An Essential Guide to Successful Blogger Outreach

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Longhopper

With social media rapidly consuming the internet space, it is increasingly becoming a part of our media landscape. In the recent days, more and more online news sites have embraced the pay wall model, resulting in social media, particularly blogs becoming an important source of news, opinions and products. Blogs represent an affordable opportunity to promote products & brands.

SO, WHAT IS BLOGGER OUTREACH?
In simple words, it is a process where businesses reach out to bloggers who are influential within a particular area of interest to the brand, product or service and have an interested audience (or target customers) where they can facilitate a conversation.

Businesses encourage this conversation, by offering something valuable which could be of interest to the blogger as well as his/her audience, which will then ensure acquisition of the bloggers audience, who could potentially be repeat customers to the business.

HOW DOES BLOGGER OUTREACH WORK?
Bloggers have an audience and have the ability to open a window of opportunity for the business to reach out to their reader-base, some of who could already be customers and many who are completely new. These readers help the brand websites by not just being a source of traffic, but also by being advocates of these brands to their own communities as well as search engines, which effectively would help in increasing conversions online as well as offline.

Most bloggers tend to write about subjects they are passionate about and on most times, the write-up is owned by the bloggers. The blog and the subject matter are therefore, extremely personal endeavours to bloggers. Choosing an influential blog /blogger in areas not just specific to the blogger, but also for us to promote our brand sentiments is the first step towards formalising a blogger outreach strategy.

Once we choose the blog/blogger and our niches, there are many ways to work with them (see box).

WHY BLOGS?
The great thing about blogs is that they work in conjunction with the existing marketing efforts. For example, an online press release could generate sufficient buzz to result in a blog review. This blog review can then be promoted across a multitude of social media sites such as Facebook & Twitter, be bookmarked through social bookmarking tools such as delicious & digg and even communicated through our email marketing efforts. This results in creating that social influence which is fast evolving as one of the key metrics in the buying decision making.

Above all, blogger outreach of course, substantiates SEO efforts and helps in ranking higher on search engines, thereby ensuring higher visibility and traffic. The SEO benefits mainly come from the social interaction within the blogging community, where information and opinion is shared with individuals across many domains. Considering all these factors, Blogger Outreach remains one of the favoured strategies for online marketing. However, it has it’s own risks associated with it, which we will leave for another day.

Credits: 4 Imprint Blue Papers – Blogger Outreach.

How to Track Google Adwords Sitelinks in Analytics?

Posted on December 28, 2009 by Longhopper

A few weeks back, Google announced a great new addition to adwords, letting advertisers to display sitelinks on their ads, similar to sitelinks which appears for organic searches. Adwords sitelinks allows an advertiser to add four additional links to deep content within the site and are particularly useful as they can show the customer a quicker way to get to important sections of the site. Unlike, Organic Sitelinks which cannot be influenced, Adwords lets the advertiser choose upto ten relevant links to be shown to visitors. It’s a handy addition as it gives the advertiser an option to highlight promotions and seasonal offers for a given site.

However, a point to note is that sitelinks do not automatically appear for all the enabled keywords. They only appear for an ad which occupies the first sponsored result for a search and also has a higher click through rate. Therefore, the probability of displaying sitelinks for an ad is higher for brand or sitename terms, where the advertiser enjoys a first position listing as well as a higher click through rate.

Nevertheless, enabling sitelinks on adwords fairly simple.

Log on to Adwords Account
Navigate to campaigns, then click on settings.
Scroll down to the ‘Networks, Devices & Extensions’ Section
For each individual campaign, click on ‘Show additional links to my site’ under ‘Ad Extensions’
Specify the links you want to display for your ads. You can add upto 10 links, but Adwords will automatically show 4.

Now, how do you track these links? How will you know if the Adwords Sitelinks are bringing in any conversions? Well, since Sitelinks is a new addition to Adwords, Google hasn’t implemented tracking on sitelinks yet. The first time I enabled Sitelinks for Adwords, I was seeking out various ways to track these links on Google Analytics. When I contacted the Adwords team for answers regarding tracking, they sent a neat little document on how this could be done, which I have summarised below.

