I didn’t live blog the sessions at SphinnCon, but I did take a good amount of notes. Here’s what I’ve got from my own link building session and from the first PPC session.
Link Building
[In the context of my presentation on guest blogging for links…]
To encourage bloggers, make their tasks easy. Whether that’s writing, editing, reporting etc.
To motivate bloggers, let them know you’re going to promote the article they’re writing for you, and likewise to get guest post opportunities, let people know you’ll be promoting their site.
To make life easy for editors, send full previews.
(I was joined on this panel by Ari Ozick from Wired Rhino, a B2B / ecommerce SEO shop, and Dixon Jones of Majestic SEO backlink intelligence.)
PPC
Ariel Sumeruck – Clicks 2 Customers
Some interesting arguments for businesses to get into PPC:
- On-demand scalability – This feature gives you the benefit of adjusting to your inventory management needs in close to real time. For example, if you need to sell off your remaining stock from a previous season to make space for the next season’s inventory, you can increase the PPC spend to buy more traffic. [Or you could buy conversion optimization with the same money and get a permanent ongoing benefit.]
- Easy to measure and attribute. The downside, says Ariel, is that most people set up their tracking incorrectly so the measurement isn’t accurate. Also, rules changes between systems. For example, Google Analytics attributes [conversions?] to the time of the click, while Omniture [SiteCatalyst?] attributes to the time of the event.
Tips on PPC:
- When starting out – Think of each keyword as its own marketing channel. To keep things manageable, you want to start out small.
- [I’ll second this based on my personal experience trying to launch a huge affiliate campaign. I never got the campaign started because I discouraged myself due to the immense amount of landing pages I needed to maintain message match and I couldn’t set up the headline to auto-match my keywords. ]
- Once you hit the point of diminishing marginal returns (where each additional dollar invested brings you decreasing dollars in profit) on expanding a campaign within a particular engine, look at moving the campaign to other search engines.
- Change the campaign slowly. This will enable you to understand differences in performance that result and attribute them to particular changes.
- [I just realized that this is why people recommend split-testing before multi-variate testing. With a split, you’re trying to learn exactly why/what works for application of the principle(s) elsewhere. But at some point there’s only so much you can learn, yet there’s more room to optimize, so throw loads of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.]
Come back tomorrow for Ophir Cohen and Dan Perach’s early-afternoon presentations on PPC at SphinnCon.
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