2006 Knucklehead of the Year Award & More

Lo-Fi SEO
Unless caught in collateral damage, many sites I have looked at that suffered from some update or other were usually doing something aggressive, and often for a long time. Sometimes lazy. I say lazy because it's following what others were doing instead of thinking of a way to get in under the radar. I also say lazy because it's easier to throw money at something than it is to figure out a way that can pass a handcheck.

I say aggressive because it can't pass a hand check. It's a bet that the search engines won't figure it out. I'm not denying there's a lot that people are getting away with. What I'm saying is that of those sites I've looked at that suffered some kind of penalty, there were obvious lo-fi SEO activities going on.

Absolutely, there is collateral damage. But that usually happens within the first week or two of a spam tweak. Then the sites come back as the tweak is seemingly fine tuned or, dialed back, as they say. Sometimes over the course of a couple months.

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2006 Knucklehead of the Year Award

And the award goes to the author of this wonderful link request:

"ps you're not on a list .... i really did visit your web site having found it on overture.com's pay-per-click listings. "

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From the Dept. of Whoa!

According to this report, with total buying power in excess of $400 billion, Asian Americans represent the single most affluent consumer group in the United States. Of all major population segments in the United States, Asian Americans are most likely to work in managerial and professional jobs. The median household income of Asian Americans is 15% higher than non-Hispanic White household income, 56% higher than the median household income of Hispanics, and nearly double that of Black households. The number of Asian American families with incomes of $200,000 or more (152,000) is about the same as Hispanic and African American families combined (156,000).

Yet, despite their affluence, Asian Americans have remained under the radar screen of many marketers of consumer products and services. The questions I have is: How do you market to an ethnic segment that's so well integrated into the rest of society?

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From the Dept. of Submit to Me Now!

If you've been thinking about submitting a website to Best of the Web, today may be a good time to do it before the year ends if you intend to write it off in April. Don't be caught with your pants down, submit to Best of the Web today.

Moving Forward - Avoiding Becoming Obsolete

People want to watch not read
The internet is already eating away into television's traditional role as a place of entertainment. The various search engine popular query lists powerfully demonstrate what people want out of their boxes, and it generally follows the entertainment arc. It's beyond the tipping point: People are no longer reading on the internet, they are watching it.


Information as Video, not Text
Now that high speed internet usage is greater than dial up, and computers in the form of gaming consoles, dedicated internet entertainment boxes, and computers serving double duty ease into the space formerly occupied by the entertainment center, you're going to see even more demand for Information as Video. As the YouTube generation that formerly lip synched to their favorite songs grows up and takes ownership of their parent's Media Center you're going to see a greater convergence of the internet and the living room.

Video becoming it's own thing
NYTimes is diving in with video reports. You should, too. Why offer your website visitors a widget review they have to read when you can hold their attention for a longer period of time by simply streaming a video? I can't imagine that video will completely supplant text in the near future, but certainly it may encroach on it and become it's own thing.

This is a beautiful example of how internet as video surpasses traditional textual internet:
Want to do a Pizza Tour in New York City?

And here is an example of a Real Estate Agent doing something useful with video:

How cool is that? Restaurant reviews you watch. Attend an open house from the comfort of your own home. That's head and shoulders better than those clunky panorama applets. This is a killer application and we're only at the beginning of the trend.

Video killed the internet star
1. Commercials, as in television commercials, will have to make the leap into internet videos. To do that we'll need greater participation by advertisers within the new Internet as Video medium.

2. If the internet goes video and significantly moves away from text, you will likely see the emergence of a site like YouTube as the place to go to find the information you want. The killer aspect of YouTube is the community filters built into tagging and sorting the videos, something that will never happen with traditional search.

If internet as video increases it's popularity as a source of information over old fashioned text, this will mean a demotion of tradtional search. At this point in time, YouTube stands to gain an incredible amount of mindshare as the goto site for videos if they synergize with the direction the internet is moving. So while Yahoo and MSN are busy figuring out how to deliver a relevant search query for textual websites,YouTube could be running away with mindshare similar to how Google did with traditional search when no one was paying attention.

3. Web 3.0, if they name it right, may likely be Internet as Video. What does that mean for the way you will be pimping widgets, clicks, and affiliate programs a few years from now?

Link Building Strategies: Video

One of the exciting trends in link building right now is leveraging video to increase interest in websites, as well as creating another reason for someone to link to your site. Pretty much any site can take advantage of online video production to create content that is useful to visitors, and the great thing about it is that you don't even need high end video production facilities to make it work.

Marketing via YouTube and Google Video
This is the most straightforward aspect of the trend. Someone asked me how valuable the traffic of video sharing sites are in terms of CPM traffic and my response was that smart marketers are actually using YouTube and Google Video to distribute their content. Hollywood and Madison Avenue are releasing trailers and commercials via these channels but you don't have to be big bucks to do it yourself. Smaller niche players are leveraging the traffic to create instructional videos, videos that display the strength of their products, and videos that are essentially articles re-produced to suit the medium in order to plug into the traffic.

Case study of raising brand awareness & conversions
A small martial arts studio produced a series of videos of their students performing lion dances, and added links to their site. Anyone in their local area interested in learning martial arts may take an interest, based on the performances of their students, to join that studio. A company that specializes in knowledge produced around two thousand videos ranging from how to play the guitar to how to brine a turkey. Each video has been watched thousands of times. That's a lot of exposure and aside from the time spent creating the videos, it's virtually free exposure.

What if you're a retailer?
Suppose you're selling goods over the internet. One approach is to show your products in action and demonstrating how your surfboard, skis, cooking products work well and produce a positive outcome. Another approach would be to create instructional videos that demonstrate how well your products work, for instance, how well a garden fountain integrates into a garden and makes it look twice as good.

The best part about this is you don't have to limit your endeavor to YouTube or Google Video, you can host it yourself. You ever visit a mall or county fair where they have the guy in a booth cooking tasty snacks on their wok/non-stick pans, indoor bbq? Have you seen the Jack Lalanne Power Juicer informercials? There is nothing like showing your product in action for motivating people to purchase it. It seems to me that many products, brands, and services can benefit from a mix of informercial style promotion on and off their websites.

Birds do it. Bees do it. Even New York Times does it
Even if you are a site that produces product reviews, you too can make videos people will be interested in watching, and anytime you become useful you are giving someone else a reason to link to you. NYTimes features Movie Minutes, movie reviews on video. That's a great example of leveraging video to create more content- and they're not even selling anything beyond becoming a destination.

TurnHere.com is a beautiful example of a travel site full of user generated content that is useful and gaining notice for the great videos of sites to visit on vacation. Contributing content to promote your destination or travel site is a great idea, but you can also host it from your own site to demonstrate why your restaurant, hotel, boutique, or travel site is the best choice. Sell yourself. Make it useful. From there on you can leverage press releases, blogs, PPC, YouTube, and Google Video and other marketing strategies to light the fire under the campaign so that it grows legs.

If a picture is worth a thousand words...
The main point I'm trying to get across is that while text is content and quality content is easier to get links to, video is also content. My question to you is, is it time you strategized how video content can become another reason why users should visit and link to your website?