"Hotels Near Manchester Airport" - Just how easy is it to rank for these terms?

Having done a few experiements using Squidoo as a host site, it's become clear that pages hosted on Squidoo require very little supporting anchor text in the form of back links to make them rank.

I've just created another Squidoo lens primarily optimised for "hotels near Manchester Airport" simply by tagging my lenses properly has resulting in a number of them achieving PageRank 3 from internal links alone following a G PR update.

I'll post again here once, G picks up the inbound links to this lens.

Gordon "Avaweb" Langlands Interview Part 2

Some time ago I interviewed Gordon Langlands of Avaweb.co.uk. Part 2 is now available over at http://Pheedback.com/Gordon_Langlands

Gordon runs a hugely successful UK Hotel and Travel Guide website which has been around since 1999, you can also reach Gordon through his Squidoo lens here: http://www.squidoo.com/avaweb/

In this part of the interview, Gordon answers questions about the importance of being niche. What qualities he looks for in an affiliate program, click fraud, brand bidding and what he would do if he were to start out in affiliate marketing all over again.

Analogous Relationships Viral Applications & Nuclear Weapons; Business & War

Viral widgetization isn’t exactly nuclear physics but it does obey the same rules.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_chain_reaction#Effective_neutron_multiplication_factor

I’ve put together a simple excel model. Feel free to play with the figures. (click here to download)

The model doesn’t take into consideration saturation effects or secondary user acquisition from clicks generated by a distributed widget.

Viral benefits of widgets..

1. They’re persistent... ie once in place equal effort is required to remove it leading to stability over time.
2. They’re centralized enabling version control and forward compatibility.
3. Unlike a distributed viral email, a widget is non-memetic and cannot evolve or mutate and won’t blow up in your face. :)
   

If we also recognise the analogous relationships between business and war as well as the analogous relationship between nuclear physics and viral distribution, then a super-viral business application is analogous to a nuclear weapon…


Within the Travel industry, TripAdvisor & WAYN.com are both major nuclear superpowers…

…if you're interested in joining the nuclear arms race you'll need a laboratory

Oh… and it’s probably going to take a number of attempts before you get it right.

Google Commence the Battle Against Scraper Spam

Google have announced that scraping content is bad and SEO consultants should not advise scraping as a strategy. Black hats beware...

Purely scraped content, even from high quality sources, does not provide any added value to your users. It's worthwhile to take the time to create original content that sets your site apart.

They even offer the following advice to consider when choosing an SEO consultant..

Choosing the right SEO consultant requires in-depth background research, and their reputation and past work should be important factors in your decision.

Cleaning the scraper spam, out of Google's index has to be a mammoth task, I wish them the best of luck.

Twitter.com and it's Viral Widget Success... Why?

Having looked closely at Twitter.com the always on solution to keeping in touch with friends.

I couldn't see how the attention it receives is justified by the value it offers the user.

There are almost half a million pages of cached content in Google's index, Twitter's home page Pagerank is 8 and it's for thousands of delicious link and viral exponential alexa growth, something seems to be working.

Although I'm not 100% sure about this, I've decided to add the twitter viral widget to my blog.

Parasitic SEO, Local Search Marketing & Tourism

Let's see how a simple harrogate holiday apartments squidoo lens ranks for harrogate + holiday + apartments

I've included one or two authority outbound links from the lens, just for good measure. The spiders should have indexed the page by tomorrow evening. Let's see how it competes with existing sites in this space.

:)

Paul

Shufuni Affiliate Program.

Ok... so here I go again.. Shufuni... The adult social media site, which I mentioned in a previous post.. Turns out to be the search term driving most of the traffic to this blog, unfortunately I can't seem to find an affiliate program to send the traffic to.

So I just thought I'd blog about it again and see if it doesn't result in a double indented google first page listing, for terms Shufuni and Shufuni Affiliate Program. We shall see....

Paul Reilly

I finally get round merging my two LinkedIn accounts which I accidentally opened, here's my profile http://www.linkedin.com/in/paulreillyuk feel free to drop by and request an add.. if I've not yet moved you over to this account do click the above link and I'll move you over into this account too.

Paul Reilly

Tutankhamun Exhibition Visits London's O2 Dome (subject to confirmation)

Since I'm particularly interested in Egyptology I became quite excited to discover that the Tutakhamun exhibition was visiting London this year and staying for approximately 10 months. Its been over 30 years since the Tutankhamun exhibition last visited the UK so for me, this looks like a once in a lifetime opportunity. I'll no doubt write another post when I discover more details, till then here's my "Tutankhamun exhibition" lens on Squidoo.

Hittail.com Fuck Up

I just logged into my hittail account to analyse the long tail potential of my hittail account and for some reason end up logged into Connors PR's ( the creators of hittail) long tail data. Here's the screen grab - I see that Mike Levin is 5th most popular term, one place behind "PR Firm" If you're listening Mike, you're a their 5th most powerful term and I hope you're being compensated accordingly.

Here's the screen grab

Adulttube / Xtube - Back in Business Shufuni.com Still in the Game...

