Moderator: Greg Jarboe, President & Co-founder, SEO-PR

Speakers:
Aaron Kahlow, Chairman & Founder, Online Marketing Summit
Arnie Kuenn, President, Vertical Measures
Lee Odden, SES Advisory Board & CEO, TopRank Online Marketing

Arnie will be the 1^st presenter this morning. He is going to talk about how to research and come up with ideas for producing content.  This is always such a struggle for site owners and marketers.

Start with keyword research [doesn’t everything start there?].  Brainstorm for keyword phrases your customers use when searching and use tools like Google keyword suggest and instant search, Google Adwords keyword tool and Bing’s commercial Intent.  Think about the long-tail keywords especially.

Once you have your keyword list you then need to do some online market research.  Check trending topics on Twitter, Yahoo and MSN.  Take a look at answer sites like Yahoo Answers, Quora, LinkedIn or Facebook.  Check sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Mixx.  Lastly, look at Google’s discussions in search.  All these sources will tell you what is being talked about in your industry and what’s trending.  Jot down notes about what people are asking and discussing because these are opportunities to create content.

Next, look at what’s working for your competitors. He recommends using the SEOmoz free tool of Open Site Explorer to do this.  Look through the list of pages people are linking to and finding interesting on your competitor’s sites.  Jot down ideas that you come up with and keep track of the sites that are linking to the competitor’s content because they may very well be sites you want to get links from once you publish your new content.

Determine where you want to push your content and then list your possibilities.  Keep track in a spreadsheet with columns for keywords (short tail), long-tail and content options.

Something useful is to put together a content calendar.  Think about who your audience is and who you are. What is different this year vs last year vs a year from now and where do you want to publish your content.  From that you can put together a publishing content calendar so that everyone is on the same page of producing content.

He reiterates how important the long-tail keywords are.  Long-tail keyword phrases have a better click-thru rate when compared against the short-tail keyword phrases. On short-tail searches, it was found that 32% of searches click on the 1^st listing and only 5% on the 2^nd. With long-tail 25% click on the 1^st, 14% on the 2^nd, 11% on the 3^rd.  With the long-tail phrases you have a better chance of getting traffic in a lower position vs in a short tail search.

He goes on to talk about how if you commit to content, and you do it right, it will pay off.  This leads into Lee’s presentation.

Lee starts out by saying that content rocks and rocks are hard.  Google and customers care about great content.  Sites with thin content and small social representation will not do well with Panda.  Pay attention to what Google says is good content and then work that into creating good content for your customers.

What is driving the convergence of search, social and content? Angry pandas or customers who consume and share content on the web? Think about how you can create and optimize the content to make the customers consume and share that content.

You can continue to chase after the newest, shiny social toy but it is a distraction.  You have to have social in your SEO bag of tricks, but don’t let it lead the SEO.  Content is where you need to put your efforts.  Approach your search, social and content with customer needs and preferences in mind to help you win.

Customers will go through a process of Discovery, Consumption and then Sharing.  They first have a need and they will maybe ask on social for advice on what to buy – they are discovering options.  Once they do some research in the SERPs they actually will go into the Consumption phase by actually buying a product.  Once the product is bought, they will more than likely go into the Sharing phase by talking about the purchase on her social platform.  Break that information down and decide where you need to be so that you’re in front of the customer at all stages.

You also need to profile your desired customer. Who are they? What do they do? What are their interests? By understanding these things it will help you understand what type of content you need to produce.  Is it going to be how-to guides or reviews or videos, tips etc?  Is it going to require social presence and which social properties matter?  Keep these all in mind when developing your strategy.

Don’t forget to think about the keywords that customers are actually using when talking about your industry and products.  You want to use those keywords and language in your content.  Keep track of the important words so that you know, going forward what you are going to go after.

Develop your content plan.  What content are you going to produce? What media are you going to include?  Don’t let your content be boring but up the ‘interesting factor’ by adding in videos, pictures etc.

Create content for Social SEO so that it appears on the site, social properties etc.  The key is to produce content and then put it out where your customers are.  Produce content that fit all areas of the buy cycle that your customers will go through so that you aren’t missing out on any opportunities.

Lee then gives some real life examples of sites he’s helped by implementing a content strategy.  They just prove how important content is and that if you go about creating and implementing them correctly, it will pay for itself over and over again.

Something to include in your strategy is figuring out how to get in touch with the influencers in the industry so that they can help spread your content and brand to create awareness.

Takeaways from Lee’s presentation:

• Take a customer centric approach
• Incorporate SEO, social and processes
• Practice proactive optimization

Optimized.cc is a guide to help you with content marketing and optimization that Lee offers.

Aaron is up last. He is going to spare us any power points and just read off some notes instead to open up the conversation.

Before you get into Lee and Arnie’s tactics you need to understand and buy into how important content marketing is. If you don’t buy into it then more than likely it won’t succeed because implementation won’t be whole-hearted.

People go to the web to find things, and they use your content to help find it.  That’s why it’s important to have good content.  Aaron disagrees that content strategy starts with keyword research. It should start with the brand and then decide what your objective is.  From there figure out how it fits into the buy cycle and then go into the keyword research.  Just think about the strategy first before doing the research.

He also talks about the ‘push’ & ‘pull’ of content marketing.  Think about if the content is something that will be ‘pulled’ from SERPs or is it something you are pushing out.  Integrating the content marketing basically means that you are going to become a publisher.  Think about how your customers want to come to your site for content but if you don’t have the ability to have quality content to publish, then you’ll have a problem. If that’s the case, then you need to go out and figure out how to get into a publisher’s mindset so that you can create and publish content that will matter.  If everyone does this we’ll all be doing better than what we are seeing today.

