46 and 47 » Website Marketing

Victoria’s Secret Takes Geo-Targeting Email Campaigns To New Heights

47 — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 04:12:29 +0000

A couple of months ago, Victoria’s Secret starting doing something pretty interesting with their email newsletter. I started seeing unique emails from them marketing some athletic apparel with collegiate sports logos they’re selling now. The content of those newsletters is geo-targeted based on, apparently, the zip code you give them when you join their customer list. The really cool part is that it’s cross referenced with the major universities in the area. So, for example, a person living in Los Angeles, California might see “blah blah USC Trojans versus UCLA Bruins blah blah” because it’s rivalry week in the college football world so they play each other this weekend.

Pretty neat. The likelihood of someone (or a significant other) in L.A. being a Bruin fan or a Trojan fan is probably high. I think it’s a good idea and wish I knew how well it’s working for them. I know I’ve seen quite a few of the shirts they’ve advertised in the newsletter while tailgating at college football games this year but that may or may not be related.

So what’s not to like about this? Well, we live in a different state than the one with our favorite college sports team. In fact, almost all of their geo-targeted newsletter talk about two teams that I absolutely hate because of that. Every time I see one of those emails I alternate between being pissed off (my die-hard sports fan side) to being utterly impressed that they even thought of this (my internet business side). What I really think they need is an option for people like me to put in their favorite team. I’d gladly give up that marketing data so see stuff I’d actually buy for my better half.

Hmm. Now that I think about it, everything they’re showing me right now I might still buy but only to stomp on, douse in kerosene, and burn in effigy. That’s probably enough sports fanaticism for one article

If you’re doing email marketing you might think of ways to borrow this technique. Even though I’ve got a few minor beefs with it, it’s still a neat idea. Now we just need them to publish their conversion data so we know how effective this is. Or not.

47
Thanksgiving. Football. Perfect.

A Different Perspective On John Chow Getting Banned From Google

47 — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 03:20:54 +0000

After reading some of the negative comments in a review of Nomadic Matt’s ebook, I disagree that everyone should ignore John Chow. The John Chow brand is one of the most powerful in the “make money online” niche. Seriously, how many webmasters, regardless of their niche, could get banned from Google and still increase their earnings?

It’s not like he’s flying blind with his blog, he knows exactly what he’s doing. Why does everyone talk about how he doesn’t rank for his name but forget about his other websites? Anyone searching for the The Tech Zone, a site he also owns and started before his blog, finds that as the top result. Hmm.

Most of the people reading this article know who John Chow is regardless of what Google does. Heck, there are still a bunch of fake John Chow blogs mooching off his brand. That brand is worth a lot of money and, if I could do it without the fame, I’d trade places in a heartbeat. He’s been banned for longer than we’ve been building websites but people are still talking about it. Search engine rankings aren’t the only way to measure value people. Do you think all of the advertisers on his blog, people that ask him to promote their products to his list, and organizers paying him to speak at their events do it just because they liked reading what he ate for dinner yesterday?

I think people should, at the very least, start using him as inspiration to grow your own brand and build up your list. Be honest with yourself. You know you’d crap your pants, reverse course right away, and beg forgiveness if Google dumped one of your main websites from their index for doing something they didn’t like. Why didn’t he?

Step outside of the internet marketing world, go back to being Joe the web surfer for a minute, and you’ll see the importance of branding. When a 16 year old girl looks for her daily “what’s the newest celebrity gossip” she doesn’t need Google to find it. No way. Perez Hilton might be a mean, mean little man but I only dream of getting that much type in traffic. Repeat type in traffic. Guess what? Tons of celebrities hate him because he’s such a jerk. Heck, a big chunk of his regular readers hate him too. It doesn’t matter because when you think of celebrity gossip you think of Perez Hilton. The I Can Has Cheezburger people don’t live in fear of Google laying the smack down either. There’s a reason Aaron and Peter at SEO Book talk about branding so often.

You probably think I’m the biggest John Chow fanboy in the world by now. I’m not. Most of the time I don’t read anything he says or care what he does. He’s a publisher that got greedy, tried to game Google, and got caught (only large corporate websites should buy PageRank and rankings like that). I learned an important lesson from that whole self-imposed fiasco with his blog and our own experience with getting dropped by a search engine.

Unless you have a brand or a list, Google is your pimp.

John has both. How about you?

47
Looking forward to the day when I stop being a Google man-whore.

How Accurate Is Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool?

5 Reasons Why Our Cable Company Needs Niche Marketing Lessons

47 — Fri, 22 May 2009 05:26:12 +0000

Our cable company gave us a perfect case study in horrible niche marketing. One of their recent TV commercials really shows why if you don’t know your niche you’re toast. You’ll understand why it was so bad in a minute but first a bit of background.

We were both athletes growing up and still love sports to this day. I guarantee that when there’s a major sporting event happening, we don’t think about our small internet business, 46 and 47, at all. Unless it’s a timeout or halftime or something. Unfortunately, we don’t get any work done then either. Anyway, the point is we’re both huge sports fans and when a commercial targeted at us came on TV we both actually paid attention and listened. It went like this.

