Using Real-Time Analytics to Enhance Viral Campaigns

One of the greatest shortcomings of most analytics software is that it is non real time. With Google Analytics, you can easily expect to wait 18 to 24 hours for data to begin to pull in from the previous day. Most server-side analytics runs daily, processing the archived logs of the previous 24 hours. However, when performing a social media / viral marketing campaign, it is imperative that you watch your traffic sources closely so that you can extend the legs of your viral campaign. There are a handful of real-time analytics softwares available on the web including Chartbeat and Visistat, for our purposes here we are going to use Clicky, the real time analytics software used by Virante when running viral campaigns. Giving Your Campaign Legs via Forums One of the...

Getting Links from the Top 50 Domains

The good folks over at SEOMoz have provided us with a list of the Top 500 Linked Domains according to the Linkscape index. I thought it would be interesting to start churning through the list and finding out how search marketers, spammers, etc. are finding ways to get their links on each of these incredible domains. Some of them are incredibly sneaky and blackhat (check out the Flickr and AOL links, for example). Here is a list of the top 50 or so. (Sometimes we have to resort to subdomains)… Google.com: get in the directory Adobe.com: followed forum links Blogspot.com: If you cant figure out how to get a link on blogspot, give up now. Yahoo.com: join the directory Youtube.com: Create your own channel Wikipedia.org: Add it, it will be nofollowed, but still...

Your New Year’s Resolution: Man Up

In my experience, the overwhelming majority of search engine optimization of failures come from the biggest search engine penalty of all: fear. Business owners and webmasters are terrified of losing their existing rankings, petrified in their rankings by the fear of retribution by the great Google. F*** fear. 1. You have no excuse not to buy links. Sorry folks, but unless you actually believe manipulating the search results in your favor is wrong, you should be buying links. You should be buying positive reviews, you should be renting high quality, targeted text links, you should be securing sponsorships, etc. Excuse: buying links cost money Yes, it does. So does every other form of advertising. The difference is, people who are searching for your site and find...