Reputation is something earned, even a negative one. Inside an online marketing thought bubble of unicorns, rainbows, sunshine and seo, we are usually all too willing and able to help someone that wants to “push down negative results” or “boost up good profiles”. It is this close minded thinking that led to an epic fail – the very same person that commissioned us to fix his reputation, filed a chargeback against us after receiving the service! haha, you can’t make this stuff up.
Hindsight is 20/20 so let’s look at some red flags for fixing the reputation of this innocent victim! đ
Multiple court cases, with 12 plantiffs against him
Signs off emails with Sir or Mr before his name (really?)
Claims to have went to Harvard (don’t think so at this point), and uses high end cars as his profile pic (delusions of grandeur)
Has dozens of profiles created with his name, in an attempt to push these results down before (he knew just enough SEO to be dangerous and not effective)
Being naive and all to eager to help those in need, I was placated with a phone call assuring me he was the true victim.
Next time a restaurant, doctor, lawyer or systems analyst *wink wink*, contacts you, maybe their steaks do taste like rubber, or the doctor is a quack, or maybe the lawyer is using deceptive tactics. Using SEO to fix someones reputation is masking the problem, and hurting those seeking out the absolute best business or person for their needs.
Imagine your Mom needed a heart doctor, and came across one that had a nephew trolling for his reputation online. Yes, this is an exaggerated circumstance and your pulled pork sandwich that was a supposeded solid 4, tastes like a 2 won’t cost you your life, but will cost your trust in the process of online reviews. Trust in the internet (that sounded cheesey) needs to be upheld and Pulledporksandwichseo isn’t helping that process.
Are there situations where someone unfairly has an axe to grind? Yes, but those should be addressed on the platform they were posted on, whether that is Yelp, Google + yellowpages, a forum post, tweet, facebook, etc (if you can’t address it, only then would SEO be your only means of correction). Creating noise (other profiles or websites) and/or boosting up profiles to ofuscate the truth isn’t reptuation management, it’s manipulation.
The industry of White Hat reputation management (instead of good, quality content, you have a good business :P) is on the rise. Services that attempt to bridge the gap between brick and mortar, their customers and the internet will have a future, acquiring real reviews. The others better hope John Doe’s Linkedin account can outrank ripoffreport.
The stories and importance of social media are everywhere. If you aren’t on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, etc you are losing out on clients, leads, eyeballs, etc (which is true). All this data needs to be tracked and analyzed, but don’t put a TPS cover sheet on your social analytics just yet…
What exactly are you analyzing? If you aren’t spending capital, whether an outside agency, or internally to expand your social reach, you are playing 52 card shuffle with yourself, counting the same cards each day, in a futile effort of busy work, and worse, false promises. Just because you track and measure something doesn’t mean you will get actionable results. Take weight loss for instance
How many times this month have you weighed yourself? How many times did you do something about it?
Chances are you weigh yourself out of habit each day. The pounds are adding up, but it’s okay, because you are tracking it (this is me right now!). There is little to no positive action taken to affect the weight loss, only understand it’s occuring.
Tracking is More Dangerous than doing nothing because it gives a false sense of achievement, a false sense of doing “something”
You know if your business is doing enough to succeed on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. No amount of tracking will pull the wool over your eyes, but enough reports will certainly pull the wool over some superior’s eyes, which leads to an unhealthy demand from companies to track everything, even if it means being less productive. There is a sweet spot when it comes to numbers having meaning, known as a sample size. If you aren’t obtaining 100+ social interactions in a month (across all your social profiles, comments, etc), chances are you can put down the calculator and put your hard hat on and “go to work”. Analysis is doing nothing for the majority of companies trying to go social, and acting as a major hindrance.
How do you take action to become a more social company?
No one wants to be the first to “like”, plus 1, subscribe, tweet, etc. Have a circle of friends or like minded people help you build a “social base”. Hire an agency or hire someone internally to manage your social accounts, and building their presence (if you aren’t willing to spend $$ on growing it, no sense tracking it).
Only post something that is worth reading. Fools always have something to say, but the savvy business will post great promotions, thought provoking reads, or something that adds value to their readership.
P.S. – just did 10 pushups, which has done me more good than tracking my weight for the past 2 weeks.
What is a Super Web2.0 Mini Website? Think of the best white hat link building sales funnel with all of the benefits and non of the negatives. Yes, it’s even more white hat than this
A Super web2.0 is a manually hand-crafted Mini Website, where we use all of the positives associated with your website, and spread your brand message, while getting quality keyword rich backlinks.