It’s been said for years, content is king.  Create, develop and implement a content marketing strategy smartly. Always make the customers your driving force of content creation and you won’t go wrong.

Good morning and welcome to New York! We’re in the Grand Ballroom for the opening of SES New York 2011. As I mentioned in our liveblogging guide, I haven’t been to this conference for six years. First impressions, Hilton’s wifi sucks. The coffee is pretty tasty. There are no tables or outlets for the livebloggers. I’ve been spoiled by the West Coast.

Our keynote speaker is Duncan Watts, Principal Research Scientist for Yahoo!. If the big screen can be trusted, his topic will be Using the Web to Do Social (Media) Science.

Mike Grehan introduces the conference and welcomes us to New York. Thanks, Mike! He plugs SEMPO, bashes PageRage, makes jokes and it’s all a good time. Finally, he introduces Duncan Watts and we’re off!

Duncan starts off with a trip to the 1940s to Lasswell’s Maxim: “The key to understanding what’s going on in communications science is ‘who talks to whom about what, through which channel and to what effect?’”

This is a very difficult task though it seems simple on the surface. He thinks that only now, 70 years later, are we getting to the point where we might be able to begin to answer it. Instead, he’s going to cover 4 projects dating back to 2001 that answer part of Lasswell’s question.

Experiment 1:

Six Degrees of Separation

Based in the 1960s experiment of a single “target” in Boston and 300 other individuals who were “senders”. Each had to get the packet to him but only directly if they knew him on a first name basis. About 64 packets reached the target though about 6 connections.

In 2001, they tested it on a larger scale. They chose 18 targets around the world and 24000 people sending packets. It passed through 166 countries and over 60,000 people. 400 reached the targets. The median chain was 7 people.

This lead to the discovery of the “Bored at work” principle. All you need is something that is vaguely entertaining for about five minutes without making noise and you can get them to do

Experiment 2:

Success in Cultural Markets

Cultural markets are books, music, arts, etc. Things that we value but not in a quantifiable way. “Hits” in cultural markets are many times more successful than average. Success seems obvious in retrospect but it’s hard to predict.

They created a music lab with 48 unknown bands. There were two “conditions”. The social information conditions – each band had a visible signal of how many times other people have downloaded the song. In that conditions there are 8 “worlds” which only count on information collected in that world. In the independent condition, you only got song name and title, no download information.

They did it four times with different conditions, first with teens and then with the adults from the previous six degrees experiment as well. The “strong” test correlated rankings with order, the “weak” did not. The last experiment flipped the order entirely making the best songs seems the least popular.

They discovered that individuals are influenced by their observations of the choices of others. The stronger the signal, the more they are influenced. The more information you give them at the individual level, the less they’re influenced by the crowd but the collective choice reveals less and less about what the individual prefers. You can create self-fulfilling prophecies for a song but not for an entire market.

The trouble with this experiment was that it was linear. You could only be influenced by what came before, there was no social interactions.

Then came Twitter, which is ideally suited as a fully-observable network of “who listens to whom”. It includes many types of “actors”

• CNN, NYTimes
• Governments and Fortune 500
• Celebrities, bloggers, journalists, experts
• Ordinary individuals

And it has URL shorteners like bit.ly which allow you to see information flows.

Classifying users with Lists

How do you categorize the types of users on Twitter? 2009, Twitter introduced Lists in order to help people filter their feeds according to popular topics. Watts and co treat lists as crowd-sourced labels for users who appear on them. They focus on four categories of “elite users”: Celebrities, media organizations, bloggers, companies.

They use a sampling approach to filter the firehose:

The conventional wisdom is that user attention has fragmented in all directions. What they found was that in spite of the fragmentation, about 50% of the tweets that people receive on Twitter come from 20K people. Celebrities outrank all other categories then media, then orgs, then bloggers.

Elite users are more active per-capita. However, ordinary users collectively introduce many more URLS. Media companies produce the most URLs per organization.

Like follows Like, especially when it comes to celebrities.

Bloggers retweet the most, celebrities almost not at all.

There’s a two step flow of information, theorized in the 1950s. Opinion leaders pass on information from mass media to the rest of society, instead of media delivering the information directly. They tried to see if this was the case with Twitter. 40% don’t listen to the media at all. Of the remaining 60%: 46% came indirectly. It’s a huge distribution of intermediary. Ashton Kutcher is the largest intermediary, not just because he has so many users but because he retweets more than more followed celebs like Lady Gaga.

Opinion Leaders:

• Tweet more often
• Have more followers

This is consistent with the Two-Step Theory.

Striking concentration of attention on Twitter but it’s impossible to tell what the “effect” is based on their discoveries so far. So, they took another step to

Twitter Influence Project

Counted bit.ly URLs but only counted them if they were retweeted. Most are not passed on and almost all cascades are small and shallow. A tiny fraction are large and propagate up to 8 hops. The largest cascades get tens of thousands of retweets.

Next they used a random sample of 800 bit.ly URLs by content type, category, interestingness. Split the two months of data they had and stuck themselves in the middle. First month became the past, then they tried to predict the “future” based on it. They were able to do pretty well on average, but that’s a big caveat. On an individual level, it was a random scatter.

Two factors that seem to matter most

• past local influence
• # followers

What doesn’t matter? Interestingness, volume of tweets.

However, you can’t just trigger a cascade by targeting influential Twitter users. Most cascades that influential start don’t go anywhere. It’s necessary but not sufficient. You should give up on predicting individual event. Instead focus on the typical event size and try to optimize that.

Should Kim Kardashian be paid 10k to tweet or can you duplicate it with a broader, less influential base? It depends on how much acquiring the broader base costs. In most cases, the broader base is better unless the cost is very high.

