Please see below for our Think Visibility live blogging notes (updated throughout the day).

• Lets talk about Links, Baby – Paddy Moogan
• Mind Games: Using Brainwashing, Psychology and Cults to Boost Your Conversion Rate – Stephen Pavlovich
• Adventures in outsourcing – Paul Madden
• Twitchhiker – sharing, not selling – Paul Smith
• One Domain, One Hundred Days, One Result – Gary Taylor
• Dave’s Den – Dave Naylor

Lets talk about Links, Baby – Paddy Moogan

Paddy will be covering:

- Reviewing sites that have been submitted (to provide link suggestions)
- Generic link building tips
- “Shadier stuff”

First website reviewed: thefoodplace.co.uk

Link Analysis

Think about what type of links you need before just getting any links.

Their current profile has lots of sidebar/site-wide links for The Food Place.

So what do they need?

More domain diversity. They have too many links from linking pages, as opposed to domains.

Easy win?

Link bait; “Top 10 Restaurants in Leeds”, etc. Play on people’s ego’s to get links. If you’re mentioning a restaurant then they are likely to be interesting. Try to mention restaurants that are active socially, to give you the best chance of getting some engagement from them (ie. a link back from them).

Consider running a survey before hand, asking people for their favourite restaurants. This will allow you to contact the restaurants before hand, by encouraging them to send people to vote for their own restaurant.

Using Twitter for Links

Paddy took a sample of 50 of their followers, and 38 of them had websites. Why not try to get links from them? They are all following the restaurant for a reason – and may be willing to link to the website.

Qwerly.com – Let’s you pull information (such as user’s websites/bios) from a list of followers without having to login to Twitter. You can scrape this using Google Docs rather than manually looking for everybody’s websites. Use Friend of Follow initially to get data from your users (export via CSV), then import this into Qwerly.

Links from Customers

Feature customers in a news letter, give them a specific discount (asking for a link back).

Next website: smartcatlearning.com

Currently, they are lacking domain diversity, although they have some good strong links.

Opportunities

- Schools
- Parents
- Mummy Bloggers

There are so many mummy bloggers. Once you’ve searched Google and found a good mummy blogger, click the ‘similar’ link in the search results to find similar ones.

Search Twitter bios using Follower Wonk for mummy bloggers.

Next website: shopsafe.co.uk

This website would be great for “ego bait”…

Provide awards for websites = give badges to the winners to get links back. They have 30 or so categories, so do it for every one of these categories. A lot of potential link opportunities.

A “blue sky idea” = become a review aggregator…

Push customers to add more reviews, they could then become an authority and act as an independent review website. Let the retailers use these reviews on their website (including a link back).

Next website: acorn-printing.co.uk

They are fair trade. This is gold for getting links, as not all competitors will be fairtrade.

Use Google to find fair trade links to get links from various link pages. This is an easy win.

Fairtrade.org provide lists of local campaign groups, there’s potential to get links from them.

They provide t-shirts for universities and charities, try to get links from these.

Link bait idea

Someone holds the record for wearing 155 t-shirts at the same time. Try to beat this record wearing branded t-shirts, and push this out through YouTube, Twitter, etc. Likely to get links to your website.

General Tips

Guest Blogging

Find targets and do outreach first. Contact people before you write any content, just provide them with the ideas, perhaps give them 4 or 5 ideas.

Add links at the top of your articles instead of the bottom. Bigger click-through rates + Google likely to give more authority to links at the top of articles.

Ecommerce

Get a link from SafeBuy. This is a pricey process, but you get a handful of good links from their website. If you submit to them, submit 4 or 5 different categories, as you can get multiple links.

To get links to product pages, create YouTube video of the product (a demo of it, etc). Provide the embed code for people to share this video, but get a link back to your specific product page.

New Startups

Smarta.com are always interested in start-ups, and are likely to give you a link if you do an interview with them, etc.

Links from Journalists

Use JournalistTweets to find journalists within specific niches and topics they are talking about. Reach out to them if you have relevant content.

