Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
How to Write Your Most Popular Post
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/yzeYbUSjJ0M/
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
How to Write Your Most Popular Post
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/yzeYbUSjJ0M/
Source: http://jaysonlinereviews.com/money-online-training-videos-beginners-started-affiliate-marketing/
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Why I Switched Blog Hosting Companies (and Who I’m With Now)
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/Qm_uBW2eyv4/
Source: http://jaysonlinereviews.com/money-clickbank-top-affiliate-programs-2012/
Here;s a quick mock-up of the Digital Peoria online magazine concept: art, photography, fiction, and all things creative in the Peoria IL area. I brought some material together to demonstrate how this platform could be used.
If you're interested in showcasing your creative work in an online magazine format, CONTACT ME.
Digital Peoria will supplement the Peoria Life online magazine. Your personal artistic work can be displayed in Digital Peoria. Your "stories about living in Peoria" belong in Peoria Life.
How To View Digital Peoria:
(1) Operate the embedded version at the top of this post by clicking on "Expand".
(2) Click on "Click To Read" for Full Screen View. Click on Escape button to leave Full Screen View.
(3) Click on a page to make it larger. Or scroll wheel up and down to change the size of a page of the magazine. Or move the sizing tool slider from left to right.
(4) Click on > and < arrows to turn the pages.
(5) By moving your cursor around on the page, you bring different areas of the page into the center of your computer screen, for better viewing. This helps as you enlarge the view.
You have great control over how large the view of any page is, so you can easily read text and see images. It's easy to operate this online magazine, because it has redundant controls (multiple options) and intuitive user interface design.
Pin ItSource: http://pluperfecter.blogspot.com/2012/09/digital-peoria-online-magazine-issuu.html
Source: http://jaysonlinereviews.com/guest-blogging-i-am-looking-for-guest-bloggers-on-my-blog/
Source: http://jaysonlinereviews.com/clickbank-review-learn-how-to-get-started-making-money-with-clickbank/
Source: http://pluperfecter.blogspot.com/2012/08/new-tech-neologisms-for-internet.html
Source: http://jaysonlinereviews.com/blog-advertising-special-offers-2012-advertise/
Google recently launched their webspam Penguin update. While they claim it only impacted about 3.1% of search queries, the 3.1% it impacted were largely in the "commercial transactional keywords worth a lot of money" category.
Based on the number of complaints online about it (there is even a petition!) this is likely every bit as large as Panda or the Florida update. A friend also mentioned that shortly after the update WickedFire & TrafficPlanet both had sluggish servers, yet another indication of the impact of the update.
Originally leading up to the update, the update was sold as being about over-optimization. However when it was launched it was given no pet name, but rather given the name of the webspam update. Thus anyone who complained about the update was by definition a spammer.
A day after declaring that the name didn't have any name Google changed positions and called the update the Penguin update.
Why the quick turn around on the naming?
If you smoke a bunch of webmasters & then label them all as spammers, of course they are going to express outrage and look for the edge cases that make you look bad & promote those. One of the first ones out of the gate on that front was a literally blank blogspot blog that was ranking #1 for make money online.
As I joked with Eli, if it is blank then they couldn't have done anything wrong, right? :D
Another site that got nailed by the update was Viagra.com. It has since been fixed, but it is pretty hard for Google to state that the sites that got hit are spam, blend the search ads into the results so much that users can't tell them apart & force Pfizer to buy their own brand to rank. If that condition didn't get fixed quickly I am pretty certain it would lead to lawsuits.
Google also put out a form to collect feedback about the update. They only ever do that if they know they went too far and need to refine it. Or, put another way, if this was the Penguin update then this is GoogleBot:
When I was a kid I used to collect baseball cards. As the price of pictures from sites like iStockphoto have gone up I recently bought a few cards on eBay (in part for nostalgia & in part to have pictures for some of our blog posts). Yesterday I searched for baseball card holders for mini-cards & in the first page of search results was:
That blank Yahoo! Shopping page is also what showed up in Google's cache too. So I am not claiming that they were spamming Google in any way, rather that Google just has bad algorithms when they rank literally blank pages simply because they are on an authoritative domain name.
The SERPs lacked expert blogs, forum discussions, & niche retailers. In short, too much emphasis on domain authority yet again.
