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| A Warning Shot or an Accident? Does it Matter? Posted: 12 Nov 2010 11:10 AM PST On the 22nd of October Google had an indexing issue and a separate algorithmic change. Some of the sites associated with the indexing glitch quickly came back, whereas others seemed like they were hosed for weeks and headed toward the path of perpetual obscurity. To give a visual of how dire this situation was for some webmasters, consider the following graphic. The blue line is Google search traffic and the gray is total unique visitors. And since search visitors tend to monetize better than most other website visitors, the actual impact on revenues was greater than the impact on visitors. And, if you figure that sites have fixed costs (hosting, maintenance, new content creation, data licensing, marketing, etc.) then the impact on profits is even more extreme than the impact on revenues. Hence in the search game you can go from hero to zero fast! Search is one of the highest leverage business functions around today. But it is also volatile. And it is a winner take most market. When stuff heads south like that, what do you do? Do you consider it game over and try to lower costs further? My approach to such events is to take it as a warning shot. To take it as a challenge. In the above example the traffic came back... ...but algorithms sometimes get rolled in using phases. Sometimes stuff that gets tripped up and later restored is being set up for a second fall when they refine their relevancy algorithms again. Sites that get caught in snags are sites which are fairly weak. So if you take any set back as motivation to create something better and work hard then you at least know that if you failed you tried and it just didn't work. Most likely, if you try hard, you will be able to make the site much better and not only reach your old traffic levels, but exceed them. Even though the traffic came back for the above site, it has been getting a lot more effort. And it will continue to for months and months. The fear of loss is a great motivator to push people to create something better. Sometimes I think Google should mix up the results a bit more often just to drive people to create better stuff. :)  |
| Now All Blogger Outreach Campaigns Will Be Considered Spam Too :) Posted: 12 Nov 2010 10:08 AM PST Not that long ago I highlighted how infographics were largely being destroyed as a link building tool by some unscrupulous folks who were offering to pay people to host the infographics to their sites - in a sense making the word infographic seem & feel like spam, just like paid links. :D After killing that source of links, the folks behind that work are proudly moving on to fake non-profits and awards for bloggers, launching multiple fake charity sites in the last couple months, and then mass emailing bloggers with fake awards and link buying offers, along with a touch of comment spamming. I mean, its not that many comments. :) Any website with only 4 pages of content, that claims to be a non-profit, yet has no contact information available, while claiming to be 3 or 4 years old (even the domain name was only registered 2 months ago) is probably somewhat sketchy.
As a marketer, you want anything you do to pass the sniff test. So if your stuff looks anything like this fake scammy crap garbage then you are not going to have much success with it. Largely because the folks who are sending out millions of emails are going to sterilize the market and turn the web cynical toward even more marketing techniques. So you need to make your marketing efforts that much more personalized, and it also helps to have a real presence in the field, that way bloggers won't dismiss you as just another scam, like they might those folks promoting the fake charity angle. This is another reason why it also helps to create things in entirely unique formats. The gamers exploiting stuff burn out one opportunity after another, but most of their new & creative slants are simply extensions of things that worked for others. Getting out in front of the scammers on a new trend & format is far more profitable than following in their footsteps. But be aware that marketing ideas have a curve to them. An idea which starts off pure and is successful & profitable will end up coming under the eye of scammers at some point. And most forms of fraud are based around trying to look like the real thing, so eventually a format that was once profitable eventually loses its potency and you must move on. The best forms of marketing which help you differentiate yourself from the scammers are those which build trust over time: branding, awareness, social interaction, etc. The person holding up a puppet might be able to compete with you here and there from time to time, but if you build something with depth and substance they will have a hard time competing on a sustainable basis.  |
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