Everyone’s an influencer (.pdf)

Large cascades are rare, hence, it’s probably impossible to predict them or how they will start and it’s better to trigger many small cascades.

Each of these experiments has part of the question from the beginning but it’s still not all put together. Exp 1 showed how large networks are connected, exp 2 showed how social influence drives popularity and unpredictability, Twitter studies show that attention is highly concentrated but influence is still hard to predict at an individual level.

His book will be out next week: Everything is Obvious. Someone buy it for me.

There’s a question from the audience about negative influence but Duncan says it’s not something they’ve studied yet.

Hello, readers! Hope you’re enjoying our live coverage of SMX and thanks for following. In this session, we’ll talk YouTube for marketers, with tips on how to best use the platform.

Moderator: Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

Aparna Chennapragada, Product Manager for Google Video Search, Google
Grant Crowell, Senior Analyst, ReelSEO
Jeff Martin, Dir Search Marketing, TouchStorm
Eric Papczun, VP SEO & Feeds, Performics
Manny Rivas, Online Marketing Account Manager, aimClear

Chris introduces Eric Papczun. He says let’s talk about “winning.” And we are starting with an autotune video featuring Charlie Sheen. [OMG, hilarious. Looks like it’s the same people who did the Bed Intruder song. Yep, he just confirmed it. Well that was a nice little afternoon pick-me-up.]

He uses this video as an example of how something can go viral and the power of it. He doesn’t know if Sheen is winning in all this, but he knows that YouTube is. YouTube is No. 5 on the list for where users go for content consumption.

You have to do something that moves people.

He is showing another video by Arcade Fire. The video pulls images from your own hometown, your own house. It’s a compelling video that asks the users to participate in the way the video plays out. It’s interactive. It really struck a chord in viewers. It’s at the heart of creating something that moves audiences.

Optimize your videos and perform video SEO.

• Two minutes seem to be the right amount of time.
• Nail your titles.
• Enable sharing and social components.

[There was more but he is fast! You can learn more from recent articles in our SEO Newsletter on video optimization.]

More Tips and Facts

• YouTube ads are very targeted, very effective.
• Twenty-seven percent of YouTube sessions contain search queries.
• Create brand channels.
• Own the YouTube home page for 24 hours through advertising.
• YouTube is the No. 1 video site for mobile.

Audience Targeting

• Age
• Gender
• Geography
• Behavior
• Language

Content Targeting

• Connect ads to keywords, buzz (hot topics)
• Individual videos and channels
• Packaged content

You have to mingle with your consumers.

He says the best example is the Old Spice campaign. He is showing the response from the Old Spice guy to Kevin Rose (founder of Digg).

Then finally, measure.

He says to get into the analytics and find out how to measure your campaign.

Next up is Manny Rivas.

He is starting with a study that aimClear conducted on Universal Search and video. He is going over the integration of content into the SERPs like videos, images, Twitter streams and more. Video thumbnails have more than a 40 percent click-through rate than links.

The objective of the study aimClear did was to look at the videos that came back in a result, then find out what platforms they were coming from, what weight they held and a few other factors.

What they found was that YouTube wasn’t the only game in town. TubeMogul is one platform outside of YouTube.

They also found in the study that videos show up in Google in one of 11 “packs” in the SERPs – there’s horizontal, vertically and other ways they are returned. The most common is two-pack videos. Bing only brings back videos in packs of four typically.

The results of the study:

[The slide shows a woman with a pregnancy test, everyone laughs. He says “Yes, confirmation! Marty did not laugh at this slide.”].

Don’t optimize the video with “buy” terms. Using informational-type keywords brought back video in the SERPs. Ranking in the platforms help showing up in Universal SERPs; 100 percent of returned videos in the SERPs ranked on the first page of the monitored platform.

Next up is Jeff Martin. He is going to talk about maximizing views with YouTube tools and third-party tools. Remember, views beget views in YouTube.

Tactics using your existing videos:

• Annotations. Areas of text you create after you upload a video. Can make links to other content of yours.
• Call-to-action overlays. Quasi-ads that are yours. Drive viewers from the video to your site. Enter video into promoted video program.
• Video responses. Get more content in front of your viewers. Rotate your videos. It’s good for engagement because users can create videos in response to your content.
• Playlists. Good for getting content to the top section of the “related videos” list. Use more popular videos to drive newbies to more of your content. Playlists can appear in search results. It’s sporadic though. Playlists have a unique URL that you send people to.
• Captions. Captions are indexed by YouTube and Google and are used as signals; also good for the hearing impaired. Don’t force optimization in your captions, before you produce the video, do the keyword research first, then write your scripts.
• Activity feed. Mass communicate with your friends and subscribers.

Third-Party Tools

• Avoid features that automate liking or disliking, try to simulate video watching, that spam comments and users’ inboxes.
• Look for features that find users, related channels, visibility and engagement levels.

Grant Crowell is last. He is having us switch gears and talk about a topic that may have never been talked about before at a conference. It’s the legal side of video.

He found a lot of legal issues going on with YouTube and users. He said a lot of people’s accounts are being cancelled because they aren’t following the guidelines. No one really pays attention to it.

Consequences include video removal, account cancellation, loss of business, civil lawsuits, criminal charges. Anyone can complain about your videos, too. Your competition can be one of them.

He said someone is actually facing court time for a YouTube prank. His name is Evan Emory [you can Google it].

Check out YouTube legal resources. The terms of service is one place to explore.

Who owns the video – you or YouTube? YouTube doesn’t take away ownership. But, you have granted them all the rights to use it however you want. You can file online with the U.S. Copyright office if you’re concerned about copyright infringement.

If YouTube is an important part of your business, talk with an attorney in the media space. He is talking about a free legal video webinar by Saper Law Offices.