These are a triple threat. Not only are they very aesthetically pleasing, they rank well (on high trusted sites), and they link back to the original site boosting them up. Linking back to them wouldn’t feel like “tier link building” but more like building up a network of sales funnels that represent your business in the best light possible (plus no shady ownership of dozens of domains or expensive hosting/registrar costs). They are strong enough to stand on their own, but when coupled with an original website, their power and value grows exponentially.
But aren’t these just blogs?
No. They are created in such a way that they have high quality, converting landing pages. They are built to mimick 1-5 main pages of your website. Not many people put effort into creating legitmate business pages online, outside of their website. Remember, you aren’t a just website owner, you are a busines owner, and the more quality places you can expose your brand, and get Google love at the same time is one of the rarest opportunities.
The Case Study:
A friend of mine, Marc, runs a Personal Training facility in NJ. I wanted to create something special, basically mini websites in as many locations as possible. This was the birth of Super Web2.0 Mini Websites.
Yes, they are optimized for SEO, but also notice we embedded a Map when we could along with telephone, address, and video. Google and search engines can easily see this and understand what business it is, and therefore understand its popularity. If you were looking for a personal trainer in NJ and arrived at this page (not his website) you would be able to contact him, and make an informed decision on whether you wanted to join or not. It’s a legitamate sales funnel.
I created 22 Sites for Marc, and we’ve gotten better at this process as we keep testing. We are adding more content to make the indexation process easier, and these sites are perfect for sending backlinks and social signals to; boost them up, and they will boost up your main website as well. Lots of win, win scenarios.
Here is the Excel breakdown of rank increases (we did nothing else, other than make the Super web2.0s). Yes, this client has low competition phrases but shows the power of them. *sorry for small image*
441 rank improvments! Keep in mind we didn’t backlink these, or give any social signals, and we did less than 25!
As the search engines begin to crack down on spammy links it’s important to build up a network, a sales funnel of trusted authority websites that represent your business well (web2.0s and video can then be backlinked using a higher volume approach). Right now, is your website the only online presence that can lead to a conversion? If so, you need to expand your horizons, and if not, chances are these super web2.0s would be a great addition to your strategy.
We are currently building 50+ super web2.0s for web2.0backlinks.com and it’s beginning to rank extremely well. We plan on sending links to them along with social signals to create a long standing traffic funnel.
Wow, most people have websites for years and never get to a Pagerank of 4, let alone in under 3 months! How is this possible? Pagerank is determined by the quality and trust of sites that link to you; ingenious idea by the Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Birds of a feather flock together, or in this case link together. It can take years of press releases, interviews, newspaper stories, and other link building to reach such a trusted status, but how did we do it in such a short amount of time?
Time to Piggyback! By posting on already indexed and trusted blogs with high pagerank we were able to get links back to our new website – http://facebookadsppc.com . The actual page where our link exists is on a webpage with pagerank. Some of the blog comments can roll off to another page (or get deleted in time), but for the most part, it’s extremely solid as you can see by these results. As of February 19th we are starting another campaign for this website, but the ONLY thing we did so far, were high pr blog comments to reach this pagerank of 4; the same exact service strategy we used internally is now available to the public.
Best of all, we also see ranking improvements. As you know by now, very strong links help build a solid foundation, and future links can help push towards the desired #1 spot for multiple keywords. This is a great way to protect your website’s from being penalized for low quality (which usually means low pagerank) backlinks.
We did 1000 high pr blog comments back to facebookadsppc.com . This represents an investment of $595.00 based on the Enterprise pricing. Of course you don’t need to do this all at once, we did it as a test because that’s why I get out of bed in the morning (wife’s breakfast is pretty epic too!). Social signals, + “regular links” + high pr blog comments could have you dominating in very competitive niches. Again, only if you are profitable already would I encourage you to signup, or if you are uniquely positioned to become profitable. As Herbert Spencer said “The great aim of education is not knowledge but action”. We don’t like to provide knowledge on something if we can’t provide the service. We used ourselves as the guinea pig (like we always do), and the results show it’s worth offering as a service so here we are :).
