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Transforming Pixels to Gold

Spending too much time looking at screens, a good digital strategy could be about getting everyone some fresh air. And there's some truth in that - because there's nothing appealing about the decomposition process that begins with long hours glued to a chair orchestrating some devious marketing plan to deceive a potential tribe of money throwing masses?

SEO Stamp Of Approval: KeywordCompetitor.com

David Wall - Tuesday, May 18, 2010

I was recently asked to review KeywordCompetitor.com, a real-time Keyword Research Tool. I was interested since needing to implement some competitive keyword research and was a little lacking on the tools in the arsenol to do so

Having exhausted Google Keyword Suggestion, tools.seobook.com and even Brad Callen's stuff for insights into what's working for direct competitors, I thought this was worth a shot.


After initial trials, I was amazed I see how this tool helps you track your competitors in real time, improve your SEO and PPC campaign, through getting daily reports and monitoring any changes made by your competition. Helps you react quicker and also make a few necessary changes in your own campaign. There’s other keyword tools out there, but for its Price and Features, Keyword Competitor get my vote!

Social Media Marketing - an Economy of Experience?

David Wall - Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Take the "media" out of social media and you're left with the word "social". It's easy to be tangled in metrics about what makes social media successful and overlook that simple point. Facebook and the like suit our present communication needs, so we use it. It works because connecting with people through social media is easy in a time starved and an otherwise disconnected daily existence.

How many of us find emailing someone next to us at work far easier (and quicker) than starting a conversation? It's often much simpler to say happy birthday to a close friend on a social network than sending a (paper) card - great for trees but not so good if you're trying to sell birthday cards…

Have a look at the huge growth rate of social media over the past few years - it takes about 10 seconds to watch the little blue dot representing Facebook.com bubble up and eclipse everything else in its path between 2006-2009. We'd expect a similar trend if the Interaction Consortium did a worldwide piece. The US, for example has internet users checking Facebook every 37 minutes, they post to Flickr 5 times a day, watch YouTube for 2.5 hrs a day and update Twitter every 3 hours… according to Razorfish.

But stats and technology aside, we're still in the realm of social significance. Whether a brand communicates outside or within social media, we need to question: does it provide value or hold any significance in our social exchanges? In other words, will anyone talk about it? Would anyone really care?

A Razorfish survey puts it bluntly: "Consumers don't want conversation with brands - they want deals". We can just as easily say "…they want value". And it's easy to offer value in terms of deals - a discount / a "free coke and fries…" but when a product offers value just with an association to its brand - that's an exchange we're more than willing to pay for.

Speeding down this technological highway we're leaving commodities and services for experiences posts Laurel Papworth. Deals are great but in an "Experiential Economy" they're only as good as the experience we want out of them. Who would go for a 50% or even a 99% discount from a product that has 0% value to us? An experience that no one wants, even for free would have next to no takers (apart from a few freebie hunters).

"The best job in the world" is a prime example of the value of experience. The experience of typing on a keyboard is just that much better from a tropical beach bungalow than a crammed office - even with walls decorated with snow peaked mountains, climbers scaling cliffs, sail boats etc. above words like "leadership", "direction", "motivation" and "Freedom"…

The point is "real" experiences are what makes social waves. If the service or product offered are the best vehicles to these, they'll be big waves!

And the experiences don't even need to be direct - most of the time they're not. It's even easier for a brand to offer experience by association. Like the teenage boy branding himself with his favorite band, absorbing more of the lifestyle and experiences the band promotes the more paraphernalia he buys.

Hear more at Sydney Social Media Marketing 2010 Bootcamp - The Era of Marketing
Learn more from Laurel Papworth,Tourism Queensland Marketing Manager, Robyn Quinn (The best job in the world campaign) and other industry leaders at Sydney Social Media Marketing 2010 Bootcamp – The Era of Marketing

And talking about deals deals deals…
All friends of Photolibrary can take advantage of this special offer: Delegates will be entitled to a 15% DISCOUNT... we all love a good deal!

Posted via email from Transforming pixels to gold

Number 1 Google result in 17 Minutes

David Wall - Wednesday, August 26, 2009

That's a grand claim and I bet you think it's not achievable. Don't people pay search companies big $$$ to do this sort of thing and isn't it supposed to take a hell ot a lot longer? Well yes and yes but I'll explain all that later. First take a look at the the proof and marvel over how the internet still allows us to do such things, all FREE of charge.

pudding yumPudding, hmmmm

The proof's in the pudding

The trick is in finding the right longtail keywords that produce results. Check Google trends to see if your keyword/s are climbers or a falling out of style searches (the below example: "most professional stock photo sites" was the former case).

