Marketing – Quote of the week!

If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying “Circus Coming to the Fairground Saturday”, that’s advertising.

If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that’s promotion.

If the elephant walks through the mayor’s flower bed, that’s publicity and if you get the mayor to laugh about it, that’s public relations.

If the town’s citizens go the circus, you show them the many entertainment booths, explain how much fun they’ll have spending money at the booths, answer their questions and ultimately, they spend a lot at the circus, that’s sales.

And, if you planned the whole thing, that’s Marketing!

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How dare Sphinn outrank ME for MY content

Whilst i am still working on my ‘other’ blog post i thought i would just throw something out there, this post is supposed to be a little in jest so please don’t take it to seriously ok? Good!

I have had the fortune of having a couple of articles from this blog submitted, and then subsequently ‘go hot’ on Sphinn. The stories have usually been submitted on the same day that i released them to the blog but generally take 2 days until they go hot.

Once the story has gone hot then i tend to get a couple of hundred referrals from Sphinn which is nice targeted traffic, so what’s the problem?

Well the problem is that even though I published the story on my blog first, the Sphinn article has less text, and the Sphinn article is linking to me as the source, i often rank below the Sphinn page in the Google SERPS 🙁

Lets look at exhibit A shall we?

As we can see from the image above, i wrote a post about the Pligg Auto Submitter which was actually published on the 29th July. However Google’s crawl date says 2nd of August, the same day as the Sphinn post. The titles are pretty much the same, and my URL is (arguably) better. Plus i have more content on my page.

Now if i could direct your attention to exhibit B

This one is even worse! I am 10th whilst the damn Sphinn post is 5th! Not only that, the sphinn post doesn’t even have a crawl date next to it. Oh Google you try my patience at times.

Now i am fully aware that the Sphinn domain has waaaaaay more authority than Chewie.co.uk, i am also aware that the Sphinn pages have more internal links pointing to them than my post. However in the world of relevant rankings, i do think that I should be ranking higher (who doesn’t :)) when Site B (Sphinn) is effectively republishing the work of Site A (Me) and also linking to the source… c’mon Google sort it out 😀

Don’t let this stop people submitting my stories to Sphinn though 🙂

New stuff for Chewie.co.uk

Ok so this isn’t an SEO related post, but tonight i’ll be working on something good for tomorrow so thought i would just quickly let everyone know that the header on the site has changed and i have a new mascot/avatar/favicon/whatever who is now appearing in the spanky new header on this website.

The new header reflects the blog a little better and was designed by my friend Jay who owns Blooming Gorgeous flowers

Creative Linkbait from a BunkBed website

Marketers take note:

Here is a nice little piece of linkbait from a company which sells bunkbeds. Now how the hell do you generate a ton of links into a site which sells bunk beds, it’s hardly the most exciting of industries now is it?

The way in which to do it is to think outside the box and come up with something particularly wacky which the likes of Digg and Reddit are gonna love, perhaps you could even make a Facebook application out of it to? I once spoke to a commercials director who said he wished the internet would take more note of methods used by TV advertising, who often have to come up with funky new ideas to catch a viewers eye. Well it seems the marketers of this site took note.

Well thats what the guys over at BunkBeds.net have done, and they have done it pretty well to say that. The little game that they came up with is ‘How long could you survive chained to a BunkBed with a Velociraptor?‘ The title pretty much sums up exactly what the game is about. You get asked a few questions such as ‘Do you wrestle’, ‘Would you kick the Raptor in the balls’ etc and when you have done you get a time which tells you how long you would survive. They could of changed Velociraptor with anything, but this works so well because its quite ‘out there’.

The idea is simple, the execution is simple, but the results speak for themselves. If we look at Yahoo site explorer then we can see that the page alone has generated 531 inlinks. Currently it is gaining momentum on Reddit and is being posted in forums and imageboards.

So next time your glass blowing, or desk manufacturing client asks how you can generate some links into the site, then think of something wacky like this and give it a shot. You could probably get a page like that up in about 3 hours tops.

I don’t think they have a Facebook application yet, but its something which could be converted pretty quickly and generate even more of a buzz, if anyone from BunkBeds.net reads this and wants the Facebook application creating, just give me a shout 🙂

Diesel thanks the Internet for new advert

By now you have probably seen the Diesel XXX advert (it’s a SFW porn film) which has been front pages on both Reddit and Digg, you’ll have probably even seen it arrive in your inbox. What you probably didn’t know is that Diesel pretty much ripped the idea from an internet thread on Something Awful. I can’t link to the actual thread because it has been archived and you need upgraded memebership to view it.

Now as i said, Diesel ripped the idea from the thread and made a pretty cool movie from it, but here is the cool part. Instead of just taking all the credit, Diesel actually contacted Something Awful and basically said ‘Hey thanks for the ideas’ on top of that they are paying for each forum member who contributed to have their account upgraded!

I think its pretty cool when a big company like that takes the time to thank the people for their ideas, and it also goes to show the power that internet communities still have. We have all seen meme’s such as LolCats and Fail come from the likes of 4Chan, so it’s worth remembering that a lot of internet marketers can generate good idea’s based off user content. There are a ton of goldmines out there, you just need to be creative to turn it into a way which will work for you or your clients… just remember to thank the people who gave you those ideas or you might go the way of Sarah Palin and get your email hacked 🙂