Personalized Marketing

A little while ago my friend, Reina, asked about my thoughts concerning the recent change in the FTC advertising guidelines. I have a strong opinion on why I feel the FTC is meddling with bloggers (and other web entities). Below is my answer to her question. It may come across a bit as conspiracy theory, but I don’t believe I am wrong (I guess conspiracy theorists usually believe they are right).

REINA: So today is slow at work so I was going back through all my emails at work and found an article about changes in FTC guides regarding web endorsements. I’m curious if you’ve heard about this, if so, what your thoughts are on it, and also how it has affected blogging and advertising. Have you noticed a difference? Is this sort of thing enforceable or will it be online business as usual? The article made me think of you. Just curious what your thoughts are. Here’s the article.

PAUL: I am very familiar with the new FTC regulation and frankly I think it is joke. However, I do think it will have a profound effect on the web, but not how most people think it will. You see, I really believe Google is behind this regulation.

In order to rank organically in Google you need to have a lot of links pointing to your website from other websites. So, people buy lots of links from different websites to help drive search engine traffic to their website. It’s a bit more complicated than but that’s the jist of it and it works really well.

Google’s policy is that you cannot do this without disclosing the fact that you are buying links. If you disclose that the links are paid for than it makes it easier for Google to discount your links. This in turn, makes it harder for you to rank in Google.

Now with the ridiculous FTC regulation Google can actually legally go after you for breaking their search engine rules. This FTC ruling is one of the finest examples of business meddling with government policy.

So, that is my conspiracy take on the whole thing. It just seems a little fishy that the FTC modified a Federal Advertising Guide that hasn’t been touched in 30 years.

UPDATE 03/11/2010: Thanks Tyler for sharing this video. It does put things into perspective concerning Google!

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It might be a little strong of language to refer to Matt as a god, but he truly is amazing with what he has done with wordpress. I actually meet Matt last year at a WordCamp in Utah. The event was really good and it was also nice to rub shoulders with Matt. He really is a down to earth bloke who loves what he does. Not to mention he has a stellar piece of software.

Any one who knows me, knows that I am a wordpress geek. Plugin, themes, blogs, anything wordpress I study and analyze just about anything I can, and I do it just about every day. Pathetic…possibly, but a good career as well. Anyway, I found the below interview of Matt on WordpressOfTheDay.com and thought I would share it. I really like the cinematography done by SpeakingEvents.com (the company interviewing Matt), and I feel it gives a good insight to what wordpress really is all about. I particularly like the part that he talks about why wordpress is free. You can almost see pain in eyes as he talks about putting ads on wordpress (he is talking about wordpress.com). It’s funny and inspiring all at the same time.

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I am always a sucker for swag, particularly cool swag. So, when Affiliate.com offered to send me their cool shirt I couldn’t resist. However, the condition of receiving this great swag was that I did a post on how I wear the shirt. Well, we received the shirt and I realized as cool as the shirt was, it looks far better on someone else—my 10 month old daughter.

Meet Chloe

Now I am a first time Dad, and I will admit that I take on a little bit of “first-time-dad” pride. Even more so, when it comes to showing off my baby girl. Frankly, I firmly believe that Chloe is the most beautiful baby in the world. Actually, I am certain I can get this confirmed! Therefore, I felt it fitting to give Affiliate.com only the best model possible for their t-shirt. I know once Chloe’s innate modeling talent is witnessed she will be in high demand to do everyone’s web marketing campaigns (sorry godaddy, Chloe will never be godaddy girl)!

Anyway, if anything, thank you for indulging a very proud father, who loves showing off his little girl anyway possible! Oh, and I guess, Affiliate.com is doing a contest for the best post displaying their shirt. I will just give my apologies now to the other bloggers. I blame Chloe’s mother for her being so cute!

Affiliate.com

Chloe Modeling Affiliate.com's Swag T-Shirt. I like to start indoctrinating my children quite young when it comes to web marketing =).

26 Photos

 

Update (03/01/2010): Today Affiliate.com announced HeatherinBC.com as the winner of the t-shirt contest. As much as my fatherly pride doesn’t want to admit it, Heather deserves to win the contest. Her post is an excellent post on wearing her t-shirt to the Canadian winter Olympics. That’s really a hard act to follow no matter how cute I may think my little girl is =) . S0, congrats Heather to winning affiliate.com’s contest and the gold in hockey!

Update (03/03/2010): So, this morning I received an email from babyrus.com and I almost threw it into my spam folder. However, upon further checking I realized it was a $100 eGift from Tom Wozniak and the crew over at Affiliate.com. Tom’s note: “Hey Paul – thanks again for entering the affiliate.com T-shirt Contest. We also wanted to send a special thank you to Chloe. Hope she enjoys it.” I actually think Chloe’s mom will enjoy this gift as much as Chloe will! Thanks Tom for the consideration. Obviously, you didn’t have to, but we do appreciate your generosity!

P.S. Below is one more proud Dad moment. Sorry, I couldn’t resist!