Part of the idea of the web was that it could connect supply and demand directly, but an excessive focus on domain authority leads users to have to go through another set of arbitragers. Efforts to squeeze out micro-parasites has led to the creation of macro-parasites (and micro-parasites that ride on the macro-parasite platforms).
Now more than ever SEO requires threading the needle: being sufficiently aggressive to see results, but not so aggressive that you get clipped for it (and hopefully building enough protection that makes it harder for others to clip you). That requires a tighter integration of the end to end process (tying efforts into analytics & analytics back into efforts) & a willing to view SEO through a broader marketing lens & throwing up a number of hail marry passes that likely won't on their own back out but will give you a lower risk profile when combined with your other stuff.
And your business model is probably far more important than your SEO skill level is. Imagine running a consulting company for a lot of small business customers for a few hundred Dollars a month each, based on stable rankings & then dealing with a tumultuous update that hits a number of them at the same time. And then they see an older (abandoned even) competing site of lower quality with fewer links ranking and they think you are selling them a bag of smoke. These sorts of updates harm the ability to do SEO consulting for anyone who isn't consulting the big brands. Yes many people made it through this update unscathed, but how many of these sorts of updates can one manage to slide through before eventually getting clipped?
As search evolves, invariably anyone who is doing well in the ecosystem will at some point face setbacks. Those may happen due to an algorithm update or an interface change where Google inserts itself in your market. If you never get hit, it means you were only operating at a fraction of your potential. If you consistently get hit, you might be aiming too low. Many trends can be predicted, but the future is unknowable, so set up a safety cushion when things are going well.
This year Google has moved faster than any year in their history (massive link warnings, massive link penalties, tighter integration of Panda & now Penguin) & the rate of change is only accelerating. Go back about 125 years and a candle wick adjuster was cutting edge technology marketed as brand spanking new:
Blekko has a decently competitive search service which they manage to run for only a few million a year. As computers get cheaper & Google collects more data think of all the different data points they will be able to layer into their relevancy algorithms. In some markets Chrome has more marketshare than Internet Explorer does & Android is another deep data source. And they can know what user data to trust most by tracking things like if they have a credit card or phone verified on file & how often they use various services like Gmail or YouTube. Google+ is just icing on the cake.
At the same time, they need to improve. As the search algorithms get better, so do the business models that exploit them:
I asked Kristian Hammond what percentage of news would be written by computers in 15 years. “More than 90 percent.”
There will be many more casualties in that war.
Source: http://jaysonlinereviews.com/learn-build-backlinks-dominate-google-2012-search-engines/
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DailySeoTip/~3/3uB7X4F3_IY/
Many people are very particular with how they store their food to help prolong its freshness and flavour. A great way to achieve this is by removing the air in plastic containers. A vacuum sealer is the perfect tool for the job!
Now let’s see if a vacuum sealer is a viable product, let’s consult our SaleHoo Research Lab.
Sell-through Rate: Did you really find a hot niche?
One good indicator of how well a product may sell is the sell-through rate. Ideally it’s best to invest in products with a sell-through rate of at least 50-60%. Thankfully, vacuum sealers have a sell-through rate of over 53%!
Median End Price: Is there enough room for profit?
As of the month of April, the median end price for a vacuum sealer is $38.66. Remember that the median end price on eBay can be ambiguous because the median end price is for all listings which can include bulk listings that sell two or more vacuum sealers in a single listing. This can skew our data.
This product can definitely sell higher or lower than the price shown above, based on the snapshot the average price of a vacuum sealer is $101.00 while the average Buy It Now price is $33.
Total Listings, Total Bids and Total Sellers: How viable is your market?
As of April, there are 1,710 sellers listing a total of 1,875 vacuum sealers while the total number of bids is almost 3 folds that of the total number of listings at 4,996 bids!
Definitely another key indicator that we have found a good niche!
Data Trends: Are sellers hitting their target?
Based on the graph above, it is safe to say that sellers are doing well selling vacuum sealers. Notice that the highest total revenue of $5,875.91 was recorded last April 22 while the lowest was recorded last April 14 at $2,106.21!
Going beyond eBay: How popular are vacuum sealers online?
Vacuum sealers are relatively popular even outside eBay as shown by the keyword research results from our very own free SEO software, Traffic Travis. Do your own keyword research and get to check if you are using the right keywords for your listings. Visit www.traffictravis.com and download your very own software for free!
