WebProNews » Attention

The Danger of Aggressive Ad Placement

Aaron Wall — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 19:53:10 +0000

When I did a recent Q&A thread one of the recurring themes with sites that were struggling was AdSense ads positioned above their content.

Many websites are never given the chance to grow because they monetize too aggressively and look to spammy to enjoy the benefits of organic growth and community building.

Mentioned in this video:

96% of email is spam

Corbis gives bloggers ad sponsored images – don’t use them…just use Istockphoto

Compete.com graph comparing a leading Mustang community to one that has limited exposure

How Google enforces relevancy and grows profits: focus attention, evolving quality score, advertiser enabled filtering

how to market viral videos

Bootstrapping Blog – even good sites can diminish credibility a bit if the ad is not well blended into the content

get charities to help you market your business, video about marketing techniques you should be using, and video about creating a self reinforcing authority

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Matt Cutts Provides More Cloaking Giggles

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 17:11:29 +0000

A Danish company provided the daily allowance of raised eyebrows for its claim of offering undetectable cloaking techniques.

Matt Cutts Provides More Cloaking Giggles

As the clich

The Difficulty With Grabbing Attention In Search

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:57:24 +0000

Those much-revered top five placements on search engines for a given set of keywords only draws the viewer’s attention for seven seconds. Gord Hotchkiss sees this short attention span as a call to brands to keep doing their market research.

The humorous Short Attention Span Theater of Comedy Central’s earlier days condensed comedy bits into brief pieces slightly longer than a commercial break. Fifteen years ago it was just a funny idea. These days the short amount of time needed to watch them would be a huge obstacle to the typical Internet surfer.

Hotchkiss has been discussing market research, particularly with regards to the studies his firm, Enquiro conducted, like their eye-tracking panels. When it comes to search, online entrepreneurs with solid organic search results, or top placement of paid search ads, may be surprised at how little attention those receive.

(T)he famous golden triangle study we did with Eyetools and Did It, and subsequent ones conducted by Enquiro, have shown over and over how quickly we interact with a search engine and how much of our scanning activity is ‘top loaded’.

Also, we don

Writers Ding Viacom Over Google Lawsuit

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 11:07:51 +0000

Even though Hollywood executives claim this Internet thing is too new for them to figure out how much they can cut out of it for writers, the scribes pointed out Viacom seems to have an idea.

The ongoing strike by the Writer’s Guild of America has brought production of TV shows and movies to a standstill. At issue: the writer’s want a fairer slice of the revenue brought in by DVD sales and Internet content delivery.

Writers have been rebuffed in their negotiations. Michael Eisner has claimed it’s too soon to demand revenue from an unproven business model.

“For a writer to give up today’s money for a nonexistent piece of the future — they should do it in three years, shouldn’t be doing it now — they are misguided they should not have gone on the strike. I’ve seen stupid strikes, I’ve seen less stupid strikes, and this strike is just a stupid strike,” chided the former Disney honcho.

However, as Boing Boing noted in a post by Cory Doctorow, Viacom patriarch Sumner Redstone has a pretty good idea. A video of Daily Show writer Jason Rothman pointing out Viacom’s billion-dollar lawsuit against Google for alleged copyright infringement on YouTube painted Redstone as a hypocrite on the issue.

The video also zinged Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman over a statement he made this summer: “Viacom will exceed $500 million in digital revenue this year.” Web media is part of that revenue projection.

Either digital content has an identified value, or it does not. Viacom, at least, thinks both conditions can be true. The writers disagree.

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Malware Draws More Attention To DoubleClick

Doug Caverly — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 15:40:36 +0000

Compared to murder, malware isn’t so bad. It’s not exactly good, though, and in a development that can’t please Google, it’s been connected to DoubleClick.

Don’t think that DoubleClick’s employees are locked away in some dark room, creating pop-ups and backdoors – that’s not at all the case. Instead, they supplied ads from a German company to sites like CNN and The Economist, and those ads used pop-ups to promote unnecessary security software.

DoubleClick apparently didn’t mean to get involved in this, though, and is taking steps to extricate itself. “DoubleClick officials told eWEEK that they have recently implemented a security monitoring system to catch and disable a new strain of malware that has spread over the past several months,” according to Lisa Vaas. “This system has already captured and disabled about 100 ads . . .”

Google’s acquisition plans are far too involved for this event to derail them, so there aren’t really any worries on that front. Still, the incident has tarnished DoubleClick’s image, and if the acquisition ever goes through, will become something that Google should address.

Google’s not known for pinching pennies, but this could also have the company’s officials wondering if an offer of less than $3.1 billion would have been enough to win DoubleClick.

Profitable Niche Publishing Business Models

Aaron Wall — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:50:21 +0000

Via TC, I discovered IBM released a report on how the they think the $550 billion global ad market might change in the coming years. The predictions look bleak for most ad agencies and traditional media gatekeepers, but good for niche publishers who have a solid stream of attention:

The "voice" delivering a message, along with its perceived authenticity, will become as powerful perhaps as the message or offer.