Paddy now goes on to talk about the “shadier stuff” which he’s asked us not to blog.

Mind Games: Using Brainwashing, Psychology and Cults to Boost Your Conversion Rate – Stephen Pavlovich

Steve will be talking about conversion rate optimisation.

Conversions is not just about buttons. You can’t just tweak little things on a website in the hope that things will improve. You need to persuade people. Find out why they aren’t converting, and what can be done to encourage them to convert.

Persuading People

When doing split tests, think about why somebody isn’t converting.

Persuasion has been going on a long time. None of this is new.

Stop looking at other websites for inspiration – look to other forms:

- Spam junk mail: These are very finely tuned pieces of persuasion in action. These off-line letters are typically much better converting than typical online spam. These have been split-tested over long periods of time.

- Time Me Out (yes, the TV show): The principle ends up being people wanting to beat the other person to get the goal (ie. two girls fighting to impress one man). The same applies online on eBay: people end up getting competitive and try to out-bid each other, even if it means paying more for the product than they would pay in a shop.

Example

Zappos in the US list on their website “only 3 left!” on their product pages. This implies that there aren’t many left, and people have to buy now so they don’t miss out. They could take this further, and tell the visitor how many other people currently have this in their basket – bring out the competitiveness of people to encourage them to buy.

Steve then moves onto a Q&A from the audience…

Q: Have you noticed a difference in persuading someone from a social outlook, as opposed to a standard search outlook. How would you convince someone from Facebook, for example?

Steve: Don’t lead straight in with the sale. It’s about building the relationships (and email marketing is one of the best forms of doing this if you can grab their email address).

Q: Steve is asked to review smartcatlearning.com – a website to provide dyslexia test for children.

Steve: Testimonials are key. Although the page currently contains some of them, don’t underestimate the power of testimonials – flood the page with them. Video testimonails would also probably work well.

Work on the authority angle. Try to get positions from the members of the school – are they the head teacher? Include this information, make the testimonial stand out more.

Q: How do you get more email addresses from people online?

Steve: First analyse why people are coming to the website. If you don’t know, use Kiss Insights to capture the data to specifically ask them once they arrive. Take that data, and you can then tweak your website to provide related products etc, and also incentivised ways of grabbing email addresses.

Create content that will target people coming to your website. Monitor the incoming search terms and create things such as buyers guides, trends, etc. Give away this valuable (free) content, then perhaps begin testing whether you can get people to enter their email address first.

Play on the principle of giving somebody something first, then asking for something in return:

1. Make a download available for free
2. Ask for their email address before the download can begin
3. Let the download begin

In this example, the person has got something for free, but then they need to enter their email to confirm it. They are likely to be much more inclined to enter their address at this stage.

Avoid adding email newsletter fields within a checkout process, but add a note asking them to sign up to the mailing list after they have checked out on the site. This page could also be used to get feedback on the site.

Q: Do you have any benchmarks on conversion rates?

Steve: The only conversion rate you can be happy with is 100%. The thing about conversion rate is that it’s not a very good metric to use. Ultimately it depends on the industry, the website, the traffic, and how much a conversion is actually worth to you.

Branded traffic will typically convert much higher.

Ultimately the conversion rate of a website can only be compared against itself after a period of time to judge the difference/improvements.

If you’re doing a split test, that’s when the conversion rate of a website becomes important.

Q: If you could recommend ONE thing to improve your conversion rate, would would it be?

Steve: Look at where the traffic is going. Analyse the sales funnel, and look where an improvement in the conversion rate would give you the biggest benefit (ie. a checkout page for example).

Speak to your customers. Are they concerned about delivery? Split test some actions based on the insights. Don’t test anything too small – there’s no point. Do big, bold, changes, and use that data to refine.

Use surveys (via email) to everybody who has bought from the company: ask them what one thing would stop you converting on our website? They might suggest they haven’t seen the product in the flesh, and you can change this by providing hands-on videos, demonstrations, etc.

