A colleague who’s really into Google AdWords showed me a great example of personalized Google ads. In some cases, Google shows ads that are related to your previous search queries. It even works when all cookies are deleted and you aren’t signed in to your Google account or whatever. The searches must be executed in the same window, however. Let’s say I’m looking for the weather forecast. When I search for “weather forecast“, I’ll get these results (click to enlarge): 
What if the next thing I’m looking for is a “Holiday to Spain“? 
Now let’s see what happens to the ads if I enter “weather forecast” in the search box again? 
Hmm, the first ad looks really targeted to me. Let’s see if we can get personalized ads on other queries as well. My girlfriend’s birthday is in a two weeks, and because I’m a really cheap bastard, I’m looking for a “sale” somewhere. |
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Personal branding is hot. Really hot. Because my personal brand value of close to zilch, I guess it’s more important to get my brand name pronounced right. I know Wiep is only a four letter word, but I can imagine that it’s quite hard to pronounce it if you don’t know how. The Dutch language can be a bitch.
Wiep is pronounced as ‘cheap’, but without the ch. Now mix the ‘eap’ with a combination of a V and a W (like some sort of Russian V). That’s it. V/W-eap. Do you want to know how not to pronounce my name? There are 7 ways after the jump. Because it still can be difficult to pronounce (it actually is really easy, but I don’t want to make you feel bad if you still can’t do it correctly), so here are 7 ways of not to pronounce my name correctly. |
It seems like Google’s testing out some stuff with the setup of their cached pages. Below are two screen shots of the cached page of Wiep.net. The first one is the “original” one, which was reached by clicking on the “cached” link of the top result at Google.com. When trying to see the cached version of my homepage via Google’s Dutch version, I noticed (and Martijn and Heini noticed the same thing) that this version does not have a date of cache retrieval nor a link to the ‘cached text only’ version. This is the original version: 
And this is the “Dutch” version:
It’s not data center based -both cached versions above were requested from the same data center IP-, but it seems to be language based, as the Dutch version of Google Belgium shows the same version as well. To make this even stranger, the “cache” link that Google provides on every cached page (top left), does not work anymore. This link points to http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/features.html#cached, but their is no cache anchor present on the page. In fact, the word anchor doesn’t even get mentioned on the page, in contrast to, let’s say, about a year ago. Is this strange or is it just me? |
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Warning notice: while this post is easy to digest, it also contains a lot of crap. I’m sure almost every search marketer has been in the situation of thinking “so how am I going to tell this friend/ prospect/ client that his website is crap in a polite way?” in at least more than one occasion. Some people are in the situation of being able to decline such opportunities while others even publicly talk about the fact that they won’t do work for certain websites. However, numerous companies will happily accept to build links for a crappy website, because they only see the big bag of money that this new client will be bringing in. For this last group, I’ll be diving into the art of getting links for crappy websites today. 
Image: Ashahi Beer’s Golden Crap, by chrissam42
This starts with analyzing the link profiles of the competitors of the crappy website. Neglect the good links from high authority domains. Let’s face it: these sites probably won’t be linking to your client, so you’ll just have to focus on websites that look like or are just plain crap and settle with links on resources page #4. Together with 99 more crappy links. - After this, you can submit your crap to dozens of SEO friendly directories that all look the same and almost instantly accept all kinds of crap. You’ll end up with a few links from AdSense overloaded pages that get crawled even less than a suncream salesman visits Norilsk, Siberia. But the website you’re promoting is still crap. |
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It is, like Lisa Barone mentioned earlier, time to let your link baiting campaign grow up. This starts with foc using your link bait campaigns the right way, by using the right hook and by dropping your bait in the right place. And what type of hook to use and where to drop your bait, depends on the goals you’ve set. This post will give some guidance in how to choose the right hook to reach those goals you’ve set. Defining your goals
Just like with any other marketing activity, you’ll have to set yourself a clear goal first. Do you simply need lot a lot of traffic? Are you looking for lots of bookmarks? Or do you only want to improve your search engine rankings, no matter what strategy it takes? You’ll need to have a clear goal in mind. When you’re shooting with a shotgun while you’re being blindfolded, you will certainly hit something, but were you aiming for it? There are numerous types of goals you can set for your self, but every possible goal will include one or more of the following factors: - Links (are you looking for lots of, or quality links)
- Traffic (do you want lots of, or qualified visitors)
- Buzz (are you only aiming at buzz/ branding)
- Bookmarks (are you mainly looking for bookmarks)
- Durability (do you want your campaign to have a long shelf life)
Choosing your hook
There are several types of hooks (or content creation approaches, or types of link magnets, or whatever you want to call them) you can choose from. The most important ones and the ones with the biggest potential are being mentioned below, together with the possible potential of each hook. This way it’s easier to see which hook can help you best in reaching your goals. |
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