Advertisers must add a query string to the end of each URL which works as an identifier for Analytics. For example, if www.example.com/category/page is the URL, Advertisers must add ‘?sitelinks=page-identifier’. The URL will look like this:

www.example.com/category/page?sitelinks=page-identifier

Adwords Sitelinks Tracking on Analytics

Now some of the sites already utilise query strings in their URLs such as this:

www.example.com/category/page?id=22

In this case, advertisers have to append the URL to include both the queries as below:

www.example.com/category/page?id=22&sitelink=page-identifier

Once the identifiers are in place, you can track sitelinks on analytics by following these simple steps:

Log on to Analytics
Click on the relevant website profile
Once you are in the dashboard, click on ‘Traffic Sources’ on the left navigation menu, which expands to show different options. Click on Keywords. It displays the list of keywords from the Adwords Campaign.
Select the filter ‘Landing Page’, which can be found below the tabbed menu and you should see the keywords which brought traffic to the site and the corresponding landing pages.

Hopefully, Adwords Sitelinks should improve CTRs and eventually result in higher conversions.

From Organic to Paid Search!!

Posted on November 30, 2009 by Longhopper

After two and half years at Arena, I decided to move on. Actually, it wasn’t an option I was looking at, but during my time off a few months back, I had casually met a recruiter to understand where I stand after my experience as an online marketer. Although, it did sound positive, nothing came out of the interviews immediately and I completely forgot about it as I returned back to Arena from my sabbatical.

It was nearly two months later that I got a call from a company and after going through the role again, I thought it could be challenging but I wasn’t fully convinced. I thought hard for a couple of weeks considering a whole lot of possibilities. Although, I was working as an marketer, I was only involved in organic search side of things and the new role promised plenty of opportunities in managing paid campaigns as well as other offline activites. Also, I am very keen on building my repertoire as complete marketing professional. This was enough to convince me to take up the role.

While monitoring search traffic and running reports, I used to marvel at how efficiently optimised and organised the campaigns were at Arena. Now I have a big challenge of doing something similar as my first challenge and I spoke with the external Camapaign Managers this afternoon to terminate the existing contract. SO officially, I am manning paid search from today.

Paid Search

While monitoring search traffic and running reports, I used to marvel at how efficiently optimised and organised the campaigns were at Arena. Now I have a big challenge of doing something similar as my first challenge and I spoke with the external Campaign Managers this afternoon to terminate the existing contract. SO officially, I am manning paid search from today. Lets see how this goes!

Get Your Website Right For Driving Up Sales

Posted on September 23, 2008 by Longhopper

Online retailers often face a huge conundrum. Although their primary objective is to drive traffic to the site and ultimately sales, they have to battle with a variety of mediums to achieve this. From the site development and maintenance to user experience, occupying enviable spots on search engines, and reinforcing the companies presence on various forms of online media, is all a massive challenge particularly in a web 2.0 driven age. Despite the surge in internet users, online shopping is still a distinct experience from visiting a high street retailer.

Consumers Shopping online not only get a cost advantage, but they are also served with an incredible amount of information helping them make the right decision. With many price and product comparison sites, blogs, product reviews, feedbacks etc, online shoppers, usually are equipped with product knowledge prior to their purchase. However, despite a wealth of information, consumers often bank on search engines to help them make a purchase. This is where, a company’s approach to its online presence comes into play. User engagement plays an important role in the performance of a website, therefore emphasising the need to develop a site that aids consumers in making a right decision.

Arena Flowers has recently been used as a case study in a forth coming text on Internet Marketing. We are quite pleased with this new development and we feel that we are doing things right. However, there’s always room to improve and enhance customer engagement and we constantly strive to understand internet marketing in its entirety to achieve this. We do rely on customer suggestions and feedback to improve our offering. However, since we are being used as a case study in an internet marketing text, we feel that it would be wise to take suggestions from one of the authors of the text on improving our website. So we approached Dr. Dave Chaffey, a leading Internet Marketing consultant and trainer and the author of best selling books on online marketing for an interview and he gladly agreed. Watch this space for tips on optimising a website for better customer engagement.