P.S. When I worked at a major travel agency this was my primary strategy to push for crazy competitive terms. It was/is EXTREMELY tedious to find blogs with high pagerank that allow linkable comments, which means most Online Marketers aren’t doing it, which means it’s worth doing đ
Twitter Vine is an application that lets Twitter users create their own content in the form of short videos, rather than relying on 3rd parties such as Youtube or Flickr. Much like Jack, Twitter is in search of the goose that laid the golden egg, to increase revenue and increase user engagement.
In the original version of the story, Jack is an immoral character, squandering the cow, playing wife (giant) against husband, and eventually murder for riches. While Twitter isnât murdering anyone, it clearly wants to take away market share from some of the same platforms that helped it become popular in the first place. Much like ânewerâ Jack is seen as a hero for slaying the evil giant, Vine will develop as something meritorious because it gives Twitter users a chance to create their own content; praised by many, and unquestioned.
Donât Muzzle the Ox
Twitter is Muzzling the Ox, or in this case the original players in this content space. If the video sharing ability was extended well beyond a few seconds, perhaps minutes, or hours, it would become very clear that itâs just another video host, now hosted by Twitter. Yes, owning your own content has its benefits but Twitterâs business model is not based on keeping users on Twitter. Itâs always been about aggregating real time news and giving access to websites, images, and videos from all parts of the web. Spreading the love and wealth.
Youtube will survive, along with Flickr and other content creation platforms, but why stop with short videos? Why not add the ability for people to blog directly on Twitter? Can you see how the lines between content aggregator and content creator are being blurred? It doesnât lead to anything good, and usually results in favoritism within the network. Even Google has gone down this path (blogger, Youtube, gmail, etc come to mind), shutting down Knol after realizing it couldnât compete with Wikipedia, which was completely open and created for a purpose.
Time to Sell the Cow
Twitter wants to increase the average time spent on their website. They need more revenue (donât we all?), and outside of their inhouse advertising system (which is very solid), the only way to accomplish this are advertisements within their network, which usually can only be paired with content.
Jack sold the cow for a handful of magical beans. Twitter is selling out the very content creatorâs it helped create, in hopes of more riches in the future. Yes, the average user doesnât care what video or image service is used within Twitter, but it strikes one more blow in any new content creation website disseminating their information through Twitter. They should also expand upon Direct Messaging and throw its hat in the email arena. Then you can upload videos, blog, and email peopleâŚa slippery slope that leads to Tom from Myspace as your default friend.
Now let’s get to the SEO / Online Marketing portion of our story đ
Vine.co currently has 794 indexed pages (not a lot considering thousands are probably using it, but it’s extremely early on).
As more people embed their Vine Hosted “videos” they will be increasing the links back to Vine.co, inreasing it’s power and pagerank but we have a major onPage SEO problem
For them, it’s an after thought, because they will be successful with our without unique page content from within Vine. For you or me it’s another reason not to use their in house video service as it’s not optimized. Would you create content for Youtube if every video said “Joe’s Youtube videos” or “Joe’s Flickr images”. Just seems odd that they are dealing with massive amounts of data and decided not to make it easily findable by the search engines or basic meta principles.
As it stands, I see no reason to use their internal video system, outside of being a normal user (which is probably a fun feature). From the business side, the pages aren’t going to rank, and the videos are too short to lead to any conversions. It will most likely remain a novelty item for sexting, dog pictures, and random compliations from Youtube (ironic?), but don’t get too excited over mashing up 6 second clips because Youtube and other major players are getting really good at detecting duplicate video and image files.
This case study sends signals back to a specific website and tracks the rankings. Internet marketing use to just be about getting blog links and creating an email list. Fast forward to today and we see the results of getting all different types of social backlinks that Google, Yahoo, and Bing love.
Video to follow along:
The test subject:
BookmarkingBeast is a website we own; we decided to invest $ for social signals and for this case study. If you go to the main website: http://bookmarkingbeast.com you can see all the social sharing options in the top left. We had Google+, Facebook, Linkedin, etc for awhile, but just recently ramped up our efforts on Pinterest, Twitter and Youtube to see if we could get results.
The setup:
Create 40 different Twitter messages and have them retweeted approximately 30 times.
Create 40 different Pins and have them repinned approximately 30 times.
Create 40 raw video files and upload to Youtube, vimeo, dailymotion and metacafe.
