One of the first signs I see that makes me livid is when SEO companies use a clients website to rank themselves. This is a practice that is used by web design companies as well, but perhaps is less egregious as they may not understand the implications (I hope). I’ll never come out and say ” THEY’RE USING YOU!!!”, I simply ask the clients a couple of questions like: “Is your internet marketing company giving you a discount for having this link on your website?”

The answer is inevitably “No” and this leads to more questions. When I break down the fundamentals of SEO for people, they get pretty upset they’re being used a cog in someone elses machine — someone they’re paying to promote their website.

Here is an example from a local Phoenix SEO company I found particularly upsetting. These guys have a number of employees, quite a few clients, and quite honestly: someone there should know better. This leaves the choice of ignorance or negligence, a quandary for sure. I won’t call them out by name because the last thing I need is more dirty looks at the Phoenix Marketing Events, but they’re a member of SEMPO and the BBB. These practices cheapen the implications of such memberships putting links on clients websites makes you look like an amateur.

Another particularly infuriating tactic used by bad SEO consultants is data fencing, or data kettling. After hiring said persons, they’ll setup a relatively complex Google Analytics or similar package on your website. Then, they’ll either charge you for weekly reports (Something Google does automatically for free) or they will charge you to “move” your data if you ever decide to leave them as a service. This tactic is frustrating because it would help an ethical SEO person to have a baseline of just how bad the last guys were messing things up. When you start looking at the implications of them giving up the data, you can start to figure out why they don’t want to give up the data: it’ll make them look bad. With my clients, they generally already have a Google Analytics account setup, which they don’t use, and I just add myself as an administrator. I’m not after their data or or their links: I’m after their repeat business and ecstatic referrals.

The most greatest lie the Devil ever told the world was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.

Social Media is billed as a revolution for being connected with more people, reaching out to customers, and rolling up your sleeves and getting into the trenches of managing your own public relations. Large companies are slowing customer attrition by reaching out through Twitter. Small companies are finding new customers. Why wouldn’t you want to be in on “Social Media”?! Why wouldn’t you want to hire a new employee to handle all of this complex new communication? Here are some common arguments for Social Media, and why they’re bullshit:

Fallacy #1 – “If we don’t have Social Media, we’ll never know if people are unhappy with our brand or product!!”

Call me jaded, old fashioned, or any other slur you’d like to use to insinuate that I am “behind the times” but in my opinion, if a problem has made it to Twitter or Facebook, it’s really not the problem. If you sell a physical product, and somebody is unhappy with, they’ll usually look for a way to contact you. In the last 5-10 years there has been a trend towards giving “Support” email addresses and 1-800 numbers that lead to poorly trained personnel after long wait times. This is unacceptable.

Often times people turn to Twitter when they have no where else to turn. You should have prominent documentation written and illustrated by someone in the native language of the probable consumer. On the front of said documentation you should have something elegantly stating in BOLD with BIG print, “QUESTIONS? 1-800-YOUR-NUMBER”. Staff the phone number with people who understand the product, the problems, and have the power to solve them. They should be able to issue RMA’s, Refunds, Exchanges. Nobody wants to talk to a “handler”, they want to talk to someone who can help them right now. It’s disrespectful to have them talking to anyone else. Though The Oatmeal is hilarious in this comic, he backs up my point.

It should never get so bad someone has to turn to Twitter. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t keep an eye on your brand via a column in Tweetdeck or pop on to search.twitter.com every once and a while, but instead of hiring someone to troll Twitter all day for you, or build Facebook friends, you should put another capable, talented person on the phone to answer customers more than 140 characters at a time. At the end of the day, Twitter is a gateway to a more robust communication medium: cut out the middle man.

Fallacy #2 – “Without a presence on every single Social Media platform known to man, we’ll whither away!!”

No one is saying Social Media can’t be valuable to you. However, instead of hovering over Tweetdeck, or updating your Status, why aren’t you going out of your way to make your customers “Jump up and down” happy? Then they can update their Tweetdeck, or their Facebook status. Rather than creating fans, create evangelists who will tout your product and recommend it to their friends? Business hasn’t changed just because some company burning money in Silicon Valley called themselves “Twitter”. It’s great to have people recommending your product, but you want them to do so because the product and service were GREAT, not because you’re their follower on Twitter.

