Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

There’s certainly been alot of hype surrounding Facebook over the past year, what with the implied $15B valuation and entire venture capital funds being set up just to invest in Facebook apps. Anecdotally I can tell you my wife can spend hours on the site uploading photos, chatting with friends, and the like and both my brothers (age 18 and 27) are huge fans as well. So what does this mean to web publishers in terms of marketing potential? I’ll share my experience in two areas of Facebook marketing: advertisements and applications.

Advertisements are the most straightforward form of Facebook marketing since most internet marketers will already be familiar with the procedure of setting budgets, CPCs, etc. Facebook isn’t much different in terms of the mechanics of starting a campaign and we were up and running quickly with the $5 daily budget minimum for a mountain bike ad campaign. The ads themselves are a combination image and text ad which is different from what you’ll see on sites like Google and Yahoo. However, Facebook ads aren’t necessarily keyword based like search engine ads. For example, our ad set-up says “You are targeting men between 16 and 34 years old in the United States who like Mountain Biking.”

The biggest difference we’ve seen in our Facebook leads vs. leads generated on Google Adwords and other paid campaigns is that the Facebook users typically view more pages on our site and are more likely to create an account. We’re paying roughly the same CPC as on other ad networks and getting more pageviews - so far so good! The higher pageviews could be because Facebookers are familiar with the Review App model - sharing photos, reviews, etc. - so they are more likely to contribute and become involved on our site than typical search engine users strictly seeking information.

(The Facebook ad manager)

The other, sexier, form of Facebook marketing revolves around applications. Facebook applications are widgets that users can add to their profiles and provide interactive features like quizzes, photo uploads, and the like. Users can then share their applications and (hopefully) your application will go ‘viral’ as it is passed among friends. Creating a Facebook application is much more involved than running an ad campaign but a programmer can generally have a simple application up and running within a couple days. There is no cost to developing and deploying your application on the Facebook platform.

We’ve created two of our own Facebook applications and we’re very happy with the marketing results. Our first application, Mountain Biker, has been installed by more than 500 mountain bikers and lets users keep track of the mountain bike trails they’ve ridden. The application includes a competitive feature as well to see who has ridden the most trails which (ideally) keeps users engaged and incentivized to pass the app on to their friends. Mountain Biker has sent considerable traffic to our own website and has provided a tremendous branding opportunity to users who might not already know about us. The best thing is we spent nothing (other than a little time) creating the app yet it continues to be passed around among our most likely customers.

(Mountain Biker application users on Facebook)

There is some evidence that long-time Facebook users are suffering from application burnout as they install more and more applications that are just subtle variations on old themes. It’s important to make sure your application concept is fresh but also keep in mind that now is the time to launch your app before interest wanes and the spammers take over. If you’re looking for a new way to reach 18-34 year olds, Facebook is certainly a great option - get it while it’s hot!

Has anyone else noticed this lately: Whenever I click the bookmark for my Yahoo! Finance stock portfolio I am taken to the Yahoo! homepage instead of the correct page. This only happens the first time I click it; if I click the bookmark again, it usually goes to the correct page. I would understand if I were logged out of my account somehow but the link doesn’t redirect me to a login page. In fact, once I’m at the Yahoo! homepage I can clearly see I’m still logged in with links to my (unused) Yahoo! email inbox.

This certainly isn’t the first time I’ve noticed Yahoo! providing a poor user experience for the sake of profits and pageviews. If you’ve been following this blog for the past few years you’ll remember our complaint about the Yahoo! domains cancellation form. For more than 6 months the form, linked from our Yahoo! domains control panel, displayed a message saying the cancellation form was temporarily down for technical reasons. Inconvenient for customers who wished to cancel their domain renewals, a little too convenient for Yahoo! who continued to collect the $$ on domains that were automatically renewed.

Could this latest scheme be a ploy to inflate Yahoo! homepage pageviews by redirecting traffic from more popular Yahoo! products like Yahoo Finance? Reminds me of the trouble Apple got into recently by bundling the Safari for Windows download with iTunes updates. Forcing your customers to try out your other products is not only frustrating, it’s bad business.