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Thresher's Viral Voucher Could Cost Big Money this Christmas

UK wine merchant Thresher allowed their vouchers to go “wild”. The 40% discount voucher, which was seeded on the website of South African wine company Stormhoek and was downloaded more than 800,000 times prior to it hitting the mainstream news.

The offer was originally intended for Thresher’s suppliers and staff, according to one BBC report but proliferated virally by email, and blogging.

The influx of visitors brought their server crashing to its knees and the story was immediately covered by mainstream UK media. The media coverage appears to have been a disaster recovery strategy as they appear to be in fear of their bottom line profitability. While the raised brand awareness will be most welcome, its uncertain how much this will cost Thresher’s in lost revenue, due to the seasonal offer of 40% discounted drinks.

Ah well…. millions of pounds worth of free media publicity, just before Christmas is quite a result, especially given it all appears to have happened without the help of a viral advertising agency.

Let this be a reminder of the power of really simple viral marketing.

AdultTube / XTube - making it big!!

AdultTube / XTube appears to be making it big with multiple viral components used to blend modern social media optimisation (YouTube style viral widgetization) and good old fashioned webmaster affiliate incentives. These influencing factors plus erm.. natural human curiosity appear to be driving viral growth of adult social media site

Currently ranked as 1,163th most visited (Alexa.com).


The alexa 'Daily Reach' graph below shows the consistent growth over the past 6 months and without much sign of slowing down. I expect this trend to continue, while sub 1000 postitions are becoming harder to achieve AdultTube/XTube has the viral model and user demand to keep running onwards and upwards.

Lastminute.com - bad review on YouTube.com let's see how it spreads

I came across a negative viral video posted by an unhappy Lastminute.com customer Jimmybick who appears to be quite unhappy about his stay in Marrakech. One thing is for sure, bad reviews which make it to social media wont go away very easily.

This unhappy customer posted 3 videos of his bad holiday experience with Lastminute.com

1. Lastminute.com Marrakech holiday nightmare -- shower
   
2. Lastminute.com Marrakech holiday nightmare -- phone
3. Lastminute.com Marrakech holiday nightmare -- hairdryer

Let's track the growth of a random travel related bad news viral on YouTube.com

• Shower (2 page views - as of today)
  
• Phone (26 page views - as of today)
  
• Hairdryer (209 page views - as of today)

I'll keep returning to these YouTube videos and let you know how much it grows over the next year or two. I'm particularly interested to see if there's any consistent growth, either linear or geometric.

If Lastminute.com would like to comment here, then please feel free. Meanwhile I'll be tracking the growth or decline in the spread of this particular holiday nightmare

Superbreak Feedburner Experiment

As a little experiment in getting feedburner.com pages ranked and indexed, I burned a feed using interview content tagged with the term Superbreak (http://pheedback.com/superbreak) ensuring the Superbreak brand term was included in the feedburner URL.

Now…I’ll leave it to the spiders and we’ll see how it ranks.

Totally Viral Hits UK TV Screens Every Week Night 10.30pm on UKTV G2

Checking my email, I browsed through this weeks Popbitch to discover a new TV show Totally Viral. Although I've not seen it yet, judging by the information on their website, Totally Viral is a fusion of home made, video clip TV (see You've been framed) and user editorial (see Digg.com)

Totally Viral is the best of the web, found by you. Get involved and remember to watch the TV show every weeknight at 10.30pm on UKTV G2.

One thing I can now be sure of is that viral videos reaching mainstream audience via our TVs will give viral video producers a larger audence and provide businesses a better business case for exploiting social media and investing in social media optimisation.

At this point I'm interested to see how much of the editorial process is driven purely by users and how much of the descision making process is made by the shows producers? Could this be the first case of a spam opportunity (see gaming digg) reaching our TV screens and does this fusion indicate a new era in spam 2.0?

A Four Step Web 2.0 Viral Strategy for Plant Lovers.

In the previous post, I mentioned an old saying "from tiny acorns, great oak trees grow." which took me back a one of the first part time jobs I worked when I was in my early teens.

I got a job working on a market garden centre growing various types of conifer. Now I'm not afraid of hard work, but I swear, this was truely back breaking. I'd spend all day bent over, carefully pulling up conifers and placing them neatly on a barrow to take away to be sold.

I can't remember the name of my old boss, but I clearly remember his wife, who would bring a cup of coffee around 11am and a cup mid afternoon. The reason I remember her so clearly was down to the fact, she could never remember who had sugar and who didn't, so her solution was to give everyone 2 heaped sugars and not stir it - If I wanted my coffee sweet, I'd stir it, and if not, I wouldn't. The system worked perfectly... unless I'd drink too far and... Yuck!!!!

But the reason I've mentioned it is simply this:- in that business as with any horticultural and indeed agricultural business cycle, there was never an option to "make immediate revenue" the simple fact was that a seed needed time to germinate and grow into a seedling and a seedling needs time to mature into the saleable product.

In market gardening it's very much a labour intensive business and the only other overhead or asset required is the land, and of course ideal growing conditions plus demand for the product.