You’ll never know what the objections are, until you’ve asked them.

Adventures in Outsourcing – Paul Madden

Types of outsource:

Coding and Admin:

- oDesk
- Elance
- V Worker

Design

- Code my Concept
- P2H

Business Admin

- Free Agent

Human Being

- Crowd Flower
- Fiverr

Crawling

- 80Legs

oDesk

Paul’s favourite tool for outsourcing. oDesk provide a tool to let you take minute-by-minute desktop screenshots of the people you employ.

Use English skills of 5 as it’s absolutely vital you can communicate effectively.

Chose providers that are affiliated with a bigger provider – don’t just use individuals. This means you can deal with a manager of a team, and outsource various tasks to his team.

Get the owner of the team to sign an NDA.

Don’t interview – just give them a small task (paid) to test their skills for future projects. Also try to speak to them on instant messenger and have a proper conversation with them.

Set an hourly limit to pay them (ie. 20 hours a week).

Add them to Basecamp. Ensure all providers are added to Basecamp, get them to track their time and communicate via the messages (client’s can also be added to this).

Make it nearly impossible for them to get things wrong. Break tasks down into the very littlest detail to ensure it comes out meeting the exact requirements.

oDesk also have an iPhone app – which is great for tracking progress.

Outsourcing

Narola Infotech are a 30+ staff provider on oDesk with 5+ years experience. Compare them to a solo provider, there’s a lot of risk involved, and are likely to go off if they get a better offer.

Are you exploiting people by outsourcing? No, not from what Paul has seen.

Stereotypes

Coding (PHP/MySQL)

General:
- India (organised)
- Pakistan (independant)
Typically $9 an hour

Specialist:
- UK
- USA
- Canada
Typically $20+ an hour

For design, he’s never had any success outsourcing apart from the UK. The same applies for content – if you need good quality content then you should use native speakers.

Some Tools

Crowdflower

Typical tasks include:
- categorising images
- looking for particular information on sites
- helping out with account creation

Fiverr

A community you can have some fun with.

Providers will do anything for $5.

Paul shows us some examples:

- “I will walk into a shop and shout your brand name for $5″

Paul setup a job with him, and asked him to shout Think Visibility.

He got a message from the provider, saying he was arrested outside Walmart for filming illegally.

Paul’s second attempt at Fiverr was getting somebody to record a video of dancing puppets shouting Think Visibility.

Paul goes on to talk about some bits that are probably left unblogged (one for attendees only).

Twitchhiker – sharing, not selling – Paul Smith

Unfortunately my laptop battery died for this session. Sorry.

One Domain, One Hundred Days, One Result – Gary Taylor

Gary is up next to talk domains.

The challenge (set by Dom): You’ve got 100 days. Pick a domain, get it to rank, then generate a sale /sell it.

Where would he recommend to buy establish domains/websites?

- Sedo
- Acorn Domains
- Your Main Domain
- Deal a Site
- Site Point Market
- A4U Forum

What was Gary looking for as part of the challenge?

- An enjoyable niche
- Retail product availability (ie. you can actually see stuff)
- Existing traffic and potential to improve
- Established rankings (but not number 1 rankings)
- Buy it now price of £1,000 – £2,500

Overall he wanted an established domain, but something that he could get his teeth stuck into and improve.

If you’re going to develop a domain/website, you simply have to enjoy the niche, otherwise you’re never going to continue developing it/be committed to it.

The domain niche Gary decided on for the challenge was: Dogs.

Rottweilers.co.uk was available for sale on Sedo, and Gary bought it for £1,500. It’s an existing domain, 3 years old, 60-100 uniques a day with a premium WordPress theme.

Comparing this domain to 3DReadyTVs.co.uk that Gary had setup from scratch (registered 2008) and developed from the ground up, the Rottweilers one proved to generate many more visitors.

How do they compare (revenue)?

