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Sometimes it's Worth Doing That Which Makes No Sense

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I cranked up Tweetdeck early on Friday night to do my weekly check in. Unless I have a plan to implement I only check the feed about once a week.

I’m not really a user of Twitter, more a pusher. I mostly work with a bunch of other accounts than my main one.

But, when I heard that Pampers have a “follow me” request on every packet of nappies something clicked.

Don’t get me wrong, Twitter was great when it first started, noise to signal ratio was very low and the exclusivity factor was attractive.

But the Pampers thing seemed to whiff a little.

I would still advise clients to cut traditional advertising and put it into new media, Twitter being one of those. Although you really need to know the landscape to truly use it to increase your ROI

Which is the point, right.

And you can use it effectively to promote your brand and develop a following.

Although I don’t take on many clients these days I still have a healthy bunch to whom I can share cutting edge techniques with and the point about cutting edge techniques is that few people are actually doing them.

“Only dead fish go with the flow.”

There are incredibly profitable techniques out there right now. And no I’m not going to give them away on a blog, even when I do tell people the process they don’t quite get it. Some of it is extremely counter intuitive.

The point is if you are feeding where the rest of the herd are, you are going to be drinking muddy water, with the odd floater sailing by.

Twitter is one big, muddy trough. Most people don’t mind that, and to be honest it’s all they need.

Some need to be where the herd hangs out, nothing wrong with that. If you have thousands of followers and you can sell to them, it makes perfect sense.

Observing the social media scene as someone who uses it as a business tool, rather than the social aspect I see there are certain reasons that some platforms succeed and some fail, making gentle hissing noise as they go.

Most don’t realise you can actually break most rules of social media and benefit from it. Too many “How to Tweet” books out there, which I find very useful when I need to nod off.

So, I thought I would break a few rules and throw something out there, just to see. Something that was a bit of nonsense.

I had the germ of an idea and probably in about 1 hour had bought a domain name, set up the web page, created a mailing list. I hadn’t done this for years, I usually get someone else to do it and the speed surprised me.

I called it Slagster.com I will invent a juicy tale of how I came up with the domain later.

After a few jokes about Angel investors and a failed IPO and a lot of nonsense Tweeting from me – I’m sure some people thought that Charlie Sheen had hacked into my account – I noticed someone else had already signed up a Twitter account for Splagster (good luck with that) and a bunch of people signed up to the email, without knowing what the hell what it was about.

Until now.

I do have the germ of an idea, something simple, something tasty, something counter intuitive. Not something for the IM crowd, but something designed to make a lot of noise and be disruptive.

It’s a challenge, and it’s exciting.

And it probably wont happen.

But that’s not the point. The point is to do something that sometimes does not make sense, even at the expense of attracting a few WTFs. It refills the reservoir and girds your loins. Not sure I want my loins girded, but anyway.

Splagster.com, it definitely will not be what you think, but sign up anyway.

Is Blog Commenting Useless for SEO

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The difference between an SEO who has tested commenting on blogs and one who hasn’t is that the one who hasn’t says it doesn’t work and the one who has keeps quiets about it and keeps commenting.

As an SEO it also marks you out as to whether they are in the Premier League or still slugging it out for the pub team.

Some SEO “experts” will see say, “nofollow”, doesn’t pass juice. End of.

This is a mistake.

A blog comment is an advert, it is a branding tool, it will add to the sum of how people perceive you. How people perceive you has a direct impact on whether they will link to you.

For example, when SEO “experts” say blog commenting is useless, my perception of their skill as an SEO is further informed.

It’s well known that blogs and their comments get scraped and nofollow removed.

A visible link means that a human can visit the site and drop a dofollow if they like what they see.

Blog owners tend to check out the links left in the blog comments, which means you can get very important bloggers to come to your site.

A blog comment can demonstrate your skill in an area and make people go, “ooohhhhhh, she’s good.”

If blog spamming did not work, do you really think it would still be happening? What’s interesting about the nofollow that was introduced to blogs to stop spamming is that it hasn’t done anything to stop it.

Also, even when the link was dofollow and SEO’s would look at a blog and say, “but it’s not a real website”

Does this mean that you should go out and leave “Great post”, in the comments of as many blogs as you can find. No, because there is a way to blog comment and there is a way to not.

Blog commenting is a tool in the tool box, brought out for specific tasks and for specific reasons. I’m not not going to give you a step by step guide of how to do it as you probably have a massive brain (you’re reading this blog) and have worked it out on your own by now.

However, I am always willing to listen to the other side of the argument and so if you have data on to show that blog commenting is useless I would love to hear it.

One of the problems of course is that it can be really boring if you hae no opinion and that outsourcing it can lower the quality.

It’s tricky, which means if you hit the sweet spot there are few others creaming it.

Ultimate Guide to using Quora for SEO Ranking on Google

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I don’t like Quora.

I didn’t get to invest in it or create it.

Quora is going to succeed.

But, I am not going to be adding to its database, unless it’s to do a bit of reputation management for clients.

Also, if lots of places start scraping it, it may be worth dropping a link, even if it is nofollow.

There are going to be specific advantages to using Quora, however it’s not going to be what the site owners originally intended. If you are in the business of getting people to go to your website to buy stuff or you have clients who need people to go to their website to buy stuff, I would take a very close interest in Quora.

Why?

Because it’s going to get eyeballs, and it looks like it is going to crush Yahoo answers and those SEO mercenary, Ninja assassins are already knee deep in Yahoo answers gore, getting websites to rank.

