Negative Marketing

Like with all knowledge you can use it for good or bad. Bad is a subjective term as apart of marketing is making your competition look worse than you. Its a little known fact that even the most ‘church of England’ companies tend to take part of negative marketing activities to make their competition look like a poor choice for customers.

There are a number of direct and indirect strategies that can be employed including the use of false customer reviews, in appropriate return linking, anti-blogging and what I call Mr angry web sites. I have used some of these strategies myself many in retaliation for things individuals or companies have done to me. For example, when a certain company decided to steal money from my bank account for 6 months and refused all other means of resolving the issue. Sometimes the only way to get ones point across over to them is public humiliation.

I never use these activities as apart of any main stream marketing effort as morally its tacky and wrong. It’s only knowledge I’ve used for revenge purposes and with a co-ordinate assault by a team of people then a business can be seriously damaged, beyond repair.

Google at the moment expanding in supplying reviews/customer comments by the side of web site listings. This can be a very positive thing, but also can be used by the competition or anyone you might upset to undermine your web site. Customer comments, whether real or not is actually the most powerful negative marketing technique that a person can use. Marketers will use this by picking up on any negative aspect of a competitor and making a big thing of it, then real customer will often have that in mind and make similar supportive comments, turning the review/comments system into a wave of negativity driving customers away from visiting your web site.

There is a lot of talk on the internet about Google Comments being a bad thing and they are on the whole completely correct. Many good businesses are going to fall victim of negative marketing. For the enterprising and those void of morals there will be opportunities too. These are what I regard as black hat activities and its not a good thing for a CV in my opinion but anyone who markets any sort of website can so easily turn to the dark side.

Anti-blogging is really about setting up multiple blogs under different names, talking about a subject perhaps isn’t directly related to the product or service (it could be a personal blog) and then post a number of articles about the product, complaining and undermining them. If you use the major blogging networks who automatically categorise, list and distribute your articles via RSS feeds then this can be an excellent way of spreading further negative publicity.

Using in appropriate linking can be a powerful tool since Google will adjust your page ranking depending on what other websites are linking to yours. So if you happen to have a vanilla site but then later find that 50 rather inappropriate adult sites are linking back to yours then Google will think you are spamming and your vanilla sites ranking will collapse within 6 months, naturally negatively affecting income for that business. Some marketing companies already offer this service to established clients that have signed confidentiality agreements.

Lastly there’s the Mr Angry websites. This is where a disgruntled customer is often so annoyed that they actually set up a single page or entire website with a forum where others can get together and slag off the target. Allot of large companies have Mr Angry sites and their domain names usually go along the lines of; (company-name)sucks.com or (company-name)scam.com etc.

Having a domain name with your company name and either Sucks or Scam in them is very damaging in itself as not only is it embarrassing but also shows prospective customers that there are problems with resolving of customer complaints. People take allot of notice of Mr angry web sites as its perceived that no one that is sane is going to go to all that effort unless they are really annoyed or just completely insane!

I suppose that a sophisticated on-line stalker could use the guise of a ‘fan site’ turned bad into a site that can negatively affect your business. In this situation, you can often turn this in to a positive (if you know how) and actually increase your popularity and making the stalker look like a complete mad man. I wouldn’t advise doing this as stalker behaviour can be un-predictable and it can be dangerous in terms of personal safety. Its just not worth the hassle!

Face Book

I’ve never been a fan of face book because its too much of a distraction, though its a dam great tool for capturing eye balls for advertising. I might do a social networking platform one day. Its something I have thought about before but have never had the time for such a massive project, besides I need to update my programming skills first to even attempt such a technically challenging project.

Anyway, I have succumb to commerical pressures and now have a Face Book page. Whilst logged into FaceBook to view my profile, Click Here

whose your target market?

Before we get in to the hard stuff, you first need to consider what sort of market you are aiming to target with your site. Its better to build a dating site that specifically targets a group or range of people with similar interests than just doing a generic dating site that appeals to everyone. There are already too many large generic dating sites with multi-million pound budgets that any new site cannot even hope to compete with.

One method I use for creating a niche is that I write 5 lists of words; Location, Gender, Age, Status and Activity Related. An example of a very short list might be:

Location (Geo): UK, England, English, US, Americans, American, States, Florida, France, French, Germany, German, Russia, Russian.

Gender Related: male, man, chap, guy, bloke, Women, woman, girl, lady,
Age Related: Teen, adult, pensioner, youth, mature, old, young, virgin, 30somethings
Status Related: Single, married, available, separated, looking, friendship

Activity Related: Drinking, Dance, theatre, eating out, clubs, music, concerts, films, staying in, horse riding, football, pop music, computer games, quiet pubs

From this group you might consider targeting “young sing male concert” goers looking for girls that are into the same thing. Or 30Somthings single again’s looking for friendship wanting to meet for a drink in a quiet pub.

