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Archive for December, 2009

I was a teenager who kept a journal.

Hiding the journal was essential to keeping it. After all, it kept my thoughts safe from the prying eyes of my mother and sister.  

Over the years, nurtured by the sharing capabilities of the internet, I became less concerned that my parents and sister were going to read my journal. In fact, I left many of them at my house when I went away to college.

What changed? Well, the web allowed me to have more two-way conversations with my family and friends. Plus, by the time I left for college, much of that information in the journal was now grossly out of date or practically public knowledge anyway — why was I working so hard before to keep it safe? I benefited more by sharing than I ever did by holding my cards close to my chest.

In 2010, Public is the New Default

If you’re company is entering 2010 with the same mentality as a teenager protecting her diary, you’ve come to the wrong decade. I know for some businesses, fear of losing an edge over the competition or fear of backlash prevents them truly embracing the spirit of the age. Earlier today, Eric Schonfield of TechCrunch wrote about this change saying it “represents a major shift in the social fabric, and it is only now just getting started. If you thought there was a lot of hair-pulling over privacy in 2009, just wait until 2010. Facebook’s new privacy policies which favor more public sharing, will be a big driver of this shift, as will the continued adoption of Twitter, which by its very design makes personal utterances public. Then there are startups like Blippy that go even further by turning every single purchase into a public statement.”

Though Eric (and Techcrunch) have a tendency to makes this shift sound a massive headache, I am optimistic about the evolution of the web. It’s transformed from a dark, Batcave like lair where you weren’t sure who Batman really is or what side he works for – into a transparent universe where information flows more freely. On the 2010 web, we know who Batman is – he’s Bruce Wayne – and he blogs and tweets about his adventures daily.

Become a Leader in Business Transparency in Your Industry

As your business enters the new decade, consider your options. Instead of simply following along, work on becoming the leader in business transparency for your industry. You could encourage customers to share their ideas and write about their experience with your brand in a public forum. Shoot videos that give an intimate glimpse into the way your company operates like this video about the importance of gluten-free equipment by allergen-free food maker Kinnikinnick Foods. Allow your employees to blog, build public relationships, and share their ideas about your industry with the world. Provide a way for your customers (and everyone, really) to peek in and see how your software is performing. You can even keep a Twitter list of your employees and encourage them to share their personality and represent your brand daily.
 
Or, you could continue to wait for a different world. Either way, we are definitely headed toward a new wave of transparency in 2010 –  many of the social networks we’ve talked about this year have moved far and away from a private default (choosing to make some things public) to a public default (pre-selecting the things we want to make private).

Will your business be a window or a wall in 2010?  One thing I do know – it’s way easier for your prospects to climb in through a window. 

photo by phil h

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Posted by randfish

What a year! From traveling to software development, saying goodbye to old friends and growing the team with new ones, we’ve had a tremendously exciting 12 months at SEOmoz. To celebrate, next week, on Wednesday, January 6th 2010, we’ll be hosting an informal meetup at the Elysian Brewery on Capitol Hill in Seattle, WA. Everyone from the Seattle technology, startup and SEO community is welcome to attend, and we’ll be hosting a special guest, Distilled’s Will Critchlow (who’s chosen the worst possible time, weather-wise, to visit our fair city). Please RSVP via the Google form below! 

In addition to the meetup, I thought it would be appropriate (and fun) to celebrate the year with a look back in pictures. Enjoy!

SEOmoz’s Mel Gray, Matt Heilman, Gillian Muessig, Nick Gerner, Sarah Bird & Mike Thompson at Seattle’s Big Climb Event, raising money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society

 

The SEOmoz December holiday party at Olive8 – (Left to Right) Arden, Jimmy, Christine, Sarah, Ben Huff, Timmy, Gillian, Adam, Sam, Jen, Rand, Chas, Kate, Darren, Danny & Nick. Why did we all stuff into the dual showers? Umm… I don’t know. It seemed like a good idea at the time. You can watch our holiday video greeting and more holiday party photos on Facebook.

 

SEOmoz’s Chas Williams and Sarah Bird won most festive attire at our holiday event.