What do these numbers mean?
Globally there are 110,000 searches for the keyword ‘vacuum sealer’ (the singular form of “vacuum sealers”) with 74,000 searches in the US alone!
Notice how big the difference is for the keyword ‘vacuum sealers’? This shows how important it is to use the correct keyword to be able to direct the maximum amount of traffic to your eBay listings and/or online store.
Trusted vacuum sealer wholesale suppliers
Vacuum sealer supplier #1
Your #1 source for housewares and gourmet products, they accept most major credit cards - Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover. They offer both wholesale and drop shipping programs and deliver to various international destinations.
View their SaleHoo listing (requires SaleHoo account)
Vacuum sealer supplier #2
They manufacture a huge range of electronics, lingerie, and household products. Their collection includes scales, massagers, fat analyzers, pedometers, breast enhancers, underwear, and more.
View their SaleHoo listing (requires SaleHoo account)
Vacuum sealer supplier #3
They offer premium quality products at competitive wholesale pricing. Blind drop shipping is also available. They accept credit cards – American Express, MasterCard, Visa and Discover, as well as PayPal, checks, money orders, cash orders, and wire transfers as forms of payment. International orders are accepted.
View their SaleHoo listing (requires SaleHoo account)
To access our list of vacuum sealer wholesale suppliers and take advantage of SaleHoo’s Research Lab mentioned above, sign up as a SaleHoo member now.
Inside you will get access to over 8000 suppliers, comprehensive training to help you find the best products to sell online and access to our members only forum full of tips and secrets from other members (including eBay Powersellers) to help you make money online. Join SaleHoo today
See you next Monday!
-------------------------------------------
Disclaimer: The information published here is strictly for informational purposes. All above product items are only suggestions for possible products which will sell favorably, and should be used as a guide only. At the time of writing, all above products were researched using methods recommend by SaleHoo and found to be potentially profitable for sellers. All sellers are encouraged to conduct their own market and product research.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DailySeoTip/~3/6mV8vNyIvQ4/
Hello all,
As part of our development drive on Stores, we've released a few changes!
Today we have one new feature, and a few important bugfixes:
This week we added the ability to share a product from your store to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest!
To use this feature, login to your store admin area, and scroll down to the 'Social' section. Here you can individually enable which social features will show up on your storefront.
Once a social network is enabled, your customers will be able to click on the icon on your storefront, to share your product
Source: http://www.salehoo.com/blog/salehoo-stores-update-10th-july-2012
Source: http://jaysonlinereviews.com/money-online-great-business/
Source: http://pluperfecter.blogspot.com/2012/04/how-not-to-begin-email-sales-message.html
The best part about a growing and very quickly changing industry is the diversity of viewpoints; the worst part is the exact same thing because sometimes 1 always equals 1 and doesn't need bullshit in lieu of evidence. I try my best to stay out of the limelight and just focus on making things happen. However, occasionally a topic will bother me so much that I have to chime in. The last time was over 5 years ago so I figure I'm due to speak up again. Today's topic? Negative SEO. My issue with the topic? Deniers.
There've been several posts on how negative SEO doesn't exist (those are the worst) or that maybe it exists but only weak sites can get hit (in other words, people with opinions that didn't do any testing). I'd like to put those topics to rest as best as a guy that keeps to himself can. I really should be able to do this in one sentence, but in the event what I write as the second half of this sentence doesn't do it for you, I have a couple stories; if crappy SEO of over-optimized anchors and junky links are to blame for ranking drops, how can it be said one cannot do this to someone else, and even if you were to deny this, then why the sudden rush to denounce certain links? On to some anecdotes!
While leading a training session overseas I mentioned a site I watched get hit by some negative SEO activities. I know that it was negative SEO and not a slip up on the SEOs' part by virtue of knowing the history/team behind the site and watching it as part of my normal data routine; the site was managed by the kind of guys that get asked to speak at SEOktoberfest...the kind of people I'd go work for if my bag of tricks ever ran out. Ok, so you're asking how I know it was negative SEO. The easiest explanation is that I watched the site spike heavily with on-theme anchors from junk sites over a one week period and was filtered shortly thereafter. It stayed filtered for just under few months, but 2 days after discussing the site and explaining how I knew the site was hit it magically reappeared (yes, there were googlers in the audience).