By using lists of words It helps you to discover new markets that perhaps you initially wouldn’t had thought had otherwise. Its a good idea in spending a substantial amount of time at this stage as the subject or niche you choose will have a pivotal role of how your web site will perform for its life time. You want to spend time on this stage, because ideally you want to have a strong brand identity and after a while your site advertises itself through word of mouth or has a loyal affiliate manager following that are promoting your business for you.

For this tutorial I’m going to use the niche of “single 30Somethings looking for other club goers from the UK”. At this stage you may want to consider whether you want to target a particular gender (I don’t) and you’ll notice I’ve decided to specifically target a particular country. In practise this could be a little too much niche like, where as in the real world of on-line trading it would make more sense to open the side up to a slightly wider audience.

<strong>Interpreting Google Results</strong>

You may think you know how to search Google, having done so for years. When you are looking for a brand name or an idea you have to learn to interpret the results in a slightly different way. Its not just about what results you can see, but also those they are not present. After all, you are looking to fill a gap in the market and not to duplicate another site exactly, since you will fail in your aspirations of having a successful dating site.

Go to Google Search and now search for the keywords of “single 30 club uk dating” (excluding the quotes).

<a href=”http://www.sinsearch.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/googleserps1.jpg”><img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-383″ title=”googleserps” src=”http://www.sinsearch.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/googleserps1.jpg” alt=”" width=”500″ height=”284″ /></a>

The search results includes mainly two types of web sites; existing dating sites and club/music orientated sites. This is perfect because you have the opportunity of promoting the site to two core audiences and a multitude of secondary audiences related to Music and club culture.

Another important thing you should be looking for is to see if the keywords you have used returns search results that includes advertising from the same or related industry. You can see from this results page it features an advert from match.com at the top of the page, plus also a screen full of ads down the right hand side. This should tell you something! It tells you that many dating sites consider this collection of terms to valuable to pay for advertising for.

If you read any on-line marketing book about using Adwords to promote your site, they always suggest trying to find the golden egg – ie, a popular group of keywords that no one else has thought of and use them in your Adwords campaign since the pay per click unit price will be very small. This is fine for Adwords, but in reality if you decided to base your site using the keywords of “uk dating” then you have a very small chance of getting your site to number one before you retire in 20 years time.

To be successful you need to pick a group of keywords that sit in between those that are the most popular and those that are the least popular as seen my Adword advertisers as this gives you a fair indication of how successful your web site may be in the future.

The number of search results that has been returned during your analysis is something that you should look closely at. If there’s to many then its a good indicator that the search criteria needs to be narrowed and therefore you perhaps you need to tighten your niche. If on the other hand hardly any results are being returned then its a fair indication that its not going to be popular enough and therefore not draw the sort of interest you are hoping for.

In the example above, Google is returning 299,000 results which would make it pretty easy to make it to number one without much effort. You can quite easily just create a web site, link it from a couple of locations and be number one in Google within weeks. When I am looking at creating a new niche I am generally looking for a wider audience of around 1.5 million results in the search results page. Though it should be said that I would also use “single 30 club uk dating” as well and create content that specifically targets that particular set of keywords to ensure as wider spread of traffic as possible.

If you particular search returns in excess of 10 million results then you certainly need to narrow your niche to something that gives a smaller number of results. At this point you could chose to narrow it by selecting to target your site to a particular genre of music that is played at certain clubs where the 30 somethings hang out.

Strange SEO Phone Call

I had an odd phone call from Leicester, UK. The guy on the end had an extremely strong Indian accent and I found it difficult to understand him. He was saying that he had seen me on a certain web site and he was looking for someone to do his e-marketing. He did know a fair bit with what he was talking about, though I did get a feeling he was still rather pumping me for information on terms of how to increase his organic searches.

Search engines fascinate me, Google fascinates me since its not just a search engine in terms its not just about keywords, but its programming as a phonetical aspect to it. Have you noticed if you type a mis-spelt word into Google or a word that sounds like another one and it returns a different word in the “did you mean” link. The challenge of coding for what something sounds like is a highly complex task.

If Google uses phonetics then I wonder what would happen if during the optimisation stage you used not only primary keywords but also phonetics and commonly mis-spelt words related to your content? I never tried it, though its possible that using voice recognition to write everything, I may unintentionally end up testing this one day!

I found out the guy with an extremely strong Indian ascent appears to work for a company with a .net domain name that could easily be confused with another company with a dot com. It looks like the site has been coded to standards expected by search engines in terms there has been use of appropriate header and name tags. Specifically, the document content, Alt, title and meta tags are confused and are full of stop words.