Questions and Answers

Aparna Chennapragada is from Google and she is going to participate in the Q&A session. First, she wants to share a couple thoughts.

She says video is very exciting, but very early and a lot of chaos still. It’s tricky, the hard part is that there is very little text Meta data. As a content provider, think carefully about the information you can provide about the video so that it can be presented for any given query.

Q: Chris is talking about some of the video sites being content farms and how the Google algo update recently hasn’t affected them, what are you seeing?
A: Aparna says Google factors in Universal Search in the quality algorithm.

Like most good SEO theories, mine is based on an observed trend. At Bruce Clay Australia we have noticed that sites with social aspects to them are performing better in competitive search results. This trend was first observed about two years ago, and Des (a Director here) deduced that ‘web signals’ acted to assist rankings. A web signal is the mention of your brand + your keyword on a webpage crawled by search engines. For example “McDonalds cheese burger”. The more web signals there are the more Google considers you to be a brand authority on that keyword. Interestingly, in our experience even a new website can rank quickly and well if the social signals are implemented correctly, indicating that in certain industries it is not so much the number of web signals that are important but rather the rate of change of these signals.

Being social, as I see it, consists of two parts; firstly, add a social element to your website, such as a forum or a blog. Secondly, push content to areas where users are expecting to be social (e.g. Facebook) and leverage their ‘readiness to engage’. Let’s call these processes “On Site Social” and “Off Site Social”. The following diagram helps explain this process in a bit more detail:

A typical progression to On Site Social usually looks like this:

Stage 1 – Content – a site primarily driven around content articles and the frequency with which these are loaded, for example, news sites.

Stage 2: Community around content – a traditional content site decides to open itself up to a discourse – this is the start of a two way interaction. User interest is sparked by new or interesting content, which they can then discuss amongst each other, for example a blog.

Stage 3: Community – when the lunatics take over the asylum. The website becomes driven by the community, with some interaction from moderators or editors. Think Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, and of course Facebook. These sites mimic offline social activity.

Many brands are employing community as a strategy to build their sites. This is not easy to do well – thousands of forums are left deserted, while many a blog has but one post. However, throwing caution to the wind, big brands are ready to risk it all for On Site Social. Why? Two reasons:

There is never enough budget

It is true. Anyone who works in online will know that the cost of pumping out editorial articles is not insignificant. Google also wants these to be high quality and engaging or you might just end up on the content farm blacklist. As the index and your competitors grow, you need more fresh content to retain authority.

It is all about growth

Just like a share price or the GDP, website traffic is all about growth. Imagine your manager saying “yeah the traffic numbers are half, but I get the feeling people are so much more engaged so I am happy”… Yeah right! YoY needs to go up. It’s not just about visitors and UBs. Average page views, time on site, it all needs to head north.

Not only is user generated content great for feeding the long tail, it is also time sensitive and can be mashed up easily to make something unique. People ask questions in the same way they would type them in search engines – so it’s often naturally keyword optimised. There is, of course, moderation needed and sometimes answer quality can be an issue.

While there might be some moderation needed and a troll or two in the mix, UGC is cheaper and can drive significant traffic. If you put your On Site Social to work for you, the community (and hence content) can grow exponentially bigger while you’re running costs remain largely the same; hence the economies of social media.

Off Site Social also recognises some great scaling qualities. In many cases setting up your off site social profiles is only a small amount of upfront work, and the bulk of the content can come from existing on site media. Here are some social media quick wins:

Scribd: Grab your ebooks from your site and re-publish them on Scribd.

YouTube: Take the videos from your site and re-use those on your YouTube channel. Link back from in video pop ups to drive the traffic back to your website.

Twitter: Create an automated RSS feed so that all new blog posts are sent out via your Twitter feed. Every time there is a press release published, pop a note up for your audience to check it out.

Facebook: While running a Facebook page well is by no means a quick win, you can set up a presence so that if people are searching for your brand you appear. Run your RSS feed through a Facebook app to get a bit of extra mileage from your posts. Or at a bare minimum grab your vanity URL as quick as possible to avoid disappointment when you are ready to go – guns blazing – into full social swing.

App Store: Got a great piece of content on your website? Re-use it in an iPhone or iPad app and get onto the App Store to build reviews and ratings.

LinkedIn: Funnel all HR activity and any training or events straight through the company LinkedIn account.

As you move your social efforts off site, you should be able to see the exponential, spherical increase in eyeballs, with a relatively small amount of outbound effort. Of course, never forget that all IMO (Internet Marketing Optimisation) principles apply: get your keywords correct, set up your profiles with links back to your site and write your copy so that it mentions those all important web signals.

Welcome to DomainFest! Jessica and I are bringing you coverage all day from Santa Monica, right here on the beach.  Peter Celeste welcomes us all to the third day of the conference and runs down the agenda.

Domain Experts Michael Berkens, Larry Fischer, Tessa Holcomb, Jason Miner, Kathy Nielsen will be talking about buying and selling domains and handing out tips right and left. Our moderator Lisa Box will keep the conversation moving.  J and I know nothing about being a domainer so we’re excited to jump right in.

Lisa: How do you price domains to sell? Is it forumaliac? do you price by traffic, revenue?

Michael: Look first at comparable sales that have been reported. Try to recall sales that are similar to the categories you have in your portfolio. Visit[something] could be justified by the sale he just completed with VisitStockholm.com.  Look at tourism, geography, etc and compare it.

Larry: In the past few years what has become more of a norm is looking at visits and revenue to determine value within a name. Five years ago, there was an x-factor, a multiple based on revenue. Some people just want to own a market and for those people stats don’t exist.

Lisa: do you use Alexa or anything of that sort?

Larry: If it helps your cause, use it, if not, don’t use it. We also look at the company that we’re dealing with. If we thinking they’re going to get value, we’ll hold out until they realize it.