Rottweilers: he’s earned £3.50 in the past 7 days.
3DReadyTV: he’s earned 90p in the past 7 days.

You’ve got to put a price on your time – as as any PPC or SEO would, domainers have to be aware of the potential revenue value of developing a domain before committing to it.

Q&A from the Audience

Q: Will exact match domain’s “bubble” burst?

Gary: Google are putting focus on brands recently, but who is to say keyword-rich domains aren’t brands? If you’ve got a good keyword-rich domain, you’ll have the advantage over your competitor. Ultimately a lot of it comes down to how much you develop the domain (in terms of content and links). Keyword-rich domains also benefit from type-in traffic.

Q: Have you ever lost rankings when you’ve purchased a domain from someone?

Gary: Yes. People may do things to make domains look to be ranking better than they are (ie. short term rankings). The key is to do your research – make sure the domain has been treated well (no dodgy links, etc).

Dave’s Den – Dave Naylor

Dave’s talk was analysing some websites submitted by the attendees.

To analyse webistes, Dave typically uses:

- Xenu
- Screaming Frog
- Microsoft IIS SEO Toolkit
- My Playground Tool
- Majestic SEO

Run sanity checks on your website. You can do manual site reviews, but sometimes you need to use the basic tools to go back to basics and understand the website from a technical point of view (and links).

Some on-site tips from Dave’s site reviews:

- Don’t include lots of links on your home page.
- Avoid making the footer links too spammy, try to incorporate these links within more useful content on the page.
- Avoid having thin content pages. Content is so cheap now – get some good quality content throughout each of the key pages. Use Content Now to get content written.
- Avoid linking to unrelated websites from links pages (his example is a mobile phone website linking to a car insurance website – avoid these)
- Make sure your headings include what your site actually does – avoid being too generic (+ include keywords!)

Dave suggest avoid linking out to large PDF files (no matter how useful) without providing some of the content on your website. If you have a PDF document that’s 60 page long, it’s a good thing to link to it, but why not do a summary of the PDF that then becomes an authoritative article on your website?

For navigational menus, Dave suggests replacing bland menu options with CSS image replacement, then using the text to include keywords.

Make sure you have actionable title tags for your pages. Every page is a potential landing page from the search engines, avoid having generic title tags.

Avoid using pipes within title tags to split keywords without any thought for people who may be reading them. It’s lazy SEO.

Nofollowing internal links on your website is just plain stupid. If you don’t want search engines to follow your links, then don’t link to it – simple.

If you don’t have a lot of content on a page, but you have a lot of good customer reviews, why not incorporate some of the snippets from the reviews into the content page, so you end up with a really rich page of content.

When changing site URLs, make sure you update all of the internal links rather than just lazily 301 redirecting them all.

If you’re going to use infographics on your website, that’s fine, but don’t just do infographics, also include some good content that will help drive you sales rather than views.

The post Think Visibility Live Blogging – March 2011 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Monday – MFN are having a talk on Affiliate Marketing at The Castle Hotel
Tuesday – at 4:00 MDDA are running a Celebration of 20 years of Digital Manchester at their Offices. Then at 6:00 make your way over to the BBC on Oxford road for Social Media Cafe.
Wednesday - There’s an interesting event at The University of Salford called Privacy and Identity: Can We Govern Information in a Digital Society? From 1 until 4pm
Thursday - Northern Digitals in (surprise surprise) The Northern from 6pm
Saturday – Is the Think Visibility full day conference in Leeds which we’re going down to in full force. Say Hi.

Phew.

See you there!

For a full calendar of events, look on our design and digital events calendar
If you want your event added, contact Rebecca on info@pushon.co.uk

The post Events this week appeared first on PushON Ltd.

As with earlier in the year, I decided to do some live blogging throughout some of the sessions – links of which are below.

