Archive for February, 2010
How to get listed on Listorious
You’ve worked hard to establish your brand on Twitter. You carefully crafted your 140-character bio with important keywords and phrases related to your niche. You have your website url on your profile. You put out great information in your tweets. Your followers are all perfectly targeted. Now it’s beginning to pay off. Your superior knowledge is getting you recognized. You are being added to Twitter lists, putting you on the same level as the leading experts in your field. How do you leverage this newfound notoriety? Use Listorious to spread the Twitter love.
Listorious.com is a directory of Twitter lists. Lists are not automatically added, but anybody can submit a list to the site. You can submit the lists that you have set up on your Twitter account, or you can submit someone else’s lists. If you submit someone else’s list, it would best benefit you if you are on it along with other leading experts in your niche. What does adding your Twitter lists, or lists that you are on, do for you? Every list is tagged, meaning they can be easily pulled up on a search engine result for those tags. Every Twitter profile associated with that list is also added. That means your bio and your website url are added, too. Having your Twitter lists on Listorious puts you, along with your link and bio with related keywords, on a high-traffic website where you can be found by spiders for search engine results. If you have Google Alerts set up for monitoring your brand, you will be notified within a day or two of the list submission.
To better clarify, you want to submit lists that are specific for your niche, not the lists of “friends” or “tweeps to follow” that have people from different niches. You want to submit “blog” or “blogger” lists if that’s your thing, or “marketing” or “crafts” or whatever your expertise is. And you want everybody else, or as many as possible, on that list to be in the same niche. The point is to bolster your standing as an expert in your field, and to add another search engine result for you under your keywords.
How to submit your Twitter lists to Listorious
Grab the url of the list you want to submit
You find the url of the list by going to your Twitter profile and clicking on the “listed” link under your bio. Then you will be taken to a page with the list of lists that you are on. Click on the list name. Then copy the url from the address bar of your browser.
Go to Listorious
Click the “Add List” link at the top right of the page
You will need to allow Listorious access to your Twitter account. If you are comfortable doing this, click the “allow” button and continue. If you are not comfortable allowing access to your Twitter account, someone else may submit the list. Maybe you know someone who will do it for you if you don’t want to wait around for that to happen.
Put the url of the list you want to submit in the “Enter URL of any Twitter List” box OR Choose the list from the “Or select a Twitter list you created or are part of:” dropdown box
If you copied the list url earlier, here is where you paste it. Alternatively, you may choose from the lists shown in the dropdown box. Note that the list in the dropdown box shows Twitter lists that have not yet been added to Listorious.
Put your keywords in the “Tags:” text box
The tags is how people can find the lists that you are on. You want the tags to be associated with your brand. Use your keywords or phrases. You might try to choose tags from the “Top Tags” list, too.
Click the blue “Add List” button
Congratulations, you are now listed in Listorious!
HubSpot TV – Follow the Party with Guest @MattDouglas
HubSpot TV is LIVE every Friday at 4:00pm EST. Watch the show in real-time at www.hubspot.tv and chat with us via Twitter using NEW hashtag #HubSpotTV.
Episode #80 – February 19, 2010
(Episode Length: 28 minutes, 53 seconds)
Intro
- How to interact on Twitter: Include #HubSpotTV in your tweets!
- On the show today is Mike Volpe (@mvolpe), Karen Rubin (@karenrubin) and Matt Douglas (@MattDouglas)
- As always, all the old episodes are in iTunes: http://itunes.hubspot.tv If you like the show, please leave a review!
- Wild Web Women have nominated Mike for “Social Media Man Crush” finalist. Please vote! http://tinyurl.com/socialmediamancrushes
- We’re considering doing an “on location” HubSpot TV in Las Vegas on March 22, so let us know if you would to attend the event live!
Special Guest Matt Douglas
- CEO of http://www.mypunchbowl.com
- Writes a Startup CEO blog: Startup Swami
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/mattdouglas
Headlines
Inbound Marketing Book Reaches #74 on Amazon
- Marketing Takeaway: Go buy Inbound Marketing if you haven’t already. Help us get to the top 50!
Southwest Ejects Large Movie Producer
- Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines Are Not A Good Fit
- “Long story short: Kevin Smith is a large man. As a result, due to a flight change on Saturday flying from Oakland to Burbank, Smith was told he had to leave a flight because he did not have two seats to sit in since he apparently cannot meet the single seat standard for Southwest.”
