Blog Bites Man

Hi,

I am interested in purchasing permanent textlink advertising at some specific pages of http://blogbitesman.net/

let me know if interested so that we can discuss it further. I can make a good offer to make it worth your time.

Let me know!

Someone wants to advertise on my blog? Is this guy on crack? Either the blog stats I see are wrong — and I have 100x the traffic I think I have — or I have my first groupie! Or, bloggie, I suppose.

Neither is the case. Curious, I asked for more information (seriously, what are you smoking and can I have some too?). Two days later, I received an email with a $100 offer to put text ads on five blog posts. He had sent me two examples of sites that had complied with his offer for easy cash. Here’s how the ad — on a site about cooking — reads:

Viagra, anyone? Clearly it was a spammer that was looking to build a good linking strategy.

It’s going to be incredibly tough for search engine algorithms to filter out these spam links. The paragraphs are written in perfect English and the text links go to various different websites. While the example above is incongruous with the rest of the site’s content, in another example, the spam paragraph actually relates perfectly to the rest of the page. ie, it’s contextual and much more likely that someone will click on the links, giving greater validity to the ads as far as the search engines are concerned.

I did a quick Google search to find out how one can report spammers, but what’s interesting about this model is that this guy is not a spammer in the classic sense. It’s a different class of spammer, the same way a honeybee is different than a wasp; same order (Hymenoptera, in case you wondered), different species and degrees of sting. I would be paid for the ads. It’s no different an arrangement than the advertiser Text Link Ads, the latter of whom is a member of the BBB and SEMPO and who only places ads on sites that have signed into their network.

Why am I blogging about it? Is it a bad thing or much ado about nothing? I think it’s insidious. This type of linking strategy makes it harder for legitimate business owners to get decent search rankings for their companies or products. As someone trying to market great products, the last thing I want is to compete with this species.

My reply to this offer:

Sorry, dude, I just say “no” to link spam.

His reply:

About the sites I work for, they’re not spam sites. I’ve worked for some edu sites as well as for gov sites. If requested, I can also arrange a replacement for a site you don’t want to link to :).

In my terms, its not spamming. You might have a different definition for link spam :).

I’m not convinced. You?

Hadn’t intend to write a sequel to this push v pull post, but a few very concrete tactical ideas were taking up space in my brain….

Making “pull” happen means putting few to zero resources in “push” things like a direct sales force, outbound emails, and telemarketing. In my previous post, I focused on high-level concepts, but more practically, here are some thoughts of where to spend your marketing dollars:

Creating a great website first, SEO second: Write useful, informative content your audience — be they customers, journalists, or consumers — wants to read without stuffing search engines with keywords. If you know the audience you’re writing for, the content of your site will get a decent ranking from the search engines. Then, you can optimize the site with the header tags, linking, alt tags, add your company’s name to the Yahoo! directory, work on your linking strategy, and all the other things that the SEO experts talk about.

Word of mouth and creating evangelists: Do you trust your friends’ recommendations or what some marketer tells you? Studies confirm that what you’re thinking: friends of course. Word of mouth is the most powerful way to market your products.Risk-free offers, trial evaluations, open or closed beta testing are ways to get people to try your stuff and, by extension, create some evangelists. There are ways, too, to systematically encourage word of mouth. For example, tell-a-friend programs. Working Assets gives their customers a free pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream for 12-months if their their friends signed up to use the phone carrier’s service.

Perhaps the simplest way to encourage word of mouth is by shocking your customers with a product or level of customer service that knocks their socks off.

Advertise: Start with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and/or specialty engine ad networks and search ads first. They’re targeted. Experiment with other types of advertising such as banner ads.Scoble may say that newspapers are dead (and by extension, I assume he means print publications because they’re disappearing, consolidating, and crumbling too) but more pragmatic folks believe, and I agree, that print publications work perfectly well for some audiences. It’s just way more expensive than a lot of online marketing and it’s hard, if not downright impossible, to measure its impact. But the bottom line is that you have to go where your customers are, online or off.

PR: Hiring agencies is another surefire way of spending a lot of money. These days, it’s often equally effective to start a conversational marketing PR strategy. Talk with customers, bloggers, and influences in your space. And listen. Those conversations will turn up online and in print. It’s a slow process, but it ultimately turns into coverage for your company and products, and it doesn’t cost a dime. I think agencies are better suited to some industries than others, but you need to keep a close eye on your spending.

Conferences: Still one of the best ways to brand a company and get your name out, but they are expensive and very time consuming.

Channel marketing: Get someone else to push for you!