You'll notice the 17 minutes marked by Google (under result 1) and the amount of web sites Google finds for this very phrase: over 30 MILLION! You'll also see the site is actually a social video site, namely MY SPACE - so what's the deal there?

Well that's the power of social media marketing....

Bad quality image? Blame MS outlook!

Nice, but is this stuff really legal?

It's legal alright, but this technique isn't as good as it used to be. Basically its all part of Google's new search formula that values novel content from sites with a high page rank (Google's website scorecard). Combined with the priority video get on search engines, we have a powerful SEO tool, if used in the right way. It isn't as good as it used to be because up until recently, ranks like this stuck a lot longer.

The good news is that quality content distributed over various avenues, like social media channels will have the net benefit of increasing your search presence in a short amount of time - but it's all about consistency, good content (we'll it helps) and distribution.

OK, but if its so good why don't I do for my own site?

Below's the pudding and that's one of the long-tail keywords mentioned in my last post - this one also brought up 78.8 Million sites for this search (not really as long-tail as I'd like)

"Automate your revenue" NOT "Automatic your revenue" - sounds like a washing machine!

So how can I do the same?

You'll need to sign up to a number of social video sites such as Viddler, YouTube, BlipTV, Revver, MySpace etc. Get your video ready, make sure you title the video using the longtail keyword you wish to target, add a link to your website in the description and hit upload. Grab a coffee, wait, enjoy your coffee, wait some more - then query Google...

If your not getting first page number 1, make sure you read the previous post: How to get 1000 hits per day with niche keywords. Try another longtail keyword.

How to get 1000 hits per day with niche keywords

David Wall - Monday, August 17, 2009

Focus on 10 highly searched low competition keywords

But why 10?

To focus your efforts on a small and manageable amount of quality keywords – not a lot of keywords with inherent problems like:

1. Wrong audience: if people get to your site and get off straight away (called a bounce), these keywords don’t reflect your site content

2. Too competitive: keywords that everyone is targeting, so you’ll need to be very patient to get on the first page of Google

3. No one searches on this keyword: that’s a no brainer

In this example, I’ll search for “online marketing” (one of the most highly competitive search engine terms around!), see who’s performing well, take their keywords (view source and check meta keywords on the top of the source code) and use this as a base.

The number 1 site for this search gave me these meta keywords:

Web Development, Online Marketing, Web Design, SEO, Web Developer, Website Design, Website Services, Website Developers, Search Engine Optimisation, Web Designer, Web Development Company, SEM, SEO Company, Website Designers, Web Services, Internet Marketing, Web Solutions, Web Development Services, SEO Services, Web Design Company, Web Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Web Design Services

These are very general terms but to make this work, I’ll need to find niches to capture some of those quality long tail searches. So first thing is to eliminate this by taking out all the irrelevant terms and industry related terms (that only people in the industry will use).

The cut down list:

Online Marketing,
Internet Marketing,
Web Marketing,
Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Optimisation,

Now check search volumes and look for niche versions of these terms using http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/ - it’s good and free (great combination).

We need to be on the look out for strange long tail terms that get searched but not yet capitalized on - example: “online marketing web page copywriting” gets a good daily volume and is not that competitive – you can find this out by clicking on the Google traffic estimator link for each keyword (if Google tells you: “Not enough data to give estimates”, you know few people bid on that keyword on paid search and it’s also likely not capitalized on in organic search either).

So here’s the 10 keywords / phrases that get average 30-100 searches a day and has nothing on the Google estimates – that means low competition, so getting to page 1 on these will be relatively painless:

online marketing web page copywriting
business home internet marketing online
free report on internet marketing tips for more
the best business model for internet marketing
holistic web page marketing
low cost web marketing
web marketing mystro
search engine marketing ardan michael blum
search engine marketing political website design
list of search engine marketing

To sum up, after following other techniques I’ll be posting about here about exactly how to implement and distribute your 10 terms (including on page tricks and easy social media distribution) - you’ve got a potential of up to 1000 hits per day (10 keywords X 100 daily searches = 1000). Stay tuned

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