 

Tony Adam (BillShrink), smiling next to his SEOmoz Werewolf/Search Spam card at Pubcon Las Vegas in November

 

Kristy Bolsinger (blog), Kate Morris (blog) & Matt Cutts (blog) at the SEOmoz Werewolf Party at Pubcon Las Vegas

 

Ben Hendrickson and Jen Lopez, attired in full moz regalia, carrying "link juice" by the SEOmoz booth at SMX Advanced in Seattle

 

Ben, Danny (with a mustache! – he’s hidden so look real close), Chas, Scott & Timmy at lunch downstairs from SEOmoz’s offices at the Elysian Brewery on Capitol Hill

 

Sarah Bird hard at work in our cramped conference room

 

Sometimes, when we have tough decisions to make and could go either way, we Roshambo. I lost this round, and we ended up spending $5K on some professional services in our search for a new VP of Engineering.

 

Aimclear’s Marty Weintraub sent us a singing gorilla for the holidays. Tragically, I was out of town, but got to watch the video on Facebook

 

At the beginning of the year, we had some construction work done on the office to help accomodate new arrivals

 

Mozzers hard at work in the conference room (and apparently freezing cold, too).

 

Ben Hendrickson explains ranking models and how we can "prove" H1 tags don’t really matter for SEO

 

Rand, Sarah, and SEOmoz board member & investor, Michelle Goldberg at The Naked Truth (a startup event in Seattle). Leaning on my shoulder is Mystery Guest, who tragically forgot sunglasses (why didn’t I give her mine?!)

 

The Conversion Rate Experts squirrel (yes, they have a mascot) at the SEOmoz/Distilled London PR) Training Seminar in October. Must check on progress of the SEOmoz Ring-tailed Lemur mascot costume.

 

Jon Kelly (Quinstreet), Tony Adam (Billshrink), Andy Liu (BuddyTV) and Neil Patel (Quicksprout) at SEOmoz’s annual party after SMX Advanced in Seattle at the Garage (photo-bombing courtesy of Matt Cutts)

 

Rand on Hubspot TV with Mike Volpe in Hubspot’s Boston offices (Rand: "My grandparents asked what channel I was going to be on.")

 

Rand is subsumed by Kristjan Mar Hauksson’s (of Nordic eMarketing) gigantic Viking hands in an Icelandic ice bar in the capital, Reykjavik following RIMC 2009

 

Dixon Jones (Receptional), Adam Lasnik (Google) & Rand go glacier hiking in Iceland

 

Rand at Searchfest Portland with Anne Kennedy (BeyondInk) and Adam Audette (Audette Media) speaking about SEOmoz’s history & future (apparently I was a bit more animated than most other folks)

 

On a panel at SES London chaired by Mike Grehan (SES), Rand pictured with Brett Tabke (WebmasterWorld), Chris Sherman (Third Door Media), Jill Whalen (HighRankings) and Kevin Ryan (WebVisible)

 

Outside the Chicago Hilton for SES Chicago with Richard Zwicky (Enquisite), Bill Leake (Apogee), Aaron Kahlow (OMS)

 

Jane Copland (Ayima), Danny Dover, Rand & Richard Baxter (SEO Gadget) in London following the Distilled/SEOmoz PRO Training Seminar

 

Mystery Guest gives Rob Kerry (Ayima) a gift in London on our way back from lunch near the Ayima offices. ("Why is my love always a source of linkbait?" – MG)

 

Rand & Will Critchlow (Distilled), standing under their respective time zone clocks in Distilled’s London offices.

 

Alexander Holl (blog), Rand, Sandra & Matthew Finlay (Rising Media), Marcus Tandler (Mediadonis)  at an SMX Munich party

 

Rand with Vanessa Fox (NineByBlue) & Mystery Guest in Bled, Slovenia for a day trip following SMX Munich

 

Rand & Mystery Guest join Nirav Tolia (Fanbase) for lunch in San Francisco during one of Rand’s VC fundraising expeditions to the valley

 

Bob Rains (blog), Lawrence Coburn (Rateitall), Lauren Vaccarello (Salesforce), Todd Malicoat (Stuntdubl) and Donna Rains in a limo during a (loosely SEO related) wine tasting trip in Monterey, CA

 

Laura Lippay (blog), Mystery Guest, Vanessa Fox (NinebyBlue), Lauren Vaccarello (Salesforce) & Jessica Bowman (SEM in House) in San Francisco following the Jane & Robot conference

 

Rand, Tom Critchlow (Distilled), Ken Jurina (Epiar), Dharmesh Shah (OnStartups & Hubspot), David Mihm (blog), Matt Brown (Define Search Strategy), Danny Dover & Nick Gerner at the SEOmoz PRO Training Seattle

 

Mystery Guest homemade retro Star Trek outfits for Halloween this year (and got a wig + Vulcan ears to complete her ensemble)

Rand with his grandparents, Si & Pauline Fishkin at a Broadway musical following SMX East in New York City