Seeds are privided by nature, are there for free and so the analogy that a viral marketeer following this natural model seeks minimum or negligable media costs in the same way.

So here's how i see the 4 step social media strategy for plant lovers...

1. Solicit user generate viral content where possible - keep production costs to a minimum.
   
2. Seed & tag your user generated viral content appropriately - use the Web2.0 ecosystem (YouTube, Google Video, AdultTube - if appropriate)
   
3. Nurture your user generated viral content - tell a few bloggers, issue a press release of two
   
4. Back to step 1
   

I'm so convinced that viral social media is perfectly analogous to market gardening that the above 4 step strategy is all that's required (outside of actual social media optimisation) to grow in the medium to long term, "great oak trees".

To prove my conviction, I just created a new blog. http://slicksocial.blogspot.com

Web 2.0 Viral Marketing - is there a business case for social media optimisation?

Now that the web is no longer young and many would say it's... "in it's second iteration". We find ourselves in a situation where Web2.0 now provides the platform from which to seed and host a piece of media to massive, self organising communities using technology which has already being optmised such that much of the resistance to viral propagation has been removed.

Widgitization, social networks, and send to a friend, now offer us a proven method to captivate audiences with our message, host our message and spread our message. The process of widgetization provides a persistant viral platform. Which will (providing at worst, the widget is not removed, or at least see positive attrition in numbers) spread geometrically.

But enough theoretical bollocks for now - the big question is....

Is there a business case for social media, and social media optimisation (SMO) in the travel industry? This was the question put to me by Holidaybreak Chief Executive Carl Michel.

Firstly, it was agreed that there must be. Potentially infinite distribution at negligable cost suggestes a very strong business case exists but lets now put some figures to that...

Today I came across a viral marketing experiment which in it's top line figures suggested an aquisition cost of zero, however it failed to take into consideration the production costs of the viral videos - this in it's self was ranted about over at threadwatch.

The comparison between PPC and viral video was flawed. OK so the production costs weren't taken into consideration ($9600) and the actual cost per acquisition was $9600 to acquire 62 subscribers (rather than customers)

To quote the totally justifiable rant from Brian Turner...

Either I completely misread this, or Marketing Experiments - recently acquired by Marketing Sherpa - by got it completely wrong.

In a study into video as a viral marketing technique, they:

- spent $9600 creating 28 videos for YouTube, Google Video, etc
- which over 60 days received 324,190 views
- which results in 4,162 clickthroughs
- which converted at 1.49% to newsletter subscribers

The article then goes on to laud video viral marketing as a success, and that it beats PPC hands down in terms of acquisition cost.

After all, the acquisition costs for new subscribers via the videos was $0.

But, hang on, what about the $9600 cost of the videos?

Maybe I'm being dumb here, but by my calculator, 1.49% of 4,162 is 62.

Which is $10k to get 62 newsletter subscribers.

I can't see any reason how this can be lauded as a success.

Indeed this IS a justifiable rant, however (as I posted in the comments over at threadwatch) a persistant viral can take some time to take hold. Imagine if only one of the widgetized video clips finds its way into some seriously high traffic and is spread and blogged about daily for a couple of months the multiplication continues to take place - potentially indefinately. Yes it happens.

I recall, back in the day, launching a viral e-book (the old skool equivalent of a widget - I suppose)... The ebook spread and one day it found it's way onto a massive traffic source. It took over twelve months to happen and to be honest I'd forgotten about it.

Now let's travel back in time to just after the dawn of the web 1.0 era....

People knew that they needed a website, they knew it would somehow help their business, and in many cases the only measurable benefit was that it satisfied their ego - Yeh, I'm talking about the electrician "who got a website" and the plumber "who got a website".

Of course there were those who got a website which was developed around their marketing plan and provided a serious contribution to their marketing mix, but the amount of times I had to day... "Listen man! you don't need a website!" or "Hey.. when was the last time you decided to eat in a particular resaurant as a result of an Altavista search?"

I'm sure you get the picture. Well now back to present day, it's November 2006 (oh and I'm almost 33) the Web 2.0 era is well and truely underway. We're in the same situation as we were back in the good old days.

Everyone knows they need a social media strategy but cannot justify it. Just as they couldn't back in 1996.

From tiny acorns, great oak trees grow. was the phrase I used to use back then, and that saying applies more today than ever. Whether it's Web 1 or Web 2.. 3... or 4.

Avaweb's Gordon Langlands Interviewed

Another interview.. Travel super affiliate, Gordon "Avaweb" Langlands (http://www.avaweb.co.uk) talks to me over at pheedback.com about his experiences as a travel super affiliate. This is part one of a two a part interview, so we kept the line of questioning for the newbie affiliate marketer. Part 2 will be up soon, with more advanced affilate marketing questions.

Nick Cust - Superbreak Managing Director Interviewed

Another in the series of interviews, this time it's Nick Cust, Superbreak's joint Managing Director, he's talks openly about his personal ambitions as well as his thoughts on disintermediation in the online travel game. Nick also talked about his favourite holiday location... you know i'd have never had him down as a Doors fan :)