I expect this fallacy to garner a lot of comments about “But Gary Vaynerchuck used Twitter to …” blah blah blah. If you ever LISTENED to Gary you’d know he also spent HOURS every day on the phone talking to people about wine. He’d answer the same question passionately 100 times a day about what is the best Red to go with a steak, or what White will accompany fish. Gary wasn’t just sitting there saying “This White wine is great. Buy it here!” Gary was hustling and connecting with people, and most importantly, he was creating evangelists who will help him build his brand. If I were having a dinner party, and someone said how great the wine went with the filet, you can bet your ass I’ll be doing business with Mr. Vaynerchuck again.

Fallacy #3 – “Everyone uses Twitter, We need that! Facebook is vital to reaching our cool clientele!”

Facebook and Twitter can be valuable tools for reaching niche markets. Unfortunately, so called “Social Media Experts/Gurus/Strategists” are trying to cultivate a market based on the “Me too!” principal. However, the ice cream store on the corner probably doesn’t need “Advanced Web Strategy” to convert more customers. They need common sense.

I take no hesitancy in saying that I have never tried a store or place because someone has checked in there on Twitter, or because they’ve suddenly become my Follower. There is a Hawaiian place just down the street from me called Paradise Hawaiian BBQ. It’s freaking amazing, and I love it. I don’t tell all my followers to try it, but I do *shock* take my friends there if I can. They generally love it as it’s great. I think that as more and more local little places get on Facebook, the efficacy will be diluted. If you followed every single place you went on Twitter and Facebook, and each one sent you one update per service per day, your feed would look like a billboard. The classic Social Media Bullshittery to this is that, “No problem, you followers can hide you so you don’t annoy them”. The common sense response to this is “WHAT IS THE POINT THEN?”

If I sell really obscure blue widgets out of my garage to a very limited audience, Twitter is a great way to cultivate brand recognition and find new customers. However, if I’m just Josh’s Ice Cream Store (I think I’d like to own an Ice cream store one day btw) I can see getting a lot more benefit out of doing promotions for my existing customer base and for those passing by. Ice cream, classically, is a crime of opportunity. A “flavor of the week” promotion seems a lot more sensible than tweeting about Organic ingredients. A “Pink Ice Cream For Breast Cancer” promotion where every bit of profit for that day/week is donated to charity would probably do a lot more good than “Today we’re making chocolate and it looks great!”. And who knows, someone who thought the Breast Cancer promotion was cool just might Tweet about it.

Fallacy #4 – We don’t want to get left behind.

Scarcity is one of the oldest marketing tricks in the book and Social Media Bullshit Artists will paint a very serious picture of a virtual gold rush happening. They paint it as if Facebook is going away, or Twitter won’t be there tomorrow. “You’ve got to act now”. The curious part of all of this is they may have a point. Does anyone remember Myspace? How about Friendster? These were passing social media fads that were eclipsed by new services. There was a time where it was IMPERATIVE for your business to be on Myspace. When did that stop being neccesary? When there was something new to sell.

Instead of building equity in things like Facebook pages, and Twitter profiles which in reality you don’t own, and have no control over, why not build a robust website and a mailing list. This is data you’ll always have despite the hot social media service of the day. As long as you don’t spam people to death, most won’t object to an occasional email about a Breast Cancer promotion. I always like to go look at businesses who have thousands of followers on Twitter and are Tweeting all kinds of things. Often times, they have TERRIBLE websites. So when Twitter introduces their new API that allows advertising, and suddenly while talking to you all your customers are seeing ads for your competitors, all your brand equity is now worth nothing. Your competitors are capitalizing upon your hard work to gain relevant active followers. However, had you been building a list and equity in your website this whole time, you wouldn’t have this problem.