Google Adds Fuel to the Browser War

Posted on September 2, 2008 by Longhopper

When Will asked me to do a post on a website trying clone Arena Flowers, it coincided with Google’s launch of the Chrome web browser. I had related the two and was about to hit the publish button, when I realized it makes little sense to tie in a search behemoth to a little known flower website based in Australia. So abandoned the post and decide to port it to my blog instead.

Over the years we have seen many successes being replicated and at times these imitations have gone on to do better than their predecessors. Take the issue of Internet browsers for example. Internet Explorer has ruled the roost for years despite constant threats from other better, feature rich browsers. But in the last few years, browsers are technically superior, less resource intensive and feature filled. Firefox is the best example. Year on year, IE’s usage has been declining by 7-8%, primarily due to a similar increase of Firefox users. Following the success of Firefox, which in essence is bankrolled by a company which dominates the web world, Google, the very firm has announced the launch of Chrome, a next generation web browser which represents a technological shift in the browser market.

Google’s entry to the browser market raises several interesting questions to the search marketing industry. Following the recent launch of Internet Explorer 8, which packs in advanced privacy settings preventing search engines, Google in particular from collecting user centric information related to ad performance, a nifty search bar and several other features which are predominantly inclined towards Microsoft’s services including Live Maps, Encarta and Live Spaces etc.

In any case, retreading the history of Internet browsers is quite laborious, but what spurs the interest is how the search industry reacts to chrome in the coming days. The blogosphere is abuzz with Chrome’s launch and the first screen shots have started trickling in along with a detailed technical view on the browser through the official comic book by Scott McCloud. It’s a pity that there’s no news of Chrome for Mac, but knowing Google it should be on the way soon. In any case, whenever it is available, you can download chrome from here.

Trademark Bidding – Winners & Losers!!!

Posted on May 26, 2008 by Longhopper

It’s finally here! A few years after trialling in the US, Google has extended the controversial trademark bidding by opening up the auctioning process to all entities in the sponsored links space. While Google reaps the benefits of a new open space bidding process, this move could fundamentally shift the Search Marketing landscape.

Previously advertisers and brand owners had some sort of insulation to protect and limit their brand related keywords from being auctioned. However, since May 5th 2008, Google has radically changed its trademark policies to encourage competitors to bid on the keywords. The new policy, mirroring the Google’s trademark policy in the US, is certain to rake in plenty of moolah to the world’s biggest search engine.

However, it is the businesses which will suffer owing to inflated CPC prices for their own brand terms. Also, businesses which had previously kept away from internet marketing will be forced to allocate a budget to ensure that their customers aren’t wooed away by the competitors. At the same time, they also have to ensure that the competitors do not take complete liberty of promoting themselves at the cost of their business.

In the UK, some of the larger online businesses like Lastminute, Teletext etc., have already taken up the cause by filing a suit against Google. A few of the smaller companies which are benefiting from Google’s new policies are being bulldozed by their larger counter parts with legal threats.

It’s quite interesting to see how the search marketing industry pans out in the next few weeks.

Combating Content Theft

Posted on April 8, 2008 by Longhopper

Recently we have noticed quite a few websites and blogs using fresh flower images from the Arena Flowers site without permission. While we feel privileged to see our flowers on multiple mediums, particularly blogs as they seldom benefit commercially by using our flower images, it is the systematic disregard of commercial websites which is worrying. Controlling the use of content and images of an online medium has been problematic for their owners as an average blogger or a web publisher has little or no idea of copyright laws.

Since the launch of Arena Flowers website, we have seen a couple of sites offering flower delivery services clone our web layouts. However, in the recent past, we were slightly put off by a publisher when he started passing our images as his own to woo customers to his business. When we contacted him to advise him of the potential consequences, he started playing the hardball by arguing that he copied the images as he believed that he was not in violating by taking it from a website which allowed him to save the images on his computer. Of course imitation is a compliment, but copying is not. Either people have a rudimentary knowledge of copyright and trademarks or they they turn a blind eye. For small businesses, when information and digital content is widely available, it is a great temptation to choose the easy path of passing others images as their own to gain access to customers. But they seldom realise the costs of such ignorance.

Mysterious PR Drop!

