I found this today from the excellent ReadWriteWeb (a must read) and thought it was so good I should share.
That Stupid 30 Pounds of Stomach Fat in Eight Weeks Ad
Has anyone else noticed that this ad is EVERYWHERE on the Net lately? Easily the most all encompassing media buy of all time. I think they must have bought every single banner slot on the Web. I’ve seen this a million times, and my fiancee recognized it immediately too.
Does this silly banner ever go away? I think I've seen it on every page on the net.
Posted in Online Marketing.
A Few Quick Tips for Proper Twitter Etiquette
I’ve been a pretty big fan of Twitter lately. As I grow this blog (can I please have a little free time?) I’ll put a fancy link to my Twitter account. But for now, you can follow Justin Schmidt on Twitter by going to www.twitter.com/jtron9k. Now that you’ve come back to this site after following me on Twitter, here are my five quick tips for proper Twitter Etiquette.
Five Quick and Easy Tips for Proper Twitter Etiquette (or Tweetiquette)
- Don’t always expect to be followed back. Join the conversation and participate! If you follow someone, occasionally reply to them or visit their links.
- If someone direct messages you anything besides a spam link, direct message them back.
- If someone retweets (RT) then thank them.
- Just like in real life, using please and thank you will get you far.
- Don’t tweet anything that you wouldn’t say aloud at a dinner party.
This is just the beginning of a longer series I want to do on Twitter etiquette. If you have any suggestions, please leave them in the comments! I love to hear from people on this. I’m not by any stretch a Twitter power user, but I love the service and I am pretty convinced micro-blogging will be the future of the Web.
Posted in Social Media.
Do Your SEO Prep Work Just Like You Would Do Your Prep Work In the Kitchen
I do a lot of SEO writing. One thing I’ve learned is that if you do a bit of prep work, you’ll have a much easier time actually writing the content.
My SEO prep work process is pretty simple. It is SO simple, that I can put it into one of those super SEO friendly “Top X” ordered lists you see all over the Internet.
So…
Five Steps to Brilliant SEO Prep Work
- Copy and paste your target URLs (for external linking) your source URLs (your references) and the keywords associated with each at the top of your word processor / text editor.
- Write three sentences describing your target audience. It is important, in any type of writing, to make sure you know your audience. This is especially true for content on the Web.
- Distill each of your paragraphs down to one sentence, just like a META description, and be sure to include your target keywords.
- Determine the target length of your article and your desired keyword density. Knowing this ahead of time will keep you in check from dumping your keyword in there a million times.
- Develop those sentences into two entire, alternative paragraphs incorporating the details learned from your reference URLs while being mindful of your keyword density targets. You also want to be damn sure you’re not making spam. Developing multiple versions gives you the flexibility to have an “article directory” ready version if you want to use it.
Posted in SEO.
How To Market Using Twitter
I had a wonderful example the other day on how to use Twitter to market your products and services. This example wasn’t something that is completely new, as I know it is becomming a fairly common technique. Nonetheless, I was fairly impressed by the ettiquette of the user who marketed to me on Twitter.
Story begins with me asking my girlfriend to marry me on Christmas. Being the good little social media user I am, I tweeted my engagement. Within minutes I had a local photographer in St. Louis following me on Twitter. He was kind enough to say congrats on the engagement, so I figured it would only be appropriate to extend the offer of checking out his services. Now he is one of the photographers I’m considering hiring for my wedding.
The lesson here is that if you’re going to do keyword searches on Twitter for tweets related to your business, at least engage the person. Don’t just follow them and hope they follow you so you can tweet your marketing messages.
Posted in Social Media.
Keyword Performance Dashboard Report in Adwords
Logged into Adwords this morning and noticed a new feature. There is a dashboard report in the “Account Snapshot” tab that can give you a quick report of your top performing keywords, keywords without clicks, worst performing, most expensive, and most competitive keywords for your selected date range. This is pretty handy. I do a lot of snapshot reporting at work and I usually have to find all these manually with advanced filters and sorting in Excel. Nice work Google.
Posted in Online Marketing.