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I have a very talented sister who is both quite technical and very marketing savvy. She recently decided to focus on her social media consulting. The below article came from one of her clients questioning whether someone should focus on a facebook page or a facebookgroup. When she finishes her consulting site I will update this post to let you know where you can find the best sm consultant out there . Until then you can live vicariously through mymarketer and enjoy the fruits of her labor here. Thanks sis!!!

Social Media: Facebook Fan Page Vs Groups
by Amy Claypool - a Social Media Consultant

Fan Pages

Fan pages are generally better for a long-term relationships with your fans, readers or customers. Facebook Fan pages could perhaps be best described as the hot-yet-high-maintenance younger sibling of the two, offering more options in some instances, but also more inconveniences in others.

• Creation: When creating a Fan page, you begin by selecting your category, choosing from either Local Business, a Brand or Product, or a Public Figure / Celebrity. The detailed information you add will depend on your earlier selection. Ie: If you chose Brand or Product, you would be asked to fill in a Mission Statement.
• Messaging: Messages sent to Fan members will not appear in your Inbox, but rather in your notification bar on the right hand side of your profile (this is changing soon to make it more assessable).
• Accessibility: Unlike Groups, Facebook Fan pages can be indexed on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), and are thus publicly accessible .Facebook sporadically displays Fan pages that your friends are a part of, and they are also added as links to the public profiles of your Facebook account assisting in promotion.
• Recruiting: With Fan pages, you cannot send bulk messages using your friend list, inviting people to join. Well, in theory you can, but not through the Fan page dashboard. When someone becomes a fan it is posted in their profile on their wall which is visible to all of their friends virally promoting the fan page. Fan page recruitment can be generated through more passive means, through external marketing (posting the URL on your blog, website, twitter tweets etc.) as well as through personal message invitations.
• Content: Here you have more freedom in terms of content generation than you would have with Group pages. With Fan pages, you have the usual wall, discussion board, video and photo uploads that the Groups have. In addition, however, you can also import a blog feed, meaning automatic content can be generated on the page, making it look “busy” and “fresh”. There are also numerous other applications you can add to your Fan Page, such as StumbleUpon, Quizzes etc

Groups

Groups are generally better for hosting a (quick) active discussion and attracting quick attention.

• Creation: When creating a Group page, you begin by choosing a name for your Group. For best results, something clever will do. Thereafter, it’s a matter of choosing the Category Type (ie: Business, Common Interest, Just For Fun etc) as well as a more detailed Sub-Category (Beauty, History etc). Then simply add a brief description of your Group and the setup is basically done.
• Messaging: Messages sent to Group members will appear in their Facebook Inbox. This means potentially greater reach, although if you overdo the Group Messages, members will eventually make a point of ignoring you or leave your group.
• Accessibility: Groups are not publicly accessible via conventional search, and can only be accessed through Facebook itself. So, even though your group on Facebook Group has a million members, no one outside of Facebook will be able to view the page without being granted permission to join the group.
• Recruiting: With Groups, you are allowed to send bulk messages to friends inviting them to join. This means that numbers can quickly be built up.
• Content: The major weak point with Facebook Groups would have to lie in the creation of content. If you would like to post regular pics, stories, or video, this has to be done manually. If you have a blog and would like its content displayed here, the Group will unfortunately not be able to pull the feed.

Differences

Two major differences between Facebook Fan Pages and Facebook Groups include:

1. 1. Fan pages are visible to unregistered people and are thus indexed (important for reputation management, for example);
2. 2. Unlike fan pages, permission to the groups must be granted to join the group. An facebook group admin person needs to grant permission to each user and allow users send out “bulk invite” (you can easily invite all your friends to join the group while with pages you will be forced to drop some invites manually). Groups are thus better for viral marketing, meaning that any group member can also send bulk invites to the friends of his.

Recommendation

There are pros and cons for both types of pages, corporations, celebrities and large businesses do seem to be making use of the Facebook Fan Page option, as it seems to be the meatier of the two. Group pages remain popular and easy to set up, so whichever choice you make, be sure to dive in with both feet (though, I recommend Facebook fan pages for most business ventures on Facebook).

Content updated and modified from the following sources: gottaquirk.com, searchenginejournal.com

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Josh Spaulding wrote a fantastic article about whether or not you should build backlinks to your article directory articles (let’s just call these articles, AD Articles). His answer:

“The answer to the question is 98% of the time, no. And 2% of the time, yes.”

He continues on to state that AD Articles are for ranking on easy longtail and that they shouldn’t be used to rank on difficult keywords. I 100% endorse this method…if you are writing AD Articles to have them rank for your longtail instead of having your own site rank for them. However, I use AD Articles in a completely different manner.

I don’t really use AD Articles for ranking the AD Article itself on my longtail, but rather as a backlink to a similar article on my own site. I love AD Articles because they provide relevent backlinks to my own site page. Generally, my technique is to write three articles all with the same title and subject matter (but with different content) and place them on three different authoritive AD Sites. All three have the same anchored text pointing back to a post on my own site with the same title (and thus the same title tag).

