SEO News Blog

Honesty Tax

The anonymous nature of the web acts as a tax on anyone who is an honest merchant. Sales are driven by perceived value, and many marketers spend 90%+ of their time & effort on front end marketing and optimizing their sales channels, while providing little to no substance to anyone who buys from them. By the time those customers get to people like us, they are already more distrusting, cynical, and jaded due to having been scammed - in many cases multiple times.

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Posted by rebecca

Since I’m a movie buff and an Internet marketing nerd, I often notice Internet marketing and search mentions in various movies, and I always pay attention to the movie URL shown in trailers (my two recent favorites: the URL for Sacha Baron Cohen’s upcoming Bruno film was www.meinspace.com/bruno, but it looks like now it’s redirecting to MySpace.com, and the URL for I Love You, Beth Cooper is www.iloveyoubethcoopermovie.com, making me wonder why they had to append “movie” to such a specific URL). Recently I came across two examples where the movie industry referenced or directly utilized Internet marketing/social media marketing, and it got me wondering if Internet marketing is finally starting to become more mainstream (meaning fewer people will look at you with blank faces as you try to describe what you do for a living).
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Do you know what attracts your readers? What headlines they respond to most? Do they respond to pictures? Do they know what your offer is?

No doubt we all agree that testing is a good thing to do. We can see clearly if our ideas are working or not. But a lot of testing is, quite frankly, tedious.

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iProspect recently did a study which showed that the majority of people who respond to graphical ads do so via a latent action other than a click on the ad, like a search for the brand. Any such brand lift or indirect effect of advertising on content sites has generally been ignored by most advertisers because search driven ad networks want search to get credit for that conversion.

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Posted by Lucy Langdon

Although a lot of a blog’s success comes from the ongoing effort you put into growing and nurturing it, there are a few things you can do to give it the best possible chance from day one. The checklist below varies from very simple actions through to big decisions and longer term strategies.
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One of my biggest business flaws was perhaps starting off with a fairly low self-esteem. Because of that, I catered toward people who were whiny, wanted free stuff, and never had any intent of buying anything. Being naive, and wanting to be liked too much, I catered to such worthless people, and probably cut my income short over the years by millions of dollars. Over the course of the last year I decided that I was going to change directions on that front, and I have never had a problem with being blunt.

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Do aggressive marketing practices repel you?

Or make you more likely to buy?

Is it a cultural thing? For example, does hard sell work in some cultures, but not others?

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Posted by rebecca

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

Compete has rolled out a bunch of changes, adding user generated tags, a new interface, dynamic graphs, and more. Pete Meyers has hired a new intern, Yoozer, and he’s here to answer your toughest questions about usability. Are you a small business and scratching your head about this newfangled Twitter thing? Check out this Twitter guide for small businesses and hop on the 140 character bandwagon. Man, Twitter is all over the place lately. Is it bad for journalism? Marc Gunther seems to think so… Last Twitter link (for now): Brent Payne is all…well, atwitter (sorry) over the fact that Alyssa Milano responded to his tweets. [insert lame Who’s the Boss joke here]� Tony Adam counters Darren Slatten’s theme winning post about reputation management with a post saying online reputation management does matter. I smell a feud! 10e20 offers up some basic tips for online and offline social networking. PROTIP: Befriend Chris Winfield. He and his hair are among the most powerful social media marketers in the biz.
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Posted by randfish

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) has some rules about online marketing that may surprise you - they certainly surprised me.

Recently, SEOmoz’s own Sarah Bird was interviewed by Eric Enge on a wide variety of contract and legal topics. As I was proudly browsing through the piece, I was especially curious about what Sarah had to say around marketing on social media networks:

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The economy is in a rut because of Big Risk - beyond just the subprime housing market.
First, it was Big Finance - AIG and company. Second it was Big Media - the NYTimes and friends. Third, it was Big Auto - GM and gang. It’s quite plausible that the next victims will be Big Advertising […]

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