Here is snapshot of all the pins/repins going on for BookmarkingBeast. Granted, all use the same one, but this is just to show you how powerful you can spread your message / website across Pinterest. Also notice, each description used a keyword phrase we wanted to rank higher for. We did this same approach for Twitter, i.e. keyword phrase1 http://yourwebsitehere.com, keywordphrase2 http://yourwebsitehere.com
Youtube and vimeo allow clickable backlinks in the videos. This is one of the most known, yet under utilized tactic by online marketers. What good is the knowledge of it’s power if you don’t use it, right? We created 40 videos. Here is one example:
Notice not only does the video link back to bookmarkingbeast, but it also ranks for: do follow social bookmarking sites
The result (all that matters đ ):
BookmarkingBeast had other social signals and a small amount of traditional links before we launched this Pinterest + Twitter + Youtube campaign. At the time it wasn’t ranking for any of the phrases in the Meta title, which the main one is: social bookmarking service. Now we see it cracking the top 10 for not only this phrase, but many related ones as well. We see more search engine traffic and our signups have increased. I don’t know if it’s the 100th monkey principle, but it appears more people are aware of the service and when social bookmarking services are mentioned or software, bookmarkingbeast is usually involved in the conversation.
Actions you can take:
If you don’t have a Twitter, Pinterest and Youtube account you need to create them. Every website and webpage you have should be linked back to through these social sites. You can do this manually, hire someone, or use our quality trusted services (same ones used for this case study). Twitterbacklinks.com , PinterestBacklinks.com , and we are launching our Video marketing / youtube backlinks site soon.
To achieve these results would be the equivalent of an Enterprise plan for Twitterbacklinks $150, Pro PinterestBacklinks $90, and our youtube service (40 videos x $15 for creation, upload, promotion). This represents an investment of around $840, with most being video expenses. Between other social signals and a small amount of blog backlinks, this brings the total investment to around $1000. The reason we feel confident putting money into our own services is because social proof is not a fad, and it’s important to invest capital back into research to understand what works and what doesn’t. This works on a large scale, and I’m assuming it will on a small scale (just harder to gauge). Google is still king of the internet and it wants to be fed social signals. The three listed here should keep it full for awhile đ
This is a Post on Getting Started with Affiliate Marketing.
Contents:
What it means to be an Affiliate Marketer
5 Rules of Internet Marketing
Best Affiliate Offers in the Online Marketing Space
How to Become an Affiliate
Popular Affilate Networks
How to Promote Affiliate Offers
Case Study – How much can you Earn?
Being an affiliate means you vouch for a person, product or service. Chances are you have recommended a family member, or friend to a great restaurant, lawyer, doctor, mechanic, and a specific movie. When you did this you didn’t get paid with currency, but your social trust increased (if you gave a good referral). Being an affiliate online has all of the positives of real life referrals with the added bonus of being able to help thousands (a good affiliate referral is one that is needed), make commission for the quality referral, and gaining social influence on a much larger scale than just friends and family.
Let’s also not forget that your word / reputation is at stake. I had a friend refer me to a mechanic that overcharged and the car “died” a week later (I would be fine with overpaying if it ran!). Because it’s not your own product / service you must do due diligence when recommending it to others – yes, this means actually practicing what you preach.
Before we get into specific examples of how you can begin making money as an affiliate online let’s understand these 5 Golden Rules of Affiliate / Recommendation Marketing
1). Never Promote a Product You do not use, would not use, or have not used
Your reputation is all you have. If you are willing to sell your friends or network of like minded individuals on an inferior product, it speaks volumes to your personal integrity and you will never recover. Promote enough junk and you’ll be just another “marketer” trying to squeeze $$$ out of people. I’m sure it’s a dark, lonely road, pushing Viagra products…don’t let it happen to you, unless of course you use, recommend and trust the product đ
2). Be 100% honest with your Reviews
A common tactic of Internet Marketers is to use the words “Don’t Buy Before Reading”, or “Is it a Scam?” after a products name. Of course they never had any intention of actually bad mouthing the product. I’m sure you come across some that are legit, but hundreds of searches later, they typically all follow the same formula. Soft bash the service followed by hype, followed by an affiliate link.
3). Add Value to your Review – Everyone Loves Case Studies
Testing out services or products helps let others know you aren’t just summarizing what everyone else has already said. Take the time and put a test together of your own. This is the perfect opportunity to create a video of you using the product, or a blog post showing exactly why “X” product is a smart purchase decision. From pajamas to laser guns, we like to see things in action, whether video, images, and text.