- “Smith, 39, responded with a barrage of profanity-laced Twitter posts, saying he was treated worse than a terrorist. ‘I know I’m fat, but was [the pilot] really justified in throwing me off a flight for which I was already seated?’ he tweeted.”
- Marketing Takeaway: Avoid problems by being clear and honest about your product and maintaining consistent service.
Are Social Media Sites Responsible for Social Monitoring?
- Philly targets Facebook, Twitter after snowball fight turns ugly
- “Two members of the Philadelphia City Council are considering legal action against Facebook, Twitter and MySpace in the wake of a ‘flash mob’ earlier this week that turned violent, according to a letter sent to the city’s mayor and obtained by CNET. The letter, written by council members Frank DiCicco and James F. Kenney, explains that this is the second such time a band of mischievous teens has formed via social media and went on to destroy property. ‘We believe that the lack of monitoring of these sites allows for mass, organized riots to occur.’”
- Marketing Takeaway: Social media can be used for good or evil, so make sure you are on the right side of the fence.
Search Engine Use Linked to Personality
- Study Finds Link Between Brand Building and Search
- A study by Wunderman (owners of Compete) found that what search engine consumers use to find a brand’s website impacts their perception of that brand and impacts their decisions made while they’re on the site.
- “The demographic and psychographic profile of each loyal search engine user is different. Bing users, for example, tend to be mostly from the tip of the adoption curve (innovators and early adopters) where Yahoo! and Google’s passengers tend to be middle majority.”
- Marketing Takeaway: Make sure you figure out what search engines your customers are most likely to use.
Forum Fodder
- Jim – “Should I follow my competitors using Twitter, and how do I get their followers to follow me?“
- M2 – Following is easy, listening isn’t. Follow everybody that affects your business: customers, vendors, competitors, etc. Use a Twitter client to build lists that isolate the useful signal and funnel it into more manageable buckets. (I like TweetDeck; Seesmic is another option, and there are others.) The lists will help you find the conversations that you want to monitor or join.
Marketing Tip of the Week: Sell umbrellas, not rain.
Closing
Webinar: How to Use Online Video for Inbound Marketing
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How do you get started with YouTube, video podcasting, live streaming, or viral videos. Download the free webinar to learn how to use online video to grow your business with inbound marketing. |
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Whiteboard Friday – 5 Things You’re Not Doing (But Should Be)
Posted by great scott!
This week, we’ve got a couple of newcomers to Whiteboard Studios! Our very own Jen Lopez and Danny Dover (whom you should know well thanks to Jen’s Meet the Mozzers post) are pinch-hitting for our globe-trotting CEO. Let’s all give them a big welcome.
We did a PRO Site Review Webinar last week and noticed a few SEO issues that are all-too-common. So, in this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Jen and Danny will walk you through five common areas where people often make mistakes, and explain quick fixes that can help you improve, including bot blocking, courting the Linkerati, identifying problems using Top Pages, analyzing conversion rate, and addressing canonicalization.
Here are the charts Danny referenced in the video:

Courtesy of WebsiteOptimization.com
Also, if you’d like to learn more about tracking first-touch attribution in your analytics, Whiteboard Friday alumnus, Will Critchlow, wrote about it here.
Rotator URLs, cloaking links, and traffic exchanges
Rotator urls are a wonderful tool, particularly for traffic exchange users. They are a real time saver. You simply submit the same rotator url to all of your traffic exchange accounts. When you need to make changes, you only need to do that once where you control the rotator url. You don’t have to login to all of your traffic exchange accounts to make the changes needed. I fully understand and support the use of rotator urls.
What I do not understand is the trend of putting other rotator urls inside of rotator urls. You know what I mean — when you see sites that have more than one rotator bar at the top of the surf window. Just today I saw 4 rotator bars on a site. Why is this a bad practice?
It really slows down the loading time of the site.
With most traffic exchanges, you have at most 10 seconds before the viewer moves on to the next site. You would like to have your site seen before that happens. Putting a regular url into a rotator url already slows loading somewhat because what you are doing is essentially redirecting from the rotator url to the site url and that takes time. Multiply that by the number of rotator urls inside the rotator url, and you will never get your site seen. Either the browser will freeze or the viewer moves on to the next site. Kinda defeats the purpose of showing sites in a traffic exchange.