Doing AD Marketing this way makes it important to have as much authority as possible on each of my AD Articles. So, I will build backlinks to those AD Articles to give them more power. Yet, there is several ways you can structure your backlinks to your AD Articles. You can either have the anchored text be the same as what you are trying to rank your own article on or you can use some other anchored text (but still related).

For me, I like to use the second method for building backlinks to my AD Articles. It allows me to target more keywords. However, I never build authority for an AD Article using a longtail keyword that I am not already targeting on my own site. Interestingly enough, I have never had an AD Article out rank me.

I prefer this style of AD Marketing over Josh’s method. As Josh pointed out, there is a fundamental problem with his method:

“…you have [to] remember that this isn’t traffic to your site! The article still has to convert that traffic to your site!”

Obviously, you can use both techniques. However, each method is focusing on a different end goal. Josh is truly using AD Articles as an ad for his own site in the search engines; whereas, my AD Articles are being used more as authoritive backlinks to my site. Putting backlinks to your backlinks may be too much effort for a simple longtail keyword, but if you are going to spend any time focusing on a keyword (primary or longtail) you need to take the time to have the traffic go to your site over the AD Site.

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If you look at my last two post (see here and here) you will notice that in one post I am displaying my code as an image and the other as regular text. In fact, looking at my last entries before the last one they were all images. Every time I tried to add the code to display wordpress would read it as regular code and make my post look funky.

I finally got wise and found a plugin that allowed me to show my code without messing everything up. The plugin is Code Everything and it is super easy. Basically, all you do is add <code> before and </code> after your coding example, and walla you see the example you want to show. I know this really is insignificant, but you have no idea how much time that this little plugin saves me (and hopefully you).

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For the last several years I have been working on a wordpress MU project that seems to be the bane of my existence. I will work on it non-stop for several days, and then leave it alone for a few months and then go back and find errors that I hadn’t noticed before. It is really frustrating but some day I will actually finish and launch this project.

One of my biggest issues though, is my desire to have the theme editor active while I am in the development phase. Obviously, it is not wise to have the theme editor available when you launch a community. Having your theme editor global allows any user the ability to change the theme for your whole community. Yet, I spend a lot of my time in the wordpress admin area and having to jump from admin to ftp is annoying (yes, I admit I am lazy, efficient, but lazy).

Anyway, Wordpress MU deactivates the theme editor by default. Since I go periods of time without touching MU when I come back I have to update my wordpress instance. Every time I lose my precious theme editor, and every time I have to dig through Google to find the solution to bring it back.

So, for my sanity I am recording the process here so I can easily find it six months from now. This solution is current for wordpress mu 2.8.6. Who knows if it will work beyond 2.8.6. If so, I will write another post and link this post to it.

FTP to your server and open admin/includes/mu.php. Here you want to find the “old” code and change it to the “new” code.

old: unset( $submenu['themes.php'][10] ); // always remove the themes editor
new: //unset( $submenu['themes.php'][10] ); // always remove the themes editor

This change will let you see the theme editor option in the appearance menu. However, when you click on it the Wordpress Gods will tell you the function has been disabled. In the same mu.php file you will need to find and make the below change.

old: if ( strpos( $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'], $page ) ) {
new: if ( strpos( $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'], $page ) && !is_site_admin() ) {

Hopefully, this process won’t change for a while, or at least until I launch my project. Good luck.

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Happy 2010! For some reason I always prefer even years over the odd years. Not sure why, but I just feel more energized at the beginning of even years (probably a part of my OCD-ness showing).

Today I was looking at a couple of my blogs and I realized that the copyright date in the footer of some of them had not updated from 2009 to 2010. I figure I am not the only person to have this problem. So, I thought I would offer as a new year’s gift the below PHP code that automatically changes your blog’s copyright date to the current year on January 1st.

Required Code
Copyright © //Shows the copyright and its associated symbol
< ?php print date(‘Y’); ?> //shows current year
< ?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?>. All rights reserved. //shows the name of the blog found in the wordpress general settings and reserved rights

What It Looks Like
Copyright © 2010 MyMarketer. All rights reserved.

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A quick note to wish all the MyMarketer readers a happy Christmas. This year would have been far less interesting were it not for great insights you have contributed, and the comments you’ve made, in this blog during 2009. I hope you all have an excellent time over the festive season.

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Obviously, backlinks are important to a site’s ranking. However, you may find that keeping track of all the backlinks you get becomes quite a chore! In fact, I sent an email to my programming friend to create a software to track backlinks. Yet, I lucked out because recently, a freind of mine passed on a free link tracking software, called Backlink Reporter.

Several of the nice features of Backlink Reporter is that it allows you to keep track of all of the backlinks you have acquired for one or several websites. It also helps you quickly discover which links you previously had that are no longer linking to your site. Obviously, no one buys links , but if they did this tool is great in making sure that they are getting the links paid for.

The nice feature that sold me was that it also tracks the page rank of the backlink. As stated in a previous blog, don’t let the “gurus” fool you, page rank still is a good metric on the power you will be receiving from a backlink.

Oh, and the only catch in getting this free software is that you have to give a backlink back to the owners…hence this post =).

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