Advertising

Yesterday I unveiled my most successful linkbait ever. In less than 24 hours, across two days, the linkbait resulted in over 1.4 million pageviews. I learned something important in the process:

The best linkbait targets multiple niches and expands your audience.

Did you catch that? It’s critical. The best linkbait will target a large audience that stands outside your normal audience.

So how do you create cross-niched linkbait? It’s actually not that difficult. Start by writing a list of the most popular topics on the web:

• Humor
• Women’s products
• Sports
• Celebrity
• Politics
• Music
• Television
• Religion
• Gadgets and Tech
• Dating
• Pets
• Cars

The list could go on and on, but you get the point. Now brainstorm how your specific topic might relate to each of these topics in a unique way. Let’s say that you have a blog about dogs:

• 25 Funny Dog Quotes / 25 Hilarious Dog Videos
• 25 Ways To Dress Up You Dog / 25 Ways To Pamper Your Dog
• 25 Athletes and their dogs / 25 Famous Sports Dogs
• 25 Celebrities and their dogs / 25 Celebrities and the dog breeds they look like
• 25 Politicians and their dogs / 25 Ways That Politicians are like dogs
• 25 HipHop Artists and their dogs / 25 Dogs That Have Appeared In HipHop Videos
• 25 Famous TV Dogs / 25 Great Dog Commercials
• What 25 Religions Say About Dogs / 25 Things We Can Learn About Religion By Looking at Dogs
• 25 Funky Gadgets For Dogs / 25 Technological Advances That Have Made Dog Owning Easier
• 25 Ways Dogs Are Better Than Cats / 25 Pets and How Dogs will Relate to Them
• 25 Cars That Are Perfect For Your Dog / 25 Tips For Taking Your Dog On The Road

The great thing about cross-niched linkbait is that it not only targets a new audience, but it also gives you a great way to brainstorm new angles on your own niche. And if there’s only one rule in social media it’s this: create something uniquely interesting or funny and chances are you’ll reap dividends.

Now that you know why bloggers should use Yahoo Pipes to produce custom content, lets go over some of the basic functionality offered by Pipes modules. I’m not covering everything here yet. In fact, I’m not even going to name the modules, just discuss functionality.

1. Import RSS feed. Provide an RSS feed URL for input, or specify a web service – such as Flickr – from which to retrieve an RSS data stream.
2. Get user input. To build robust Pipes, you need a way of letting end users supply information: search terms, URLs, dates, quantities, etc.
3. Generate URLs. If you want to marry Pipes with outside services, you will sometimes need ways to generate web service URLs on the fly, using user-supplied information.
4. Aggregate multiple feeds. Combine multiple RSS feeds. How multiple feeds are combined is dependent on which other modules are used (sorting, filtering, etc.)
5. Sort by value. Given a stream of RSS data/ content items (whether from a single source or mashed together), sort the stream by some field value. This could be by item date (usually the same as publishing date), title, category, etc. What you use depends on both what actual RSS/XML data you are importing as well as your specific functional need.
6. Pass filtering. Pass filtering just means that given your RSS stream, you want to specify which data items should be allowed to pass through to the next step. For example, if you are mashing together several blog feeds, you might “pass” items based on date, author, or a search string (e.g., posts about “Corvette” cars). Or you can filter out items by eliminating duplicate titles or URLs.
7. Transforming data fields. Sometimes you want to take the text content of an RSS stream and alter it using a set of rules. You might add or eliminate data fields, replace occurrences of a word or phrase, count items satisfying a criteria, geocode the data to produce a map, etc. There is no one single Pipes module that you use to transform data; there are many transform/ operator modules, each with a specific functionality.
8. Mathematical operattions. Yahoo Pipes offers some very basic math functionality that can be combined with either numeric user input or suitable modules that produce a numeric value.
9. Plug-n-play of custom web services. The Yahoo Pipes interface is integrated with several external web services. However, a few months back, they introduced a module by which you can plug in your own custom web service.
10. Looping. Looping lets you repeatedly apply a block of Pipes modules over each item in an RSS stream. In fact, you can build a block of modules into a Pipe, name it, then access it from a loop in yet another Pipe.
11. Output results. The output of a Yahoo Pipe is a new RSS feed by default, though you can produce geocoded Yahoo Maps as well.