The pages titles are very badly written and I’m not surprised {company name} is having difficulties. The first keyword used in a meta tag is very important indeed and under no circumstances should it ever be your brand name, unless you are such a massive name that you already have very good brand recognition. (ie people already know you). If people don’t know you, then its highly unlikely they’ll be searching by your brand name. Using the brand name in position 1 of the meta doesn’t help to establish a new brand, on the contrary it just makes your site harder to find.

When choosing keywords for a web site; what you are actually looking for aren’t words you WANT to associate your site, but words or phrases that are already being used that can be related to your pages. This often means by slightly rewriting content in order to have the correct ratio of keywords between the title, meta and text. If you have a too high ratio of keywords then your site will be penalised as being a possible spam-dexer. If on the other hand this ratio is too low then you may well be missing out on possible revenue making opportunities. The trick is getting that balance and I won’t pretend its an easy thing to do – Its not.

An over optimised web site is actually just as bad as a site that has been badly prepared for the web and de listing is a regular event. I stay within the guidelines and always work steadily building traffic by using valued content. You cannot short cut the process or fake it. What is the point? Why not just put in a bit of effort to make decent content.

company.net using this as a main company then when someone else owns the .com (a major web host in the states) isn’t a great idea either. Google will always point to the .com first. In my experience, if the dotcom isn’t available and you’re not an organisation then use a different name.

Sometimes, people make the simplest of mistakes when they start their business will have a dramatic negative affect on visitor numbers, making the process of SEO a difficult and expensive one.

Meta Tags

You can control what a search engine uses as the title and description by using “META Tags”. The main four that are used are – Title, Description, Keywords and Revisit-after. These contain snippets of information about your site that aid indexing robots when they visit your server.Meta tags are extremely simple to use and implement. All you need to do is paste them in the *HEAD* part of the HTML document (web page). For example:

*META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”webmaster, scripts, revenue,”*
*META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”Free Scripts, New Sin”*
*META NAME=”revisit-after” CONTENT=”14 days”*
*META NAME=”title” CONTENT=”Sins Resources”*

Keywords:

The keywords tag is the most important META tag you’ll use when promoting your Web site with search engines. The content in this tag will tell search engines what keywords are relevant to your page. You should select words that people are most likely to use when searching for information that your site contains.

Description:

The Description tag contain a brief description of your site for search engines and indexes. Some engines allow descriptions to contain a mere 25 words whilst others will allow longer descriptions of 65 plus. My personal preference is to use shorter descriptions, though there doesn’t seem to be any harm or benefit whatever length you select to use.

Revisit-after:

If you update your site regularly, adding more pages you can instruct some search engines to revisit your site and index these new additions. Don’t set the revisit value too low as it will be ignored by robots completely.

Title:

Title tags do pretty much the same job as a normal document title. The Title Tag is still used by some search engines. I always include it for completeness, even though its not entirely necessary. There is a description tag that contain a summary of the page or what its about. This information will be used by search engines that ignore meta tags.

Following these simple guidelines will increase your sites chances of being found by your target audience.

Automatic Blog Pinging

Its been a while since I set up a new blog and being a lazy person I don’t like visiting every single site to register my site each server. In this situation its often nice to use a pinging service. When you ping a server, you are saying hello and I’ve got some new content for you to index. This is pretty much the same deal as registering with a search engine, except with directories you only have to tell them about your site the once. Where as with pinging the idea is to provide a means of telling servers about your site or blog every time you have added some new content.

I myself sometimes individually ping services to make sure they have worked properly and other times I am just lazy like everyone else! Using an automated service does have its negatives as you never can be completely if the ping was received without problems. There’s nothing like doing this yourself, rather than relying on a third party application.

Even so, I don’t have time to visit all the pinging sites every time I change something on one of my blogs. So I tend to make use of the services below:

• Pingomatic
• Blogflux Pinger
• King Ping

Niche Directories

If your site offers a product or service to a specified group, such as to other webmasters then you may find that there are sites provide dedicated directories for this. Search the internet for all such resources related to your site and try to get your site featured in their directory. Usually its works on a reciprocal link basis, plus they may offer premium space for a price. Directories will indeed provide some very good targetted traffic.

The reason why directories are so good is that they have already filtered the masses from google into the sort of visitor that is interested in your particular niche. Like with my site, that attracts a certain person with certain characteristics and interests, so sites who share those interests want to be listed in the directory. I would say using directories well is really important.

Top Lists

A top list operating like a Chart. Each Top List member is required to place a logo and html code on to their site that your visitors click on and are taken to the top list chart listing. Your sites position in the chart is calculated by the number of hits that you send to the Top List. So the idea being the more hits you send, the higher your site climbs, the greater its exposure and the more hits you receive back. Top Lists can be value-able hits provider if your site already attracts significant numbers of visitors from other locations.

