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Viral Marketing & Link Bait Basics: Part VIII

Posted in SEO News and Analysis February 26th, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment

There is a general type of linkbaiting method that is often used on the Internet, much more so that specified marketing campaigns. These are especially useful for those that have content-rich sites, such as blogs, or anything that is meant to sell information via traffic, rather than through a direct product. This is general viral marketing and linkbaiting, which can be applied in several difference ways. Each one should appeal to a different source, and slightly alter the way that traffic is created.

Blogs

Quickly becoming a staple of the online world, blogs are a better place than ever to generate interest. Because they are so easily shared socially, they make great viral marketing foundations for your website. This is also true of generating links. Blogs will commonly link to one another, and they have to do legally use a source. Using the day’s top interest points, or targeted niches, will help to ensure you regularly bait links through your own blog.

What you have to decide is the purpose of the blog itself. Most will probably have it stand alone, and put all their time and effort into updating it, and branding it. This is commonly seen with news blogs, gossip blogs, technology blogs…anything that moves quickly and has to shift from day to day. This will always bring in the most links.

Next, you have general interest blogs. These don’t bring in as many links, but they do often get dedicated followers for the information you provide. For example, you may create a site dedicated to offering all natural beauty tips, or reviewing video games and movies. They won’t be updated on a day to day basis, but they will generate a good deal of interest, and continue bringing in links on the same topics for a long while.

Last, you have SEO blogs. These are sites that have posts created specifically to anchor links. These can be beneficial for advertising purposes for another website, but they can also be easily caught. You should think of these as hit and miss options. They may help to boost you in small spurts, but those are not lasting. They are like the Mario Energy Stars of the linkbaiting world….effective, but not at all permanent.

Viral Marketing & Link Bait Basics: Part VII

Posted in SEO News and Analysis February 19th, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment

As you continue on the round to successful link baiting you might notice something that most marketers end up seeing at some point: content only draws in backlinks for so long. It doesn’t matter how good the content you have created it, or how many links it attracts during the first few weeks. Once a campaign has run its course, whether that be over a month, or over a few hours, it is done. That same content cannot generally be resurrected again.

There is one main exception to this rule. That is when you have written a second part to the original, and link it through that content to the original source. This may bring in some backlinks as new visitors seek it out for reference. This is a good strategy to keep milking a particularly helpful bit of content a little while longer, but won’t work long term either, as that second part will eventually go out of vogue as well.

Regarding Zencart’s cross sell module

Posted in Add Ons February 17th, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment

We have received reports that many people are having problem with the module not being compatible with the new version of Module Manager, this is to be expected and we are deeply sorry for the inconvenience. A new version has been posted under the support thread of this module, and if all go well we will post it to download section soon.

We will be working on a new xsell module that will suggest related products automatically, so if you have any suggestion or features that you want please let us know now.

Sincerely yours,

Rubik Team

Viral Marketing & Link Bait Basics: Part VI

Posted in SEO News and Analysis February 11th, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment

Today I would like to talk about using linkbaiting as a means of establishing positive public relations for your company or website. When used correctly, you can use a few well placed items of viral marketing to create an image of professionalism and trust for your business. It is the proper way to go about using this method or marketing, and it is another reason that it is so important to be mindful of what kind of content you use.

It is also a method of using the viral content itself to draw in links, and it is a much more effective way for medium-sized businesses and websites to compete with larger ones, which have a great deal of funding at their disposal for advertising campaigns. Just think of the videos, commercials, ads, contents, and gimmicks that have been used in the past.

An example is the recent release of a website for the movie ‘2012′. They created a fake organization called The Institute for Human Continuity, which offers a fake lottery to become one of those saved when the world “ends” in 2012. They created a well formed website, professionally done, to cause a hype, and they didn’t announce it as a marketing campaign. They even managed to secure a .org domain to increase it’s realism.

Great Marketing

Increase sales by tracking site search

Posted in eCommerce February 7th, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment

Google Analytics (GA) is a popular service for many small – medium ecommerce businesses because it can provide almost all the features that other commercial (paid) services can provide while staying FREE.

Many people, however, don’t know how to take full advantage of the power that GA offers them. Last week I was chatting with a client and turned out she did not know that she could track what the customers search on her site with GA. Just imagine how surprised and happy she was. Knowing what your customers searching on your site along with other factors (how many times they have to refine their search, how deep did they have to dig down, … to find what they are looking for) can help you to stock your store with the products that are on demand, or to re-work your internal search engine to give better search result.

