Our Article on Linkbait Gets a Thumbs-Up

A regular reader and commentator on our blog, Gary R. Hess, recently gave us kudos for our January, 2007 post, “Leveraging Linkbait,” by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.

Writing in his blog, Gary called out “Leveraging Linkbait” as one of the 12 best articles on the subject of linkbaiting.

Never heard of linkbaiting? It’s cleaner that it sounds. In fact, linkbaiting can be an effective addition to your overall marketing mix, helping drive more traffic to your site. Read the original post, as well as the follow up, to find out how to make linkbait work for you.

Well done, Rand, and thanks, Gary.

—Michael Mattis, Head Linkbaitist

Alternating Color and Placement Can Keep Your Ads Looking Fresh

Ventura Boulevard in L.A. is a focal point for Hollywood studios advertising their latest cinematic blockbusters. The ads are displayed on massive billboards that soar high above the traffic. Look up on any given week and you might see a seemingly endless parade of gigantic green ogres, dopey-looking 40-year-old virgins, dashing swashbucklers or cat-suit-wearing superheroes.

Tourists and newcomers to the area can be dazzled. But to long-time residents, they barely register an impression. That’s because seeing the same ads in the same places can lead to ad fatigue.

What is “Ad Fatigue”?
The average American adult sees more than 3,000 ads each day, but by necessity we tune out most of them, so we can get our work done, drive home without crashing into the guy in front of us, etc. Your users can suffer from ad fatigue, as well. This can be a real problem, especially when you have many repeat visitors. People can become so used to your ads that they are less likely to see them—and less likely to click.

Fortunately, there are a couple of fairly simple ways to keep your Yahoo! Publisher Network ads looking fresh.

Vocal Color
The first solution is to take advantage of the more than four billion color combinations you can choose from in your publisher account interface. In general, our publishers have found that choosing a color palette that complements their existing color schemes tends to be the most effective, although this should not be considered a hard and fast rule.

Subtly alternating your color palette periodically can keep your ads looking fresh. Create three or four ads, each with a distinct but still complementary color scheme. You might try starting with the most subtle, blended colors, then progressing to those bolder in color. Swap out each ad on a periodic basis: weekly, monthly, quarterly—whatever seems best to you. This can help keep your audience’s attention on your ads.

Keep ’Em Moving
Another way to keep your users on their toes is to alter your ad placement. As noted above, people get used to ads when they’re always in the same place, even if the ads themselves are changing, then fatigue and indifference cab set in. Try changing the placement or layout of your ads, or inserting an extra ad in an unexpected place (but no more than three per page, please!), on a periodic basis. 

Remember, you can test the effectiveness of each color scheme, layout and placement by using the Reporting Categories feature.

Lastly, we’ve also discovered that mixing display (that is, “graphical”) ads with your contextual ads can be more effective than depending on either graphical or contextual ads alone. So you might want to look into the Right Media Exchange, which allows you to show display ads from a variety of networks—and get paid for them.

—Michael Mattis, Blogster-in-Chief 

Editor’s Note: We all want to go to the SMX Social Media confab in New York next week. But good conferences don’t come cheap, especially if they’re in the Big Apple. But not to worry. We know people. Like Rand Fishkin, who is giving a talk on Social Media Marketing Essentials. As one of the smarteratti, Rand knows that driving more visits to your site can mean more clicks on your ads from more qualified prospects. Driving more visits is a good thing. Driving more visits for no money is even better. In his SMX conference presentation, Rand will discuss how to get more clicks via Social Media. He offers a preview here (for no money).

The buzz about social media has reached a crescendo. Naturally, this has sparked a good deal of debate and trial and error around the practices of marketing across social media on the web. Results, from successes (which we often don’t hear much about) to failures (which seem to get the most press) dot the landscape of social media marketing and inspire both curiosity and fear in website owners and marketers.

Today, I’d like to act as Sergeant Joe Friday and present, “Just the facts, ma’am.” Social media marketing may be a bit of a minefield, but it’s also an exceptional opportunity for marketers to reach a traditionally tough-to-penetrate demographic—early adopters. This is the fundamental reason that social media marketing is so exciting—those who are active in social networks are powerful people—they’re influencers, bloggers, journalists, thought leaders and publishers. They can help to spread your message, so reaching them can have a remarkable impact.

So… How does social media marketing work? In many, many different ways. You can use social media marketing to:

• Create profiles on social media sites to conduct reputation management and control (You can see what others say about your brand and actively prevent your brand name from being abused—i.e. the John McCain MySpace scandal)
• Participate in social media networks to earn credibility and mindshare from other members of those communities
• Share stories, links and content that the community will find valuable, which sends either a positive branding message or direct traffic to your company
• Build links to your website to help with traffic and organic search rankings by building content on social media sites
  Control the search results by using profile pages to fill up the search results (and push down potential negative results)
  Distribute viral content you’ve created to help attract links, traffic and attention (see this post on linkbaiting for more)

Each of these unique activities requires considerable effort, know-how and experience. It also requires that you know where to go to engage in social media marketing. These are the top 10 sites we engage with and get value from:

StumbleUpon—With more than three million regular users, StumbleUpon drives terrific traffic and has social options that help to make it even more powerful
Wikipedia—Incredible visibility in search engines and a powerful brand make participation valuable
Yahoo! Answers—with three million users and growing, Answers is a natural fit for any company seeking to build its brand and expose its experts to the curious
Digg—The Digg home page drives tens of thousands of visitors and considerable visibility to the larger blogosphere
Reddit—Similar to Digg, but with an older, somewhat more mature audience focused on politics & offbeat news
del.icio.us—Tag pages, the home page and the popular page are all valuable for driving traffic and branding
Flickr—One of the best sources on the web for sharing images and a highly participatory community as well
Newsvine—Recently picked up by MSNBC, Newsvine allows for unrivaled levels of participation and content generation
Yelp—The current leader in local reviews and listings
YouTube—The powerful, highly visible video site has millions of active users and allows for incredible brand reach when a video becomes popular

The best recommendation I can give is to spend time in these social communities, learn the ins-and-outs of the people and participants and jump in only when you feel comfortable engaging. For many publishers, this may require a social media specialist (either in-house or contracted) or someone who can dedicate the time to learning the landscape of social media. If you’d like to learn more, a good recommendation would be to stop by the SMX Social Conference in New York City next week, and be sure and look in at my presentation on social media marketing essentials as well Patrick McGee’s  session on Yahoo! Answers.