If you are skeptical then your first response better be that I'm only loosely describing one example so let me say that in the same industry where I've shared my knowledge of the subject on some more sophisticated methods (first released in the SEObook community), I feel almost like an information arms dealer since even the larger brands have themselves or through affiliated relationships been clubbing each other over the head. You read that right; I explained how I thought negative SEO could be employed and then watched a bunch of people actually do it, repeatedly. Unfortunately, I was hit too, but that's a different issue. In this particular industry, the only people left standing now are some poorly matched local results with fake reviews, a bunch of hacked domains, and the flotsam of macroparasites that gained popularity post Penguin. The only one that came back? The one I publically shared at a conference, explaining exactly how they were a victim based on the link patterns that didn't fit with the site's history over a several year period.
I'll wrap this up with a bit of humor. As a joke a friend of mine asked me to negative SEO him for his name. Let's say his name is John Doe and his domain is johndoe.com. The negative effect was temporary, but I was able to get him filtered for a little while on his name for maybe 120 seconds of my time and less than $50. The site did come back after a few days, but our mutual feeling on the matter is that for an extra $50 double-dose I could probably get the site filtered again. Neither of us wants negative SEO to get any more prevalent than it already is, so I'll skip the details on exactly how it was performed. There are multiple forms of negative SEO significantly scarier than someone with a copy of xrumer and in some cases there is very little you can do to prevent it; if a jerk wants to take you down, it can happen. If your niches begin to look like the wasteland I described above where I shared my thoughts a little too freely, then heaven help you because it doesn't look like Google is going to.
Cygnus has been involved in search since 1997 and loves tackling new and interesting (and of course lucrative) projects. Follow @Cygnus on Twitter for his rants.
Source: http://www.seobook.com/stop-questioning-negative-seo
Microsoft is expected to announce all new Windows Phone 8 mobile OS in Developers Summit on June 20. The event is happening in San Francisco
Read full article here > Microsoft to Announce Windows Phone 8 OS in Developers Summit 2012 written by Tushar Tajane
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techzoom/kzCz/~3/yYCppOXq1Eg/
Source: http://jaysonlinereviews.com/best-training-courses-2011-guaranteed-to-help-you-make-money-online/
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
10 Fresh Tips for Finding Time to Blog
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/o1PPaAz0lUU/
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Should You Use a Third-Party Commenting System on Your Blog?
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/vNud8eBvQAo/
Following last week’s blog post on selling on Amazon.com, I thought I would shine the spotlight on Ruby Lane in today. If you haven’t heard of Ruby Lane, get familiar, because Ruby Lane is fast becoming a preferred marketplace among online sellers.
What is Ruby Lane?
Ruby Lane is much more than just another eBay alternative. It offers a platform for you to launch business and promote your business. Like other emerging marketplaces such as Addoway and Bonanza, Ruby Lane has a focus on antiques, art, collectibles and artisan jewelry.
Who shops at Ruby Lane?
According to Ruby Lane, their website visitors are well-educated web users who are comfortable buying online and have disposable income to fuel your business. 87% of Ruby Lane buyers are female and 93% are aged 40-79. Furthermore, 76% of users who come to Ruby Lane earn more than $50,000 per year.
What are the fees like?
Ruby Lane does not take commissions on sales, but that doesn’t make selling on Ruby Lane cheap! To set up your shop, you will pay a one-time fee of $75 then a $15 monthly maintenance fee. Additionally, you will pay a $20 advertising fee which goes towards online and print advertising. You also pay a one-time listing fee of 30 cents for each item. If you sell over 150 items, you will get a discount on listing fees.
That’s a lot of fees! However, if you are making regular, profitable sales, the fees are money well spent. So how are Ruby Lane sellers going? Let’s take a look at the traffic levels and profitability of the site.
How much traffic does the site get?
Ruby Lane gets over 1.8 million unique site visitors each month, or 60,000 per day. Note: “unique” visitors mean just that; if someone visits the site more than once, it’s only counted as one visit. That makes 60,000 a pretty respectable level of daily traffic!