This is the basic functionality that you can currently expect from various Yahoo Pipes modules. (I believe I’ve covered everything, funcitonally speaking. I’ll update this post if I’ve forgotten anything.) If you plan to continue reading my upcoming Yahoo Pipes By Example posts, you should make sure you understand the above functionality first. Upcoming posts will provide hard examples using specific Pipes modules. By the way, today is Yahoo Pipes first birthday. Happy b-day, Pipes.

I was chatting with Ryan the other day and he told me he had discovered some new high value niches. This has sparked off new ideas that are going to be enthusiastically pursued. Ryan discovered these niches almost by sheer luck. It got me thinking if it was possible to try out a niche intentionally before plunging into it?

Domainers have long had the “domain tasting” technique where they register a domain, throw adsense on it and see if it earns before having to pay the bill. Only those that show promise get picked up. Could we do anything similar on blogs?

Adsense doesn’t care about the theme of your blog, just the theme of your page. While I don’t care for adsense as a monetization method it would serve as a proxy for the profitability of the niche that you find. If you adsense gets decent click prices you have scored.

Of course it is going to take effort, first selecting promising niches, and secondly driving traffic to the test page. I am guessing a linkbait would be in order. You might want to use an adsense tracking system also if you want to do this on a large scale.

What do you think? Idea?

… get ready to dig in and be persistent.

That’s the key. To be successful online you need to have the persistence of a rat terrier who’s trying to dig under the neighbor’s fence.

A few months ago, Performancing decided to try an experiment. As experts, we know what works and what doesn’t. So we put together a bunch of professional services that we would want to use.

This was a risk. Most people are looking for quick fixes. Even in corporate America, you’d be surprised by the vast number of paid professionals who are more impressed by a short term digg-bait that sends 30k visitors (with zero conversion) versus a nice, steady growth in search engine referrals (which actually convert).

But we know better. We know that the only real path to success online is to nail the SERPs. And the only way to nail the SERPs is to take a long-term, steady approach to authority building.

That’s why we decided to name our cornerstone service “Authority Builder” – because that’s what it’s all about. Twelve months of growth in quality content and quality links.

If you’re not in it for the long haul, and you’re only impressed by pretty spikes in (irrelevant) traffic, then you’re chasing a pipe-dream. Spikes in traffic are only good if they lead to long-term success. Social Media should be *part of* but not *all of* your plans for online marketing.

At Performancing, we know what it takes to achieve long term success online and we’re now excited to be working with some really great clients who understand the vision.

But do you understand the vision? Whether you work with Performancing or not, we encourage you to buckle down and be persistent, because at the end of the day, that’s the only guaranteed method for making money online.

I was talking to my friend on AIM. We were brainstorming article ideas and I was thinking about doing a series of articles on “How To Build An Authority Blog” – and then it occurred to me (by way of my friend):

The one message that no one wants to hear is this: success takes time.

You can accurately identify who’s going to be successful on the net by simply checking to see whether they have a proper grasp on the amount of hard work and long-term commitment it takes to succeed.

The sad thing is that no one wants to hear this message and it gets tuned out. So it’s very tempting for those of us with advice blogs to hone our content to appeal to the “get rich quick” crowd.

But most people don’t get rich quick, they get rich slowly. So if you want to drastically increase your chance of getting rich on the Internet, take the slow and steady approach. Form a long term, 3-5 year plan, and start taking those steps today that you can acheive today to prepare you for the steps you’re going to take tomorrow so that ultimately you will get where you want to be in 3 years.

That’s the best advice I can give you. (Well, besides getting to know the right people;-)

This morning I’ve been having some fun with Google trends. It occurred to me last night while I was watching the Super Bowl that it would be cool if there were a clear way to identify the most successful Super Bowl ad in a manner other than voting (which is totally unscientific).

The cool thing about search is that it reflects people’s memories. People search on things they can recall. And a good advertisement will lodge itself in people’s memories.