Learning and Earning through Social Media w/ Mel Carson

Mel kicked off the day with an insight into how the Microsoft Advertising team were tasked with becoming more involved with social media, and he provided some interesting reasoning and approaches that he and his team use. The main take away from this session was that you should be capturing all of the data available, which will allow you to plan and execute an effective strategy, and ultimately leads you to understand the best method of moving forward.

Live blogging notes – Learning and Earning through Social Media

Keyword Domains and Mini-Sites w/ Gary Taylor

This was probably one of the favourite sessions for most attendees, as Gary took us through ways in which to find the right domain name, and how to effectively monetise domains with mini-sites (and how to replicate success). His talk was really inspiring to me personally, as I have a couple of domains lying around which could definitely be better utilising, and it was interesting to hear his thoughts on a number of issues (the Q&A was equally as useful).

Live blogging notes – Keyword Domains and Mini-Sites

Using Social Media for SEO w/ Lisa Myers

I wasn’t live blogging during Lisa’s session, but she covered a lot of interesting points to do with link bait. A key take away point from this session was something I Tweeted out at the time:

All the tweeting, digging, buzz building, social networking and seeindg in the world will NOT work if the idea is rubbish

Another thing she mentioned was that you should be hosting your own content – there is no point in driving traffic to a social network or other website, keep it to yourself.

Affiliate Marketing Technologies w/ Kevin Edwards

Kevin’s session was a little more Affiliate Window oriented than I would have liked, and it was quite specific to what they were doing in terms of some of their affiliate work. However, a good take away from this was that Kevin believes there to have been a big shift between PPC and incentivised marketing – affiliate marketing has gone main stream.

Live blogging notes – Affiliate Marketing Technologies

Linkbuilding in Real Life w/ Jaamit Durrani

I was really looking forward to this session as linkbuilding presentations are always the most interesting (in my opinion), and this was the case once again. Jaamit did a great job as it was his first ever presenting gig, and there were a lot of take aways from it, including:

• Stop obsessing over your home page – distribute your link equity
• Don’t focus on quality over quantity – get lots of quality links
• You don’t need to be an Excel genuis to look at a backlink profile – use the data available to understand why your competitors are doing better than you

The point is not to imitate your competitors, but to understand why they are doing better than you.

Live blogging notes – Link Building in Real Life

What Would a Spammer do? w/ Paul Madden

Without doubt the most entertaining session of the day, as Paul ran us through examples of spamming and black hat work he used to do (he’s now a “respected businessman” – his words ). Paul (aka @SEOidiot) covered different techniques that have previously been used to exploit Google – some of which are still working today. There weren’t many ‘take aways’ as such from Paul’s session, but it was certainly up there with the best of the day.

How to Gain Ranking Dominance w/ Dave Naylor

Last (but certainly not least) up was Dave Naylor, talking about how to gain ranking dominance within the search engines. Dave talked about how you don’t neccasarily have to put a lot of leg work into ranking within a sector if you have budget – you can buy domains/websiters that already have authority and ranking within the industry. He also recommended tailgating existing brands to build initial authority within the SERPs, and to become a brand yourself.

Overall

Another fantastic conference, and a great day out. All credit to Dom and the Think Visibility team for making it happen once again – I’m just disappointed we couldn’t hang around for longer for the after party!

Here are some of the other roundups / notes from the sessions:

• Top Think Visibility Takeaways on the Distilled Blog
• 10 Reasons why Think Visibility 4 Rocked
• ThinkVisibility 2010: Cherry popping SEO goodness
• Think Visibility 4: The PR’s Guide to World Domination
• Think Visibility – A Love Letter to You

Also check out Holistic Search for a number of live blogging notes by Pete Young.

The post Think Visibility Roundup – September 2010 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

1. Link Building can be Daunting

Break your link building efforts down, and make it manageable and achievable. Schedule your time depending on how many resources and the different techniques you have. Plan your efforts over the year, not just for the coming month.

Link building is not something that happens over night.

2. Quality vs Quantity

You should plan on getting lots of quality links, instead of focusing on few quality links vs a lot of quantity. Understand the techniques on both sides of the spectrum.