 

Rand & Cindy Krum (Rank Mobile) tour Soho during SMX East in New York City

 

Left to Right: Rand, Greg Boser (3Dog Media), Barry Smyth (BSocial), Stephen Pavlovich (Conversion Rate Experts), Rob Kerry (Ayima), Aidan Beanland (Yahoo!7), Michael Motherwell (MMIT Search Australia), Bruce Clay (Bruce Clay, Inc), Greg Grothaus (Google)

 

The SEOmoz whiteboards in our conference room, showing off early concepts of new software (codenamed "Turbomoz") we’re hoping to launch this coming June

 

Ciaran Norris (Mindshare) was interviewed by Channel 4 in the UK on social media, search & Rupert Murdoch’s threats to shut off Google traffic. Tragically, he appeared garbed in naught save rags, and couldn’t be bothered to properly attire with a cravatte. Credit to Jane Copland for the image capture.

 

The SEOmoz crew outside the Garage following our party at SMX Advanced

 

David Temple (SEM Scholar), Gillian Muessig and Barry Smyth (BSocial) at SMX Singapore

Jen Lopez at SMX Advanced with Michael Gray (Wolf Howl)

Oh, and just FYI, the photos above are in no particular chronological order.

 

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NOTE: If you’ve got other photos to share, please feel free to link to ‘em!

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Have you thought about starting your own podcast? Podcasting is a great way to create interesting and fresh content regularly, develop a following, and encourage your company to get creative.

We’ve created a company culture around our weekly marketing podcast HubSpot TV. We open our doors to the tech and marketing community at 4:00pm every Friday to come watch the show, and everyone at
HubSpot knows to come grab a seat and enjoy the Marketing takeaways of the week.

Even though we’ve been doing HubSpot TV for awhile, we we still get a lot of questions on how we do it. So, here is an inside look at how to create a video podcast of your very own. 

PART I: SETUP

1) Create shownotes as an outline for your episode. By keeping the show non-scripted, it keeps the flow conversational and minimizes preptime. Our marketing team already has a lot of ongoing tasks, so creating shownotes is key for a weekly podcast when you have many other things to do!

2) Get a livestream.com account and embed the player on a page of your website. Livestream is what you’ll use to stream the podcast in real-time. Make sure to embed the player on your own website and direct people to watch the show on that page. That way you control the content around the player, but also get the benefit of the incoming traffic.

3) Set up your iTunes feed. We use Blip.tv to manage our podcast and iTunes feed. Create a blip.tv account where your episodes will live. Then you can walk through the steps to make your itunes feed. Think of a good, descriptive name for your podcast so people searching for similar content in iTunes will find yours!

PART II: FILMING

4) Use a camera that has a firewire output and also records to tape. We currently use a Cannon GL2. It isn’t HD, but frankly that type of quality is quite difficult to livestream and tends to lag. By recording to tape, you also have the recording for post-production later.

5) Use an external mic for optimal audio. What works best are lavalier mics, especially if you have a live studio audience. You want to be able to hear your talking heads clearly. If you have multiple people on the show, best would be to mic everyone and use a soundboard to enter it into the camera. (HubSpot TV isn’t *quite* there yet.)

6) Record your episode live! This step is pretty straight forward, but the real benefit here is you’re timeboxing your film time.

Part III: POST PRODUCTION & PUBLISHING

7) Import the recorded video into iMovie for post production. With the firewire and a Mac computer, you can connect the camera to the computer. Open iMovie and it will automatically prompt to import the footage. After you import, create a “new project” and drag in the footage you want to edit. Then normalize audio volume, clip the beginning and end to remove dead footage, and add fade-in and fade outs! Bam!

Add intro and exit credits (and maybe even a theme song too!) Use PPT to create your credits and save it as a JPG. Then you can drag that into your project file, and some transitions between the images and the footages, and your done. Export by going to: Share >> Export using QuickTime. This will give you a .mov file.

9) Upload your footage into blip.tv. After uploading, it will automatically create a  flash file (.flv) that you can use for embedding. For the iTunes feed, the paid version can automatically convert your uploaded file into an .mp4 format too and send it to the feed. If you don’t want to use the paid account, you can convert your .mov file into a .mp4 file yourself using iTunes. Then upload the .mov as the “Master” and the .mp4 as “Portable (iPod).”

10) Embed the flash video into a blog post with the episode show notes. This increases the visibility of your podcast, potentially helps you get more live viewers or iTunes subscribers. By including the show notes, youre adding searchable content to your blog post instead of only adding the flash video, which Google can’t see!