4). Promote Recurring Subscription Offers
Getting affiliate sales can be difficult. You should avoid heavily promoting products that are only one time gains in commmission. You will be helping someone else grow their members list, and put revenue in their pocket. The least they can do is give you lifetime commissions on all sales from that customer.
5). Expand Your Horizons by Testing New Products / Services
Since you’ll want to follow rule 1, you will inevitably find yourself trying out new things, reading about new product launches, and be more open minded to not only products and services in your “niche” but also ones outside of it. There is nothing wrong with having multiple interests. As humans we all have basic needs and wants. As long as you are honest (2) and add value (3) you can give a great recommendation on a pair of sunglasses and a subscription to Netflix without feeling dirty or unfocused.
I’m READY TO START PROMOTING PRODUCTS / SERVICES. Where do I begin?
If you are in the Online Marketing space you can promote BacklinksVault goods and services. As you know we follow the 5 rules and never put out products or promote services we don’t actively use ourselves. Not everyone needs online marketing services, but chances are you know a friend, or family member that runs a website or business online. Here are some example services you can promote for recurring subscriptions each month.
For most affiliate offers, it requires a basic registration with a username, password and account information (how you get paid!), i.e. linking your paypal or credit card information. You’ll then receive special link and banner codes so you get credit for every person that clicks these links/images and makes a sale.
Don’t want to Promote Internet Marketing Related Goods and Services? No problem, here are some networks.
Amazon is by far my favorite. I caught myself shopping online and telling my fiance “I trust it because it’s Amazon.” Now of course that statement doesn’t make the most sense, because it’s millions of sellers all around the world, but they have so much trust and brand equity that you can leverage. Best thing is people tend to add to cart random things before purchase which helps increase your earnings. One of the biggest negatives is the 1 day old cookie (I believe) so you don’t have long until the referral doesn’t get credited to you.
I was closing in on $100, Passive, in sales each month with Squidoo + Amazon (check my other blog posts) using modules that shared the revenue with Squidoo. This means 4%. If you can send a lot of traffic to Amazon you’ll get rewarded but if you are willing to look for better affiliate deals, you will most likely find them – but will they convert? I err on the side of big brands and equity with online purchases, maybe others do as well.
Under this network you can promote socks, TVS, jewelry, and just about anything and everything listed on Amazon.
eBay Affiliate Partner Network
eBay is another major brand that people trust. I’ve found in head to head comparisons that more people were purchasing from Amazon than eBay when doing my Squidoo lenses (the lenses were unfairly banned on Squidoo so don’t have future updates). Unlike Amazon, it’s not as convenient to add to cart, but I have noticed multi purchase sales.
ClickBank seems to be the preferred place for Internet Marketing Affiliates. They have a wide range of products to promote in multiple niches. You can do some research and find great payout / high converting ones, and even sort by Recurring commissions.
WarriorForum Affiliate Deals
Here you can find some high % offerings, but like anything you need to trust the person / network you decide to deal with. If you are just getting started, amazon, ebay and clickbank offer a more secure payout structure, however bigger $$ can be made by making a deal with an affiliate manger, and WarriorForum is a very solid platform for networking.
Now you are signed up as an Affiliate, but how do you Promote?
Now you should be signed up to an affiliate network and ready to start promoting certain goods and services. Let’s assume you have chosen what to promote. Now the question is how? Well, of course it’s not an easy one, but it’s much simpler than many make it out to be.
Good Offer + Promotion to Targeted Traffic = $$ Sales
Let’s start with the easiest method. We want a built in audience wherever we promote. Long term you want to build a list, establish yourself as an expert, blog, social media, etc. But we want sales now! It’s much easier to justify hard work when you can have a couple mental victories sprinkled in with your long term gameplan.
YOUTUBE. Youtube is the now and future. It’s the #2 search engine in the world and people love videos. Best of all you can make a video today and see sales by tonight (if it’s a good video). If you look around your home chances are you can find something worth reviewing. Give a detailed, honest review and then in the description link to your affiliate offer. Use a url hiding / shortening service such as http://tinyurl.com/
Here is a sample video one of our Affiliates for BacklinksIndexer created. Again you can see as long as you help bring more information, videos can make you a lot of money.
Notice the link in the description redirects to BacklinksIndexer.com . This is because he has cloaked his affiliate link and redirected from his website. The same thing can be achieved using a tiny url service (free).