Even more important than traffic is profitability. The good news is that sellers on Ruby Lane are reporting good rates of profitability. Ruby Lane was recently rated as the 3rd most profitable marketplace, second only to eBay and Amazon. With less competition and lower fees and both eBay and Amazon, you can be fairly confident in selling on Ruby Lane!
While the fees on Ruby Lane are high, but they appear to have the traffic and ready-buyers to make the fees worth it in the end. However, as with all online marketplaces, you will need to work to earn sales: Listing your items is only half the job!
Have you tried selling items on Ruby Lane? How do you rate it? Share your comments below.
Source: http://jaysonlinereviews.com/review-peerfly-affiliate-network-money-cpa-marketing/
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JCulture/~3/tgSvukwVmUw/a-guide-to-wordpress-frameworks.html
Source: http://jaysonlinereviews.com/mass-income-multiplier-software-review-work-facts/
Source: http://jaysonlinereviews.com/affiliate-business-started-money-affiliate-marketing-training-video/
Google recently launched their webspam Penguin update. While they claim it only impacted about 3.1% of search queries, the 3.1% it impacted were largely in the "commercial transactional keywords worth a lot of money" category.
Based on the number of complaints online about it (there is even a petition!) this is likely every bit as large as Panda or the Florida update. A friend also mentioned that shortly after the update WickedFire & TrafficPlanet both had sluggish servers, yet another indication of the impact of the update.
Originally leading up to the update, the update was sold as being about over-optimization. However when it was launched it was given no pet name, but rather given the name of the webspam update. Thus anyone who complained about the update was by definition a spammer.
A day after declaring that the name didn't have any name Google changed positions and called the update the Penguin update.
Why the quick turn around on the naming?
If you smoke a bunch of webmasters & then label them all as spammers, of course they are going to express outrage and look for the edge cases that make you look bad & promote those. One of the first ones out of the gate on that front was a literally blank blogspot blog that was ranking #1 for make money online.
As I joked with Eli, if it is blank then they couldn't have done anything wrong, right? :D
Another site that got nailed by the update was Viagra.com. It has since been fixed, but it is pretty hard for Google to state that the sites that got hit are spam, blend the search ads into the results so much that users can't tell them apart & force Pfizer to buy their own brand to rank. If that condition didn't get fixed quickly I am pretty certain it would lead to lawsuits.
Google also put out a form to collect feedback about the update. They only ever do that if they know they went too far and need to refine it. Or, put another way, if this was the Penguin update then this is GoogleBot:
When I was a kid I used to collect baseball cards. As the price of pictures from sites like iStockphoto have gone up I recently bought a few cards on eBay (in part for nostalgia & in part to have pictures for some of our blog posts). Yesterday I searched for baseball card holders for mini-cards & in the first page of search results was:
That blank Yahoo! Shopping page is also what showed up in Google's cache too. So I am not claiming that they were spamming Google in any way, rather that Google just has bad algorithms when they rank literally blank pages simply because they are on an authoritative domain name.
The SERPs lacked expert blogs, forum discussions, & niche retailers. In short, too much emphasis on domain authority yet again.
Part of the idea of the web was that it could connect supply and demand directly, but an excessive focus on domain authority leads users to have to go through another set of arbitragers. Efforts to squeeze out micro-parasites has led to the creation of macro-parasites (and micro-parasites that ride on the macro-parasite platforms).
Now more than ever SEO requires threading the needle: being sufficiently aggressive to see results, but not so aggressive that you get clipped for it (and hopefully building enough protection that makes it harder for others to clip you). That requires a tighter integration of the end to end process (tying efforts into analytics & analytics back into efforts) & a willing to view SEO through a broader marketing lens & throwing up a number of hail marry passes that likely won't on their own back out but will give you a lower risk profile when combined with your other stuff.
And your business model is probably far more important than your SEO skill level is. Imagine running a consulting company for a lot of small business customers for a few hundred Dollars a month each, based on stable rankings & then dealing with a tumultuous update that hits a number of them at the same time. And then they see an older (abandoned even) competing site of lower quality with fewer links ranking and they think you are selling them a bag of smoke. These sorts of updates harm the ability to do SEO consulting for anyone who isn't consulting the big brands. Yes many people made it through this update unscathed, but how many of these sorts of updates can one manage to slide through before eventually getting clipped?