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Rince and repeat every week, every month, or whenever you choose to schedule your podcast. Remember, regular episodes increases viewership and make sure to have fun with it!

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Becoming an internet marketer has low start-up costs. Your minimal start-up costs should include the monthly fees for an autoresponder service, the monthly fees for hosting, and the yearly registration fees for domain registration.

Hosting? Domain? But affiliate marketers can use the web pages provided by the products and services they are representing. Why pay for a domain and hosting? Do affiliate marketers need their own personal website?

In a word, yes.

Affiliate marketers don’t need to have their own website to sell other people’s products in that most products and services provide promotional tools to affiliates. You can use the tools provided to you and every other Tom, Dick and Harry that is hawking that product or service, but where does that get you? Smack in the middle of the pack. Part of the herd. Lost in a sea of web pages that look exactly like the one you are using. How does that get you sales? How does that build your email list?

Having your own personal domain puts you in control of your affiliate marketing business. With your own domain, you can advertise the way YOU want to and run your business the way you want to. Here is what you do for your business by having your own personal domain.

Brand yourself

Stake you claim on some internet real estate. Register your name or business name as a domain name and brand yourself. Funnel all of your traffic through that domain by housing your splash pages, banner images, squeeze pages, and blog on your personal domain. There are even ways to use your own domain for cloaking your affiliate links. Hosting packages usually include email accounts, too, so even your email address can be on your own domain under your name or business name. Let the people know who exactly they are dealing with. Brand your promotional tools with your personal domain name and let your customers know that they are buying from YOU, the affiliate marketer extraordinaire.

Control your advertising

Forget the promo tools provided by the program that all the other affiliates will be using. Stand head and shoulders above the crowd. Make your own unique splash pages and banner images and upload them to your domain. The url for those pages and images will have your domain name. Making your own pages means you control those pages. No surprise pop ups unless you put them there. Don’t simply build lists for other people. Make your own squeeze pages for your domain. Write a free report or ebook and upload it to your domain. Give them away to promote your products and build your own personal email list.

Host your own photos and logo online

Many programs allow you to personalize some affiliate tools with your picture or logo, but some of them won’t let you upload your image; they prefer that you host those images yourself. You can use one of the online photo sharing web sites, but you risk slow loading times because of the sheer volume of traffic on such huge sites. Loading time will be much faster if you have your images on your own domain. Having your own photos and logo images on your own domain is not only a convenience for you, but it is also a branding tool. Your photo, your logo, your own personal domain as the url. Talk about hitting someone over the head with the obvious!

Avoid unwanted third party advertising with paid hosting

Hopefully you are now convinced that you need your own domain. Just let me say one thing about paid hosting. Yes, there are free hosting packages available. They don’t cost you any money. Instead, the hosting company makes money by putting third party ads on your website. The only way to get rid of those pesky ads is to upgrade and pay for hosting.  Don’t fall into that trap. Search for the hosting package that makes the most sense for you, and expect to pay something for it.

Don’t have a domain yet? Start 2010 right and budget for a small expense that is invaluable for your business.

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Despite Dominos’ negative experience with social media earlier this year, which involved the explosion of a YouTube video showing two employees doing repulsive things with Dominos ingredients,
the brand is now embracing the channel to promote its brand with its new Pizza Turnaround campaign.

For a brand, one advantage of social media involvement is the opportunity to generate instant customer feedback.  Dominos’ new strategy is a great example of a company using social media to listen to and react to its customers in order to solve a problem. 

Let’s take a look at what they’re doing.

The Problem

Dominos has had the same pizza recipe since they launched 50 years ago, and while it finished first in pizza delivery and value according to a 2009 Brand Keys survey of national restaurant chains, it also finished dead last in consumers’ taste preference.  With pizza deliveries down 6% compared to last year according to USA Today, Dominos knew it needed to make a change.  

The Solution

Dominos decided to completely change its pizza recipe, hoping to reinvent its brand and change its reputation for taste.  Based on two years of research involving customer taste tests of 50 blends of seasonings, 15 sauces and dozens of cheeses, Dominos launched its new recipe to customers yesterday, featuring a sweeter sauce, a newly seasoned crust and a different blend of cheeses.

The Strategy 

To launch its “turnaround,” Dominos has created a new website, www.pizzaturnaround.com, which features a new video documentary on YouTube (see above) that uses real Dominos employees to tell the story of how Dominos listened to its critics and is changing its pizza recipe for the better.  The site also includes a Twitter stream showing people’s reactions to the new recipe (via the hashtag #newpizza).  