Posted on March 11, 2008 by Longhopper

The sudden drop in PR for Arena Flowers from 5 to 3 has been really frustrating and disappointing. Over the last few months quality links has been the buzzword and to that effect, we have been trying to squeeze out editorially vouched links for the site from related domains. At Arena Flowers, we are really proud of our SEO activities. But the anomalistic (it is indeed) drop in PR has got us racking our brains trying to point the drop to a certain differentiator. What’s more annoying is the drop in all the internal pages. We have about 100, 000 pages indexed in Google of which at least 25 % of them had decent PR and none of them have green liquid anymore. The real disappointment is to see our blog have no PR. Flowers…Uncut is widely followed and we have got so much of appreciation for our site through the blog. We also have hundreds of quality incoming links to the blog. To see the blog have no PR value is a bit disconcerting.

We have scoured the Internet and scouted all the SEO blogs and forums and even had an opinion from a global expert in the industry, without success. SEO experts argue that PR is in no way related to SERPs and traffic and makes little sense to websites, unless the sites are based on selling links. But we see PR as an indicator of our SEO performance apart from the other variables like ranking high on SERPs, traffic etc. Post PR drop, traffic is unaffected and SERPs for competitive keywords have not had any impact. However, the little green bar though irritating, does offer some satisfaction when it is a bit longer than it was previously.

It will be a real bonus if we get to the bottom of our mysterious PR drop on the home page as well as the internal pages. I contemplated posting a query on Matt Cutt’s blog, but decided against it as I feel it would be futile. There are millions of websites and even if 10 % of these websites start querying their site problems with Matt, then he would have to quit his regular job at Google.

It’s all back to square one…wonder how long it takes to be back again!

To Pay or Not to Pay – Five Tips to Identify a Valuable Paid Backlink

Posted on November 21, 2007 by Longhopper

A couple of days back, I got an email from a friend of my colleague at work enquiring if I was interested in buying a link for from their site. The site in question is an old domain (about 9 years) and has a good PageRank on the homepage and even ranks well for some of the keywords in their area and has good consistent traffic. Moreover, it is a directory providing information on an area not particularly related to ours, although there are some similarities. The good people behind the site have put in some great effort in the recent days to redesign and to develop the site to make it more search friendly and appealing to the user. For a monthly payment, we will get a link back from a page which is two clicks away from the homepage and easily navigable for the user and it looks like we will be the first ones (and probably the only one) to get a link back from that page. Although the page has a PR0, I am aware of a previous page which had a good PR and it has been 301ed to redirect to this page. I am tempted to discuss our link with them and will do so in the next couple of days. However, the issue of buying a link, especially when Google has penalised link buyers and link sellers raises a thought.

Time and again Google has come down hard against paid linking which a majority of websites rely on to improve the quality of incoming links. Undoubtedly, organic links are more valuable to websites than paid links, but it is often difficult to get a quality organic link as Google discounts many of the proven tactics in sourcing such links. For example, reciprocal linking which used to be quite a huge hit among webmasters a few years ago is no longer a dependable strategy to build a quality backlink profile. The same applies to three way linking and many such techniques which were invented to circumvent Google’s crackdown. In fact, subsequent to the recent update, link exchange pages on many websites have been hit and they no longer have a good PageRank which used to be an indicator to the quality of links you could probably trade for.

Another way of sourcing one way links was through directory submissions. But the quality of links from directories has always been questionable as many of these directory sites link to spammy/low quality neighborhoods. Little wonder that Google penalised a good number of general directories due to low quality of filters for a website to be listed along with many other attributes including a bad backlink profile for the directory itself. However, there are a few recommended high quality directories which rank well with search engines. But the lists of these quality directories are few and the category pages where you can have your listing from don’t necessarily have a good PageRank. True, for quality directories, the PageRank of the home page funnels some power to the category pages, but the numbers of links on these pages mean you get a tiny benefit of such listings. Moreover, listing in such high quality directories are often paid (BOTW, About, Business etc) or the time frames for listing are extremely high (DMOZ).