Picture this: You’re planning a vacation to Hilton Head Island, SC and you want to go to dinner at this seafood place you ate at years ago but can’t remember the name - you think it starts with an ‘S’. Wouldn’t it be great to search a restaurant review website for restaurants at Hilton Head and sort by the first letter of the name so you could view the ‘S’ restaurants all at once? With Review App you can.

Review Apps are different from forums, blogs, and wikis because they organize important information and reviews hierarchically rather than by date or broad subject (though you can use Review App to organize items this way as well). Once you’ve created your data fields and loaded some data, just use the powerful back-end interface to set up the fields you’d like your users to be able to filter and sort.

In our restaurant example, we’ll want to include a field for the city where the restaurant is located and the name of the restaurant (among other things). Now we’ll choose the ‘Filter’ checkbox next to the city field and then choose ‘Ascending’ in the sort drop down menu for the name field. We’ll also allow users to sort by city as well.

That’s it. Now when users navigate to our ‘South Carolina restaurants’ category or section they’ll see a list of all the South Carolina restaurant listings. The filter list will be automatically generated based on the cities saved in our restaurant listings and the column headings will become links that, when clicked, will re-sort the listings based on the column data. Keeping with our example, we’d click ‘Hilton Head’ in the city filter list, then click the restaurant name column heading to sort alphabetically. Scroll down to the restaurants starting with the letter ‘S’ and we found it - the Sea Shack!

Sorting and filtering capabilities are native in Review App meaning you’ll spend less time coding and more time building your review site! See sorts and filters in action at BBQRestaurantReviews.com!

I’ve read some articles recently that claim that including meta keywords on your web page may be a futile effort since most search engines are ignoring them these days. The argument is that meta keywords are too easy to game and therefore search engines have stopped paying attention (though most SEOs will tell you to leave them in since they can’t hurt).

According to our tests, however, the meta keyword tag is just as important as ever. We created two test web pages: one with our target keyword placed in the meta keyword tag, the other without any meta keyword tags (though both pages contained the same # of keywords within the page text). The result? Our meta keyword page is ranked above the page without in Google and the meta keyword page is the only page that was indexed by Yahoo. So it seems the major search engines do still care about your meta keywords - so don’t leave them out!

Here’s an interesting question: How can you find the best SEO (Search Engine Optimization) firm on the internet? How about using your favorite search engine, which for me, means Google.

Searching for ‘Search Engine Optimization’ on Google returns more than 40 million (!) results so you might be tempted to pick one of the first results to find the best firm. But wait - those first 3 sites in the shaded rectangle are paid results meaning those SEOs didn’t make the natural search cut at all. Ditto for the firms listed on the right hand side of the page. Nope, if you’re an SEO firm and you can’t optimize your own business page for top natural search results, how are you going to help customers do the same for their business?

It’s interesting to note that the first 2 natural results aren’t for SEO firms at all. The first is for Wikipedia which somehow always seems to have great search engine placement no matter the search terms. The next result is from Google warning you about shifty SEO experts who claim to know more than they really do. The third result is for an actual SEO firm, Submit Express, and though I haven’t used them myself their high placement gives some legitimacy to their ability to get clients top billing in major search engines (Google, at the very least).

The fifth result, BruceClay.com, is almost as impressive, especially for such a seemingly small operation. Of course Bruce’s site is super long with tons of text that search engines love, vaguely reminiscent of those scammy sounding e-book sites. Me? I think I’ll pass on Bruce Clay.

When looking for an SEO firm to help improve your natural search result placement, consider how the SEO does with his/her OWN website and be wary of any firm that has to use paid search results to get customers.

I came across an interesting site the other day called ExpoTV that offers video reviews of all kinds of products from makeup to snow tires and beyond. It’s certainly an innovative concept but for me there are some major hurdles a review site like this will face.

