paid links or link exchanges is by posting on forums asking for links. But by doing this you just created a written record that you are looking to build links. This is probably not a good idea, since the last thing you want to do is to give the search engines ammo against you.

There are probably many more things that you should not do when building links, but these are the ones that most people have asked me about at conferences. What other link building tactics should people not do?

Everyone likes to see a little hardware once in a while, so here’s a little peek at the heavy iron underneath AuctionAds. For the most part:

4x Dell PowerEdge 1950
2x Dell PowerEdge 2950
2x Coyote Point Equalizer 450si

For the month of April we are averaging over 60 million hits per day. Thats roughly:

750+ hits/sec at peak times (corrected)
58 gigs of Javascript per day
134 gigs of HTML per day
16 gigs of RAM cache
1.1 gigs of MySQL (yes, only)

If anyone from Sun is reading..I could put a pair of X2200s to work..

Readers, Todd Malicoat pinged me about a special they are running for friends of their SEO CLASS.  You can save $500 by registering before next Friday.  Here are the details…

We’re happy to announce that the tracking issues eBay experienced have finally been fully resolved. The fixes were in place several days ago but again we didn’t want to make an announcement until we were sure everything had returned to normal. Credits will be applied to publisher’s accounts as soon as the final numbers are determined. Thanks go out to all our publishers who waited patiently through this issue. It was frustrating for everyone involved. That being said, with tracking fully restored revenues are higher than ever.

Thanks again for using AuctionAds.

Successful Merger of Filinet and R.O.WISE Platforms Completed

NEW YORK, NY and PLANTATION, FL, April 24, 2007 – MediaWhiz Holdings, Inc. (MediaWhiz), a leading provider of performance-based online marketing services, today announced a number of new services and features for its affiliate network Filinet. The new offerings combine the strengths of MediaWhiz’s Filinet.com and R.O.WISE affiliate networks into Filinet, LLC (Filinet), to better serve its clients’ needs.

“The combined Filinet includes the best features of both platforms, as well as exciting new services our affiliates and advertisers will greatly benefit from, including an increased level of detail in our reporting,” stated Yannick Tessier, Co-President, MediaWhiz. “New features include an expanded offer display that allows affiliates to see offer recommendations based on their site profile and expanded creative types.”

“The new Filinet will make more offers available to our publishing partners and provide wider distribution to our advertising partners, all on an improved technology platform,” stated Jason Cohen, Co-President, MediaWhiz. “The two platforms have been successfully merged, and we are now focusing on completing migration of all advertiser and publisher accounts by the end of June.”

MediaWhiz, widely known for its affiliate marketing, co-registration, and lead generation services, merged in April 2006 with Plantation, Fla.-based GRS, a leading list management, email marketing and affiliate marketing company, to form one of the largest providers of integrated online performance marketing services. More recently, MediaWhiz acquired Text Link Ads, which specializes in text link advertisements; and Monetizeit, a leader in online performance-based marketing services with specialization in lead generation for the financial services, healthcare, hospitality, travel and education markets.

About Filinet
Filinet connects affiliates and advertisers in the interest of generating leads and sales on a pay-for-performance model. Filinet affiliates direct internet traffic to an advertiser’s website in order to generate an acquisition for the advertiser who pays for the traffic on a cost per visit, lead, or sale basis. Filinet works with advertisers to test and optimize creative to achieve the best results for affiliate traffic, while also handling all affiliate payments, tracking, reporting, customer service and technical support.

About MediaWhiz
MediaWhiz is a leading online marketing company delivering a fully integrated solution for brand advertisers, direct marketers and publishers by leveraging its suite of marketing services to achieve measurable results. Services include affiliate marketing, lead generation, email marketing, list management, display advertising, text link advertising and search marketing. MediaWhiz delivers more than 3 million monthly leads to over 3,000 advertisers through its database of more than 100 million consumer email addresses and relationships with over 16,000 publishers. Private equity firm Lake Capital (www.lakecapital.com) first invested in MediaWhiz in August 2005. Through acquisitions and organic growth, MediaWhiz has established its position as a leading provider of integrated marketing. More information on MediaWhiz is available at www.mediawhiz.com.