It decreases the amount of your page being viewed.
Some rotator bars are fairly thin and unobtrusive. (I’ll save the rant on huge rotator bars for another day.) They leave behind plenty of space for people to see YOUR site, which is what you want people to see. Put a regular site in a rotator url, and you get one bar at the top of the site that moves your page down in the surf window. Put a rotator url in a rotator url, and you get two bars at the top of the site and your page is moved down twice as much. The surf window doesn’t get bigger. The viewing area of your page gets smaller.
It does nothing for your branding.
What will be memorable about your site is the overly-prominent rotator bars which are probably branded to whatever service the rotator is from. I told you that today I saw a site with 4 rotator bars. What was the site? I couldn’t tell you. All I saw was 4 rotator bars.
Now, let’s make a bad idea even worse
In your multiple rotators, why not add a cloaked link? One of those shortening url programs that also cause a redirect. Think about it. What would be the reason to put a shortened url in a traffic exchange? None that I can think of, maybe in emails etc, but certainly not in traffic exchanges. Then add one of the new bottom loading traffic bars with their own timer which takes even more time to load.
In other words, if you want your site to load quickly and actually be viewed in a traffic exchange, less is better. That is the main reason most traffic exchange owners and seasoned users suggest a quick loading splash page, keeping it simple, no clutter, no mess, not a ton of redirects or slow loading sites. Deliver your message quickly, make a strong call to action, that’s it.
Most traffic exchange site checkers now reject sites with too many redirects because they either freeze up the browser or never load in time to be seen. Food for thought, totally your decision.
Don’t Be a Chicken: 6 Simple Steps to Creating Online Marketing Videos
Bettina Hein is the founder of Pixability, a long-time HubSpot friend and partner providing video production services on the HubSpot Service Marketplace. You can follow Bettina on Twitter @pixability.
Forrester Research has shown that you’re 53 times more likely to get on the first page of Google’s search results if you have video on your page. But it seems so daunting, right?
It shouldn’t be.
Gone are the days when you have to spend $10,000+ on a video by acquiring a crew, hiring a director, booking a studio, etc. Creating online video doesn’t have to be hard, nor does it have to look amateurish. If you follow these few basic steps, you can — quickly and easily — create a video yourself that shines:
1. Think
The most important step in creating a marketing video is understanding your audience and your objectives. What content do your customers and prospects respond to? What is your goal for this video? For example, if you are looking to sell pre-fabricated chicken coops and know your audience is interested in chicken care, you could create video with educational content around how chickens need proper coops to thrive. Always think of your call-to-action: What do you want viewers of the video to do after viewing? Download your whitepaper on the advantages of prefab chicken coops? Go to your website and order?
Take 10 minutes and write down a bulleted list of the shots you want to take. Don’t get bogged down with this. It is better to go with your intuition than to over-think a video. You will need less content than you think because a good marketing video should be less than 3 minutes long.
Now you need to get an easy-to-use camera. Hands down, I’d recommend a Flip video camera, with the Kodak Zi8 a distant second choice.
2. Turn On All the Lights
Good light is essential for a professional-looking video. If you are shooting inside, turn on all available artificial light. Shooting outside is always a good idea. So if you’re shooting chicken coops, don’t use the brand new ones and shoot them in your warehouse. Instead, go to an enthusiastic customer’s site and shoot their chicken coop in action.
One caveat: never shoot someone with their back to a window, because it will black out their face. The same goes for shooting with the sun on someone’s back. Turn the situation around. The shooter (you!) should always have the light on your back.
3. Hold Still
Don’t go crazy with the camera — always hold your shots still. Don’t chase behind the chickens with your camera in hand. Don’t try to pan the landscape. Whenever you turn the camera on, count to 10 in your head and don’t move the camera during those 10 seconds. Then turn off the camera, move on to your next shot and repeat. If you follow this simple rule, you’ll improve your video by 100%.
4. Come from Afar, Then Get Close
Okay, so you’re at your best customer’s farm. Before you get into all the details of the chicken coop, stop your car at the farm entrance and get a shot of the location (the farm’s sign, the farm house or the mailbox with the name on it). Pros call this an ‘establishing shot’ because it helps the viewers understand where they are. Also, get a few shots of the chicken coops from a distance. Then get closer.
