Each person with Facebook account has met a social marketer (more likely, many). Most of them are total annoying failures as they work using wrong objectives. For example, invites to pages and events that are not relevant to my locality, age or interests.

Looking back, pageviews is a viable objective for some markets that sell main-stream products or try to strengthen brand. However, is it likely that I would go to a club in completely opposite side of the world or that I would do grocery shopping there anytime soon?

This issue affected display advertisement for a while already, and it affects social marketing even more so. People will not speak positively about unnecessary service that is pushed to them . More than likely they will laugh at it. And that will reduce credibility.

Back to real-world example. I have a marketer in my friend list that tries to push me a DJ fan page and events that are never close to my location. The marketer found me by inviting fans of other DJ’s that play internationally and reside in my location. Do your research, people. I see no reason to become fan of page that is not relevant.

How to remedy situations like this? Invest some time into looking for related local groups. Local clubs the DJ plays would be good start instead of international DJs themselves. That would lead to fans that are relevant and (maybe) interested. Simple, eh?

The web is all about conversions and users. Long gone are days when one measured earning potential of website by earnings, total visitor count and home page pagerank alone. These metrics are simple and easy to understand. Sadly, they do not give real useful information.

Earnings are not necessarily the most informative metric of the website. Some websites do not earn money directly. The same amount of money earned might suggest good or bad website performance depending on investments done, visitor count, market or advertisement type used.

It is even more difficult for websites whose income sources are advertisements or which advertise main business indirectly (for example, using branding). The conversion might be long process and you see increase in sales or conversions, but it is hard to estimate the performance of content.

However, you have to analyze the content. There are information that can be extracted from both statistics and user-generated content related to the original content. These things might not correlate!

For example, we post articles in our local fashion magazine and publish excerpts in facebook pages. Most viewed content not necessary is most commented one! Why it is so ?

1. Content that appeals to main auditorium of website is more engaged. Content that is related to auditorium is most interesting.
2. Shocking content would be more viewed one. They are interesting for broader spectrum of people.
3. Shocking content has more viral potential as it might be redistributed by non-members. That is why single-time visitors are useful as well.

Is engagement more important that visitors? For membership sites, definitely. You grow your crowd and your influence in them. However, a single non-related re-share of content might increase your site visibility further than in-door engagement. Thus in many cases you have to vary your content enough to attract more diverse crowd to your site.

First, I must state here that I am affiliate of couple security products that have little to do with this post on itself. This rambling is about people motivation and truthfulness.

Spending time in some forums and social boards I met couple types of people that give professional advice there: people that were in same situation, contractors and affiliates or products. The most of people would argue that the last group is most annoying and they can not discern between contractor and other two groups. However, I would like to slightly disagree.

First, a security contractor is a person that is on payroll by specific security software or service company and gets static amount of money for his job and/or bonus on how well company is doing. An affiliate is a person that works for oneself and gets money from specific amount of product sales. Quite often affiliate has more than single products he offers. So, what is the practical difference? Here are some myths:

Myth no 1. Contractor’s quality of advice is often better as many of them have better knowledge in the field.

Partly true, most of contractors work in the field. However, it is not true for hired marketers compared to security experts that refuse to work on contract bases and earn additional income from sale.

Myth no 2. Contractors have stable income, so they do not need to force each sale

Not true. If contractor does lousy job, he will lose his income (contract) completely. Doing good job might yield a bonus. If an affiliate does lousy job, his profits will diminish. However, lot of affiliates try selling as much as possible because they seek profit.

Myth no 3. A contractor does not need to use sneaky tactics at promoting product

Completely not true. Contractor has additional benefit at using sneaky tactics because they can pretend being former customers and there is hardly anything that would prove it otherwise. They do not need to use tracking codes, they do not need to disclose anything. They spamming techniques might reach borderline.

Myth no 4. An affiliate will not promote best product because he is out for profit

That is again not true as you can’t promote BAD product for long. Additionally, affiliate has a huge benefit of being able to choose what product to promote and what not. A truly good affiliate is not forced to promote a product using false comparison tables, spam or by accusing competitions business model.

Sure, there are all kinds of affiliates and contractors. However I would check such things as:

1. Accusing other reputable products being bad because option x is paid one
2. Leaving user without a choice when choosing product
3. Calling other marketers spam because they promote different product than they do
4. Calling others a scam because they do same things and are paid by performance
5. Avoiding giving free information and pushing a product
6. Forcing user to pay for free things to boost sales of product without giving them to try it
7. Making a set of disclosure rules others (affiliates) have to follow to be legitimate but not following them themselves.