This same strategy can be applied to non IM related services. Take for instance, Nest Thermostat. It’s like a smartphone for your thermostat. This is a video I found (non affiliate đ ). You can clearly see a cloaked url linking to an amazon page with their affiliate id (it’s in the description of the video; have to view in youtube to see it). This means if I click through his link and purchase, he’ll get a commission.
It’s a very basic “video” with images and music. You can use Windows Movie Maker to edit, or even a basic screen capture program such as CamStudio or Fraps.
Vimeo, DailyMotion, and Metacafe all rank very well and you can use the same video for them.
 Web 2.0s
After Google Panda / Penguin updates they tend to rank very well when the keyword is in the domain, coupled with the meta title. Here is an example of a physical product (not much competition) but you can see the potential. Google this: WaxVac Ear Cleaner review
You’ll see a blogspot page: http://grammy2kaiden.blogspot.com/2012/10/waxvac-review.html
This is just one example: squidoo, hubpages, blogger, tumblr, wordpress, etc are all web2.0 platforms that you can piggy back off of because they rank very well in Google. You can create them and embed your videos within them. It’s a double whammy, nearly guaranteeing success.
A better version of this would be waxvacearcleaner.blogspot.com (doesn’t exist as of now) but you get the idea.
We have affiliates that are earning $X,XXX every month on autopilot with recurring commissions. This doesn’t mean you will make that much right away, but if you email, create videos, and blog about these services you will reach new audiences in addition to your built in ones. If you followed my older posts you know I had a Squidoo account making nearly $100 per month passively, and it was growing. I got banned because Squidoo puts a microscope under anyone with decent earnings. If you promote outside affiliates through Squidoo they won’t be able to follow the money trail as easily. Your progression should be Video, web2.0s, email, blogging, social media. Rinse and repeat. As a test I made ONE video on youtube not in the Internet Marketing space. I only made $22, but that’s just from one video and it continues to get traffic each day. All I did was social bookmark the video and piggybacked off the natural traffic of Youtube. You can of course expand upon this with retweets, repins, backlinks, etc.
Again, don’t let this discourage you. This is from ONE video with 3,000 views, which is nothing in the grand scheme of views on Youtube. If you can make a bunch of videos (try to keep quality in mind), this will become passive income for you, and it’s the most sustainable passive income I see that exists online today. But, this commission represents over $448 in Amazon’s pocket. That’s literally 5% commission, ONE time (Amazon gets a lifelong customer and you get a thank you)…so you should really mix in recurring promotions with these products if you want a less volatile passive cash flow.
Since you are reading this post you are interested in online marketing. Chances are you have friends, family members, business aquantances, etc. You can give them a great recommendation to use our services and get paid. It’s a win win situation. And/or you can venture into your other passions and begin to make reviews / opinions (if you are really struggling to get going) about other services or products. A combination of short term goals and long term planning will help make you a great Affiliate marketer. These tips above are scalable and proven, plus they take no startup capital – free to upload videos and create web2.0s. We look forward to partnering with those that believe and trust our services. You’ll be joining hundreds others and making recurring passive income each month. If you have any questions please email me or post in the comments – contact@backlinksvault.com
Tired of hearing about Pinterest? You don’t have to use it, but you’d be leaving a stone boulder unturned. As business owners and marketers our mission is to establish a company message and disseminate it as efficiently as possible. Whether you run a local hotdog stand, a website, or a multi-national corporation, Pinterest offers some unique opportunities.
Includes:
Pinterest at it’s most basic level of marketing
Pinterest for branding
Pinterest for bloggers
Pinterest for infographics, informative images
Pinterest for “viral” funny or bizarre images (that get you backlinks)
Pinterest for videos untapped way you can gain more Youtube subscribers / views.
Pinterest for ecommerce
Pinterest for brick and mortars
Pinterest for Travel Agencies / vacations
Pinterest for News outlets
How to Create a Board for Best SEO and Target Markets:
How to Create a Pin
Pinterest Marketing Services
1) Pinterest – basic level of marketing:
This is for website owners that don’t have a physical presence, and don’t plan on creating or updating a blog daily. The reality is most websites don’t use a blog, and that’s okay. But you should still exist on Pinterest for the added exposure and SEO benefits since Google, Yahoo and Bing trust the social signals from this Pagerank 8 platform. In the example you see this is how we are currently using the network. Since I plan on creating more quality blog posts and videos we would like to shift to fit into more of these categories, but for now the first one is a good start. Here is the url to the pin: http://pinterest.com/pin/548946642049490924/
As you can see it’s just the image directly from the website. Nothing ground breaking, but helps get us established
2) Pinterest for branding:
Branding is usually met with ROI people screaming it’s not real, but on Pinterest there is a difference between having your logo pinned and repinned and having your entire brand identity present on the platform. Here is an example search for Coca Cola: http://pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=coca+cola . Notice how the brand message immediately confirms that yes, this is Coca Cola. Now, unless you are trying to establish a certain brand identity this might not be the best way to approach pinterest, but the more unique pins you can have up about “Joe’s Famous Sandwiches” or “Insert Your Business here” the better.
