While the auto world has been chatting up a storm over a video put out by the fine folks at Hennessey Performance, they’ve been lapping up the exposure. While you folks are in for another motorsport marketing example from me, and this won’t be the last but I’ll at least keep it short. They pitted their latest beast of a creation, their Cadillac wagon vs my personal favorte, the Nissan GTR. They ran the car on slicks against last years Nissan which is what has most people bickering about all over the web. Moral of the story? A little controversy that pits people against people will always drive traffic and branding your way. The story has been picked up on Autoblog.com and Jalaponik, two of the biggest auto industry blogs there are. Not to mention that, but Twitter and just about every related car forum is linking and chatting up a storm. All I can say is, way to go Hennessey and keep up the great work! Our CEO is saving his pennies for your Venom GT and he has very sexy dreams about that car every night!
Author Archives: Ryan Clark
Hennessey Performance: Cadillac Wagon vs GTR R35
ChamberofCommerce.com Needs Your Listing!
With the recent string of top notch business/company directories I’ve been finding great places to build links, expand your business and build your brand better. I recently talked about getting listed with Company.com and Manta.com, and now I bring you ChamberOfCommerce.com. I really like these types of sites as they provide legit businesses with a place to network and build trust online. Currently this website is for US businesses only, so us Canadians weren’t able to sign up and build a legit profile.
The links are cloaked so there’s no link juice being passed, but that’s fine with us. Not every link needs to be follow/dofollow to have value. While there are varying levels of accounts you can get from free to costly, I’d hope the more expensive monthly accounts come with some sort of added benefit…but now I’m getting into paid link territory. There’s not much else offered here that’s unique at the moment other than business advice and guidance from industry professionals. That’s nothing to shake a stick at but it definitely won’t come cheap!
Google Panda Q/A From SMX West
SMX West has just wrapped up, sadly we missed it and were stuck sitting here in the office working away. There are always a ton of awesome videos that come from the conference, and sadly not a lot of them get the exposure they should. I really enjoy slapping these on my mobile and watching them while I work out, or before falling asleep. But, generally speaking they’re brilliant videos with industry leaders discussing the latest and greatest, and in this case the latest and painful. The Panda/Farm update has heads still spinning, and we’re still seeing a lot of scrapers and spam still ranking quite well. I hope this video clears up some of the questions you may have had, or if you’re just wanting to see what the marketing world is getting at behind close doors.
Rand Talks About Preventing Link Based Penalties
It has been a while since I posted a Whiteboard Friday post from the fine folks at SEOmoz. So when I saw Rand rocking that snazzy sweater, I just new I had to do my part and share it here. I wish more people would watch this video because they have no idea the nightmare that is cleaning it all up. This video covers a whole spectrum of linking topics that will cause trouble, as well what to do to stay out of the black hole that Google can put you in at a moments notice. I highly recommend checking out their original post because they graciously provided a transcript.
Animoto.com Review: Client Case Study
A lot of our clients need, must, want and absolutely have to utilize video marketing. For those who don’t know the costs of producing high quality, high definition video then you’re in for a shock. If you have to ask then…well you should know the rest of that quote. The majority of our clients are of course hotels, real estate agents and ecommerce sites and are always in need of video content. There are many great reasons why you should be marketing with video and I’ll go into that a bit here. First, I’ll try and convince you to try out Animoto’s FREE program and see if it is a must have tool in your arsenal. It’s really too easy not to folks, so don’t miss out!
The video by Rose does a wonderful job of showing you how easy it is to create videos, and how many useful options there are packed into this web software. The main idea is to create picture sideshows in a much more fashionable sense. So when it comes to showcasing products on your online shop, making a slide show of your latest property listing or just showing off the family vacation, it’s a breeze. We recently had a client whip out 25 high quality videos for us to use, all in which showcased his unique products. Guess what we saw?
His first sale by video! The videos were only shared on their Youtube profile, and since they’re unique, they made quite the jump start on their account. This meant his videos were indexing at a rapid rate, the views starting climbing and most importantly his profile with that juicy Youtube link was indexed. We honestly didn’t expect to see a sale come from the videos that quickly, but since they have some very sought after furniture that sale came fast. After further inspection we started to see a few of his videos were already ranking in the top 5 spots for his target keyword, and that meant a onslaught of highly targeted viewers were watching the video. Luckily we make sure each video description includes a link to the direct product, along with a unique to Youtube only description.
So what else? The videos were next used on their social media accounts including their Facebook Page, Twitter account and on their blog. The videos were also added as embeds on the actual product pages which is a great thing to do in an ecommerce shop. Why you ask? Well let me give you two great answers. First up it adds more content to your page, and looks more complete in my opinion. Secondly, we noticed a huge increase in the time-on-site due to the people sitting there and watching the 90 second video. The bounce rate is better, the customer is more happy and our client seemed to be the happiest of all. They were not expecting, or thinking, about the overall benefit to video marketing. Really it’s a no-brainer, but it’s just another tactic in a sea of marketing options one can take advantage of.
There are tons of social video sites out there in which you can use your videos and build a few extra links. These won’t be ultra-awesome authority links, but they’ll add a nice and diverse hit to your link profile. This is something we love to make sure out clients have going on. After a couple months, we also noticed sites like Squidoo, Hubpages and social media scapers embedding our clients videos. We have no problem with this because some included their link, it made the views and ratings go up and that’s key to ranking those videos. For those who don’t know how easy it is to rank Youtube videos for long-tail keywords are missing out!
Try Animoto Out for FREE!
Matt Cutts On NoFollow Links
Matt answers an interesting question from a webmaster in Thailand about only using nofollow links throughout his website. I can imagine how confusing this can get for some new webmaster’s out there. What should I append nofollow too, how should I build my internal linking structure and is that going to be seen as a PageRank passing link? Hopefully some of you find this post informative and give new webmasters an idea of how to go about linking without fear of screwing something up.
Gwazu.com Makes Twitter Contests A Breeze
Our team has been handling a lot of contests lately in the social media realm, so when a new tool comes out we’re always thankful. Getting followers to your social media channels are more important than ever, and we have an inkling that it’s going to be even more crucial by the end of 2011. Marketing a contest by Twitter is so easy that not doing one is just plain crazy. Gwazu.com has recently come onto the radar of our team not only for its contest marketing ability, but to enter random give-aways when we’re bored. I thought we’d take a quick look at what makes this web app tick, and hopefully persuade some brands to start using their platform.
The first thing I’ll mention is the complete ease of entering a contest from the consumers point of view. As long as you’re logged into your Twitter account, you just need to click the enter contest button and you’re done. It doesn’t get any easier than that! This should really entice companies and brands to jump on board and utilize their platform. Those ReTweets should be nice and handy in getting a lot of exposure, and play things right so that people are funneled to your Facebook Page.
Getting your contest listed here for now just requires a simple email and a reading of their rules. Gwazu’s aim is to alert the world about the biggest and best social media contests, so I don’t recommend coming to them with a measly $10 gift card to Mcdonalds…although I’d most likely sign up for that! You can also pay to advertise in their featured contest spot which is top dead center, schmack dab in the middle! So what are you waiting for? Get on that social media contest your brand has been dying to do before it’s too late!