Sure, you should include the Facebook widget on your website to show your connected. That makes sense. But when Zuckerberg eventually pisses everyone off, and Facebook has had its heyday, you can remove it and put in whatever happens to be the hot service of the moment. And since you’ve built brand equity to your website, it will be easy for your consumers to add you on “Bablur” or whatever the new trend is.

Conclusion

This is by no means an attack on the pragmatic use of tools to garner customers. Instead, it’s a call to action to consider whether or not you’ll see a positive return on investment and brand equity. Social Media Gurus/Experts/Whatever aren’t legitimate. Period. At best, they’re specialized public relations folks. At worst, they’re snake oil salesmen. They’re selling something that’s difficult to measure the efficacy of and tough to understand for the average business owner. They’re selling something that doesn’t build equity in the small business and instead is another gear in the machine of some big corporation. For many businesses Social Media will be a learning experience: they’ll learn to be more weary of things they don’t understand.

I ran into a problem last week where I wanted to decrease the bounce rate of a couple of my sites. They have some less than conventional elements in them, and most importantly of all, my “Thank You” pages are affiliate links, lower bounce rates, and increased time on site. I don’t have the traditional e-commerce funnel that Google Website Optimizer likes to see. So, I had to find a way to test and compare these metrics. Ideally, I’d do it using the same traffic sources.

Here is what I wanted:

A – B Testing (This means two versions of each page being pitted against each other directly)
Comparison Metrics – Every Metric Available to Google Analytics. That includes any Goal you’d like to set inside of GA.
This is for testing copy, images, and page elements — ANYTHING you can put inside a post. Get creative: Different Contact form locations, Buy Now Images, the possibilities are endless. You now have the versatility of split testing anything you can do in the WordPress editor.

To accomplish this, I wrote a small plug in that will split every WordPress post. Here is how it works:

Make two Google Analytics Profiles for the same domain.

Plug in the UA numbers to the WordPress Split Tester options screen under “Settings”

Add a meta field to your posts. Call it “splittestpost” and put in the Post ID of the post you’d like to split test against. It doesn’t matter if it’s a draft. This way, you can have alternate non-published content.

So, from then on it will test both pages at 50%. You can see the results on your Google analytics pages.

Click here to download Phoenix Split Tester

The only thing I am shocked about is that someone on the Nestle payroll, paid to do social media, thought it would be a good idea to suppress the community, in any capacity. Social media is like water. If you were to fill up a bottle of water, it would exist happily. If you try to freeze that bottle, it’s going to have poor results.

The Beginning

The first energy drink I can remember is Jolt Cola. They claimed it had the same amount of Caffeine as two cups of Coffee. However, Jolt! was never really popular with any crowd but the code slinging, hard talking computer crowd. It seemed that everybody had their old standby Cola and wasn’t really inclined to switch to the jolt lifestyle. Also, Jolt wasn’t available at the fountain. This was a negative.

Energy Drinks Predecessors
Years later, Coca Cola came out with a green cola to compete with the wild success of Mountain Dew. It was called Surge. They had a great media blitz, and were widely distributed throughout the network of Coca Cola affiliates. You could get a Whopper and Surge. You could buy it in the bottle, and you could buy it at the grocery store. But still, it found people unwilling to make the switch from their beloved Mountain Dew. Surge was the predecessor to Coke’s second endeavor into this arena, Vault. It’s an easy drinking “hybrid” of Soda and energy drinks.

Energy Drinks Grow Up

Today you can’t even go to a bar without being bombarded by energy drinks. They come in virtually every flavor, color and size you could ever want. Let’s take a look at why they’re so well marketed:

1. Despite being just soda, they’re never called soda, but rather “Energy Drinks”
2. They are more expensive than regular soda. And come in smaller cans.
3. Brand name energy drinks aren’t available at the fountain.
4. Don’t suffer the same “Sugary Stigma” as regular Soda

Energy drinks are the definition of “How To Create A Premium Product”. Using nothing but the same old soda from 100 years ago, Energy drinks have risen to one of the most lucrative beverage segments, using nothing but good marketing.

