Supernatural Agency: Online business tales

If you’re doing search marketing, including SEO and SEM, for your site(s) then you need to understand multivariate testing, the science of choosing various page elements, ad copy, keywords and other variables and testing them against a control. Your control is basically a combination of these elements that so far is your steadiest performing combination.

Jonathan Mendez is far deeper into this testing than I am and has begun a series of posts that go into how multivariate testing works into detail. This is complex stuff, but if you take the time to start learning and applying it to your search campaign, the payoff can be huge and the knowledge you gain will be a major business asset.

The days of pretending that there is some kind of separation between ‘branding’ and measurable direct marketing are over- everything is measurable and the results don’t lie. Traditional agencies and marketers take note: The creative director who ignores this reality in favor of amorphous ‘creativity’ is going to lose you clients.

If you’re a business owner this eliminates the old “I know half of my advertising budget works, I just don’t know which half (sorry, can’t find the attribution- if you know it please comment)”. With sophisticated testing, analytics and conversion tracking you can know exactly what dollars/creative are working and which are not.

I was interviewed recently for a piece on Marketing Sherpa. It was about optimizing PDF files for SEO. This info and the techniques described were developed by my business partner Mike Johnson.

BTW, if you’re not familiar with Marketing Sherpa it is a great resource for all kinds of marketing tactics and research with real world examples. Recommended.

A few days ago Maholo founder Jason Calcanis posted a blog post about 17 ways to save money in a start-up. Because of one controversial statement in an otherwise mundane post, he started an intense debate in the blogosphere. I’m not going to weigh in because practically anywhere in the tech blog world you go you can find an opinion. What I am going to talk about is the real purpose of the post which, IMHO, had nothing to do with start-ups or saving money. It was linkbait.

Inbound links are gold from an SEO point of view. If they are from sites relevant to your site’s subject matter they weigh heavily in your favor with the search engines. They also drive a lot of traffic if they come from high traffic sources. Any savvy blogger is on the lookout for ways to acquire links and controversy is a proven tactic. This is known as linkbaiting- writing pieces that piss people off or invite lots of commenting and discussion on other blogs. Calcanis is a master of linkbaiting.

Other common ways to fish for links are insulting Apple Inc. (draws the fanboys in droves), writing contrary comments on sites like Techcrunch (however they get so many that this is no longer very effective) and guest-posting on the blogs of others. Guest-posting is pretty easy as most bloggers are thrilled to have someone else write for them and flattered if you ask nicely. Just write something and submit it to a blog you like.

Linkbait is a better tactic than simply requesting a link exchange because it is in relevant context which makes the links far more valuable.

If you blog and don’t have traffic, add in a few creative linkbait initiatives. Even one good link can make a huge difference in your popularity.

Here’s a pretty cool linkbuilding chart.

If you have sites out there on your domains and you haven’t been adding  Google Site Map code to them now would be the time to do this as the three major search engines have now standardized on this method of adding your site to the index queue.

Here’s a good explanation of how the Site Map protocol works.