I got a lot of examples of such behavior. And sadly it will remain that way in the market.

And there is one thing I have to disclose – I was a contractor of security company for a short while too (No, it was not Malwarebytes, but the experience would be the same I guess). I did not liked the experience, because my freedom to promote right product in each situation was reduced. Now I can give suggestions of any product I think is good for the customer. Even if I get 0 cents from it. That is freedom I have working for myself and not being a contractor.

And if you think it would be if I would work in different company, that promotes “best” “free” product? Well, think again. I will have less freedom and less choices.

Now I do not say that being contractor is evil. Being contractor and not disclosing it when suggesting a product is evil, though. Much more evil than being affiliate, which is easily seen in most cases. Calling other legitimate products malware is evil when you are paid by competitors. Calling others spammers when you do the same is evil.

Sometimes friends and clients complain about competing sites that should not be there:

• No obvious optimization
• Content is crappy, mentions term once and in very different context
• Few or no links
• Design is old and ugly

However, such site is in the first page and sometimes quite high in results. So, what are the reasons for this?

Personally, I have seen a blog that ranked really well under one porn term with single mention in blog post. It had nothing to do with porn industry though.

Sure, we do not know Google algorithm, but my guess is disambiguation of search results plays major role in niche markets. Quite often the key phrase is not enough to determine searcher’s intent and search engine has to provide alternate meanings for the term. Sure, in many cases the Nr1 is site that performs best in terms of SEO, but there is room for different sites as well.

Let’s discuss an example. A person searches for “online poker” – a quite competitive term. In the first page we will see poker rooms, poker information portal, poker forum, some news sites and images. It is not because forum sites and poker rooms are at the same level in terms of SEO. We get these results because Google cannot determine which result is most relevant for us:

• We might want to play online poker in top rooms (highest possibility for the term).
• We might want to read reviews of these rooms
• We might want to discuss about online poker
• We might want to read some related news, etc.
• We might want some local results as well.

Sure, we will not see poor sites under this query in top places. Online Poker is too competitive. However, some of the sites might appear out of nowhere even under this term.

So, what can we conclude from this?

1. Copying top sites is not the fastest way to front page. Unique approach is.
2. The longer the query the more SEO work has an impact.
3. Behavioral analysis and local data will have an impact on what results you get as well. They matter. Guess what sites target users need, and not what they use now.

Thats all today

1. Your server and domain
   1. First thing I would check is the spammy IP list. Is your IP address blacklisted? It happens, especially on shared hosting. Good place to start searching is http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx . I would use a dedicated IP if I plan to do mass mailing.
   2. Do your IP address resolves back and how? If it has IP address in reverse domain address, they think it is a DSL – assigned IP and not a hosting one, so it is assumed that this is SPAM. If IP resolves back to your domain, it is a good sign.
   3. SPF record is highly advisable. Not all incoming mail servers use SPF record; however it never hurts to have one.
2. Your email message headers. Forging headers is bad idea. Your headers should be informative and correct, including message ID. It is important how you write your email address there as well, you should always use real name with email address where possible. Same is applicable for recipient email address as well. Prove that you know them.
3. Avoid spam words or keep their density low. The message should have enough text; however it should not be too big. Also, avoid excessive capitalization and spacing.
4. You should include information why they are getting this message, also your contact information, as well unsubscribe information (if applicable). You do not have to write that your message is not spam – only spammers do that.
5. You should use well-formed html if you have to use it. No hidden text, tracking images or similar – they are usually blocked by anti-spam programs. Also you should include text version of email.
6. Avoid using spam – mailers. The anti-spam programs know about them and how to recognize most of them. This is quite sure way to be flagged as spam.
7. Monitor your returning email box. See what messages got undelivered and bounced back. See if it is your problem or the recipient problem.
8. Upon registration, ask your visitors to add your email to their address book and use same email for communication with them. Address book is the best way to pass spam filters.
9. Some mail servers do not like too many emails from single sender at any point. Try to space out the sending of your newsletters.
10. Avoid sending too many messages to people that can’t read them – full message boxes, blocked, etc.
11. Check your web application if it can’t be used to send spam for real. This might be a case for “send to a friend” forms or similar which allow information input. This is quite serious security issue as you might get blacklisted.

Overall, the most important factor is monitoring back all information you get back from emails you send, especially the “negative” one : bounced emails, sending errors and similar. There are lots of information in bounced messages that you should read and evaluate.