Jason: We use a lot of the comparables – sales we’ve had over the last 10 years to give us an idea. Ron Jackson’s site is a good way to get an estimate.

Kathy: We look at TLDs, prices, comparisons, etc. This is all on our website – Sedo.com.  Don’t use just one source, look up a couple of sources. There’s also appraisal services that you can look at.

Larry: Talk to a number of brokers, get advice that you may not have considered.

Lisa: How do you set expectations?

Tessa:  It’s pretty common that owners come in with prices that are too high and it’s really true that it comes back to comparables. You have to look at the search, the existing traffic, the current value for that keyword, etc.  Walk the owner through those points and educate them about what their domain is realistically worth.

Michael: You really need to use Google. See what the other extensions are doing. If you have a .com but the .net is already built out and ranked, you need to know that so that you can value it properly.  If the .net gets 100k visitor, then that changes the value.

Lisa: What is the real difference between a make offer or a set price?

Kathy: We all want to sell to end users and end users don’t like to see ‘just make an offer’.  End users are much more likely to start negotiations. 25% of our sales came from Buy it Now fixed price sales last year.

Jason: We sell to small to medium size business owners. 10x philosophy of the sale of the domain. Business owners definitely want to see that fixed or starting price. They feel a trust when there’s a price. They might not inquire when it’s a make offer. Having a price gets them interested.

What’s the best way to get the offer name out?

Michael: we have a button on every domain out there that we own and it’s a clearly stated 2500 minimum.  We don’t do any outbound sales, everything is incoming.

Larry: I make a lot of outgoing calls but we also get whois queries as well. There can be huge price disparities between names. Singular vs plural can be a big difference. The plural owners wanted 10 mil but we were able to do the singular for under 7 figures.

Kathy: We definitely feed the aftermarket services and a lot of people are still going to the registrars as well. A lot of people don’t know who sedo and afternick are yet.

Lisa: Do you recommend brokerage services?

Tessa: Definitely.  Exposure is key for the lower price names and when you’re getting the higher priced names you really need a broker who understands your goals and someone who can keep tabs on who is interested and what’s going on with that name.

[Missed a question here about big name sales.]

Larry: There’s also a gut check.  You have to know it feels right.

Lisa: For people starting out in domaining, trying to build investments, what do they do?

Michael: Some people just want to do $8 buys and then sell it for $59 on Snapnames or something like that. There are still good names coming up on drop.

Lisa: Describe the drop market?

Michael: some registrars drop to specific locations, some are just open. Some are picked up by scripts, some are picked up by hand reg. If you’re just getting involved and you don’t have a lot of cash, that’s a good place to start.

Kathy: Auctions are mostly investors. End users aren’t comfortable not having a price upfront.

Tessa: Go to a broker and have them walk you through and advise you on your portfolio.

Larry: Don’t be scared if you’re just starting out. Thomas Edison was told by the patent office that almost everything that could be patented had been. There’s always room for growth. It’s still possible to get hand regs and make money off them.

Lisa: Are there any categories that will make a better impact?

Larry: Follow the money. If it has a high CPC, there’s probably a lot of buyers for names in that industry.

Lisa: What about cc TLDs?

Kathy: .de is still the first best selling cc TLD. Germany is a very very strong market. 46% of all the cc domain market. .eu is the second one.  She hears .co.uk and .tv are 3rd and 4th.  People are buying .tv for media purposes, not country purposes.

Jason: Look into fast transfer or instant transfer. People like speed and the market is just realizing that that speed is possible. It makes business owners feel comfortable.

Lisa: You mentioned escrow, can you explain about that a bit?

Larry: I recommend escrow. It protects the buyer and the seller. You transfer the domain only after the escrow company receives the money.

Jason: Fast transfer is also guaranteed. It works the same way. Larger sales definitely need escrow but smaller can use fast transfer.

Lisa: What do you think of the new generic TLDs?

Michael: I think there’s a lot of opportunity.  Not only from the domainer side but from the registrar side of it. It’ll be an oipen process where people can play from the other side of the field. With possibly more than 500 new TLDs. There are 21 TLDs right now and I don’t think there’s any way we can predict the effect of going to 521 over the next year.

Larry: I don’t think it’ll affect the .com, .org, .net sales. Also we don’t know how Google will rank the new TLDs. Will they rank .insurance as high as .com? Who knows?

Lisa: How can people increase the value of their domains?

Tessa: it goes back to that assessment of what the domain is worth. We have to look at keywords and traffic. Monetizing the domains used to be PPC and now it’s CPA and we’re seeing domains that sell for CPA for a lot more.  What’s making money now: Health and fitness, finance, dating, gaming. Development: if you can develop a name enough that you can get it ranked, that’s going to sell better.

Jason: Most people have 80/20 domains. 20 percent of the domains are making almost 100 percent of the revenue. SEO the long tail and bring it up. Make sure you put a link right at the top of “this domain is available for sale.”

Is development key?

Larry: My personal experience is that it’s the brand value of the domain, not the development on the domain. IT’s more for the name than for the site.  For the long tail, finished sites benefit from development. However, from what Matt Cutts said, Google is looking to eliminate sites that don’t have any added value, so you can’t just build something that ranks for nothing.

Kathy: I think overall the international market is very strong and they’re investing all across the board. There’s interesting new extensions across the market. After Sunday, it’ll be really interesting to see if the Superbowl has any effect on .co sales. It’s only been around since July.

Lisa: Would you recommend .co buys now?

Kathy: Yes, that’s the beauty, you can still register a lot of them.

Michael: Definitely, there’s only 600k out there already. Go out and get some of them and diversify your holdings. Get cc TLDs and some of these new extensions to diversify.