Dominos is encouraging consumers to try the new pizza and offer feedback via social media like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.  Perhaps an even bolder approach, the brand is also reaching out to food bloggers who have previously made negative comments about the pizza’s taste, asking them to publicly review the new recipe.

What Dominos is Doing Right 

We can respect Dominos’ campaign for a number of reasons.  For one thing, they’re doing a great job of taking advantage of multiple social media channels (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook) to accomplish their goal.  Secondly, they’re actually listening to what their customers are saying in order to improve their brand and their customers’ experiences.  They’re also being extremely transparent in their approach by asking their customers and critics to offer their feedback, whether positive or negative. 

While it’s too soon to tell if the company is benefiting financially from its new reinvention, Dominos’ marketing approach is definitely admirable and unique.  In the very least, it’s certainly generating some initial buzz and curiosity. 

What do you think of Dominos’ new campaign?  Has it tempted you to try the new recipe?

Video: How to Use Social Media to Attract More Customers

Learn how to use social media to attract more customers. Download the free video and learn how to generate more business using social media.

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Posted by Danny Dover

 As SEOmoz has matured as a company, our SEO team has shifted away from treating SEO purely as an art and more toward treating it as a science. There is certainly the necessity for both perspectives but I believe we are now much more centered.

As a result of this shift, we have been running more tests and analyzing more data. Before I get into the topic of our latest test results, let me provide some important points to establish context.

1. There is overwhelming evidence that from a "ROI on time spent working" perspective, there is much more value in link building and creating content that is link-worthy than obsessing over search engine algorithm fluctuations like PageRank sculpting. Link building is human oriented and thus more inline with the long term goals of the search engines. Links also have the added bonus of being easy to measure and thus easier to prioritize.
2. We can’t directly measure how PageRank flows so we can only infer results. This needs to be acknowledged when interpreting test results. That said, we also can’t directly measure objects outside our solar system and this solution of inference has become the basis for modern Astronomy. (If it is good enough for NASA, it is good enough for SEOmoz ;-p)

The Experiment

We chose the following five PageRank sculpting methods to test:

Rel=‘nofollow’ - The standard mechanism for nofollowing a link. <a href=’http://www.example.com’ rel=‘nofollow’>example</a>

Link Consolidation – Consolidating low priority pages. You can read more about link consolidation here.

Iframe – Include a standard link in an iframe that is blocked via robots.txt or meta robots so engines can’t follow it.

Javascript – An external Javascript file (blocked from robots) that inserts links into divs when the page renders.

Control Case – Null test with standard links.

Page Setup

We then built five standardized websites that used these different methods (one used iframes for its test links, another one used Javascript for its test links, etc..) and included one normal link with the anchor text of a phrase that was completely unique on the Internet.

Each website in the experiment used the same template. Each keyword phrase was targeted in the same place on each page and each page had the same amount of images, text and links.

The variables were:

• links (based on experiment type)
• colors
• photos (although alt text was standardized)
• text (randomized text based on proper English grammar using a standardized word-set)

We then did everything we could to make sure that all of these pages received the same amount of link juice from external sources.

The null result would be a random assortment of experiment types ranking in the SERPs.
The alt result would be one experiment type outranking all of the others.

Redundancy

We then duplicated this experiment eight times in parallel. This meant 40 different domains, 40 different IP addresses, 8 different WHOIS records, 8 different hosting providers and 8 different payment methods. (We then went outside and drank)

We ran this test for 2 months.

The Results

PageRank Sculpting Method	Average Rank in Google
Nofollow	2.4
Link Consolidation	3.0
Iframe	3.1
Javascript	3.2
Control Case	3.2

As you can see, the nofollow method ranked an average of 1 place higher (0.7) in the SERPs than the control result. This is significant when you realize the total is out of 5.

It appears that the iframe method and link consolidation were slightly effective but the margin was so small that they could be contributed to error.

As expected the Javascript method did not work at all. (Since the external scripts were blocked, the engines never saw the links)

The Bottom Line

Despite what the search engine representatives say, nofollow is still an effective way for sculpting PageRank. If you have nofollow sculpting already installed, don’t remove it. If you don’t have it installed, implementing it probably won’t make a drastic change but we encourage you to test this when it is responsible to do so.

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I invite you to share your interpretation of these results in the comments below. As with any experiment, these results are not valid unless they can be reproduced and stand up to the critique of others. What should we do differently in future experiments?

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