As search evolves, invariably anyone who is doing well in the ecosystem will at some point face setbacks. Those may happen due to an algorithm update or an interface change where Google inserts itself in your market. If you never get hit, it means you were only operating at a fraction of your potential. If you consistently get hit, you might be aiming too low. Many trends can be predicted, but the future is unknowable, so set up a safety cushion when things are going well.
This year Google has moved faster than any year in their history (massive link warnings, massive link penalties, tighter integration of Panda & now Penguin) & the rate of change is only accelerating. Go back about 125 years and a candle wick adjuster was cutting edge technology marketed as brand spanking new:
Blekko has a decently competitive search service which they manage to run for only a few million a year. As computers get cheaper & Google collects more data think of all the different data points they will be able to layer into their relevancy algorithms. In some markets Chrome has more marketshare than Internet Explorer does & Android is another deep data source. And they can know what user data to trust most by tracking things like if they have a credit card or phone verified on file & how often they use various services like Gmail or YouTube. Google+ is just icing on the cake.
At the same time, they need to improve. As the search algorithms get better, so do the business models that exploit them:
I asked Kristian Hammond what percentage of news would be written by computers in 15 years. “More than 90 percent.”
There will be many more casualties in that war.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Traffic Technique 3: Online Advertising
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/eo8XryPy2sg/
(Image Source – my poorly built logo creator)
In my long career as an Online Marketer, I have had to often pick an agency to partner with or to carry out the different mixes of online marketing, such as SEO, Paid Search, Affiliate marketing, Email Marketing, Analytics, Social Media etc etc. Fact is, I am a rounded marketer who, although spends time on SEO the most, understands and works in most online fields. This means I am often the go to person for brands when they want to pick an agency to work with.
One such day, while in the middle of listening to an agency pitch, I felt quite a bit perplexed. The two pitches I heard were vastly different, and I wasn’t happy with either. The core problem I had with agency pitches was around the following observations:
The above is often true, even if you have issued a clear brief to your agency as to what you would expect to see, or what questions you would want answered. Any agency can follow a brief and answer it, but very few in my opinion see beyond the brief. And as an experienced agency recruiter for brands, I would like to see much more answered within the pitch than I am still seeing.
Many agencies don’t make it CLEAR what they aim to achieve, nor do they try to CLARIFY what the businesses need or want.
Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nomad9491/2399208582/
So I formulated the CLARITY model for briefs, which could be a frame work for answering pitches – help you answer your brief, while allowing you to demonstrate much more than the questions at hand. CLARITY, in my opinion, is an agency model that would score very highly but would also form the ethos of an agency environment that is really geared to helping their clients.
At the same time, the model has helped me pick the right agencies over and over again, and as such could be used by in house Digital marketers to form their own judgement sheets.
Although many SEObook readers are SEOs, many are in the agency environment themselves having to pitch, or in house and may have to from time to time help pick an agency. Many are like me, interested in SEO, but involved in much more online and offline marketing. As a result, I felt that sharing my model may help at least a few readers.
Warning: This is a rather long post, and could sound a bit preachy.
The model is a mnemonic that covers the 7 elements below:
Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ventodigrecale/315084105/
When working with any outside agency, the type of communication is vital. The overall tone and approach as well as the individual team members all add to a business’s communication strategy. Some businesses like being overly formal, while others find that formal approaches are annoying and could hinder work. When picking the right agency for you, understanding how they communicate with clients and amongst themselves is extremely important to make sure that the working relationship is a healthy one.
For example, how your agency dresses and behaves in meetings is fairly important – it is a subliminal communication signal. As part of a pitch process I was involved in, one very talented SEO turned up, but was wearing ripped cuff jeans.
The Head of Ecommerce was at the meeting and was not impressed that for such a large pitch, the key person delivering was in scruffy jeans.
Result? They didn’t get the gig because the Head of Ecommerce was distracted by the fact that this person hadn’t bothered to dress appropriately.
My tips to people running a pitch:
Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smemon/4984567320/
In the digital world, things change daily. And sometimes small changes make big difference – take the latest Penguin Algorithm update from Google. The change in the way Google is treating a majority of low quality links has caught many an agency unprepared to turn around quickly - and to my knowledge a few, if not a majority, have since drafted communication to their clients about the change and what it means for their SEO.