As a webmaster you do need to carefully pick the top lists you choose for your campaigns. The first thing you should look out for are top list owners that send incoming traffic to the front page of the web site and have the top list software itself 4 or 5 clicks away. This is a great indicator that you won’t get much traffic back though you’ll be giving the top list owner allot of free traffic to them.

Next you should check out the top list several times before joining to see if its crashed. Many toplist platforms out there are rubbish. Theres one script that the inexperienced constantly buy because they don’t know any better and I’ve been told its a hackers dream.

The final thing you should look for and perhaps the most important element is the relationship that exists between the “in” and “out” hits. Ideally you want to join a top list that will give you more “Out” hits than you have to send to it. So, if it looks like you have to send 1000 hits just to get 100 back then its not a good idea to sign up. If on the other hand you can see some members are only sending 100 “in” hits and are recieving 500 “Outs” then its a good indicator that lots of people are navigating to this part of the site and clicking on things.

If you are careful in selecting your top lists in your campaign then they can be a useful tool to add to your arsenal.  If yoy need any help in this area then you’ll know where to come!

Website Marketing

This is a very complex subject, that can easily be a whole suite of books in itself. In this article itself, I can only give you out lines and basic ideas as it can all get rather complicated. My head is full of this crap!

Organic Search Engine Optimisation – Basically this is about making your content interesting to search engines and be readable to them. Its important to mention at this point VLD automatically creates search engine friendly pages which gives you a massive head start. What this means is that it uses properly formed URL’s that search engines can understand. You see, unfortunately most search engines simply do not read pages generated by server software. So, it is really important to use the most appropriate server software as without it there’s absolutely no point even attempting any further search engine optimisation on your project.

Link Exchanges – This is a traditional or old fashioned method of improving a web sites ranking inside a search engine. Unfortunately, this methodology was thoroughly abused by many on line marketers that that built what we refer to as Link Farms; which were sites full of links but had no value added content itself and thus were eventually deemed to be as very low value by the search engines. There is absolutely no point in wasting your time doing hundreds of link exchange when a couple of dozen good ones would give exactly the same benefit in terms of page ranking or positioning inside the search engine.

Social Networking – Its wise to market your product or service by using social networking sites such as face book, myspace and sites like bebo. You can use the blogging facilities to write about your industry or work and link to your web site. People are generally moving away from blogging on the whole and is instead using the incorporated blogs inside these social networking platforms. For the time being it is also worth maintaining an independent blog at another locations as it gives you an additional web site that is linking into your business site.

Tube and Video Sharing – Its quite a popular activity at the moment for small business owners to create video’s or entertainment videos that may be sponsored or just advertising your particular business or affiliate web site. If you are not sure about doing video’s yourself (too shy?) then you could try hosting your own podcast shows around a related dating topic which could be sponsored by your business. Now imagine your podcasts being distributes via itunes, which gives you an idea of the marketing potential of using audio and video media to spread the word about your product on-line.

Blogging and Message boards – Despite blogging being no longer key to success, you still need to have a blog even if it gives you the credibility to comment on other peoples blogs and do link exchange between blogs. Even though these blogs may not be directly linking to your business side, they will be linking back to your industry blog that in turn will go to your business site. This is actually quite an effective method in funnelling traffic and targeting those most likely to buy to your web site. The same goes with message boards, as the more times your URL is mentioned on related web sites, the better your site will rank in the future. Remember the objective of web marketing isn’t to just attract the most visitors possible, the purpose is to target paying customers – thus 1000 buying customers is better than 100,000 visitors that buy nothing from you.

Paid Advertising – The best paid advertising solution that most people are familiar with is Google Adwords and Yahoo. Additionally its possible you may be able to find other sites that may to able to offer you banner advertising on a flat rate as opposed to the normal pay per click basis that often works out so expensive with Yahoo and Google.

Using Picture Posts

Picture posts are similar to top lists, except that sites allow you to post sample artwork/images to these sites for people to click upon. If you specialize in an industry that produces artwork then it becomes a useful way of displaying a sample of your work to a wider population. Care needs to be taken when using Picture Post services as many require images to be fed directory from your server/website and not allow them to be uploaded to their own server. This can become expensive if the picture post site is attracting 1000’s of visitors a day – Your graphics on your server is also being loaded 1000’s of times a day. If you have a bandwidth quota then it will be soon exceeded and your host will be asking you to leave or pay for the extra usage. Take note, because your graphics are displayed 1000’s of times, only a very small percentage will click on it.

Totally from a marketing point of view using a picture post is a good way of driving free traffic to a site. This is not necessarily a good thing because the type of person that uses picture post sites tend to be those that won’t want to pay for content. You have to think about it from the customers point of view and use a picture post system to your advantage – use it as a tease rather than giving them everything they want immediately!