One thing’s for certain in the online marketing industry: change.
That was the frame for our “Discussion of the Week” last week on our sister site, Sphinn. Just a couple years ago, Digg.com was a darling among online marketers — a place to help content go viral, gain exposure and (usually) a boatload of new inbound links as others discovered your content when it reached Digg’s homepage. So we asked, Is Digg Relevant To You As a Marketer?
The majority of replies said, no, Digg has lost its relevance today as a marketing venue. Sphinn member DanThornton1 from The Way of the Web said, “I continue to use it fairly regularly, but I’ve never found any real benefits from it. I tend to find I get far better responses and results from other similar sites, whether it’s Reddit, Stumbleupon or others.” But, on the other hand, Sphinn member righthandplan says he still sees some benefits: “I’ve used digg to get links indexed for [a site] and was surprised to see Diggs from others, as well as direct traffic. But as a social media conversation starter? No. However, in terms of awareness building and traffic driving, definitely.”
Meanwhile, stories about Facebook’s new Timeline feature and the need to build a diverse marketing strategy were the most popular Sphinn stores among our Twitter followers last week. Read on for the full recap….
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- Discussion: Is Digg Relevant To You As a Marketer? – Over the years, Digg has been a huge target for marketers because of its ability to drive exposure to content — exposure that typically resulted in both traffic and links. But Digg has evolved over the years and doesn’t seem to have the same cachet it used to have (at least in my opinion). In our “Discussion of the Week,” we want to know: Does Digg have any relevance to you today from a marketing perspective? Is it still capable of driving traffic and links like it did years ago? Or, is it yesterday’s news? The floor is open!
- Case studies: It’s shockingly simple to game Klout – Yousaf Sekander says “Klout uses, in fact, overuses the word ‘science’, ‘scientific’ and ‘science team’”, but doesn’t deliver anything near accuracy. He proves his point with examples. Follow the post’s links and look at the comments, too, where Klout co-founder Joe Fernandez defends his service.
- Facebook’s Timeline Will Impact Your Career – Timeline is going to change the way Facebook interacts with our professional lives. Here are the changes to watch for — and the ways you can make them work for you instead of against you
- Google Analytics Premium: Better Support & Goodbye Data Sampling – From Daniel Waisberg: “Google launched a paid version of Google Analytics that processes higher volumes of page views and provides additional support. The general feature set and user experience remain the fundamentally the same as the standard product. ”
- Link Building vs. Link Attraction – I’m suggesting that you focus on link attraction rather than rely solely on link building. If you generate awesome content and then promote it, you’re going to attract natural links. In effect, if you develop really compelling material, links will follow as the content gets shared.
- You Get What You Pay For With SEO, Just Like With Everything Else – Perhaps the best explanation about “Cheap SEO” that I’ve seen.
Most Tweeted (not already listed above)
- How to Use the Facebook Timeline: A Complete Walk-Through of the Redesigned Profile – Josh Constine wrote a complete walk through for the redesigned profiles on Facebook.
- Don’t Put All Your Eggs In One Basket – A Diverse Marketing Strategy – A post about how to broaden your online marketing strategy.
- Whoops, I Didn’t Mean for You to Read This – Great thought piece from Brian Solis about Facebook Timeline: “Indeed, privacy as we knew it is dead. It is now something that we have to learn and teach. Your privacy settings in Facebook are yours to manage. But, to do so takes initiative and an understanding that like your credit score, what you share online requires definition and reinforcement.”
- Google Panda 2.5: Losers Include Today Show, The Next Web; Winners Include YouTube, Fox News – Danny Sullivan provides a first glimpse on Google’s Panda 2.5: Pandalized sites include some that don’t deserve the downfall, on the other hands the winner list comes with sites that shouldn’t get the slightest boost at all.
- Web Form A/B Testing: How I Increased Form Fills by 37 Percent – Last month, I launched an A/B test of our Request a Quote form page to see if a new design would impact the percentage of form fills. I planned the design of a new version of the page to see if the some of the basic “best practices” really had an impact. The result was a 37% increase in form fills.
Hot On Sphinn: September 26 to October 2, 2011
- Paid Search Conversion by Position – It’s been a little over a month since Google added the {adposition} parameter to its ValueTrack capabilities and we were quick to implement it in order to see what insights we could gain from the ability to see the specific position of all individual ad clicks. Position data available previously was far less granular — about the best you could easily do was see the daily average position for each keyword in your program. This view is still valuable, but it masks the variability in position an ad might see in any given day due to a number of factors including: broad matching, day-parting, quality score calculation at auction and other SERP personalization.
- Quality Scores are Underrated – Another fantastic atricle by one of the best in the industry on quality scores.
- Social media attribution: friend or foe? – Social media attribution based on influence, actions, and interactions: friend or foe?
- “How much does a website cost?” and other pricing questions – 40 designers weight in on their pricing on design work for logos, homepages, websites, and mobile & web apps,
- Dutch Treat: My Interview With Dennis Goedegebuure – Where I chat with Dennis about his career & many issues concerning Enterprise-level SEO.
- Display Network Best Practices – Good tips on how to properly structure and optimize display network buys.
- YouTube Case Study: Ceilume’s “Ask the Ceiling Tile Guy” – Ceilume’s YouTube channel was created on April 25, 2008, and the first video, “Ceiling Tiles – How to Replace,” introduced Davis as the “Ask the Ceiling Tile Guy.” Uploaded on June 16, 2009, the video now has more than 57,000 views.
- Top 10 Retail SEO Mistakes UK Brands Are Still Making – Kevin Gibbons shares the top 10 replies to the question “What SEO mistakes are retailers still making?”
- Albert Einstein can make you better at SEO – 5 SEO lessons that the late great scientist can teach us all… He said some profound things in his time, and many of these can help us all to be much better at SEO.
- SEO Metrics Everybody Can Use – Some actionable advise on what to include in SEO client reporting. Worth checking out if you’re in need of guidance.
- Google News launches rel=’standout’ – So Google News released just another signal that news outlets can use to selfishly pitch up to seven derived agency stories per week.
- Bing Rolls Out Integrated Marketing Approach to Their Local Business Portal – Bing, in an effort to gain small business mindshare has rolled out a number of upgrades to their Business Portal. In addition to their mixed model approach to deals, they have added very interesting collateral generation capabilities, a loyalty program and a school fund raising program to help promote the effort.
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
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