Very important: Don’t zoom, just turn the camera off, walk closer, then continue shooting. Get even closer and show off the fine workmanship of your prefab units.
5. Speak Loudly
While you’re at it, you’ll want to get an interview with your enthusiastic chicken coop customer. Customer testimonials are an essential element of marketing videos. People will believe other users of your product much more than they will believe a paid actor.
How to set it up: Find a quiet spot (no machinery or fans humming in the background, no crowds chattering) Get your customer on camera from the chest upward and tell them to speak loudly. Just ask your customer a few simple questions: What do you like best about our prefab chicken coops? How hard were they to assemble? Avoid yes or no questions.
6. Edit
The shoot is over and all you need to do now is polish. This part can be daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Use easy editing software like Apple’s iMovie or get help from someone who knows how to edit.
Important steps: include your logo, keep the video under 3 minutes and don’t forget your call to action. Add royalty-free music to set the mood and tie everything together. Use simple, fade-through transitions.
Once you’re done, use inbound marketing best practices to market the video. Upload it to your website and to YouTube. Add it to your email signature and link to it from your newsletters. Direct viewers to a landing page afterward to convert them into leads.
Don’t be a chicken. Get started NOW on a marketing video to drive visitors to your site and generate leads and sales.
Webinar: How to Use Online Video for Inbound Marketing
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How do you get started with YouTube, video podcasting, live streaming, or viral videos. Download the free webinar to learn how to use online video to grow your business with inbound marketing. |
Connect with HubSpot:
Meet the Mozzers!
Posted by jennita
Over the past few months, we’ve announced a number of exciting changes here at the mozPlex. Some of those include becoming focused on our software, new SEO tools and a cultural change with our TAGFEE Tenets. With that, we’re committed to being transparent and authentic and feel we’ve done a great job keeping the SEOmoz community up to date on many of these changes.

However, one area we’ve been slacking is in ensuring that our community knows who we are, as a team. There are many mozzers who mainly work behind the scenes building tools, or providing excellent customer service to our members. Along with our shift from consulting, we’ve had a few organizational changes and people’s roles have changed. Additionally we have a number of moz Associates that help contribute to the blog and provide expertise in Q & A.
We’d like to take this opportunity to introduce you to our team, and ask you to get to know us a little better. There are a few new mozzers that may even surprise you! This is an exciting time for us and the community and we’re excited to introduce ourselves. Each mozzer was asked to provide their title, social media accounts, top moz moment (tools created, blog posts written, etc.), then I asked them to answer a few fun questions. So without further ado, I’d like you to meet the mozzers.
Development Team
Every team plays an important role to the success of SEOmoz and our tools, but the development team is key. Without this group we wouldn’t have the suite of amazing tools that we have to offer our members today. Browse through the developers and see who has worked on your favorite tool, and learn more about the people behind the scenes.
Ben Hendrickson Sr Software Engineer "From the day I started building the Linkscape prototype to the day we launched the first version was about 10 months. I think that project went well." |
Chas WilliamsSoftware Developer "I work mostly on Linkscape these days. I wrote the code for anchor text distributions and the new views for OSE, so the OSE launch was a proud moment for me
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David Joslin Systems Engineer "Since starting in August I have worked to improve our uptime significantly through monitoring, tuning, and application fixes. " |
Jeff Pollard Lead Web Developer "I make sure your website experience is a wonderful one!
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Kate Matsudaira VP Engineering "Helping bring SEO tools and technology to the next level" |
Ken Woodruff![]() Senior Architect |
Nick Gerner Senior Engineer Nick Leads SEOmoz API development and is currently working on solutions for historical Linkscape data tracking. |
Phil Smith Developer "Working on sooper-top secret project"
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Roger Mozbot Needs No Title Standing on a crate in order to be as tall as Googlebot.
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Marketing Team
Now that we are focused on our SEO tools, the consulting and marketing teams have been combined. There have been a number of changes in roles and we’re now more focused than ever on getting our products launched, participating and leading our amazing community, and creating excellent content for our readers. Take a peak at our new Marketing team!
Danny Dover SEO Specialist Danny is at least half full of SEO know-how |
Jen Sable Lopez Community Director Having worked remotely for 9 months, I LOVE being in the office.