WordPress, like many other open source programs uses a source code control program called Subversion. Subversion exists to keep track of changes to source code. With one line, you can install an entire WordPress installation in just seconds. It’s super fast. With another line, you can upgrade your version of WordPress leaving all your existing themes, plugins and custom files untouched. It’s a phenomenal system. Unfortunately there is nothing secret, or particularly saucy about it. WordPress has a page soley dedicated to installing, updating, using subversion. I highly recommend you read and understand it so you’re not just blindly following my directions. Installing and Maintaining WordPress with Subverison

The “convert your existing installs to subversions” guide above works really well for a couple of installations, but I had 30 existing installations I needed to convert over to Subversion, and I was going to be damned if I was going to sit there repeating commands for each of them. So, I condensed the commands into one line, and ran them sequentially. This set of commands is meant to be run from /home/yoursite. It assumes your default WordPress install lives in /home/yoursite/public_html. Here is the command (PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD BACKUP BEFORE YOU RUN ANYTHING!):

 svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.9.1 blog-new; cd public_html/; cp -p wp-config.php .htaccess ../blog-new; cp -rpfu wp-content/* ../blog-new/wp-content; cd ..; mv public_html public_html-old; mv blog-new public_html

Here is what it’s doing:

Now, if a new version of WordPress comes out I simply go into that directory and type: svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.9.1/ . (Or whatever the latest version is)

However, we can do one better. To “borrow” from Rob Adler’s vocabulary we need to get into the “Automation mindset”. Since we can upgrade the whole installation with just one line, it doesn’t make sense to be cd’ing and cd ..’ing until our eyes bleed. So let’s write some pseduo bash code:

List directories in /home
su to directory/user name (Or change owners of dir later)
For each directory, change to it.
If it contains a folder called .svn and a file wp-config.php
Issue command “svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.9.1/ .”

That’s it. It will find every installation of WordPress living in /home and it will upgrade it.

Notes:
If you run anything the requires a license.txt file in / (Auction2Post, Older WFReview versions, etc) then you will need to use a slightly different command. This is the same command, but once everything is done, it copies license.txt to the new blog directory.

svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.9.1 blog-new; cd public_html/; cp -p wp-config.php .htaccess ../blog-new; cp -rpfu wp-content/* ../blog-new/wp-content; cd ..; mv public_html public_html-old; mv blog-new public_html; cp public_html-old/license.txt public_html

The first thing I noticed was from my friend Brent Terrazas. If you don’t know him, you should. He often plays in a realm of advertising that many of us don’t even give a second though to: traditional media. When it comes to ideas I’m unsure of, I always go to Brent for a second set of eyes, and a different perspective. He’s sharp. This year, he managed to come up with a great idea. If you’ve ever been to one of these conferences, you know it’s a circle jerk of “Let me have your business card!”

Capitalizing on this, Brent made some business cards that say, “Out of all the business cards that you’ll get today, This is the only one that promises a response. Brent Terrazas” The other side has instructions how you can donate to a charity. By donating you’ll receive: a thank you card, and a real business card from Brent .

I think this is an awesome idea. First of all it encourages people to donate to charity, second, at a conference of “Ballers”, $2 should be of no consequence for a good lead. Brent is a good lead. Second of all, it’s a really unique idea. It’s the kind of idea that intrigues people. I know when he told me about it, I was totally blown away how he is going to help people, weed out people fishing for email addresses, and promote himself all with a simple business card.

If you’d like to help Brent you can donate to his charity and get his contact information: here.

The other thing I noticed happening this year was exactly why I went to ASW last year: to find merchants and networks that weren’t predicated upon scammy rebills. I personally don’t push rebills because I don’t believe in the product. If there existed a product which provided value to the consumer, and had “negative option” billing, I’d be all about it. Right now, there isn’t one I can endorse with a clear conscience. Luckily, I’ve had a year on my competition while they got themselves wrapped up in lawsuits from Google and the FTC, I’ve been working on finding sustainable models of income where I can build value for the future, not just turn and burn websites.