Best of luck on all your social media adventures!

—Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz

Do Want to Know More?
So do we. That’s why we’ve been running an ongoing series on low-cost traffic drivers to help our publishers get more users and help increase qualified clicks. Check out these previous posts:

Optimizing for Social Media

SMM in Depth

Working the Media

Boost Your Buzz

Optimizing for Relevancy

Leveraging Linkbait

It’s Who You Know at “SMX Social Media”

If you happen to be feeling sociable in Manhattan next week, drop by Danny Sullivan’s SMX Social Media conference Tuesday and Wednesday, Oct, 16 and 17, at the Metropolitan Pavilion.

This intimate little conference will offer convivial sessions on many aspects of the emerging social media space, including social media marketing essentials, bookmarking and tagging, linkbaiting, micro-communities and more. Be sure and look in on the keynote, Tuesday afternoon at 4:40 p.m., as Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us and Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon spill the social media beans.

Also of note, Marchex SEO manager, Matt McGee, will be offering a case study on Yahoo! Answers in the session, “Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing” at 2:30 p.m. Wednesday.

“I’m going to introduce Yahoo! Answers and show how it can be a beneficial marketing tool to build credibility and positive brand image, get into some best practices and tips on how to make the most of it,” says Matt, who also notes that Yahoo! Answers is consistently among the highest sources of traffic for his blog.
 
Hey, it’s New York—if social media can make it there, it can make it anywhere!

—Michael Mattis

Image courtesy danhellers.com via Flickr

A Socio-economic Approach to Ad Placement and Color

We’ve discussed ad placement and color strategies in general terms before. This post offers tips on ad placement and color based on your audience’s socio-economic demographic, specifically the social “class” they most strongly identify with. First, a little background…

While it certainly helps to share your audience’s enthusiasms—a stock car racing enthusiast, for example, knows how to speak to other stock car racing enthusiasts in their own language—it’s also important to step back and try to get a more objective, dispassionate feel for who your users are on a fundamental level.

Head of the Class
Chief among the subjects considered taboo in America is socio-economic class. We like to think of our highly mobile society as either class-free or enjoying a class system based solely upon hard-won personal wealth and achievement.

Savvy marketers know otherwise. They have found that a person’s social class is reflected in an array of signals, including speech patterns, clothing, hair styles, product preferences and so forth. Smart marketers and publishers know how to use those signals to make an impression on the audience they are trying to reach. They know that fans of stock car racing tend to respond to a different set of signals than do, say, opera enthusiasts.

Vive la Différence
If you were an advertiser, you wouldn’t try to lure stock car racing fans using images from Wagner’s Tannhäuser any more than you would try to hawk light beer and buffalo wings to opera-goers. That’s not a value judgment, but rather just one of the many observations that marketers and publishers use to market their brands better.

Class Clues You Can Use
Understanding your target audience’s socio-economic class and aspirations can help you make decisions about your content, your editorial voice, and the look and feel of your site.

Luckily, with contextual advertising your ads are likely to match your up pretty well with your site’s content. But you still have to make decisions about what your ads should look like and where on your pages you should place them. Understanding your audience’s socio-economic class can help inform those decisions.

Location by Vocation
If your site deals with, say, rare, first-folio manuscripts, the latest yachting news or classical music, you may want to consider confining your ads to the margins, or placing them between discrete blocks of body copy. If, on the other hand, your site sports news from the monster truck rally or demolition derby circuit, it’s OK to be more aggressive with your ad placement.

To illustrate, look at how ads are typically displayed at a monster truck rally: They appear on just about every printable surface. Now compare that to the more discreetly placed advertising you’re likely to find at a corporate-sponsored cultural event such a classical music concert or a wine tasting. You get the idea.

Note that it’s important that you not plaster your interface with ads to the point that your content is hidden, and there should always be a clear delineation between your editorial and our ads, as noted in our guidelines.

Color Me Class-Conscious
Use the same basic guidelines for color: Though you have many choices, in general you’ll want to choose muted colors for the vintage-wine-and-cheese crowd. For the lager-and-beef-jerky set, however, a somewhat more colorful approach may be called for. In either case, it’s a general best practice to choose ad colors that are complimentary to the overall color scheme of your site. (With Yahoo! Publisher Network, you’ve got some 4,294,967,296, possible color combinations to choose from). Remember, no matter what colors you choose, clean design almost always works best.

In terms of people’s page-viewing habits, eye tracking applies pretty much across all demographics. The options for ad placement are myriad and we offer ad layouts to fit most page designs. In addition, a mix of display and contextual ads tends to work best in almost all cases.

For more detail on how socio-economic class works and how taste is determined, here are some good books on the topic:

Class: A Guide through the American Status System, by Paul Fussell
Snobbery: The American Version, by Joseph Epstein
Taste: Acquiring What Money Can’t Buy, by Letitia Baldrige

—Michael Mattis, Blogster-in-Chief