First, the reviews are only useful if you trust the reviewer and perhaps this is one reason ExpoTV decided to use this model - you get to actually see and hear the person reviewing the product. In many cases, though, the reviewer can be distracting to the review. I was searching for a mountain bike pump review and came across a woman reviewing a floor pump. Now, keep in mind that I’m a mountain biker - I stay in shape and I like to ride fast and get dirt in my face. The woman reviewing the pump was middle aged, overweight, and had a thick southern accent which, when taken together, completely invalidated everything she was saying to me. Of course, had I been reading a review from the same woman writing as ’southernlady123′ (fictional screen name) things could have been different because I would have assumed she was a mountain biker just like me. ExpoTV pays video submitters for their reviews so the site seems to attract folks who review just about everything in their home, whether they are knowledgeable or not. ‘Pay-for-reviews’ is another topic entirely, I’ll write more about this later.

Video reviews also need to be aggregated and coded to be useful. For example, if I see there are 138 reviews of a digital camera on Amazon.com I can trust that the 3.5 star rating is a pretty good average, and I can then compare that rating to other cameras in my price range. With a video, it’s one perspective on a single product. Perhaps if the video reviews were scored (positive, negative, neutral) and THOSE scores were then aggregated, a site like ExpoTV could start to be helpful. As it is now the videos themselves are rated which doesn’t say alot - does it mean the product is good or that the reviewer did a good job? As a consumer I just want to know if the product is recommended…

Here’s a quickie: Is placing keywords in HTML heading tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.) a good idea for search engine optimization? Specifically, do search engines give higher precedence to pages with keywords in h1 tags vs. lower tags like h2?

If you’re optimizing for Google rankings, you’ll definitely want to put your most important keywords between h1 tags since our h1 keyword page was indexed sooner and listed higher than our h2 keyword page. But just like our previous tests have shown, Yahoo! has a different idea about search engine ranking placing the h2 page above the h1 page in search results. Go figure.

On most of my own pages I tend to place the same text in my title tags as in my first h1 on the page, mainly for convenience sake but it really makes sense from an optimization standpoint as well. Your page title should contain the most important, most descriptive keywords and repeating them in an important location on the page itself is good business. If you’re optimizing for Google, reserve your h1 tags for the most important keywords on the page and watch your listings fly to the top!

As we’ve expanded some of our websites over the years we’ve found that we want each new section to work a little differently than the others. For example, on singletracks.com we added mountain bike gear reviews but we wanted to moderate new item submissions before they were visible on the site. Then we also added a trail map section, and in this case, we wanted to limit access to the maps to subscribers only. These two sections were in addition to our trail section where we wanted to limit new trail, review, and photo submissions to registered members only. Since the permission rules on singletracks varied section by section, we decided to make Review App to be as flexible as possible when it comes to adding new site features and setting permissions.

That’s why we built section-level permissions into Review App. Each listing section has its own set of permissions and you can even adjust the permissions on reviews and photos within the section (see screen shot below). You can even choose to moderate new posts individually and have an email notification sent to one of your admin users for processing. Review App also gives your members (if you so choose) the power to edit their posts once they have been submitted - a feature we added to our own sites after our members demanded it.

Section level permissions can be changed at any time once your site is live so you can make adjustments on the fly (in case, for example, your site is suddenly bombarded with spam bot posts). Want use Review App as a content management system (CMS) for just one of your sections? No problem - just set the “Who can add listings” permissions to “Admin users only.” The way you configure your sections is up to you and there’s no pressure - you can always change permissions later.

I recently spoke with a friend of a friend who was working on launching a new website and he asked me for some tips on getting the word out about his site. Based on our experience with singletracks I came up with a list of 4-5 things we’ve found to work pretty consistently and I thought I’d share the list with you here, starting with our #1 recommendation: create a relevant blog.

Of course blogs didn’t exist when we launched singletracks 10 years ago but if we were starting all over again my first marketing task would be to build a blog. Blogs are quick and easy to create and there is some pretty incredible software available for free from Word Press and others to get you started.