Setting up site search tracking is very easy:

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=75817

For Zencart, you should use keyword for “Query Parameter” and categories_id for “Category Parameter”

Viral Marketing & Link Bait Basics: Part V

Posted in SEO News and Analysis February 2nd, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment

The primary purpose behind linkbaiting is self evident: you are trying to capture more links for the sake of exposure. But what are the other reasons? As a basic marketing strategy, there are several other primary purposes behind using linkbaiting to bring in traffic for your site. Each one is a way of building on the original purpose, and when you keep them all in mind you will be able to create better content for the sake of backlinks. If you don’t keep them all in mind, you will lose several key resources, which means wasted time, and lost profits.

Establish a Base Audience

There is nothing so precious to a webmaster or company than having a group of people dedicated to their website/product. Not only will this ensure a group of regular visitors, but it will lead to users spreading the word about you. They will tell friends, create links, and provide a crucial network beyond that of which is provided by affiliates and standard marketing.

What the New Small Business Plans Mean for You, the Business Owner

Posted in eCommerce January 31st, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment

As the economy slowly begins to bottom out, opening the way for improvement, there is one major point that seems to be being proven again and again: small businesses will be a major part of that recovery. Without an emphasis being placed on the smaller businesses that have suffered for years under the dominance of large (and often corrupt) banks and businesses, the job market will continue to slow, and the annual revenue will once again decline on a country-wide basis.

Because of this fact, those who watched President Obama’s address may have noticed that small businesses were a main focus of the direction of the way forward. Several plans have been put into play that will help small businesses once again prosper and become more focused in a new era of the job and business market. However, the opinions of how much these plans will help are mixed, with some feeling as though it will not be enough, and others saying that something is better than nothing. But what will it mean for you, the small business owner?

Exclude zenid query parameter from your Google Analytics to get better site reports

Posted in SEO Tips, Tips & Tricks January 31st, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment

To track the customers and save their information, Zencart utilizes cookie and session. You will see Zencart usually automatically appends a random string to the end of your links on the very first page of your visit to your site.

For example, if you are not on your website now and you open it in a new window, you will the links look like this:

http://yourstore.com/index.php?main_page=products_all&zenid=asdsadlkadjlqwjdascdas

http://yourstore.com/index.php?main_page=specials&zenid=asdsadlkadjlqwjdascdas

If set up correctly, when you click on one of those links, on the next page load you will see all link appear without the zenid string. Also, if set up correctly, those links with zenid appended to them should never be displayed to search engine (check your settings under Admin-Configuration: Prevent spider sessions should be set to True).

However, that setting does not prevent zenid appears in some of your reports you get from Google Analytics however (assume that you use G.A). For example, if you check your “site overlay” you might be in for a surprise, most of your links might have a 0% click rate, and you know this cannot be true. If you look closer, however, you will discover that the zenid is in those links. This perhaps can be explained by 2 reasons:

1. Although zenid is never shown to search engine spiders, it does get shown to normal visitors for the reason given above.
2. In any case, the links with zenid are recorded by Google Analytics and since each customer is assigned a different zenid per visit session, the links then appear to be different links

http://yourstore.com/index.php?main_page=products_all&zenid=asdsadlkadjlqwjdascdas

http://yourstore.com/index.php?main_page=products_all&zenid=quheyiuahdkjasndkajoi

(from Google Analytics point of view, the 2 links above are totally different)

The cure to this is surprisingly easy. Google knows that some parameter(s) in your links should be ignored, and it allows you to do so by the Exclude query parameters setting which only takes a few minutes to do. For all Zencart store, zenid the one you MUST exclude, and depend on the customization you have done on your store you may decide to exclude some other params as well.

I hope this info will help you to use G.A more effectively in the future.

Basic HTML for startup business owners

Posted in Web design's Tips January 25th, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment

Do You Need to Know HTML for a Business Website?

If you are like me when I first start your business and you try to handle anything you can to save your money, or if you are in charge of editing content of the site (even with the assistance of those What You See Is What You Get WYSIWYG text editors), basic knowledge of HTML is a must.

I’m not going into great details regarding html code here, W3C is a great place for you to learn all that for FREE. Please have a look at that page, at least just skim through it to get the basic ideas of how website “work” in general.

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