I’m not sure how many of you watch American Idol, but an Indian kid named Sanjaya got very far. With only a handful of contestants left, no one thought such a bad singer would get this far. There are many factors that caused him to get this far, but here is how offline and online media
played a role.

Indians

Before I go into offline and online media affecting the voting, let me dispel any rumors of him getting far just because of other Indians. I personally do not watch American Idol, but even I myself thought one of the main reasons he got so far was because he had a large following of Indians and as many of you already know there are tons of Indians in this world. Based on a survey I did of 50 random Indians, I concluded that isn’t the main reason why he got so far. The 50 Indians I surveyed watched American Idol, but only 1 voted for him because the rest did not either know how to text message or were afraid that American Idol would charge them for voting.

From my understanding (I could be wrong) you can also call by phone and vote without paying a dime… but either way many Indians were afraid of getting charged. Because of this the main two other factors that I can tell caused him to do so well were related to both offline and online
media.

Offline and Online Media

As we all know the combination of offline and online media can be very powerful. With social media sites like MySpace, YouTube, Vote for the Worst, and Netscape covering Sanjaya it’s no wonder he racked in all those votes. People who use these sites as well as read blogs are very tech savvy and probably text
message (vote for Sanjaya) quite a bit. Then if you combine this people like Howard Stern telling America to vote for Sanjaya because he was the worst singer out of the group and his support from stars like Jennifer Lopez, no wonder he got so far. Here is the buzz he created through this last season of American Idol:

• Over 1.4 million web pages have talked about Sanjaya Malakar, not counting those that misspelled his name.
• There is a Wikipedia page (with over 581 incoming links) on Sanjaya Malakar.
• Over 3000 blogs have talked about him.
• He become so well known online that people started talking about his sister.
• There are thousands of videos about him on the web.

If Sanjaya would have actually won American Idol it probably would have been humorous as well as ironic. I don’t think too many people would have bought his CD if he won, but we had a great laugh getting him this far or at least watching him get this far. Either way this just shows how powerful
offline media and online media are when they are combined, so the next time you do a marketing campaign try to combine both offline and online media.

One of the most common questions I get about link building is what the best type of links are. While I’m partial to building natural links through linkbaiting and remarkable content I also like to throw a few paid links into my overall link building campaigns.

One of the reasons I like to use paid links with my link campaigns is that you can not only pick high authority sites that are relevant, but you can also pick the exact anchor text you want to use. Those are things you can’t always do with linkbaiting. You just can’t always dictate who will link to you or what anchor text they will use.

Although it might be a little hard to argue in favor of buying paid links after the latest from Matt Cutts you can’t deny that paid links are still effective, if done correctly.

In my opinion, Matt’s post can almost be interpreted as a sign of weakness on Google’s part. They’re fighting an unnecessary war they know they can’t win and itâs obvious they’re having a hard time finding paid links with their algorithms. But that’s not really what this post is about. Instead I want to give a little insight on strategies for buying links.

The biggest problem I see with people who get dinged for buying links is that they’re lazy. Instead of working on creating remarkable content that will naturally attract links they throw a bunch on money at buying links and call it a day. If you’re guilty of this then you’re asking for trouble.

Buying links effectively is all about staying away from patterns. If you’re whole campaign is entirely based around paid links that will create a very recognizable pattern that can be picked up by the algorithms and filtered out. It may even result in penalties.

Paid links aren’t bad as long as your overall link profile is clean with no recognizable patterns that lead back to the links you’re buying. When those paid links are mixed in with hundreds of natural links they won’t stick out. If you don’t have those natural links the paid links will stick out like a sore thumb.

As you can see by the images if you don’t balance your paid links with your whole campaign they will stick out and sooner or later big brother will find out what you’re up to and ding your for it.

Whether or not Google’s new defense against paid links will work or not is still up in the air. In the meantime I’ll continue to throw a few paid links into my link building campaigns. What about you?