As media gets more saturated, we get better at filtering out garbage. Jakob Nielson’s article about writing articles instead of blog posts does a great job of explaining why writing fewer and more in depth articles is effective for gaining and keeping attention in a competitive marketplace.

On a related note, Frank just noticed a TV show skipping the TV and starting out on the web. There is no easier way to increased perceived authenticity than having a direct and open relationship with the audience.

IBM also offered research on the attention economy in a paper titled Vying for attention: the future of competing in media and entertainment. Rich Shefren recently created a mindmap of what he calls the Attention Age Doctrine, which shows why people are willing to pay larger premiums for great advice and nothing for decent advice.

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Yahoo: Pay No Attention To Site Explorer

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 23:41:28 +0000

Logged in to Site Explorer? Logged out? Those inlink counts looked different because they were, according to Yahoo Search.

Search Engine Roundtable saw something funny with the Yahoo Site Explorer counts. They varied greatly when viewed while logged in to the service as opposed to being logged out.

“57,146 inlinks and 216,880 inlinks is a huge difference in the amount of data one can get about a site,” Barry Schwartz wrote.

“Is it possible that Yahoo is pulling back on showing all linkage data for a site to anyone? Now you need to be the authenticated webmaster to see full data?”

Priyank Garg acknowledged the issue at the Yahoo Search blog today:

While the counts have been incorrect in some cases, the actual returned results have been correct. However, we did roll out a product fix yesterday and will be rolling out a couple more over the next few days to resolve this difference in counts some of you have observed.

Please disregard any counts for inlinks reported by Site Explorer from October 11 through next week.

It sounds like Site Explorer will be back to normal once everyone’s finished with Halloween.

Building Your Attention, Traffic, Trust, & Subscriber Base

Aaron Wall — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 19:48:09 +0000

Some Things Only Spread Because Who is Behind Them

I recently created an Internet marketing mind map and published it on my tools subdomain with a link to it from tools.seobook.com, but nobody mentioned it. A few days later I blogged about it on SeoBook.com and dozens of webmasters linked to it. Same publisher, same content, drastically different results…because one channel has attention while the other does not.

The Flaw of Pull Marketing Advice

Much of the marketing advice offered on blogs assumes that you have a well read blog and can get away with great content spreading based on pull marketing, but when you publish a new site and write about ideas that others covered you don’t get the credit you deserve until you build an attention asset. Which means you have to use push marketing until you get readers / subscribers / brand advocates.

Markets are not fair. People are more likely to link to familiar trusted channels then new channels. It can take years to build a significant readership. And if you wait for it to happen on its own it may never happen.

Ineffective Blogging

It is hard to be the regular news spot just by producing similar news to what is available on other channels. If you cover stories that are worth spreading, but are not dong much more than syndicating them, then even if your content is useful the reference links skip past you and on to the end story you wrote about. You might get a hat tip link here or there, but you are not going to get many if you have few readers. And those links are not going to be enough to pull readers away from market leading channels, to do so requires people talking about you. Your content has to amalgamate ideas from multiple sources or unique perspectives such that people are TALKING ABOUT YOU.

Owning an Idea

If you do not have enough leverage to own mainstream ideas then you need to own ideas on the edge or borrow the authority of someone or something else. The first person to crack an iPhone got lots of exposure. Announcing a new Google feature gets you exposure. Real in depth reviews of exciting new stuff gets you exposure. Every market has an Apple, a Google, or some relation to one of those companies.

The easiest way to get a community involved in your site is to ask them for involvement. Collect their feedback and aggregate it in a meaningful format. And interviewing a market leader is an easy way to leverage someone else’s brand and gain attention. Getting community involvement is crucial because each trusted person who associates with you moves you that much further away from being irrelevant or potentially spammy. They make you worth paying attention to because they cared enough to participate.

If you get community participation it also protects your idea. It gets competitors called sleazy when they clone your idea and throw a few more marketing dollars at it.

What if you can’t get anyone to participate? Desperate times require desperate measures! Wrap your message in a fictitious backdrop based on real world opinions. Want to reach out to financial bloggers? Notice they are talking about Alan Greenspan a bunch recently? Tell everyone why Alan Greenspan thinks Google is under-priced. Quote his principals and use them to justify Google at $2,400 per share.

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Exploitation of Passion for Profit

Aaron Wall — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 19:45:14 +0000

Buying Attention & Building Trust

With content that you freely distribute you are primarily trying to build relationships with people who don’t know you and have never bought from you. Since attention is limited you have to make your content accessible to gain market attention.

Highbrow = Low Readership

Most potential buyers can not distinguish between great information and average information, but most people…

can distinguish between well formatted information that is easy to read and information that appears too complex Formatting plays a big roll in selling content.

follow the crowd and look for signs of trust from others (recommendations, on site comments, etc.)

care about enthusiasm and topic selection (why read a site that is not unique and/or too negative?)