Lisa: Major predictions? What’s the most important thing to know today in negotiating a sale?

Jason: Have that domain priced up front, have that link on the top of the page, have an educated sales force. Follow up on leads fast, be available all the time. Speed to the market is very important. Predictions: Growth, very positive trends – find a vertical you’re interested in and invest there. If you’re interested you’ll sell it better.

Kathy: They also saw growth last year and she doesn’t see an end to growth. There’s opportunities popping up every day. Invest in what you know.

Tessa: There will be a lot more newbies coming into the market. Lots more education needs to happen on all sides.

Larry: Predicts the Largest domain sale ever in the coming year. 20-30 mil for just the domain.

Michael: We get inquiries daily from the whois. Don’t use privacy and have accurate whois information. has seen a rise in knowledge from buyers. People are giving back reasonable counter offers and they understand better how much domains are worth.

Resources:

Domaining.com

TheDomains.com

DNJournal

DomainNameWire

Eliot’s Blog

At Bruce Clay we decided to start our Australia Day celebrations early! With kangaroo burgers and lamingtons!

We want to wish everyone a happy and relaxing Australia day, and thank whoever is responsible for our mid-week break! Enjoy!

Karma is a concept in some religions that emphasizes the relationship between cause and affect; meaning every action or deed plays a part in shaping the past, present and future. I, myself, am a firm believer in karma. Google also believes in karma. It will gladly serve you what you deserve if you’re practicing harmful SEO tactics.

Does that mean Google is God? Some may argue that. But one thing is for sure: You do want to please it as much as possible through good SEO. The kind of SEO that’s developed through best practices and White Hat techniques, or else you might get what’s coming to you.

Let’s take two recent examples of poor SEO that felt the well-deserved wrath of Google. You may remember the DecorMyEyes.com dude who admittedly reported to the New York Times that he was using bad reviews as a means of ranking.

Long story short: Google tweaked its algorithm to ensure that businesses like that would not succeed online and the DecorMyEyes owner was arrested.

In a maybe less-familiar story, last week Search Engine Roundtable exposed a comment thread in the Google Webmaster Help forum that revealed a shady SEO firm. Someone jumped in on the thread defending the SEO agency but denying that he was involved with it in any way.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, did a little digging and found official state records that pretty much proved the person was the owner of the business. He not only called him out, making him look like a real tool, but also advised members in the forum to stay away from the business.

SEO Code of Ethics

Can I make a religious/evolutionary comparison without everyone getting all up in arms? To me, the search marketing world is kinda like humanity in its infancy.

Let me explain. As a species (of the human or SEM kind), we understand that procreation and survival of the fittest is how we progress. Humans in our earliest years, I believe, needed some form of governance to ensure survival.

Which is where some of the religious doctrines became very handy; for example, don’t kill other people.

Since the SEM industry is developing from its infancy, it’s important for the people who are a part of it to create and adapt guidelines that will help ensure its continued progression.

These rules also help to ensure survival of the fittest for SEO companies that create value.

So I guess that makes Bruce, along with Google, God (Is that stretching it a bit?). All jokes aside, the SEO Code of Ethics was created for a reason.

Through SEM best practice and keeping in mind the best interests of your clients, the search engines and the users, you, too, can obtain SEO Zen.

So like a great many principles that came before us, the SEO Code of Ethics includes:

• No SEO practitioner will intentionally do harm to a client.
• No SEO practitioner will intentionally violate any specifically published and enforced rules of search engines or directories.
• No SEO practitioner will intentionally mislead, harm, or offend a consumer.
• No SEO practitioner will intentionally violate any laws.
• No SEO practitioner will falsely represent the content of the client site.
• No SEO practitioner will falsely represent others work as their own.
• No SEO practitioner will misrepresent their own abilities, education, training, standards of performance, certifications, trade group affiliations, technical inventory, or experiences to others.
• No SEO practitioner will participate in a conflict of interest without prior notice to all parties involved.
• No SEO practitioner will set unreasonable client expectations.
• All SEO practitioners will offer their clients both internal and external dispute resolution procedures.
• All SEO practitioners will protect the confidentiality and anonymity of their clients with regards to privileged information and items implying testimonial support for the SEO practitioner.
• All SEO practitioners will work to their best ability to increase or retain the rankings of client sites.

In SEO, just as in life, do unto others as you would want done unto you. Nothing good can come from shady business practices. You may be able to find short-term success through Black Hat techniques, but long-term value comes from good SEO.

So, take a deep breath, perform your mantra and go out there and make a positive impact on the search community!

“I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about”
-Oscar Wilde

I have an annoying affliction that rears its ugly head from time to time. It’s called blogger burnout. In fact, it literally took me five minutes to write that first sentence. I blame it on three things:

a) Information overload. I literally have 100 things I could write about right now, but nope. Nothing. Cannot form sentences.
b) Blogging every day. Trying to keep blog posts new, exciting, relevant to everyone and engaging is a big job. And sometimes it leads to analysis paralysis.
c) Forgetting that life inspires writing. Not making the connection between the experiences and challenges I face every day and topics for the blog. Big mistake.

But stick around, because in an effort to fix this nasty problem, I’m gonna hit it head on by talking about it. I’m making lemonade.

1. Use what you are experiencing as fuel for your blog posts.

My little problem is actually the basis for my first bit of advice. Write what you know. The fact is, most people who write content for the Web aren’t just bloggers, they’re professionals of some sort with talent in some field.

Every working person (and even the unemployed!) faces challenges every week. If you’re a blogger, use those problems as ideas for your posts. If you’re experiencing it, chances are someone else is, too, and will find value in it.