As part of a pitch process, identifying the potential for such large scale impacts on channels is important – but more important is to show that your team is up to the challenge. It is important to indicate that your team is an ever learning, ever developing beast, and it may be worth showing some examples where you have bucked the trend, or foresaw changes and indicate how you managed to save, support or shift your other clients strategies.
For example, knowledge of your discipline isn’t enough – you have to garner some knowledge about your potential clients industry and changes occurring within it, such as legislation.
In one pitch I was part of, we identified that the client was suffering from Voucher Code site abuse – where the voucher code sites would consistently rank for long tails of the business. Interestingly, the client hadn’t picked up on the fact that the reason that they were losing a lot of organic traffic wasn’t because they had had ranking losses – rankings were all fine. The reason they were losing their traffic was because this voucher code site was ranking immediately below the clients sites with a discount offering! Our strategy tackled that by investigating the legislation, both applied and subscribed to within the voucher code industry in the UK, and as a result managed to craft a communication brief, which would enable the client from stopping the abuse.
We won the contract, and the work we did was implemented. In the end we came to an agreement with the site in question and they stopped. Clients SEO traffic and conversions soared.
A good agency has an arsenal of resources at its disposal – indicating these as well as how you constantly add to the armoury is very important – after all, often agency relationships with clients can span years.
Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pat-h3215/7500230750/
For any business, support is important. For any business with large budgets and complicated marketing campaigns, support is critical. Although most agencies work in a 9am to 5pm daily shift 5 days a week, many brands don’t see themselves that way. Their business online is churning round the clock, 7 days a week.
Which means a crisis, issue or even an opportunity may raise itself at the least possible convenient time. Although in a pitch these sort of issues aren’t expected by most businesses, I often find that if an agency covers it, they tend to get “bonus points” especially if they highlight likely scenarios and how they would respond to them out of hours. Although this point is a subset of communication, it is also important enough as a winning point to be isolated.
One SEO agency I hired for a holiday business proposed that during peak periods of the business refreshing site wide content, (an annual occurrence) they would send one of their content SEOs to sit with the content team to start optimising content as it gets written, and getting it to the publishing team within a very short period of time. Excellent foresight, and was one of the contributing factors to a contract that still runs 5 years on.
On the flip side, another agency pitching an email support platform worth $100,000 in fees a year to them insisted that they would prefer all the communication via email and had a very complicated tracking system that runs through to first line support, then second line and then finally to a specialist if the first two lines couldn’t solve a situation. This scared the client – sometimes you just can’t wait for three layers of conversations before actioning an urgent change - and as a result they weren’t short listed.
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It sounds obvious that you have to be both respectable and responsive to potential (and current!) clients. However what you as an agency see as being “respectable” may not be necessarily what they feel the definition of the word may be.
Respectable also implies respecting your clients intelligence. One of the key primary things I teach to agencies is that they should research their potential clients carefully. By making your pitch too simplistic may offend their intelligence and could cost you.
Take for example a UK SEO agency that was pitching to a business I was consulting a few years ago. The pitch was about SEO and how they would help the business grow its SEO. Before hand, they had a list of all the attendees, which included my name and the name of the head of Ecommerce (who would at least have a rudimentary knowledge of SEO).
Now if you are pitching to me, you SHOULD know that I know a bit about SEO, if only you bothered to Google my name :)
Yet, in the pitch, the starting slide was an animated slide, which was a web with spiders running up and down it – explaining to us what a search engine bot was and how it crawls the web(!) apart from the fact that the animation was poor (a gif of a spider running up and down the web), they actually assumed that a multi million pound business that they were pitching to:
In addition, as I was in the audience I found this actually quite insulting – the fact that they hired me to be in the room meant that they were serious about a decent SEO strategy. The Head of Ecommerce had the same horrified response as I had – did the agency think we were complete idiots?
Needless to say, they lost the pitch in the first round.
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To be perfectly frank, expect a serious pitch to be faced with some serious questions. At the same time, you would be expected to show real intelligence in the way you present and prepare for the meeting.
Displaying intelligence isn’t showing how many clients you have, or sprouting your company’s internal strap lines. It isn’t displaying how many results you have gotten for other clients.