Basketball Fan is watching the big game and his team is down by 2 with the ball with like 30 seconds left.
The phone rings and it’s Basketball Fan’s brother who’s a fan of the opposing team.
Basketball Fan doesn’t have to get up to see who’s calling because a name and number from caller id magically appear on his television.
Basketball Fan sees that it’s his brother calling to say something like “Ha, ha, sucker! Basketball Fan’s team is going to lose!”
Basketball Fan’s team hits a 3 at the buzzer for the win, Basketball Fan celebrates, and answers the phone to tease his brother.

That sequence of 5 events illustrates why they should have let a sports fan read the script before wasting their money. It’s wrong to us on so many levels. We just looked at each other as it played and started ripping the commercial to shreds in tag team fake wrestling style.

(46) Who the heck’s calling me during the big game? It’s gotta be a telemarketer.
(47) No kidding! Everybody knows not to call us during the big game. I wouldn’t answer the phone.
(46) It’s a 2 point game!
(47) With 30 seconds left!!
(46) That’s still anybody’s game!!!
(47) What do you mean it’s my brother?
(46) Why is my brother stupid enough to talk trash during a 2 point game with 30 seconds left.
(47) What an idiot. He’s not really a fan if he’s not sweating bullets right now.
(46) What’s up with that stupid caller id box?
(47) Yeah, it’s covering up part of the screen!
(46) Did sports fans make this?
(47) No way. There’s absolutely no way.
(46) You deserve to lose if you talk trash during a 2 point game.

Needless to say, there’s no freaking way either of us will ever sign up for that stupid “caller id on TV” thingy. The marketing department showed us exactly why we shouldn’t buy it with that commercial. I just hope none of the non-sports people in our family ever buy us one as a gift.

We sure learned a valuable marketing lesson from our cable company. They got the details of each tree correct (sport, point differential, time left on the clock, etc) but completely burned down the forest. Almost anyone in that niche could have told them they were doomed.

Have any of you seen marketing that makes you not want to buy something even though you’re obviously the target audience?

47
Hoping none of our website marketing makes people blog about how bad it is.

Getting Yourself Off The Akismet Blacklist

47 — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:53:24 +0000

This assumes you aren’t actually a spammer and don’t deserve to be blacklisted.

How many of you comment on blogs as part of your website marketing strategy? I’d been leaving comments on other blogs lately and noticed they weren’t added to the threads. I didn’t think much of it at first because a lot of people, including me at the moment, hold comments for moderation. I don’t always go back to those threads to see a response either.

After it kept happening I figured Akismet had incorrectly flagged something about me (the domain I was guessing) as a spammer. It turns out they’ve got a contact form with pretty good support people. I asked if I’d been blacklisted through the form, they responded pretty quickly saying yes, and fixed it.

I’m back leaving unintelligible comments at 4 AM and making myself look stupid again. Yea!

47
Commenting on a blog near you.

Website Marketing Using Image Search Engines

47 — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 02:36:37 +0000

Did you know that images can help bring more visitors to your website? It takes a little bit more time to do this but leveraging image search results is another way to increase traffic. Think of the image search engines as a way to supplement your existing traffic.

A Picture Of What?

What do you need to do?

Use descriptive names and captions for the images.
Build up links back to that page (which you should already be doing).

It seems to work best if you use the names of products, people, or places. I’ve found that stuffing in every keyword under the sun doesn’t work at all for us (but it might for you so try it and see what happens). Calling the files something useful to people like gold-rolex-watch.jpg instead of image1.jpg gets the attention of Google (ditto for the captions).

Getting image search engine traffic from Yahoo and Live is still a mystery to me. Maybe someone reading this will have pointers?

Where Are The Knives?

I’ve tried to do this for a while but didn’t always do it intelligently. For example, one of our older articles included a picture of a type of cooking knife. I naturally named it something-knife-something.jpg. That article and this site have nothing to do with cooking knives of course. We rank well in Google for a variety of cooking utensil keywords now and occasionally, we get a visitor here looking for knives. Oops!

No Thanks. We’re Just Looking.

One of our sites uses this extensively and we get a lot more traffic because of the images. Roughly a third of its search engine traffic came from Google images over the last thirty days. That’s the good news.

Unfortunately, the conversion rates are craptastic so far for us. The visitors referred by Google’s image search don’t stay on the site as long and don’t click ads and affiliate links as often. Eventually, we’ll figure out how to monetize that better (hopefully) but it kind of stinks right now.

Ideas For Better Results

I think you need to really experiment to see where it works best. Based on my limited experience, I’d say if you’re selling pictures or anything where people regularly look for pictures before buying, then it’s definitely, definitely worth pursuing.

A celebrity blog or forum could really take advantage of this too. So if there’s a good picture of a famous person’s tattoo then call that picture the famous-person-tattoo.jpg (use their name instead of famous-person of course).

Another thing that might work is using image search to funnel traffic into your money pages. So setup pages or blog posts designed to get image traffic and put up recommended products or whatever there.

Do any of you have experience with image search engine marketing? Are your results any different?

Image courtesy of abnelphoto.com