If you’ve ever had friends or relatives whose eyes glazed over as you try to explain your life as an SEO/SEM consultant, you wouldn’t have been alone last week on Sphinn.
In a more lighthearted “Discussion of the Week” than some previous topics, we asked: How do you explain being an SEO/PPC/Social Media marketer to the non-tech savvy? At the moment, we’ve had 24 replies — but no one made us laugh as much as what Sphinn member John J. Curtis of L2T Media. John said he tells people, “I fight robots for a living” and here’s one of several reasons why:
It ensures you are not talking to another digital marketing professional. This is equally good news, as you are now allowed to embellish the mundane details of your day-to-day job into an online jousting match/Bond thriller, complete with hacking into Google servers and secret USB drives worth millions of dollars. And the women. Holy hyperlinks, the women!
Feel free to add your response to that question, or just click through to read the rest of John’s answer.
That was the most discussed topic last week on Sphinn. An article about avoiding affiliate marketing scams was the most popular story among Twitter users. That and more are below in this week’s roundup of the hot activity on Sphinn.
Most Comments
- Discussion: How do you explain being an SEO/PPC/Social Media marketer to the non-tech savvy? – Let's get a little more lighthearted this week, shall we? I bet you've been in this situation before: You're with a long-lost friend, relative, or someone you don't know very well. Or it could be your mom or dad, for that matter. They want to know what you do for a living. In our "Discussion of the Week," we want to know what you say in that situation? How do you explain what you do to someone you know is not tech savvy?
- Google Panda Update – Thoughts and Solutions from Jim Boykin – Interesting read from Jim Boykin comparing Panda to Google's old supplemental index issues: "Google’s been tossing duplicate pages, and poorly linked pages, and pages with little content into the supplemental results for years… this hasn’t been an issue with google….the issue comes when you have original content, on a page that is not deep enough to be at the “supplemental level”…"
- Why All SEO's Should Learn Programming – Ian Lurie believes that it's better for SEO's to suck at programming than not to know how to do it at all.
- The Top 14 Things Marketers Need to Know About QR Codes – Here's a crash course on tools, tactics, and best practices to confidently help you jumpstart a mobile QR marketing campaign.
Most Tweeted (not already listed above)
- Avoiding Affiliate Marketing Scams – Rae Hoffman shares lots of advice about making sure you don't fall victim to some of the occasionally outrageous claims of affiliate systems/products that promise great wealth, huge checks and little or no work
- Harnessing the Power of Flickr – This is a really, really great article that's ostensibly written for photographers, but contains all kinds of advice and explanation for any person or business that hopes to successfully use Flickr as part of a marketing strategy.
- Do you really need comments on your blog? – Amy Africa challenges one of the main pre-conceived notions about blogging: "I think blog comments are VERY overrated. “Social media experts” act like they are the be-all-end-all but personally I think they are insignificant for many (not all, but the majority of) companies." Your thoughts?
- You’re not a social media expert, you’re just another schmuck with a Twitter account. – There’s no denying that the web is full of snake oil salesmen, and with the explosion of social media, there is no shortage of charlatans looking to make a quick buck, this article helps you separate the wheat from the chaff.
- Seven Ways for Small Biz To Generate Revenue With Social Media RIGHT NOW – The biggest problem with Social Media is that too many people talk about it and not enough people ACTUALLY USE IT TO GENERATE REVENUE.
Hot On Sphinn: April 25 to May 1, 2011
- A Hint of What Google's Social Network Might Look Like? – Good summary by of a new Google patent on Social Messaging User Interface by Bill Slawski.
- Increasing SEO Complexity Lowers Result Diversity – If you think about what Google's Panda update did, it largely changed the cost-benefit analysis of many online publishing business models. Some will be frozen with fear, others will desperately throw money at folks who may or may not have solutions, while others who gained will buy additional marketshare for pennies on the Dollar.
- Bing Maps’ “Game Changer”: Hi-Res Aerial Imagery Coming To Entire US and Western Europe – Hot on the heels of last week’s Read/Write World effort, Bing Maps has announced another ambitious project that will improve its imagery collection. It’s called the Global Ortho Project and the goal is to provide consistent, high resolution (30 cms) imagery across every square inch of the United States and Western Europe by June, 2012.