3. Stop obsessing over your home page

Don’t just focus on building links to your home page. Real success comes from sending quality links to inner pages

4. Anchor text is your friend

A link with a keyword in the anchor text is 90% of the time more powerful than one without. Target your links to reflect the keywords you are targeting if possible. Even though people don’t naturally link like this, it works in terms of SEO benefit.

5. “Create great content and links will come” – is misleading

Unless you engineer it, the links coming through to your website naturally won’t neccasarily be to your ‘money pages’. Even if you have great content you still need a network of people to find and read it.

6. It’s time to burn our hats

The black hat vs white hat debate needs to be less of an issue, as it makes people scared of testing new techniques and gaining potentially valuable links. All SEOs are ultimately trying to manipulate the rankings, whether it be seen as “black hat” or not.

Real Life Link Building Examples

- Wall Glamour
- Zath
- Ab Wellan

Starting with Wall Glamour – their main keyword “wall stickers” receives 165,000 searches per month, and would like to know how to get back to number one in Google.

Firstly, Jaamit looks at how they lost their number one spot.

You don’t need to be an excel “ninja” – just look at the back link profile and data available to understand whats going on, and why the competitors may be doing better than you are. The point is not to imitate your competitors, but to understand why they are doing better than you.

Competitor one in the SERPs: They are flooded with “sponsored” with exact match footer links from many different websites using PHP fusion themes.

Competitor two: They have done a lot of “do follow” blog commenting, with targeting anchor text across many high authority websites (blogs).

So what do you do when you understand how you competitors are ranking higher than you?

Yes you could report them to Google, but instead you should organise a “plan of attack” from multiple angles, utilising a varied range of techniques.

It’s very possible to regain the #1 spot and dominate the long tail search.

A potential plan to gain links for Wall Glamour:

1. Low level anchor text deep links at scale ( a lot of them)
2. Anchor text in copy links from well trafficked, high PR blogs.
3. Links from trusted .ac.uk domains
4. Recover and claim on-site link juice

To delve further into the points:

Low Level, Anchor Text Deep Links

- Use article spinning instead of article directories. Manually rewrite current articles many different times, so you have lots of similar articles that are all unique and can be marketed seperately (with varied targeted anchor text)
- Use 3 exact anchor text links per article (spinnable)
- Diversify the locations you are publishing the articles on to get a greater linking domain diversity

Some resources for this: Article Ranks (in Beta) and Article Marketing Automation

Anchor Text, In-copy Links from Well Trafficked, Decent PR Blogs

- Guest blogging is brilliant for rankings, and Google loves these links. Guest articles can lead to content published on an established domain, often getting retweets and comments.

You can start with a website called My Blog Guest, and move further into industry blogs that you discover yourself.

Some further resources for guest posts: Solo SEO and Ontolo

Get Links from Trusted .ac.uk Domains

- Research and make a list of all the art & design schools and colleges in the area (and all of UK)
- Get on the phone and propose a joint “designer of the month” competition, the winner creates a WallGlamour sticker which is part of their portfolio
- Links(s) included as part of the collaboration

Recover and Claim Onsite Link Juice

Bonus tip: Wall Glamour have an old website called dogtooth.co.uk – this should be 301 redirected for further link authority. If you have any old websites or domains that are not being used (and are relevant) then 301 redirect them.

Further examples were given by Jaamit for the other two websites listed at the beginning of the post, but all of the main points have been covered above.

The post Linkbuilding In Real Life (Jaamit Durrani) appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Affiliate Marketing Trends:

- Est. £4,62bn in sales in 2010
- 12% increase in 2009 figures
- c.8% of online sales generator through AM
- Est. £275m in fees and commisions (suspected to be >£300m)
- Up from £245m in 2009
- AWin projected turnover, £52.1m (2010)
- Up 21% on 2009

There is a general census that paid search is difficult and activity is being squeezed. Affiliate marketing has gone mainstream, with more and more websites understanding the potential benefit.