Intelligence is more about:
The worst case scenario would be that you have a really intelligent hands on SEO prepare your presentation, and then instead either get an account manager or sales person actually present it, without the SEO present to field any questions. Often the result is a disaster – yet this a very common approach. Believe it or not, this has happened to me at least three times. Neither the account manager nor the sales person actually knew any SEO (PPC in one PPC agency pitch). Which meant though their presentation was solid, they ability to field questions intelligently was fairly limited to “We can come back to you on that”.
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In the online world, when data flows (fairly) freely, technology has to be at the forefront to deal with that data, to rationalise, monetise and sanitise it. An agency coming in to pitch within the digital sphere needs to show (to me at least):
Similarly, an agency that doesn’t innovate is low on my “like” list. I would be willing to spend more time with one that has interesting ideas about innovating, than one that actually just rehashes ideas that exist in the market and brand them as their own.
One agency years ago insisted that they have “market leading” guides on SEO for internal staff - from content strategies to link building. When quizzed what kind of information they would share with the businesses content team for better SEO, we received a document that was clearly well set up, researched and written for the right audience. Sounds great right? Only problem was this was the SEOmoz guide that they simply wrapped up and presented to us. Seeing that I was on one of the top contributors to SEOmoz at that point ( I think I still rank in the top 10) I recognised the document and called them up on it.
Needless to say, I don’t believe they ever repeated that faux pas - and went out and had their own content written.
Similar situations exist when companies tell me of a revolutionary tool A or amazing platform Y - and in most cases they tend to be industry standards that they use and nothing out of the ordinary. Which is fine for a basic pitch – but for a stellar pitch you need to stand out.
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Any campaign you build has to deliver a return. It doesn’t matter what the campaign is, it has to achieve its objectives. Which means if you have to pick an agency, the agency has to demonstrate the capability to not only come up with a plan or strategy that works for you it has to demonstrate that it understands what your businesses KPIs are.
This doesn’t simply mean an uplift in sales, traffic, but a clever demonstration of how the Return On Investment would be aimed at and achieved. If an agency cannot demonstrate a clear understanding of your businesses goals, and does not take the time to understand what the ROI of the specific channel being discussed should be, then they fail in using a yield based approach.
A few years back, an SEO agency pitched to me for a UK Holiday business. They were big on numbers by their own admission, and had a clear demonstration of how much it would cost us to rank for Keywords, and in fact had a clear chart identifying the top level “Category Killer” keywords.
They then went on to demonstrate how one of their current Holiday clients achieved those rankings with their help by spending the same figures that they demonstrated. The top level Keyword was “Holidays”.
2 problems with that.
First, if they already have a client in the space that they are working with to rank for those exact keywords, then I wonder to myself if the end result would become who spends the most to retain those positions. Which in itself is fine, I have no problem with agencies who have clients in the same niches, BUT, at what point does the competition with one client against the other show a negative return? If spend is the limiting factor, I wouldn’t want a competitor in that space to have the same resources as I do in terms of SEO talent, and then be simply beaten by their capability to throw more money at the campaign. Which wouldn’t be a worry, except if the agency was so willing to tell us exactly how much it cost their other client to rank, how can I trust them not to reveal the same data to our competitor?
The second problem with this scenario was they went straight for the proverbial jugular. They want to work on the money keywords (money for them!). A UK Holiday site may gain some sales on the back of ranking for “Holidays”, but I promise you that the conversion rate would be dreadful, and probably in the third decimal percentages.
If I had to pitch that gig, I would have started at the lower rung, moving upwards towards the chain to the category keyword “UK Holidays”. The spend to rank for most those would have equated to the total that the agency wanted as its fees, but the ROI for ranking for the RIGHT keywords would have been much, much higher. And an easier sell.
So the agency failed t understand the business, and as such failed to demonstrate that they could deliver the right ROI for them.
If you have stuck with me so far, congrats (and thank you!). I am genuinely hoping that agencies that pitch, take something away from this post, and people who are paid to listen to pitches, do as well. I know that these principles have been successful for a large number of agencies when pitching, despite the fact that the agency didn’t realise that they were following a successful model.
The aim isn’t to follow my thoughts flat out, but learn form a person who has been involved I both sides of a pitch process, with a decent success rate in both, picking the right agency, and being picked for a campaign.
Rishi Lakhani is a freelance Online Marketing Consultant working with a number of brands and agencies in the UK, and spends a large portion of his free time on twitter. Follow him at: https://twitter.com/rishil
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