3) Pinterest for bloggers:
Blogs can be boring and filled with empty content (let’s hope not all the time). This is where a well placed image comes into play. Your blog post instantly becomes much more “shareable”. It also helps your readership know exactly what they are getting into it; afterall a picture is worth a 1000 words. With a Paint program, or Photoshop and some novice skills you can create and modify existing images on the web to get your point across. Or you can hire a freelancer designer to create an image for each of your blog posts depending on your budget and quality of work. This then blurs the line to the next method. Even webpronews uses non unique images you can see here:
    <<Stock Image (left) compared to a more unique image (right) –>
cartoon images, or something unique of course works best, but if you have a blog you should incorporate images, then pin them.
If all else fails you can throw up random pictures of woman in tight clothing such as shoemoney. He didn’t even bother to try to have it make sense, haha….if he can do that ladies and gentlemen, you can add random images to your blog posts.
4) Pinterest for infographics / information:
Some infographics depict data in such an awful way, while others are simply brilliant. It’s going to either take a lot of time or $$ to create one, but can really help get your point across. Here is an example of someone that had a great social network / Pinterest campaign through their horror infographic http://www.specialcabledeals.com/best-cable-promotions.html
Checking the Pinterest count API we can see over 750 repins. A perfect way to leverage infographics, offers, and relevance to his website (also became a PR 4 which is very respectable)
5) Pinterest for viral images, funny, bizarre, weird:
No one said you can’t pin something if it has already been pinned. 99% of the time you won’t be the one creating these images or photos but that doesn’t mean you can’t use them. Here is an image I found online, pinned as my own (on a random account), edited and added a link back to my website. Warning, I think this is rated PG13 but you might get hot and bothered by this. At the very least you’ll want to crack open some egg nog and get ready for the holiday spirit http://pinterest.com/pin/9148005464894014/
:). You get the idea. If you see something trending on Facebook, Twitter, or other platforms (not pinterest itself, that would be a little late), then you can save the image, upload and link to your website. Instant repins and interaction.
6) Pinterest for videos:
Many people think Pinterest is just for images, but it’s a top 50 site on the web that allows video. Youtube is #2. Together you can cover some serious ground. The competition right now on Pinterest is weak for videos but still has a ton of traffic http://pinterest.com/videos/
This is a great opportunity to pin all of your videos whether it be Youtube, vimeo, etc. They seem to get randomly placed within the videos section so it’s a numbers game. Get enough of your videos posted and repinned and you’ll be sure to grab the spotlight on occassion.
7) Pinterest for ecommerce:
This is what mostly everyone has been talking about. Sites like amazon and ecommerce sites can post images and descriptions of their products. If you create the pin you can simply plug in the description and you have a ready made pin. Most of pinterest frontpage seems to focus heavily on female interests, dresses, purses, beautiful young women out on the town, food, etc, but there are males as well. It’s such a large demographic that if you sell something online you really can’t afford to miss out on easy sales and links back to your product pages. If you sell 5000 products you should have 5000 pins at the minimum.
8) Pinterest for brick and mortar (restaurants, doctors, lawyers, etc):
Google places is a great concept along with Yelp and other local business sites. Here the experience is 1000% more rewarding and informative when you can actually see photos of the restaurant or business. Have you ever looked up restaurants in your area and you only see the fake / ready made image as their logo and that’s it? Well, you hate it and so do your potential customers. If you own a brick and mortar business you should take a 360 degree photo spread of the outside of your business, staff, inside, and some videos. All of this should then be posted on Pinterest. Do you want to go to the friendly doctor that shows you his work area, or the one with the creepy large pixels of a broken stock smiley face?