A blog is a great marketing tool for any website because it keeps users engaged and coming back for the latest news and content - but you need to commit to keeping things fresh. With singletracks we started our blog just after the New Year in 2007 and have been posting one article each weekday morning ever since. Ok, so maybe we miss a day here or there but the point is to give people a consistent reason to come back to your website day after day. Many blogs make the mistake of updating whenever they get a chance which is frustrating to readers who want to read your blog when THEY get a chance and they’ll move on if they don’t know when (or if) you’ll ever have any new articles.

Search engines love new content as well and the more often you post, the more often the crawlers will visit and index your site. On the singletracks blog we’ve noticed that our articles get picked up by Google within an hour or so of posting, making the blog almost as effective as our email campaigns. In fact, when we post articles on particular mountain bike trails we’ll see an almost immediate uptick in new user registrations from the surrounding area.

Blogs are also great at building a solid link base for your site. As you probably already know search engines like Google place a high weight on the number of sites that link to yours in search engine rankings. Interesting new content gives other bloggers and webmasters a reason to link to your site but you can also use links TO other blogs to drive traffic BACK to your site. Most blog software includes a feature called “trackbacks” that places reciprocal links between blog discussions. For example: I find an interesting blog post on another site about helmets and I place a link to that site in my post about kids bike safety. My blog software automatically notifies the helmet blog and places a link back to my post about kids bike safety. Nifty, huh? And by strategically titling your blog you can have an even greater impact: We titled our blog the “Mountain Bike Blog” and after less than a year we became the #1 Google search result for ‘mountain bike blog.’ It was that easy.

Finally, I want to share a couple tips that many folks just don’t seem to get right with marketing blogs these days. First, make sure your blog is a ‘marketing’ blog rather than a ’sales’ blog. To some this may seem like splitting hairs but it’s important to get this nailed down. A ’sales’ blog will be all about your product, your company, etc. without reaching outside to get customers interested in what you have to say and how you fit into the broader market. If you haven’t figured it out yet this blog is itself a marketing blog but instead of just talking about Review App (which we do) we want to talk about a broad range of interesting and useful subjects from consumer reviews to SEO to internet marketing.

It is also important to place your blog on the same domain as your REAL website to keep all the traffic in one place. I’ve seen so many examples of companies creating blogs on domains separate from their corporate sites which is simply counterproductive. Take advantage of those trackbacks and build up the pagerank on your site while making it easier for your readers to move from the blog to your main site. Subdomains are fine but separate domains are confusing to readers and search engines alike.

If you’re launching a new website, no matter what the subject, consider making a blog your #1 marketing tool - it’s an easy and effective way to quickly grow your audience!

Over the past few years there has been much buzz about blogs and how they’re revolutionizing the way we find and share information and news online. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard about the ‘blogosphere’ from television news coverage of the current presidential primaries - apparently it must be very important. I certainly read (and write!) blogs myself but do average Americans really care? Are they looking for interesting blogs to read about their favorite subjects?

A quick search of the Google Traffic Estimator seems to say no, at least compared to other keyword queries. Searches for blog-related web sites seems to be on par with searches for forums (you know, message boards) and forums have been around since the early days of the internet - heck, I even used to lurk on a few back in the days of the Prodigy dial-up service. But how does the popularity of searches for blogs and forums compare to searches for reviews?

It turns out the search volume for review related web sites and information is roughly 3 times the volume of searches for blogs or forums. So why aren’t we hearing about the online “review space” on the nightly news? Review aggregation is, after all, a service that would not exist without the internet and something that has the power to bring transparency and change to all sorts of industries. We also know more and more folks are turning to the Internet to read reviews before making purchase decisions.

In fact part of the reason review sites aren’t as common is that blogs and forums are much easier to create and configure since their software is readily available. Review App was created to make building and deploying consumer review websites as easy as launching a blog (and back in 2006 there were 50 million of them!) or managing an online forum. People are looking for reviews online - let Review App help you supply them!