So now everyone is concerned with “compliance” and “FTC Approved” offers. I could really care less. I’m looking for small, scrappy merchants looking to pay commissions on products they believe in. I was really impressed with the number of “Green” offers ShareASale had, and how they were promoting them. They see the coming trends, and they know where to place themselves to capitalize on them. I’m pretty excited about working with them in the coming year.

Finally, the last thing I saw that was worth noting were a couple of teachers. In the hotel bus they started complaining to the bus driver about how much money UPS drivers get paid. This absolutely infuriated me. They were complaining to someone who drives for a living that other drivers are overpaid. I don’t know about you, but every UPS driver I have ever seen hustles his ass off. It’s a busy job, and it’s very hard work. Imagine running errands for 8 or 9 hours per day. Same thing. These two teachers were upset that UPS drivers make more money than them and they have “no education, and just drive a truck”. I wanted to reach out and smack these two smug fucks. First of all, if you want to make that much money too, you need only go apply to be a UPS driver. I’m sure all your education will qualify, or over qualify you for the job. Second of all, for the love of God, the least appropriate audience for this tirade is the guy driving the bus to and from your hotel. His level of patience with these two idiots was above board.

All in all, Vegas was a great experience, and I’d love to do it again.

So whether you’re trying to prevent ‘visitor drip’ or you’re curious if your affiliate company is reporting the links you send honestly, there is a solution. Google Analytics lets you track outbound links via a small piece of javascript. You simply add

onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/example.com');"

to the end of your a href code. That will let you know where your links are going, and best of all, you can setup a goal to trigger every time someone goes to /outbound/example.com. This way, you can look at your Dashboard and know how many leads/drips/etc you sent out that day.

If you were REALLY keen, you could edit the automatic “nofollow” add plugin on this blog so that it would append this to the end of EVERY link in every post. That way every outgoing link you add would be nofollow and easily trackable from Analytics to see how popular it is. But you’re going to have to code that yourself =)

Here is the Google blog post explaining it in more technical detail.

http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55527

By the time someone reaches your landing page, website, squeeze page, or what have you, they’ve been marketed to and up sold to death. Towards this end, it’s our job as optimizers, not just search optimizers, to make our pages as painless to use as possible. Sure, you can get 100,000 people to your site and convert .05% of them. That works out to 50 conversions. However, wouldn’t you rather convert at 1% and only have to drive 5000 people to your site? I’d rather work on sending less people to the site, and work on filling orders or helping customers. That’s going to do more for my brand and for my business than driving massive amount of people somewhere and hoping a razor thin portion of them do what I want.

So next time, spend a little more time on your site, make it easy to use, make that text big enough to read, and make sure that if you were using it, you’d be happy with your experience there. I think you’ll see the benefits.

Google is moving towards performance based ranking more and more. What do I mean by this? How your site performs in terms of speed, and user experience are going to count more and more in your ranking. The days of building half a million links to some shoddy squeeze page are over: get ready for a whole new type of performance anxiety.

Yesterday, Google released Asynchronous Google Analytics code. This code allows your site to load faster because it won’t be slowed down waiting for ga.js to load. There are a lot of technical details behind how this works but the gist of it is this: Google Analytics is now MUCH faster. This means it will detect more bounces (Whereas before people could bounce before GA loaded) and it impact your overall site load time much less. This is a benefit for everyone who uses Google Analytics, but even more so because it sets up Google not to penalize people using their tracking.

Today, I see a Tweet from @MattCutts, head of the Google webspam team. Like him, love him, or hate the ground he walks on, he’s got the inside track and when he talks you should at least listen. His Tweet said: “This is important. Google provides webmaster tool to see how fast your site is: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-fast-is-your-site.html”

So, now we have a speedier analytics package and an announcement from the man himself that you need to be gauging how fast your site is. The question now becomes: How slow is too slow? Does my blog need a quad core dual processor system with RAID 4? I think that with most things, you’ll want to be in the top 20%. Luckily, the new tool shows you how your site compares to other sites using a percentage. However, if you’re gunning for a really competitive term or just want to be your best, more is better.