First, I must state that I am not a convinced fan of Hootsuite due to my picky nature. However, It is as close as it gets to perfect web based twitter client for me now. Recently, I have found a way how to properly save time used to post good quality content using Hootsuite.

First, this involves Google reader, and if you do not want to switch to it, it is not for you. Google reader has a “share post” option which allows to share content to your followers. Even if you have no followers, you can use this feature, because you get Atom feed.

This feed can be integrated into your Hootsuite account (settings ->RSS/Atom ->Add feed). Set time frequency to 2 hours, and limit post amount to one – you do not want to spam your readers with content like many automated twitter accounts do. It is different from automated approach, as you review the content you submit to hootsuite, thus you take care not to submit older news or uninteresting posts that happen once in a while at any feed.

Sure, this will not replace tweeting manually. You do not get all content through RSS, do you? You should take your time reading other people tweets and sharing valuable ones further. Also, not all sites provide RSS feeds or are worth subscribing.

Hootsuite (Hootsuite.com) is a very good web-based twitter account manager. It is very feature rich:

1. Multi-user multi-account management. Very useful for corporate twitter accounts.
2. Multiple columns, tabs for columns, custom groups of users. This is quite important for bigger accounts. In fact its interface is quite similar to tweetdecks or Seesmics, thus I got used to it quite fast.
3. Tweet scheduling functionality, which might be important for some
4. Feed integration (similar to twitterfeed)
5. Ping.fm integration for upgrading fb and other accounts.
6. Own url shortening service which is quite reliable and provides statistics. Also adsense integration in it.

However, there are some issues in Hootsuite that I would like to be changed or fixed:

1. Separation of groups from tabs/columns. I might want to put same group of people in multiple tabs (as I need to see them more often).
2. Better FB integration. I use Seesmic for reading FB as well as I don’t have time to check website often. Full integration with stream API would be very very nice.
3. Some things bug in groups. For example, tweets of some people are excluded when I add them to groups even if they are in main view. This is because some users do not appear in twitter search. However, this information would be easily recoverable from home stream. Or I do not get a reason for separating groups from keyword search.
4. Custom color schemes. Yeah, I am picky.
5. Ability to clean up column once it is read, or a way to distinguish between tweets that are unread.

Will I use it? Yes, definitely. Hootsuite is a very nice software and I see lots of potential in it. However, I cannot abandon desktop client in hootsuites favor yet.

All regular twitter users have seen the face of Bill Crosby and couple other super twitter get rich schemes. Their followers promote ways to get thousands followers quickly and then get rich by turn-key systems. You don’t even have to watch after your account, everything you have to do is sit and wait for revenue.

I do not believe these systems and that’s why:

1. These schemes rely on selling twitter traffic products to other users and nothing else. The more stuff you sell, the more diluted market is and in the end only owners of the program will prosper.

2. Furthermore, tools for automatic follower increasing decreases value of each your follower because there is a larger percentage of other automatic twitter account. Same bots like yours. Lot of people will not read your tweets thus you will not earn anything.

3. You are not special in selling this product – everyone is selling them for same price. You have no distinguishable product to sell. Would you buy a product that gives you almost same followers the person that sold the product got?

4. There is no good way to feed interesting content automatically. You can feed a news source, but there is no good reason you would be more interesting than original source. If you feed more content, you will spam your followers. Sadly, you need to generate content by hand.  You need to create content yourself.

5. You have no relationship with your followers.

The single way to be on social media is to participate. Without participation, it is just advertisement on other websites. Sadly, that’s how many marketers understand “social marketing”.

There is couple of reasons to develop site distributed under multiple subdomains, e.g. subdomain1.domain.com, subdoman2.domain.com, etc. Each subdomain might be a distinguishable mini-site, which offers better separation of topics and even protects main site rankings to some extent.

However, subdomain approach has one issue that needs to be solved. That is each subdomain is treated as separate site by some search engine spiders. This leads to insane amounts of concurrent hits. The worst offender is yandex – a Russian search engine whose spider scan list is probably alphabet based. Thus many of your minisites get scanned at the same time for content.

This might not be a problem if each of your minisites are hosted separately and not on the same server. Also, this would not be a problem if your subdomains are simplistic. In other cases you have to rely on your page caching and server capacity.

There is a crawl delay option that yandex listens to. However, this option can be set in robots.txt only. And robots.txt is subdomain-based. Thus it works for single subdomain only.