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Joanna Lord Director of Customer Acquisition & Engagement "My focus is on introducing new audiences to our awesome resources and SEO tools. " |
Scott Willoughby Director-Conversion & Retention Marketing |
Product Team
The product team leads the path to ensuring that the products being built meet the needs of our customers and they manage the projects from inception through deployment. Essentially they make sure we’re all doing our jobs.
Adam FeldsteinDirector of Product Management Current Focus: 1) Ship a new version of the mozBar. 2) Something much bigger (that I can’t talk about yet) |
Ben Huff Product Manager "I focus on herding cats. Recently that included getting Open Site Explorer out the door, safe and sound. I’m currently working on doing the same for the new Keyword Difficulty tool." |
Matt HeilmanArt Director "I make SEOmoz look good"
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Operations Team
Who keeps the company working like a well oiled machine? That’s the Operations team of course! They jump in and help with any aspect of the company as needed and are often our customers first point of contact. Without their magic touch the office would be running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Thanks for keeping us from running into each other!
Arden TurnbullCustomer Service Manager / Office Coordinator Arden keeps our customers happy! |
Christine V.![]() Director of Operations I do my best to increase the staff’s level of happiness and productiveness, much like Tattoo on Fantasy Island. |
Sarah Bird Chief Operations Officer I own legal, financial, HR, and generally help make everything run smoothly. I also champion the Marketing Department and the SEOmoz API. I love my job. |
moz Associates
This is an amazing group of experts from across the search marketing industry. We’re priveledged to have this group contributing to the blog, helping with Q & A and providing insight for new products. It sorta feels like we’re showing off… because we totally are!
Cindy Krum![]() CEO & founder of Rank-Mobile – Denver, CO |
Duncan Morris Founder and CEO, Distilled – London, UK |
Jane Copland SEO Consultant, Ayima Search Marketing – London, England "I’ve written a couple of successful blog posts for SEOmoz (I worked as a full-time employee at SEOmoz from 2006 until 2009). My favourites are: Don’t End URLs in .0, What Rand and Jane Write When They’re Drunk, the follow-up and A True Story. It’s about hookers." |
Kate Morris Kate Morris, Search Engine Marketing Consultant – Austin, TX "My favorite blog post on YouMoz was Paid Search: Detaching From an Agency, which is what got me speaking on my first panel at SMX East 2008." |
Lindsay Wassell Q & A – Tampa Bay, FL |
Michael Cottam Principal, Michael Cottam SEO Consulting – Portland, OR, Canada I like this one, and it seemed to generate a pile o’ comments: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/its-a-feeding-frenzy-for-keywordrich-domains |
Peter Meyers President, User Effect – Chicago, IL The post: SEO Cheat Sheet: Anatomy of a URL My most popular post on my own blog (by a longshot) is 25 Point Website Usability Checklist. |
Richard Baxter Director / Founder SEOgadget.co.uk - London, UK Hmm. I like writing about tools you guys do – Like this and this and pretty charts on ranking factors using Linkscape data like this. And I really like talking about Microformats. |
Rob Ousbey Search Marketing Consultant, Distilled – Seattle, WA (soon to be) |
Sam Crocker SEO Consultant, Distilled – London, for now! I’m pretty new to the moz crew but I was pretty pleased with manning up to take on a "doozy" for my first Q & A and think I found a good solution to the problem |
Tom Critchlow Head of Search Marketing, Distilled – London Baby. My most loved SEOmoz post was this one, mainly because of it’s sensationalist headline… Headlines ftw. My proudest SEOmoz contribution was speaking at both the Seattle and London pro seminars in 2009 and getting some really positive feedback and comments. |
Will Critchlow Co-Founder of Distilled, UK & US – London, UK. Though anywhere rainy appears to do. Taking credit for lots of things done by our team, I’m probably most proud of the London PRO seminar in October last year. My personal favourite post, mainly for the title (just google "space monstering") is this one. |
Boss Team
Last, but definitely not least we have our co-founders Rand and Gillian. They may very well be the most well known of the bunch, but I bet you didn’t know Rand used to be a black market Pokemon dealer! Without these two, we wouldn’t be the team we are today.
Gillian Muessig President/Co-Founder "I’m the corporate evangelist and international voice for SEOmoz. My role is to connect the the SEOmoz community with the SEOmoz team and to spread the SEOmoz brand to new audiences and markets." |
Rand Fishkin CEO |
Thanks for taking the time to get to know us!




























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