So, expect an e-book to pop up entitled, The Ultimate Guide to Using Quora to rank in Google. Expect to pay $47. But, not from me, I would never give away such great info. Only my paying clients get the good stuff 😉

My advice, open an account at Quora, have a little play. Do a few tests. See if you can rank for a keyword.

But don’t use it to throw up tons of original, interesting content. Have you any idea how much you are worth an hour?

Note: Apologies for the use of “Ultimate”. I should be ashamed.

Note 2: This did start as a comment at Quora when I thought, “Don’t be a Numpty!”

Note 3: If you secretly share your SEO Quora tip with me, I will secretly share that I have back at you.

A Quick Dip into the Spam Comments that this blog gets

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We all get spam comments, a quick look at what Akisimet is blocking can sometimes be entertaining, my favourite is the last one. Below is a list of comments that Akismet auto blocked on this site.

It’s interesting to note the certain commonalities of some of them, like the ones that try to keep it ambiguous and not specific about what they are talking about.

I guess if I wanted to be a comment spammer this is the kind of stuff I would be studying, but time is best spent elsewhere.

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Why Using own Voice to SEO blog may Offend but Increase Credibility

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I have taken the decision to re-brand this blog, or rather take it back to its roots of being an independent SEO blog that does not try to be anything other than a collection of views, thoughts and opinions of the world of seo, social media and the wider world of online marketing and web development.

I have decided that authenticity and credibility are more important to me than building business partnerships within the industry and creating a conventional business. It’s really how this blog started off in 2007, by being honest, passionate, highly opinionated, not afraid to poke fun at industry icons and sharing as much knowledge as I myself gathered, I quickly made a success blogging.

But this wasn’t instant success. I had previously spent a couple of years blogging without success, then one day I decided not to care if anyone gets offended and simply tell it like it is.

If you follow this ethos, you will instantly make friends, but also you will instantly make enemies. Usually the people who get pissed off are the people with power and influence, this is the same in any industry.

It’s impossible to have credibility and not annoy people. For example if you come across an seo tool which you know doesn’t really do the do, you have to be honest if you review it, and if it’s a steaming pile of bull excrement it’s essential to state that.

The problem is, as you get more connected within the industry it becomes harder to do this, because the guy who makes the seo tool may have offered to do you a favour and if you piss him off it’s not going to happen.

Do you go out and deliberately look for trouble, not at all. But I think causing trouble should not be a reason for me to “play the game” and keep quiet when I spot a steaming pile.

Naive? Possibly? Bad for business, in the short term yes. But the audience I want for this blog is not the movers and shakers of the SEO world. It’s not the head corporate agency who drives the fancy, expensive car that I wish to attract. It’s the one man band web masters who are grafting away online, carving out a living in the dry dust of the World Wide Web.

This blog is for The seo engineer who is working at the life sucking, seo factory that is some seo agencies, not all but some are like this. I know because I talk to seo engineers all the time, these are the guys and girls who do the actual work, they share horror stories and confide in me, which of course always is kept confidential.

Not all SEO agencies are like this, but some are apparently.

I want this blog to be somewhere that you go to get the real stuff, not that there aren’t other great seo blogs out there, there are quite a lot of great seo and social media blogs I read regularly. To know that when you read stuff here it’s not because I have aligned myself with a certain group or clique, but because it’s what is on my mind. Not that there is anything wrong with being in a gang, it makes good business sense to do so. I would advise others to do this as you can really get a boost from great networking.

But, it’s not for me.

I look at other people who are having great success whilst retaining credibility and authenticity. Sure, you may hate them or they are not your cup of tea but they are people who realise they may give reason to have people despise them, but at the same time give voice to those who perhaps have no voice, who resonate with groups of people who get ignored.

People such as:

Jeff Jarvis
Jason Calacanis
Gary Vaynerchuk

Not everybody’s cup of tea, and they do create enemies and sometimes attact derision. But they do have their on voice and they also have their rabid fan base, which is the point.

I mean come on, Jason Calacanis turns up at an SEO conference to announce that SEO is snake oil, although completely wrong you have to admit that’s some cajones.

As an aside if you Google “jason calacanis seo snake oil”, the results are rubbish. The SEL article is the one I wanted and should not be buried behind 3 posts from the JC blog.

You need big balls for this kind of blogging, you also have to have the kind of personality that does not mind coming out with stuff that people hate and get offended by. Unfortunately, I have this manner about me. I say unfortunate as it does burn bridges, lose friends and alienate people. As Mike Grehan of Search Engine Strategies pointed out.

You may not like or even agree with what I will say. But, it’s going to be my honest, straight up opinion. If I don’t do this then what’s the point? This is the skill set I have. Brent Csutoras once blogged that I should STFU and stop letting it all hang out and it some part he has a point. Most people are not up for following such a high risk strategy and it does close doors and can be seemingly bad for business.

So, I have made a conscious decision not to pander to any particular group or individual, or have any association with any online business apart from my own link building agency, which as I want to keep boutique, small and effective and doesn’t really need me to make powerful friends. I have no real ambition to create a huge agency and simply get by on my ability to provide my small amount of clients with a brilliant service.

And you know what? It feels bloody good to sit here and tell it like it is and not to worry about not being liked.

Maybe it’s not really re-branding, but more going back to the original brand and ethos. Ironically one of my original goals when I set up the blog was to speak at a top SEO conference, which I have done on a number of occasions.

I expect my RSS subscriptions to plummet, but at least I will be having a good time.

I also am going to do little editing of these blog posts, it can be a little clunky to read a stream of consciousness, but I find it more authentic and a lot more easy to write.

Is there a danger of me coming over like a bit of a plonker, oh yes. In fact I can feel the eyeballs rolling as I write this.