Adam Loving's Blog » SEO

10 Inbound Marketing Hacks

Adam Loving — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 07:53:59 +0000

Traditional marketing is interruption marketing. These days, it is much more effective if you can earn a customer’s interest (as opposed to forcing them to look at your advertisement). This is called inbound marketing. In a recent presentation, Rand Fishkin from Seattle SEO company SEOMoz hadsome great tips on on successful inbound marketing. Here are the notes I took.

1. Create sharing incentives. Make something people will want to link to, or a directory they can list themselves in. For example, UrbanSpoon has a “spoon back” program. They feature reviews by bloggers who link to the site.

2. Mine the social web for engagement opportunities. Watch for people signaling their interest and intent for your product.

3. Embeddable content (or make your content embeddable). Distribute embeddable content like video, images, and slide shows.

4. Make your data interesting / controversial etc. Simple, but easy to forget. Focus on the type of stuff that fits your audience well (as evidenced by what they like on Reddit, etc.)

5. Mine your followers. Work the people that already like you. See which people have tweeted you, which have linked to you, which ones you have email addresses for. Work ‘em.

6. Followerwonk twitter user search engine – use social to connect with journalists and bloggers.

7. Implement a referral system like dropbox. When you refer you get more storage… no – what you really want is to give someone else something for free. Same for getting/giving access early

There are 3 more great hacks below click one of the sharing buttons to reveal tips 8, 9, and 10 (text will appear instantly).

8. Give your community a platform. Profiles and user generated content. Forums and tools.

9. Adopt the new rel=”author” tag and use video xml site maps to get a thumbnail next to your link in search results. SeoMOZ uses Wistia. A 3rd ranked result with video thumbnail gets more traffic than the first two.

10. Create a monthly top x influencers in your industry list. Like the Seattle 2.0 startup list or the techmeme leader board. Everybody on the list links to it. we’re vain, we can’t help it.

Yahoo SearchMonkey Apps

Adam Loving — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 06:29:29 +0000

Joshua Allen wrote an interesting post about how SearchMonkey is disruptive because it could enable semantic Web technologies. Basically the “Semantic Web” is a more meaningful internet (see my post from 2004 for a better description). Internet inhabitants have been trying unsuccessfully to bootstrap the semantic Web for a while. Google has the power to make it happen, but doing so would risk loosing their competitive advantage in Web search. If Google supported semantic Web formats like RDF, publishers would use it a lot more, and other search engines would have an easier time searching the Web.

SearchMonkey is interesting because it allows 3rd party developers to make use of Yahoo’s crawl of semantic data. This means the benefits of the index are shared without compromising Yahoo’s ownership of the index. The gamble is that Google won’t be able to keep pace with the 3rd party developers’ features, and that the features would be good enough to motivate publishers to provide feeds.

In the SearchMonkey architecture, publishers provide data (semantic information about what has traditionally been represented as text on their Web sites). App developers create Presentation Applications to match this data to search results (which is also semantically enhanced). So, if I search for “Coldplay” an Amazon search result could be enhanced with a Last.fm “listen now” link (or vice versa). The main point is that Yahoo search facilitates Coldplay being recognized as a band.

This seems to me like a good bet for Yahoo, if it isn’t too late for them as a business given their recent troubles. Assuming an audience of Yahoo searchers still exists, an app ecosystem like the Facebook developer ecosystem should develop trying to capture the users. Publishers will also be motivated Data Feed hosting will become just another part of SEO.

One last point is that this would be a great place for Evri (and Freebase) to plug in. Evri (still in private beta) has been criticized for not having a search box. This would be a great way to expose Evri’s semantic understanding of specific people when they show up in a Yahoo search result.