Of course, there are many other ways to build links naturally by adding quality content to your site, blogging regularly, using articles as a link bait, press release, building cool tools related to your site, building applications and generating content for the Social Media, creating and distributing templates for blogs, directories etc. The number of opportunities the Web 2.0 (user generated web medium or social media as it is referred to) offers is infinite and deserves a post on its own (I will surely blog this in the coming weeks). But it definitely involves a certain level of creativity and persistence to generate high quality of links.

In many ways, the Search industry has evolved to adopt better ways to source that golden link which adds value to the website’s link profile. While building natural links is dominant strategy, acquiring quality paid links remains a focus for SEO Marketers. From link farms and paid directory listings to link brokers, every SEO marketer has explored one or all of these options to gather backlinks. However, are these paid links always valuable? How do you determine how much benefit a link adds to your search marketing efforts? Although in the beginning, I would rate anything with a good PageRank as a good backlink, over the last few weeks I have learnt to judge what page offers a better value for a website. Based on my experience, I have a defined five point criteria for link buying which am sure works for many industries.

1. The quality and authority of the domain.

The age of the domain (Whois lookup) and the traffic it generates (Alexa, Compete or from the site administrators).
The Authority for the domain among Search Engines. (I have always found Google’s Sitelinks to be useful in judging this)

2. The Quality of Backlinks to the Domain and the page

Using link:www.domain.com and link:www.domain.com/backlinkpage on Yahoo Site Explorer and Google
Although Google lists the links randomly with no particular order, Yahoo seems to show Quality/new links higher

3. Does the site and the page have information for users and is it related to your industry?

Do users benefit from the content? If they are looking for something in particular will they seek information from the pages?

4. Are there any other links on the Page? If there are, what is the quality of these links?

If there are far too many links on the page, it is unlikely that it will appeal to users and this is true in case of Search Engines too. Also, the quality of the outgoing links also matter to a great deal as too many spammy sites can turn off the users as well as Search Engines.

5. Will we benefit in terms of traffic generation from the page?

If a link doesn’t direct traffic to a website, then it’s probably a low quality page similar to those thousands of directories developed mainly for SEO purposes. I personally feel that a quality link always has a potential to generate and direct traffic.

My personal opinion is that if the linking page and domain satisfies these qualities, then it is definitely worth a link back and merits a small payment to leverage benefits. Although Google discounts paid links, if a link qualifies the aforementioned criteria, it is sure to escape the Google scanner.

Please feel free to post comments.

Chronicles of a SEO Marketer – The Beginning

Posted on November 18, 2007 by Longhopper

Internet is a perceptual paradigm of constant change. Although the origins of internet dates back to the late 1950s, it is the last two decades that this medium has gathered momentum. Since the public acceptance in early 1990s, internet has grown imperiously to be a part of every day life. Not only has it depreciated the need for complex channels of information, entertainment and communication, it has also created a new knowledge economy in many nations. It has helped companies acquire vast knowledge and wealth while gaining a dominating lead in many markets. One such market is the search engines.

It is ironical that I never had the belief myself about the phenomenal potential search engines had to change people’s lives. I still remember back in 2001 when I we were busy setting up a small business process outsourcing company in Bangalore, we never had access to Internet for almost 2 years and we still had a fully functional company. We would venture out to check emails once a day to communicate with clients. One of our neighbours, who is not as computer literate as a group of individuals trying to run a company remarked about how we managed without having access to Google. He believed that without access to update information, our knowledge in the industry was shunted. He was much ahead than us in adapting technology…

Many things have changed since then. The most important of all is Google’s rise to significance, which has also spawned the growth of many online businesses. These businesses are dependent on Google to achieve growth and profitability. The dependence of these entities on Google is two dimensional. While paid search forms the first dimension, the other dimension focuses on organic search. Online businesses are heavily reliant on adapting and fine tuning both these dimensions to stay profitable. Although, paid search stimulates the economic benefits of a business, it is the organic search which is the cynosure of SEO marketers, as generating organic traffic is as complex as running a successful paid search campaign.

I realise there is a repository of information available on how we could organise SEO activities. But being in the industry for the last six months with no prior experience, I have picked up a few useful lessons myself through experience which I wish to archive here for future references. You never know, you might discover a few new tips!

Watch this space for a week on week (Well…hopefully!) SEO update!

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