This is easily one of the most under utilized tactics next to video. If you have a physical address where you conduct business upload everything on Pinterest and the other networks. It will create trust, familiarty and sales.
9) Pinterest for Travel agencies / Vacations and get aways:
The grass is always greener on the other side. Seeing images of far off distances, exotic destinations and vacation locations make us want to be there, which makes us call up a travel agency, which makes us purchase the tickets…then next thing you know, you’re on the beach sipping margaritas all because of a visual image or video found on Pinterest.
10) Pinterest for News / Gossip / Industry leaders:
If you are an industry leader you have to stay abreast of the latest happenings in your niche. Just because you aren’t TMZ doesn’t mean you can’t report on the news, give you own advice and angle on the situation. This is true whether you are selling health products, services, internet marketing, etc. By going to Google News you can see a wide range of news topics. Many of them already exist on Facebook and Twitter, but have a considerable void in Pinterest. To put things in perspective, Pinterest is exponentially more powerful than NYtimes which has an Alexa rating of 108 compared to 38. Stories are visual experiences as well, and the sky is the limit with affiliate marketing promoting other news outlets, or of course your own or your clients.
Thoughts:
Those are currently the best ways to utilize Pinterest. As business owners our job is to create a brandable, systematic message and then disseminate it as efficiently as possible. I would avoid wasting time on Pinterest following others, liking their pins, etc. It’s fine to do from time to time when bored, or to get a better feel of the platform and its users, but you bring value to the network by posting your content, regardless of what category you fall in above. Let’s also not forget that for every $ spent marketing on Pinterest is a vote for multiple traffic sources on the internet. It’s not just a “good” thing to be on Pinterest, but to grow with it makes us all stronger and less likely to be limited to one source of traffic.
If you are struggling with Pinterest or using it in a way not talked about please leave us a comment. We also run the largest network of hundreds of thousands of real Pinterest users around the world that can help pin, repin, like, and comment on your images / videos. Again, all this can be done manually or you can use our system PinterestBacklinks and/or BookmarkingBeast (which incorporates all of the popular platforms but doesn’t focus on one).
P.S. notice the image for this blog. It has a beautiful woman (check), a crowd of people indicating marketing (check), a random arrow (check), and novice like editing to bring it all together (check). See, anyone can create an image for their blog. I know you want to share this on Pinterest, so stop fighting the urge and hit that Pin button!
Hello Fellow Webmasters! Do Twitter tweets / retweets affect SEO rankings in the Search Engines? Let’s find out!
The case study:
Pick 30 webpages (we used Squidoo lenses!) to backlink / retweet using TwitterBacklinks.com . Each webpage receives 150 retweets. Wait over two months and report any changes.
The results: (Click Image to Enlarge)
In aggregate, there were 149 rank improvements in Google, from just Retweets alone. This is an extreme case of sites not promoted in any other way other than Twitter retweets; with a combination of link building and social signals, webpages will have a stronger synergy and more dramatic results.
What do the SEO Experts think? Both these gentlemen listed below are light years ahead of others in the online marketing space.
Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz and Christoph C. Cemper
“Twitter is the single most important tool to power your links” – Christoph C. Cemper
In conclusion we see Twitter backlinks / retweets do have a positive impact on rankings. Social proof and trust is also an overlooked yet important component of conversions. Because someone else has tweeted your content, it can be seen as more valuable. This of course is an ancillary psychological benefit to the direct search traffic. If others like it, maybe you’ll like it. Basic psychology.
Best practices for getting your content Retweeted:
Tweet funny or insightful content, coupled with images or videos, whether using Twit Pic or Youtube
Engage with other Twitter members in your niche or geographical location. If you don’t go to other people’s funerals they won’t go to yours đ
Amass a following through promotions or offers such as coupons or inside information
Use networks to facilitate your Twitter marketing such as Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, and/or TwitterBacklinks.com
Add hashtags or Tweet related trending events while staying different and fresh
Linkamotion is a private blog network which allows you to post to their private blogs for a monthly fee. They allow Spun Content which means you donât need to write unique content, but itâs recommended to help the index rate. There are currently hundreds of blogs in the network, all varying of different IP addresses and pagerank.
Here is the video explaining the test. To summarize, this was done over 5-6 month period linking back to backlinksvault.com with the keyword phrase âbuy backlinksâ. It was ranking 38 to start, and now can’t be found. I do not recommend this service.
    <<Stock Image (left) compared to a more unique image (right) –>