- Key shift from PPC to incentivised traffic
- PPC has upheld volume but lost % share
- Steady growth in active affiliaites

Kevin believes there has been a change in shift between PPC and incentivised marketing.

The post Affiliate Marketing Technologies (Kevin Edwards) appeared first on PushON Ltd.

He goes on to explain he is someone who buys, sells and develops domains. He works with OneResult web and mobile solutions as a project manager, and won young entrepreneur of the year in the 2008 Midlands business awards.

What are keyword domains?

- exact match keyword(s) in the URL (eg. handbags.co.uk)
- the above example is usually refered to as a generic / category killer
- there are long tail domains (eg. leatherhandbags.co.uk)
- geographical domains (eg. handbagsleeds.co.uk)
- original top level, ccTLD: .co.uk, .org, .mobi

What are mini-sites?

- small websites, only a few pages maybe 1-10
- keyword specific that focus on the domain domain with few variations
- easy to replicate, built with simple HTML and CSS
- easy to maintain, with minimal content creation ongoing, etc
- cost effective, with no high graphic design costs, etc

You don’t want a portfolio of 200 domain names that you have to work constantly on, they need to be self sustaining.

Finding the right domain name

2 basic indicators:

- Exact searches (local) on both Google Adwords Keyword Tool AND Search Keyword Estimator – above 2,400 minimum.

He shows an example of how the Google Keyword Tool and Search-based keyword tool can vary significantly, with different volumes showing.

- CPC and other monetisation opportunities

A scalable model

£3 – £5 per week per domain at most.

10 domains = £1,560 – £2,600
100 domains = £15,600 – £26,000
400 domains = £62,400 – £104,000

You can buy a couple of domains and if they don’t work out let them drop, you won’t have spent much money and you shouldn’t have spent much money developing them.

Monetising your domain

You can do the following on your mini-site:

- a link directory
- amazon e-store widget
- self-made banners linking to amazon affiliate products
- Google adsense (he’s earning about 80 pence per click with his example – flyfishingbooks.co.uk

Replicating success

- do you want to dominate a niche? you could register lots of variants of a keyword domain you already have
- diversify: you could maybe add geolocations to current domains (airport parking manchester, liverpool, etc)
- lead generation
- build a network of related domains
- target long tail domains
- affiliate programs
- think about the after-market (which sites can you sell a domain name on? etc)
- maybe go more generic with your keyword domains
- white labelling

Domain Name Industry Resources

- Notable domainers: Rick Schwartz, Frank Schilling, Kevin Ham, Gary Kremen
- Auction sites: sedo.com, domainlore.co.uk, greatdomains.com, afternic.com
- Domaining tools: domaintools.com, valuate.com, estibot.com
- Registrars: 1and1.co.uk, 123-reg.co.uk, godaddy.com
- Parking and drop catching: whypark.com, pool.com
- Forums/resources: acorndomains.co.uk, domaining.com

Kevin Ham owns the most domains out of anyone, making $70 million per year.

Questions and Answers

Hyphenated domains – he isn’t particuarly keen on them, but has had domains that have ranked well. The resell value of hyphenated domains isn’t as high as without.

Paid traffic - there are issues with Google not allowing you to advertise as it may see you site as spammy. Use long tail keywords to gain SEO organic traffic as oppose to spending money on PPC.

.org.uk domains – he is a fan of .org.uk domains for UK search, and is a good alternative to .co.uk. If you are looking for more international – chose .org over .net, with .com being the obvious first choice. Stay away from the lower end, such as .me.uk and other low quality TLDs.

Selling 1 word keyword domains – domainers usually sell to domainers, and are not particularity bought by end users. SEO agencies could be missing a trick, and domainers could strike up partnerships with agencies to develop mini-sites for the benefit of SEO clients (end users).

Resell value of a .org vs .com – .org domains sell for a lot less typically, he wouldn’t expect a .org to go for more than 1/5th of the price of a .com.