Some of My Errors

One of my biggest problems from a conversion standpoint is that I often write copy that does not sell…content that speaks well to some, but not to the buying market. Many posts exhibit the following traits:

are focused on big picture ideas and broader market relationships

are seen as being negative for being too blunt & honest

offer too much information for people to get through

try to convey too many different ideas

People want to feel the comfort and accessibility of reading a for dummies guide one page at a time while being told they are becoming gurus / experts in the process. Which creates an interesting problem for anyone trying to sell how to information. Do you aim to make it as accessible as possible? Or do you aim further along the learning cycle and write at a higher level?

Where to Aim if You Are Looking for Profit

There are more people at the bottom of the pyramid, and if you capture their attention that will likely make you considered an expert to most outsiders looking to your field. As the online experience improves hobbiests use the web much more frequently. Yahoo! and MediaVest have done research about hobbyists, calling them Passionistas:

Passionistas heavily engage with communities of like-minded consumers who use email, text messaging, and instant messaging significantly more than typical users, and are more likely to create and share user-generated content online such as photos, blog posts or videos about their passions.

Because of their intense engagement around sharing information, Passionistas are 52% more likely than typical users to recommend or influence others about brands aligning with them.

In the SEO market (and probably most business related markets) it seems passionate hobbyists new to a field are much more likely to exuberantly promote brands than those who have been in the field for a great deal of time. I am not sure how well that translates to other fields though.

How Can I Use This Post to Help Market My Site?

Become a Platform for Passion

If top rated competing sites lack passion you can own your market in well under a year. If they are passionate then to stay competitive you have to raise your game and become a platform for passion.

Microsoft recently held a search event for SEOs to show they are serious about search. Google gives passionate charities free services to promote YouTube and Google Checkout. Cater to the passionate and create purpose driven media – use the same marketing techniques that Microsoft and Google use.

Make Your Site Look Alive

You can always add interactive features to build community interest. When you do so people are more likely to participate (fueling more people to participate) and they are more likely to market your site because they feel a sense of ownership.

My designer place the recent comments and this week top 5 sections on this site before I ever saw it. And I love it because it gives the sense that the site is dynamic, alive, and active. If you receive awards or have many feed subscribers publishing those signs of validation help improve your credibility and bring in new visitors.

Virtual Demand is Becoming Real Demand

Amazon tapped some of their top reviewers to review transcripts for a book publishing contest. How long until publishers are no longer required? You can look at the success of shows like American Idol to see how much people want to be engaged with what they consume. Also look to the stats about how often passionate hobbyists turn to the web to fulfill their wants. Deep profit margins exist in deep pools of passion.

Eventually consumers will go from hell to create the markets THEY want. The businesses with passionate communities will grow while the remaining businesses go to hell. Look for new ways to track demand and get feedback to create what people want. You don’t even need a product off the start…just an audience willing to give you honest feedback.

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Links or Content? Nope, Attention

Aaron Wall — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 19:58:51 +0000

WebmasterWorld recently had another debate on which is more important: links or content. But the debate is flawed. Links or content alone are just one type of asset. You might be able to profit from either for a while, but ultimately the real measure of relevancy and staying power is attention.

When you have a new idea can you spread it? You can do the most amazing thing in the world that would alter the course of history, but if you have no attention it goes nowhere. Days / months / years later somebody comes by and steals / repackages / reformats / relaunches your idea and is hailed a brilliant futurist. You wait in line for their autograph, and can do nothing but laugh or cry because you know you already published that idea, but unfortunately you did it at the wrong place or wrong time or you used the wrong headline.

An old site that already ranks well can see self reinforcing links for years until someone launches a better idea and owns that idea. But if ignored eventually someone will take the idea from you. If you do not have enough attention you do not have the margins needed to be sustainable and fight off competition. If you run a network without adequate attention it turns to spam.

A profitable SEO running a sustainable longterm website is an attention whore. They learn how ideas spread, what types of ideas spread, and how to format them to help them spread. They tap into the human ego and dig deep into psychology to help others want to help them. Marketers spread lies if the payout is high enough. Other times people accidentally spread inaccuracies, but that works too because people talking about it grants you more authority and reading the feedback forces you to learn more.

Some marketers are conservative and like to quietly build links and attention over time. Others like to see their name on the front page of the newspaper or Digg. Both ways work, but links are just a proxy for conversation and attention. Search engines follow people.

Once you have attention you can do whatever you want. Who cares if 90% of your ideas fail? You learn from every failure, content can easily be reformatted, and other good ideas come out of remains of past failures. You only need 1 to be really successful to be set for life. And if you keep trying to launch innovative valuable ideas then people are going to keep talking about you until you launch a success. And when it launches people will talk about it because you already have their attention.

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