- 6 Tips to Increase Your Facebook EdgeRank and Exposure – Ever wonder why you can have 548 friends on Facebook, yet only 15-20 show up in your news feed? It’s not that those other friends have stopped using Facebook; chances are they’re still there. It’s just that they aren’t showing up in your news feed.
- FTC Seeks to Halt 10 Operators of Fake News Sites from Making Deceptive Claims About Acai Berry Weight Loss Products – The Federal Trade Commission is requesting federal courts to temporarily halt the allegedly deceptive tactics of 10 operations using fake news websites to market acai berry weight-loss products. The FTC seeks to permanently stop this misleading practice and has asked courts to freeze the operations’ assets pending trial.
- Analyzing Groupon's Design: Why So Many Buy In – Groupon is a mad success story. The author breaks down exactly what it is that's made them so successful, giving us lessons to apply and listing a few sites trying to use the same model.
- Simple and Exciting Website Usability Testing – Chris Butler provides actionable usability advice while detailing his company's journey with usability testing for their own web developer company website.
- Yelp Review Filter – Will Scott offers a (somewhat sarcastic) overview of the Yelp review filter and how a (spammer) might get around it.
- Coca-Cola's Marketing Shifts from Impressions to Expressions – I'm usually not a fan of articles written by CMOs of mega brands, but this piece by the CMO of Coca Cola is pretty insightful. Plenty of actionable tips and insights, so it's definitely worth a quick read.
- Facebook Launches ‘Send’ Button For More Selective Sharing, Announces 50 Million ‘Groups’ – Yet another social button has been created for your sites use. This new Facebook button will share your content with a users groups.
- Automatic Algorithms Are Fundamentally Changing The Shape of SEO – Interesting article by Andy Atkins-Krüger who discussed the search engine algorithms of the Yandex search engine with its founders, with some speculation on whether Google uses similar ranking and relevancy formulas.
- Google Defends Way It Gathers Phone Data – Research by a security analyst this week found that an Android phone collected location data every few seconds and sent it to Google several times an hour. Apple disclosed in a letter to Congress last year that its phones "intermittently" collect location data, and the company receives it twice a day.
- Decoding the Quality Score – An interesting analysis and study on ad position, quality score and click though rate for Google AdWords.
- Great Content for SEO: Simpler than You Ever Imagined – Today I want to share an incredibly simple yet massively powerful process for building search-optimized, "great content." There's no fancy tricks and nothing propetiary about the approach, but it is rare indeed to find an organization that follows these steps and hence, it's a way to potentially differentiate and build a competitive advantage.
- 11 Digital Marketing 'Crimes Against Humanity' – Another well-written, insightful and amusing post from Avinash where every point addressed is a key factor for why and how websites fail.
- 5 New Tactics For SEO Post-Panda – Adam Audette offers insightful advice to dealing with SEO realities after the Panda update.
- Failed SEO – Who’s To Blame? The Client or SEO? – Nice continuation of last week's Sphinn discussion…when things don't work out as planned, whose fault is it? Nick gives us some good tips for how to avoid failure by nailing down the expectations at the beginning.
- Google Places is Adding Upcoming Events To Venues via Rich Snippets – Google has confirmed that they are adding these events to venues “in a few major cities across the globe, including New York, San Francisco, London, Paris (and others)” and this “information is based on data from rich snippets markup“.
- SEO Posers! 9 Stark Signals Your SEO Tool Is Futile – Marty Weintraub provides a humorous list of things to avoid when looking for SEO Tools.
- Proven Ways To Use Content To Attract Links – There are many ways to generate links using content, article writing, guest blogging, link bait, white papers etc. All of these content tactics are fine and still work, but since they’re talked about frequently. So instead, let’s take a look at a handful of tips and twists you can use with these foundational tactics to generate additional links….
- Enterprise Link Building SEO – A/B Testing for Link Building Outreach Emails – Excellent advice from Hugo Guzman on how to use A/B and multivariate testing in order to improve the effectiveness of your link building outreach emails.
- Why Content Farms Are Here to Stay – Patrick McKenzie argues that content farms won't be destroyed since they remain profitable even after the Panda update.
This is the latest in a weekly look at the stories that were “hot” on Sphinn in the past week. We’ll post these recaps every week.
Related Topics: Channel: Other | Sphinn
Like This Story? Please Share!
Like Our Site? Follow Us!
Follow @sengineland