somebody thinks i am special, or, how to get mentioned on blogs

Mike thinks I am worth talking about. Because I noticed and commented a bit on why his blog Digital Agency had the top spot in Google for ‘youtube beat superbowl’ when all he really said was, hey, check out this AdAge story.

I took a look at the URL and title tags for his blog post vs. the AdAge article. I made a small point, that having your topic concisely titled in the URL and title tags is a good idea.

And this was enough for Mike to link to me.

And now me and him own the top 5 spots on google for ‘youtube beats superbowl.’

Lesson #1: Interesting content is not king. As Andy said in the comments on Mike’s blog, “Yeah, but who bothers to link to AdAge these days? We’re all interested in meta-commentary.” Content is nice. Conversations are better.

Lesson #2: Comment on other people’s blogs. A lot. Savvy bloggers notice.

Lesson #3: When you comment, say something useful. If you want to say “I love you, you are great,” that is fine, but don’t expect that to do anything other than warm the blogger’s heart. Which is good. But if you want to build traffic, comment on something that will be of interest to the blogger and to their readers.

Mike and Alice at Digital Agency say they are “Advising, commentating, consulting and creating in the new marketing world of Web 2.0.” So say something worth their time to listen to.

youtube officially beats superbowl

Ad Age tells about how, for the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, a youtube video beat out the superbowl for ROI.

Welcome to the internet age.

If you too want to join this whole “internet” thing, even though it probably is just a fad, come talk to us over at Portent. I know “internet marketing” is not going to last, but for these companies we seem to have done a decent job.

Thanks to Digital Agency for the Dove link.

and your name was?…

Even when we get the names down, the personal data (did they grow up in New Hampshire or Maine?) can be elusive. Linda commented on my post about connecting with people in business asking how I keep track of all the tidbits.

My answer is to pay attention to a very few people. Which is not really an answer, but an explanation that I do not deal with so many people just yet that I have to have a real system. If I do, I will start posting such data in our project tracking tool, within our company forum. That way anyone talking with the client (not that anyone else should be) will know that so-and-so has a newborn.

The problem with this is, maybe the information I learn about should be kept, not private, but not public. Jory calls it Stalk Marketing when someone you don’t know finds out a lot about you in order to sell you stuff.

Key point, know who you are dealing with and how they feel about their personal information. And err on the safe side.

news, search terms, and search engines

Keeping in mind that my blog still gets very few visitors, I am getting a fair amount of traffic from search terms, almost all for the 100 Fastest Growing Companies list I posted here. The only post that beats that out for views is my post about why wordpress is not good for business blogs.

The lesson for bloggers is a) make sure your post titles get in to the url, b) talk about news or c) talk about continually important issues, like wordpress and business blogs.

Notice that most of that traffic is not dependent on whether I am saying anything smart. It is dependent on who is talking about the same thing. Do a google search on ‘100 fastest growing companies puget sound.’ I am the top link. Now, not many people search for that phrase, but for those who do, they see me as the expert.

A first place in google means someone knows what they are talking about, right? In this case, yes, I give the list of 100 companies.

The challenge for you is to find those unusual search terms that can yield highly qualified traffic. Overall, 10% conversion may be acceptable for a PPC (pay-per-click, as in search engine advertising) campaign. But find a niche keyword, and you can get 25% and above.

when it’s okay to lie

I just lied to someone, I stand to benefit if they believe me, and I am not sorry.

One company I know has a web address that is a .org. The .com would of course be better- I still accidentally type in .com half the time.

The .com site is owned by someone else and is just a placeholder, making money (don’t know how much) through ads.

The aboveboard way to go about this would be to have me in my official capacity or the firm that wants the domain to contact whoever currently owns the name, and ask the price. The results would be in the many thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars, because the seller would be able to determine (correctly) that we could afford that kind of price if we wanted to.

Instead, I pretended to still be in college and working on a class project. To hopefully get a price that is less than $1k.

There is no question that, applied to daily business, this is totally unethical. Lying to get a good deal is wrong, wrong, wrong.

So why do I feel so differently about this that I am posting it, opening myself up for criticism?

In short, I believe there is some kind of property right in domain names. The courts agree- we could force the current owner to give up the domain to us, unless it happened to be their name or their business name, both very unlikely. So instead of the direct, confrontational approach, I opt for the quick and dirty approach, that gets us what we want, which we would have gotten through a legal challenge anyways, but still gives the current owner something.

Note that they would not get anything if we were able to get it through a legal challenge.

So, I am basically trading a lot of time and psychic energy, and my ability to say that I never lie in business, in order to get the domain to the people who have a right to it, while rewarding those who were smart enough to claim it in the first place.

Discuss.

Also, what if it was your domain, you could make a legal challenge for $3k and get it because it is your name, but you can misrepresent yourself (lie) and get it for $500 and far less time. Or you could buy it outright for $10k (this is not a made up number- if the seller knows who you are, and you have cash, this could be a reasonable price). What would you do?