Oftentimes, ideas will come at the oddest of times — which brings me to my next tip:

2. Keep something close by all day, every day to record your ideas.

This is where I’m extremely guilty. How many of us have (grudgingly) dreamt about work and had a great idea come from it, but nothing to record it at hand? Or, who has experienced an epiphany while driving and nothing near you to document it?

A simple notepad or audio recording device within reach is essential to putting those great ideas down the moment you have them, before they are lost. This is great writing juice for a later date, and helps put the kibosh on writer’s block before it even happens.

3. Always leave your “association” switch turned on.

Some of us turn our brains off when we leave work. Some of us turn our brains off when we’re at work. And as a writer or blogger, our brains should never really be far from associating what’s happening now to our next great topic.

This is why it’s important to leave our “association” switch turned on, and always think about how something we’re experiencing can tie into something we can write about. And how do we remember those things? If you guessed, “Writing it down or recording it as we think it,” you get an “A” for not drifting off. Which means I’m doing my job — Yaay!

4. Tap into your network for topic ideas.

If personal experience isn’t helping you tackle that writer’s block, tap into your network. I mean this both digitally and offline. Take Twitter, for example. I bet you could look at your feed at any given time of day and find a handful of worthy ideas to blog about.

I say this with slight trepidation, because if you’re like me, you become overwhelmed with the volume of information. And it can sometimes seem like everyone is saying the same thing in your community.

So, what often happens is a resistance to writing about it altogether for fear of regurgitated information. Here’s a tip: Try collecting a handful of resources on the topic, read through them, and find a new perspective on it that someone hasn’t shared.

Tangent warning: Today, Susan and I were talking about perspective and opinion in blogging. She reaffirmed to me that having an opinion doesn’t mean being right. But it’s an important aspect of blogging. I thought I’d turn to Dictionary.com for a reminder of what “opinion” means:

o•pin•ion [uh-pin-yuhn]–noun
1. a belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty.
2. a personal view, attitude, or appraisal.

Now, back to tapping into your network. Even if you’re self-employed with a staff of one, you have colleagues. These are people you turn to for insight on business, who have specific skill sets. Look to these people when you’re in a pickle. (Don’t you love old-timey expressions?)

I’ve written countless blog posts by simply asking BCI employees here, “What should I write about?” People on the front lines of a profession are the greatest source of knowledge. They have stories to tell, and it’s our jobs as bloggers to tell those stories.

5. Write about a topic you want to learn more about.

If using other people’s ideas isn’t working for you, pick a topic that you’ve always wanted to know more about and educate yourself on it. One of the coolest things about being a writer or blogger is that you get to learn a lot about things. In fact, I have boatloads of knowledge on various topics that are approximately 1,000 words deep floating around in my brain.

Take advantage of the fact that it’s your duty to learn and report. I’ve written several blog posts and articles simply because I wanted to learn more about the topic.

6. Create an editorial calendar.

Yes, writing and organization can go hand-in-hand. Sometimes brainstorming ideas ahead of time can be a huge help. Imagine sitting down to your computer, looking at the date on the calendar and seeing your topic already laid out for you. Of course, this doesn’t mean you’re married to it. Use it as a guideline and it can work like magic.

7. Minimize distractions but know the value of them.

When you’re experiencing writer’s block, you’re even more susceptible to be distracted by things like pretty colors. Sure, you’ve heard it all before: “Stop looking at your Twitter feed,” they say. “Don’t leave your Web browser open.” “Put that kitty away.” Yes, it’s true. People prone to ADD can be distracted easily. And writer’s block fuels ADD.

Remember, most writers and bloggers are “creatives” at some level, so approaching a writing task the same way an accountant would approach crunching numbers, well it just doesn’t work that way.

If you’re a writer working in a corporate environment, sometimes getting up and walking away from your desk is one of the most valuable distractions you can experience. I can’t tell you how many Aha! moments I’ve had in the bathroom. TMI?

And if you’re writing from the comfort of your own home, well first, I’m having very strong feelings of resentment, but remember — you can also apply the same principles. Just because you conduct business from your couch (OK, envy escalating rapidly), doesn’t mean you couldn’t benefit from a change of scenery.

So. Now that I’ve pretty much showed writer’s block who’s boss, I want to know, what do you do to overcome it?

Here’s a scenario: you’ve spent countless hours on the design of your website, with the input of several experts. You’ve based your design on the knowledge of your Web designer and the marketing and business savvy of either yourself, your team or the execs. You’ve even invested heavily in search engine optimization, Pay per Click and social media, to ensure people are coming to your site.

Six months in, you find your rankings are high in the search engine results page (SERP) and you have a fair amount of traffic, but the time users are on your site and the high bounce rate is painting a very different picture of the success of your website.

People are coming to your site, but they are leaving it quickly without taking any action. This means, you’re ready for the next step in Internet marketing: focusing on conversions. It’s time for landing page optimization. Without it, your money and Internet marketing efforts fall short.

With Google Instant Previews becoming the norm on the SERP, landing page optimization is surely even more important. Google Instant Previews doesn’t just show a preview image of your home page. It can show images of any page that ranks in the SERP. If people can make a decision about your site based on the look and feel of a page before they even click through, then you might be losing customers sooner than ever before.

What is Landing Page Optimization?

First, let’s talk about what a conversion is. A conversion is what you want a user to do once he or she reaches a page, and it’s the basis for landing page optimization (LPO). A conversion can be anything that you, as a business, feel is most valuable. For example, do you want a person to fill out a form? Would you like someone to download something on the page? How about adding something to a shopping cart?

A microconversion is a smaller element of a full conversion. It can help you identify which part of the conversion funnel is or isn’t working. This can be something like a click to the next page or time spent on the page.

