Understand MySpace Before Marketing in MySpace
With tens of millions of users (but probably not the purported 100 million though), MySpace.com is a force to be reckoned with. Especially when you consider that MySpace apparently drives more traffic to online retailers than MSN Search, according to some recent Hitwise data.
But MySpace is hard for us adults to get our heads around. It just doesn’t seem logical: How does it hold the interest of so many — young people, with short attention spans, in particular — despite the facts that the design/usability is so atrocious, the web page creation platform is so frustratingly restrictive, and it’s chock full of so many junk/spam/abandoned profiles?
Um, it’s about looking cool, fitting in, and hanging out. Duh!
Then where do us adults feature in this? Besides offering a tempting place for stalkers and voyeurs to hang out (can you say “Creepy!”?), it’s a promising venue for marketers to hawk their wares. But do you have what it takes to crack it? The most unlikely of marketers seem to have it — bars, bands, and quirky dotcoms (disclaimer: these guys are a client) , whereas big brands like Blockbuster don’t seem to have a clue.
MySpace is a real slice of humanity. Amongst the throngs of teenagers (many of which have their profiles set to private), the MySpace ecosystem is host to concerned parents trying to keep tabs on their kids, college students, obsessed sports fans, realtors. In other words, the Average Joe or Jane. And of course marketers. Clueless marketers. I’ll readily admit I’m one of the clueless ones. Thankfully there is someone I can lean for guidance through this teen marketing minefield… my 15 year old daughter Chloe. You may recall she’s the one with the Neopets blog whom I’ve blogged about before (BTW, she was featured recently on BloggerStories.com… I’m so proud of her!). Chloe has a MySpace page (a private one, so don’t bother looking), and she gets MySpace. I plan to enlist Chloe’s help in marketing within MySpace. At 15, she’ll be the youngest marketing consultant I know!
Before you start marketing in MySpace, you’d better understand it. Because if you don’t, the MySpace community can turn on you the moment you make your first misstep. Just like bloggers can. (Note: many MySpace users are bloggers too. MySpace supports blogging within its platform.) The cardinal rule in MySpace is the same one as in the blogosphere: ‘Keep it real’.
You know who else gets MySpace? Site owners like this one who provide layouts, backgrounds, funny photos etc. to the MySpace community. Those folks are sitting back, sipping pina coladas and watching the moulah from Google AdSense roll in.
Sometime when I get a chance I’ll write a follow-up post to this one and share some specifics about MySpace marketing, like getting large numbers of Friends, using photo animation, customizing your layout, etc. So stay tuned!
Getting indexed by Google Mini doesn’t mean you’ll get indexed by Googlebot
Google bills the Google Mini as a search appliance that’s able to deliver “the same reliable results you expect from Google web search” to your intranet or public website. I think Google is being misleading here, confusing their customer base into mistakenly believing they will receive the “same results” from the Google Mini as the Google.com web search. Google.com has major points of difference from the Google Mini. For example, Google.com takes numerous spam signals into account when determining indexation and rankings; Google Mini does not scan for the same spam signals. Google.com takes into account the PageRank scores of all inbound links; Google Mini does not.
As discovered by Joel on Software, the Mini never phones home, even to get public PageRank information; the search results it produces are entirely based on whatever documents you told it to crawl.
So, if your site’s PageRank is too low once you get into deep pages, then Googlebot may lose interest and may not even index the page, whereas Google Mini would be much more inclusive.
Or if a site contains something that looks dodgy — like noscript, noframes, hidden divs, tiny text, etc. — it will be a turn-off for Googlebot but not for Google Mini.
Thus, if you’re a Google Mini customer and your site is well-indexed, don’t take that to mean that your site will be well-indexed by Googlebot.
SEO Report Card #4 – Golfgods.com
The fourth of my SEO Report Cards led to the “deconstruction” of online golf equipment retailer Golfgods.com, whose president Jason Mischel was lamenting over the “quality” of the site’s 5000-6000 visitors per day. Their #6 ranking in Google for “golf clubs” wasn’t to be sneezed at, however it wasn’t the hole-in-one they hoped for.Â
Some of my findings…
- Inbound links of any real importance were in short supply. The Google PageRank score for the home page was 4 out of 10 (which is quite low considering that PageRank is on a logarithmic scale).
- The home page contained hundreds of links, which is way more than Google’s recommended maximum of 100 per page.
- From the home page, the brand pages were only available through a dropdown nav (remember: spiders can’t fill out forms). The most popular brands should be text links.
- Golfgods.com has a blog, which is very forward-thinking from both SEO and branding perspectives. Unfortunately, there were no text links to it to pass it link gain, only JavaScript-based links to individual posts which the spiders can’t crawl.
For the rest of the findings, read the full article here.
UPDATE: There has been some confusion whether my critique was of the old Golfgods site or the new one. And the answer is that the critique is of the OLD site — the one that was NOT developed by my company, Netconcepts. Just thought I would clear that up.
Sage advice for business bloggers
Jessica Duquette, founder of In Perfect Order and blogger at It’s Not About Your Stuff offers some sage advice in my interview of her.
The best advice I have for any business bloggers is to spend as much time connecting with other bloggers as you do on your own posts, by visiting their site, commenting on specific postings that can then link back to your site, participating in blog carnivals, quoting excerpts from their posts and linking to their sites, and allowing others to do the same from your posts. You can be writing all day long but if you don’t have links from other sites, you will not be seen by nearly as many readers. Not to mention the wonderful personal connections you can make by meeting people through blogging. It only takes one lucky link from someone to turn you from 120 people a day to 12,000 visitors a day!
I wholeheartedly agree. Do you spend as much time connecting with other bloggers as you do writing posts? If not, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.
Consider, for example, Eric Ward’s hilarious LinkMoses’ Ten Commandments of Linking. If Eric hadn’t nurtured so many relationships in the blogosphere, this page would not have gotten the publicity that it achieved.
Who wouldn’t want to work a block from the beach in New Zealand?
If you’re passionate about search and you’d like to work at Netconcepts, a block from the beach in beautiful Browns Bay on the North Shore of Auckland, New Zealand, then read on…
We’re currently looking for two key staff. To score either of these roles, you’ll need to be really, really good.
Job #1 is for a Search Marketing Analyst who may be a tech savvy graduate in arts, journalism or media, an experienced copywriter looking to get further into the online space, an online marketer who wants to gain new experience with leading US retail brands or, of course, an experienced SEO practitioner.
Job #2 is for a Search Optimization Analyst. This would appeal to a computer science graduate intrigued by search engines, a web designer or developer wanting to move into search and Web 2.0, a systems or business analyst in the ecommerce space, or an experienced SEO practitioner.Â
Full job descriptions here
Free “Long Tail of Natural Search” webinar this Thursday
My company, Netconcepts, is hosting a webinar on the topic of our recently-released white paper “Chasing the Long Tail of Natural Search“. This presentation will take place on September 7 at 11.00am Central, and is open to all.
If you want to…
- Discover how large your long tail sales opportunity really is — and how much you may be missing
- Learn how multichannel merchants are leveraging their brands into unbranded “long tail” keyword markets
- Uncover the secrets of “Page Yield Theory” and its power to exponentially grow your ecommerce sales
then…