I have decided to totally block yandex from indexing one of my sites once. Luckily, this site can live from visitors from Russia, as it is geared towards different location. But now I doubt I would do a heavily multi-domain (300+ subdomains) site knowing that I will have to use yandex traffic as well.

I am affiliate of one unnamed program that is a bit confusing for me.  The software in question is sold worldwide, however you get affiliate sales for purchases made in USA only. This troubles me a lot, as the product is good and I use it myself.

The question is what difference it makes where electronic goods are sold to? I see couple of possible answers, none of them too good:

1. Trying to compete in single market only or trying to conquer specific market. But each additional sale is good and useful to the company. And yes, you are getting them despite I will not get money from them.
2. Internationalized support.  It is good to be concerned about the users, but how this is related to the sales? Yes, it is common to have different commissions for visitors from different countries. I am ok with that too. Or are visitors from UK less valuable than ones from USA?
3. Saving money by paying for part of the traffic. Enough said.

Oh, and if you wonder if I know that someone had paid… My friend made a purchase apparently, as he believes in the product as well. Interesting enough, it is not notified that this program for USA only in their account at CJ.

Should I stop recommending that product as well? Well, I am strong believer at recommending only products that I believe in, no matter how bad their marketing is. So, for now I will not stop recommendations.

However I think that in long term they will lose market and trust of people that promote their tool, as the web is global. One should care about one, centralized affiliate center for all their affiliates no matter where sales will come from.

I use Google Ad Manager for showing additional content in one of my sites. It is quite good tool, however there is a significant drawback for it: it has no real handling of CPA and shared revenue based offers.  CPM and CPC is everything you get. And sometimes you need CPC ads to compete with CPA offers.

As an example, you have single ad space in the page. You might want to distribute CPM offers through the month evenly, but also show CPA and CPC ads at the same time. Also, depending on current eCPC, you have couple of competing affiliate deals.

Sure, you can solve this problem by entering estimated CPC value for the ad. However, this workaround is not too good: CPC you get from affiliate ads is visitors-dependant often and you might not get same CPC as other sites. Thus initial CPC value is only estimation of real value you will get. You need to update the CPC of these ads continuously. And if you test out various ads for various regions, it is quite a time consuming task.

I wish that Ad manager would release some kind of API that would allow automation of such task. That is posting and changing eCPC values for various ads. This would allow ad revenue maximization for the site by combining all (or almost all) approaches. Is it hard? I do not think so. It would require more dynamical ad rescheduling, but in the end all parties would win. Google Adsense would compete with CPA ads and it would allow Doubleclick integration.

At the mean time, I am planning to take a better look at OpenX project. I think tt does not allow CPA ads either, however I could tweak its PHP code accordingly. I am really interested to see how effective its code is as well. There are some additional benefits of OpenX as well, for example Google-independence, though I am not too concerned with this for a moment.

Google analytics does good job at monitoring pages visited, but what about pages that are not found on your server and thus never displayed? You can get these pages by moving the content around, having errors in your links, getting malformed links from various webmasters (often they are caused by bad software on their side or miscommunication) or for other reasons. Even a soft like wordpress does not check comment links, which might generate 404 errors (page not found). How to detect such links? Well, you have 3 choices, each of them have their own drawbacks.

1. Google webmaster tools. Adding your site to google webmaster tools is good idea, and there you will get information about links not found. It is most simple way, but worst as well. This is because Google detects the links that are linked and indexed. However, there might be plenty other links that need to be taken care of. For example, advertisement campaigns use non-followed (often javascript) links.

2. Log analysis. That is the best method if you have access to log files and you can process them. I prefer using Awstats for that, however you can do it by hand for smaller sites on apache, as errors are logged to separate file as well. The single problem with manual analysis is that error log has less information than common log. There is no referrer link mentioned in the error log. However, this can be solved by using grep to scan access log for 404 error codes as well. The drawback is that some CMS processes all requests and do not generate error codes successfully. This means that you will not see such errors in logs even if they exist.

3. If you can’t access error logs, the best way of action is to use custom error pages and create a log from them. You have to log both referrer path and request uri for best result. This approach can be implemented in many of the abovementioned CMS’es too.

So, what to do with bad links? This depends on what causes these links. If it is an advertisement campaign or a referrer site, you will have to create a redirect from bad link to the appropriate good one. In cases this is a malformed comment link, I would just delete it from database.

I use Google analytics for site visitor monitoring like majority of webmasters today. It is free, reliable and quite good in many of the respects. However, there are couple particular cases where you can screw yourself and analyze its results incorrectly. Here we will discuss one particular problem that is not too common, but happens quite often: by default, Google analytics handles multi-domain website visitors incorrectly.