Leasing domains – he thinks it’s becoming more popular over the past few years, especially for .com domains. There is venue to be made from it as some starter businesses may not have the capitol to develop a domain. If you have a desirable domain name, leasing it out could be a very sensible option.

Trademarks – stay away from any domains with trademarks, as you will ultimately end up in a dispute and 9 out of 10 times will have the domain taken away from you.

Finally – If there was one domain you could have, what would it be?

Gary said he would like: creditcards.co.uk or mortgages.co.uk

The post Keyword Domains and Mini-Sites (Gary Taylor) appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Bartell Drugs are a chain of 10 or 15 stores, family friendly and have got into social media. They are on Twitter and Facebook. Mel went with his wife recently, and found a magazine called ‘Glutes’ while browsing the magazine stand – this is a magazine dedicated to enhancing a man or woman’s bum. Mel thought this would be a perfect image to Tweet – and having done so, Bartell Drugs replied and engaged with him.

They are now following each other on Twitter, and because he has gained a bit of a relationship with the stroe, he will be going back there instead of a rival drug store.

–

Learn and Earn

A social media white paper by MIcrosoft – aimed at B2B. This is a story behind the team at Microsoft and social media, explaining how they got involved and how they engage. Apparently roughly 40,000 people within Microsoft do some kind of blogging or social media.

It’s all about making your message discoverable.

Microsoft Advertising

They were given the task of setting up a community around Adcenter – 5 years ago. They setup a blog and forums in 2006 for the following reasons:

- to have an official voice online
- a calling card
- to ask for feedback
- feature requests (most visited forum thread)
- signing up beta testers
- help advertisers help themselves (It’s about giving people the tools to help themselves)

Microsoft Advertising are also on 3rd parties, such as Sphinn and Search Engine Watch – with various experts engaging with other people in the industry.

They have two distinctive Twitter accounts:

- @MSAdvertising (11000+ followers)
- @adCenter (5000+ followers)

They are used roughly 16 hours a day, from the UK to US.

They have done nothing with Facebook, but they stream images and links from the blog which has led it to grow organically. They hope to get into Facebook advertising very soon.

Other places they have presences:

- YouTube (done nothing with it, but growing organically)
- Flickr (they upload photos from events and places they are at)
- PR – he said this is something that seems to come last in the order of social media. MS Advertising work very closely with their PR team, and sometimes just create blog articles that are distributed to ‘buddy’ list of connections, instead of spending the time creating a PR piece. This is very powerful.

Finally, ‘search’ -

MS Advertising own 7/9 results on the search engine results page for the key phrase “b2b social media white paper”

Capturing Buzz and Sentiment

Capture the data – track absolutely everything available. Sentiment, buzz, etc across all channels. This is really crucial to be able to understand how people are talking and engaging within the social sphere – and this needs to be reported back to be able to understand how to move forward.

Feedback – good feedback can be used as case studies and to further engage with users of your company/brand/product. Being out there and engaging with people opens a lot of doors.

The post Learning and Earning through Social Media (Mel Carson) appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Unlike SAScon, we’ll be doing things slightly different, and updating this post with snippets and links to all of the roundups we publish tomorrow – so make sure you keep track of this page throughout the day, and follow the #thinkvis hashtag on Twitter.

Our initial Think Visibility live blogging schedule looks like this:

09.30 – 10.15: Learning and Earning through Social Media (Mel Carson)
10.30 – 11.15: Keyword Domains and Mini-Sites (Gary Taylor)
13.00 – 13.45: Affiliate Marketing Technologies (Kevin Edwards)
14.00 – 14.45: Linkbuilding In Real Life (Jaamit Durrani)
15.00 – 15.45: What Would a Spammer do? (Paul Madden)
16.00 – 16.45: How to Gain Ranking Dominance (Dave Naylor)

This may change slightly during the day, so make sure you check back to keep updated.

The post Think Visibility Live Blogging: September 2010 appeared first on PushON Ltd.