The problem with Super Bowl ad voting is that it doesn’t take the phenomenon of memory or brand recall into consideration. If a person watches an ad, they might like it, but they might also forget it. The advertisers don’t care if people like the ad. They care if people remember the ad and then make purchases based on the ad.

So, this morning when I was looking at Google Trends it occurred to me that this might very well be the best indication of Super Bowl ad success. So according to Google trends, the most successful Super Bowl ads at this point have been:

The NFL itself (Chester Pitts)
cadillac escalade hybrid
GoDaddy.com
hyundai genesis
audi r8

It’s like your local government failing to tell you why they’ve set up a work-zone boundary around your local business, preventing customers from entering your door, unless the customer climbs the fence.

On October 8th, 2007 Debng of Performancing wrote the following linkbait:
66 Celebrities that Blog.

On October 9th, 2007 the article went popular (front page) on Digg:
http://digg.com/celebrity/66_Celebrities_that_Blog

According to Yahoo’s Site Explorer, the article has 1,984 backlinks:
Page specific results from site explorer

A Google search for the title of that article (66 Celebrities that Blog) completely and utterly misidentifies the source:
http://www.google.com/search?q=66+celebrities+that+blog

In fact, if you follow the above link, you will see that the source is not listed on the front page (at least not at the time of this writing). The problem is compounded by the fact that the vast majority of sites on the first page of SERPs link to the source on Celebrity Cowboy.

This problem is not isolated. Time and again, I’ve seen Google misidentify the source for an extremely popular article.

So what can you do about it? Well, Google would have you believe that you can simply file a Dissatisfied? Help us improve quality report. But let me tell you, this does not work. I’ve been filing the report once each month since October when I first noticed the issue. And although the issue was temporarily resolved for about one week in November, it has since permanently returned.

So what’s the problem? Well, there are many possibilities. The problem is that Google’s words speak louder than their actions. There is clearly some penalty or buffer that’s being applied to the source article in this case, for whatever reason. The problem is that I have no recourse (other than the remote possibility that Matt Cutts takes notice and institutes an non-scalable solution).

I personally don’t want Matt Cutts to take action specific to my personal issues. I want Google to truly be committed to a policy of openness for webmasters who take the time to try to play by the book, even putting their sites into Webmaster Tools. I want Google to seriously work to clamp down on false positives in their penalty buffering algorithm, or to at least come up with a truly scalable solution for working with well-intentioned publishers to fix problems in a timely manner.

As it stands right now, there are thousands of good websites that are being unjustly damned to SERP hell, and publishers are left feeling helpless because, although they’ve completely cleaned up and consented to work on Google’s terms, Google continues to ignore them, not even acknowledging that there is an issue.

Quite honestly, it’s like your local government failing to tell you why they set up a work-zone boundary around your local business, preventing customers from entering your door, unless they climb the fence. That’s what it feels like. I wish Google would realize the enormity of the issue.

The biggest problem with Digg is that it’s largely an all-or-nothing game. After spending a few days looking around Digg with the sole intention of understanding what is wrong, I’ve come up with this simple proposal:

Separate the logic of going popular in a category from the logic of going popular on the front page.

Ok. So what exactly do I mean and I why am I proposing it?

Right now, Digg sets a very high threshold for going “popular” – and it’s the same threshold for both the category pages and the Digg front page. Because of this high threshold for making the front page, there are many categories that are just ridiculously “stale” – I easily found a category where the top news story was from more than 6 days ago. I bet there are some categories with older news.

Because many of the categories are stale, or only have a few fresh stories per day, no one really monitors them as “breaking news” sources. Or even as a steady dose of interesting news. Most of the category pages are just plain dull and boring.

To fix this, Digg should have two levels of filtering. First, allow stories to go to the front page of a category more easily. This will create a steadier stream of new and interesting content on the category pages. Then, force a story that has gone popular on the category page to fight it’s way onto the “All” front page.

This kind of setup would create an environment where users votes on the category pages actually meant something. In other words, let the Digg users act as collective editors that play a critical role in deciding which “really good” stories deserve to be considered “great” – a 2-tier system of popularity would allow really good content the chance to exposure, it would freshen up the category pages with a steady stream of information, and it would put the average digg user back in control of what ultimately makes the front page.