Google analytics is geared towards having separate accounts on each subdomain. This means following: A visitor coming from one subdomain to another one is counted as completely new visit. This inflates your traffic ranks (effectively doubles them or more). This might happen even in cases if there are no redirects between versions without www and with www. Additionally, pages with same uri on different domains are shown as one and the same page in analysis. This is not as bad, but undesired behavior, as it makes harder to track everything on your analytics accounts.

Note – there is no real traffic decrease, however the traffic is shown 2x higher before fixing problems with subdomains.

Sure, inflating your search traffic might seem handy when selling sites or bragging about daily visitor count. However, it will not help you in the long term.

How to solve it? I have used partial solution for quite a while, where you add custom filter to put subdomain information in uri. However, it did not solve the problem with visitor amount. Recently, I have found a full solution.

You have to add a custom filter first :

• Name: Subdomain_fullurl_hack
• Type: Custom filter – Advanced
• Field A -> Extract A: Hostname > (.*)
• Field B -> Extract B: Request URI > (.*)
• Output To -> Constructor: Request URI > /$A1$B1

Secondly, you need to modify tracker code to set domain to your domain.  This is done by adding a line after your tracker is initialized (below var pageTracker = …. line) :

pageTracker._setDomainName(“.yourdomain.com”);

Btw, thank you folks at searchdigital for this guide!

If you want to check the results, I suggest comparing ones you get from google analytics with ones you get with log analyzers, like awstats.

One of my co-workers notified my of quite simple spam trick on content creation. The approach is like this:

1. Take an article about blue widgets from other site.

2. Replace blue with new term, change some facts.

3. Post article as your own.

Apparently, this works for the moment.

Example : original site : http://www.2-spyware.com/remove-pc-security-2009.html

And then there is the spammers at loaris.com : http://news.loaris.com/home-antivirus-2010-removal-instruction-how-to-remove-homeantivirus2010/

You make the conclusions. This is a way to generate cheap semi-human writen content, and it is also a theft.

The problem is that the differences between 2 different items in this field are quite small. So I guess Google spam team still has some problems to distinguish “good” and “bad” content automatically. However, this might mean a start of new wave of automatic “quality” content creation, which is not a good thing.

Google has just announced its new web based OS development plans. Google Chrome OS – quite good and nice bite into OS market share. However, the result of this will be seen in late 2010 only, and there are some doubts if this will be THE OS or if it will battle Microsoft.

Firstly, Google Chrome OS targets cheap laptop or  netbook market that is the devices where each saved dollar counts. Many of these devices are shipped with Linux and not Microsoft OS. There are some devices with Android in planning already, and another popular OS, windows XP, is not the product Microsoft wants to maintain for long. Thus it is likelly that the share recovered will be from Linux and outdated Windows XP, and not up-to-date OS systems like Vista or 7.

Another big question is that Google Chrome OS might take out user choice on applications, like it was with Microsoft and preinstalled IE. Google chrome uses Gears for offline application support. So it is unclear how Adobe Air or Microsoft silverlight applications will work under this OS. Sure, this might lead to healthy competition.

The biggest question for all is if Google Chrome OS will be enough for their dayly tasks. I do not expect seeing replacement for photoshop coming anytime soon, nor enough developer tools like ide’s and editors.

I see some positive sides as well. Google Chrome OS is enough for many simpler workplaces where all you need is a spreadsheet, word and mail. Also, it would be quite virus-prone due to the fact that it is run on Linux. So I can’t wait to see first OS Chrome-enabled device.

If you were in twitter for couple last weeks, you have noticed plenty of green avatars there. This is due to the fuss about Iran election, to show support to Iran opposition. It is good example how a cause can go viral in social network as long as it gets initial push from significant figures there.

However, this story teaches another, not so obvious, lesson. As I look through tweet list of people I follow, I tend to skip all the green dudes as single, green person. Your icon is no longer so distinguishable, especially so if you pick dullish shade of green. And if you tweet about something unrelated to Iran, you are out of look – your messages are missed in the whole crowd. People recognize you by your icon and not the text usually, so changing icon is not too good strategy as well.

How to ride that twitter wave and still remain recognizable? It is easy – choose a bit different shade of green or add some green elements. Some good examples:

These are couple of few profiles that are not missed in the stream of tweets despite promoting the cause.

And another quick point. Do not stay green for too long. Iran election will not be buzz topic for long. At some point you will have to choose how long you want to be associated with old news.