Maybe your conversion goals have to do with the time on site and bounce rate in your Web analytics. You might want to tweak your landing pages to improve these numbers if factors such as time on site are important to your site’s success. The ultimate goal in any conversion should be to positively impact the bottom line. So, keep this in mind when setting goals.

LPO is one component in a larger strategy of conversion rate optimization (CRO) for websites. A landing page is a page on your site or any Web page that a user is brought to when they click on a link, online ad or any other entry point. It can also be a page within your site that users stumble upon while browsing through the site. Regardless of where it is, it’s any Web page that you feel is important to the success of your business.

With LPO, tests are conducted in a controlled environment through sometimes-minimal tweaks to either the look and feel of the page (layout, colors, etc.) or to the content within the page (headlines, copy and call-to-actions) to funnel a conversion by the user.

How do I Begin LPO?

The first step is to choose the landing pages that are most important to your business. How do you identify those? A great place to start is analytics. Identify which pages are already driving a fair amount of traffic or conversions, and make it a goal to improve those.

A/B Test: Which Unicorn is More Awesome?

Within LPO, there are standard ways of testing. The first is called A/B split testing. This involves experimenting with two different versions of a Web page. You can do this either at the same time, tracking visitors by IP address so no one visitor receives the same landing page twice, or you can test one page for a specified amount of time, then the other page.

A/B testing is on the front lines of LPO. While you will be able to see which page is most successful, A/B testing reveals only so much data of a landing page. You will measure the success of this test based on your conversion goals, whatever they may be.

The other type of testing is multivariate testing. This is typically a test you’d want to use after you conducted initial A/B tests. Multivariate testing allows you to test multiple elements within a landing page, and conduct more detailed analyses of these elements to see what creates a successful page.

You might also want to study eye-tracking research when trying to determine what changes you are going to make. This type of research can help you determine where the average user’s eyes go on a Web page, so you can manipulate the content on your page to be in line with heat maps (the hot spots for visual connection on a page). UseIt.com has some good research on eye tracking to start with.

Items That Affect Conversion Rates

Research suggests that when people are looking to buy a product online, they go from researcher to shopper to buyer. First, they spend time researching the general product. Then, they choose a make and model, and turn into shoppers. The shoppers then turn into buyers once they have decided on one of the handful of sites that sell the model they seek. Which site a user decides to buy from can be based on many factors. This is where LPO can be crucial to that sale.

You might be surprised at how much one small change on a landing page can affect conversion rates. In a webinar from last summer with Anne Holland of Which Test Won and Trevor Claiborne, product marketing manager at Google, it discussed Google’s own A/B and multivariate tests. The presentation showed some of the small changes to Google landing pages that boosted conversions significantly, and also talked about some changes the team at Google thought would make a difference, but yielded no results. This type of scenario reminds us that human expertise is just guessing without testing.

Data from both Bryan Eisenberg, a CRO pro, and Bruce Clay, Inc.’s Scott Fowles show some of the factors (design and otherwise) that impact conversion rates:

• Color
• Size
• Speed
• Legibility
• Layout
• Shape (Of call-to-action buttons, for example)
• Proximity (Grouping related elements on the page)
• Contrast (Of the color scheme)
• Alignment
• Flow
• Benefits
• Call-to-action
• Fields (types of questions you ask in a form, for example)
• Confidence building

Keep in mind, with Google Instant Previews, that designing a site in Flash should be carefully considered. Flash isn’t compatible with Instant Previews yet, so an alternative is designing in HTML5 — or you can read up on how to optimize for Google Instant Previews and some of the solutions people are trying in Google Webmaster Central.

Understanding Your Audience

Through testing, you’ll begin to more clearly understand your online user base. But even before you begin testing, you can learn more about personas, psychographics and demographics of your users. Eisenberg talks about how to use personas to improve sales when thinking about what motivates people. A persona is a personality type of sorts, and the types that Eisenberg talks about fall into one of four categories: a) Competitive b) Spontaneous c) Humanistic d) Methodical.

How each one of these user groups interacts with your site will be different. And while you can’t cater to each and every user group perfectly, you can make decisions about your landing page that offer something for everyone.

Tools of the Trade

Landing page optimization is a complex project. If you’re taking it on, all on your own, the best thing to do is start reading about it from the experts. Bryan Eisenberg, Anne Holland, Tim Ash and Avinash Kaushik are great resources to learn from.

If you already have some skills in things Web design, analytics and science, you have a good foundation to facilitate testing on your own. If you have a team of people that can help you with each of the tasks involved, that’s great, too. It just depends on how large you want the project to be. But, don’t ever let the idea of testing overwhelm you to the point of not testing. This would be the greatest mistake.

Some tools for facilitating LPO testing (although you’ll need to understand what you want to change and why, beforehand), include:

• Google Website Optimizer (this tool is free)
• Visual Website Optimizer
• TuningEngine
• Unbounce

The Takeaway

No Internet marketing strategy is complete without CRO, and landing page testing and optimization is an important part of understanding your audience, catering to it, and making it a win-win situation for both business and user.

Even if you’re a do-it-yourselfer without a big budget, start small, experiment when you can, and dig into all the free resources online from the experts who do it for a living. You cannot afford not to test your landing pages if you truly want your site to work for you.

Alas, Movember has come to a close and all the SEO Mo Growers are clean shaven again. The office is already missing that certain touch of class brought about by 5 mustachioed gentlemen, but sadly all good things must come to an end.

The SEO Mo Growers team was able to raise $465 for prostate cancer awareness and other great causes. A big thanks to all who donated to the team or its individual members, and an extra special big thank you to all the wives and girlfriends for putting up with the fuzzy upper lip for a month.

Goodbye and thanks for the memories…

SEO Mo Growers – Mid Movember

SEO Mo Growers – The end of Movember

SEO Mo Growers and Everyone

Until next year.