Buy A Bank On ebay!

Another example of not-so relevant adwords adverts that send you to ebay:

Bank America
Find Bank America!
Buy Bank America on eBay
www.ebay.co.uk

I was searching on some banking phrases and up popped the above ad (I’ve removed the hyper-link). Now I didn’t click the ad ‘cos I’m not looking to buy a big bank this month but I’ve no doubt the landing page is worthy of a corking quality score.

Nice to know that I can bid on such things in ebay. I wonder if they’ll accept a postal order?

Search Marketing

A Right Riveting Read #2

For my second a right riveting read I suggest that you have a read of the Girdy blog.

I’ve been reading Andrew Girdwoods blog for about a month now and he regularly posts some good opinion, information and links to sites that you might not have heard of. It appears that Andrew works in the corporate end of search marketing so you tend to pick up a business-end vibe from the posts.

Quality stuff and well worth subscribing to.

Search Marketing Social Networking

We’re Influenced By New Media Brands

According to 3600 marketing professionals surveyed by brandchannel it was new media brands in 2006 that influenced the way we all live.

Top 5 global brands

1. Google
2. Apple
3. YouTube
4. Wikipedia
5. Starbucks

Top 5 European

1. Ikea
2. Skype
3. Nokia
4. Zara
5. Adidas

Now, I’m not sure I get this.

Does wikipedia really influence the way people live? Well, not me, that’s for sure (unless it’s subliminal). Google, yes, I get that. It does influence us all in ways of information access and retrieval on every topic imaginable.

Apple? Perhaps. They play their part in the promotion of a certain lifestyle. Starbucks has had an impact on the way we act out elements of our social lives. YouTube? Well it’s certainly influenced a huge proportion of the more youthful population.

I just don’t see that wikis have had influence over the way we live our lives. Do you? Maybe it is the case in the USA – or just the case amongst 3600 marketing profressionals perhaps?

Note that there are no British brands in the European list. Shame that really.

Branding

Pimp My Blog

I’ve very recently started to subscribe to performancing.com – seems good, though I think I’ve missed something, hasn’t there been a lot of fuss over this site recently? That aside, Nick Wilson has posted his view on how blog bling can adversely affect your blog. I tend to agree with his points to a degree about snap’s preview anywhere feature, especially his second point…

Click stalling: Quite often, when trying to click a link that features the Snap abomination, I have to click several times to get the damn thing to work. This is too much effort. If your site is that hard to use, you can bet I wont be back, and neither will others.

I too find this annoying, the “preview is being queued” or whatever it comes up with and it does start to grate after a while and can put you off a site.

When snap previews work I like them, but when they don’t, I don’t.

I’ve succumbed to blog bling myself though. For a week or so I’ve been using the widgets available at mybloglog. You’ll see on mine and many other blogs a recent readers list with little profile photos of the mybloglog visitors. Click on a photo and you’re off in to the mybloglog world of fellow bloggers (mostly search engine marketers and the like) and you’re spending precious time nosing at others peoples blogs. Actually, that’s demeaning it somewhat – I’ve come across some interesting sites that I now subscribe too.

I pimped my blog with technorati almost from day one and I still try and remember to add the appropriate tags to my posts. Not convinced though that’s it having bugger all effect!

Search Marketing Social Networking

TradeDoubler Rebrand

Hot on the heels of the buy.at rebrand, James Little reports that now TradeDoubler have announced a rebrand too. This time, I like the new strap line of Market Like You Mean It – quite upbeat, positive with a lets-do attitude. Just occurred to me, I wonder if they took inspiration from The Killers track Smile Like You Mean It?

I also wonder if and when TradeDoubler are taken over (as has been widely reported), will another dollop of cash be spent again to integrate the network within it’s new corporate owners business?

Keeping Up With Google Blogs

If you’re anything like me then you’ll be trying to keep up-to-date with several of the official google blogs. Stuff like adsense, adwords, webmaster guidelines and the like. Thing is, google appear to have official blogs for just about every area that they’re involved in, so it can get a little difficult to manage your feed reading.

I stumbled upon a great tip the other day (for the life of me I can’t remember where I read it, so I can’t credit the source) …. if you use google reader to manage your feeds then you can just subscribe to this (a shared feed I think it is):

www.google.com/reader/view/user/10949413115399023739/label/officialgoogleblogs

You can keep up-to-date with every blog post from all the google blogs, all in one place. Rather handy.

A Right Riveting Read #1

I’ve just this minute come up with the idea of posting a series of right riveting reads – a recommendation for you to read a particular blog, site or forum even.

Now I’m not going to do a full blown review of the right riveting read in question. In fact, sometimes I suspect I might even just post a link and offer my back-link vote for good, interesting content. Site reviews are not really what I want to achieve. This series is as much a benefit for me as for anyone else – a kind of bookmark blogging for myself in addition to my google reader subscriptions.

So, my first A Right Riveting Read? Go take a look at copyblogger, a blog packed with really informative articles on how to write compelling copy (content) that will naturally attract visitors.

Paid Links Are Detectable True/False?

Spotted an interesting debate on the topic of whether paid for links could be made undetectable. Matt Cutts posted his own view on this matter by suggesting that it is possible for spam detectors such as himself to identify paid-for links. To counter this, Rand Fishkin disagrees that all paid links are in fact detectable. I won’t repeat the arguements for and against – just read the posts and see what you think.

I’m siding with Rand rather than Matt on this one. How can google and the others tell when a site owner has accepted a payment on the quiet (as in, doesn’t promote the opportunity for paid-for links on the site) for a link to someones site? Off topic links might raise an eyebrow perhaps. A change in url destination (from Mr A’s site to Mrs B’s site) could be detected I guess – but there’d have to be suspicions in the first instance wouldn’t there?

I’ve never even considered paying for a one way link by the way.

Search Marketing seomoz Matt Cutts

buy.at Affiliate Network Rebrands

Based up in Newcastle UK, buy.at is an affiliate network that we’ve worked with for a few years now. They’re a good network to deal with and are building a strong portfolio of merchants. Following on from last years financing deal and management beef-up they’ve now gone for a rebrand too. There’s a new logo and a new strapline of “more profitable growth, faster”. Here’s what they’ve got to say about the rebrand

buy.at has had the same logo since we started back in late 2002 and we felt it was time for an upgrade. The old tag was looking a little dated so we engaged an agency to give us a new brand identity.

With the recent upgrade to the look and feel of our interface we thought it was high time to give the outward face of buy.at some attention.

We still have the same vision and ethics as we always did but now we have a more up to date look to complement them.

You will notice we also have a new strapline “more profitable growth, faster”.

This strapline embodies our focus as an affiliate network in 2007 and conveys that we are committed to overdeliver to our clients and partners. The market is maturing fast and so are we, the re-brand captures this in the new logo and following strapline.

On first impression I’m not madly keen on the strapline as it doesn’t seem to flow to me. But then again they’ve probably spend a small fortune with some top-notch brand consultancy. I guess it invokes the commercial aspirations of merchant and affiliate alike. With ours, passionate about affiliate marketing, I just said it how it is. It took me 2 minutes to come up with that one.

Affiliate Marketing Branding

5p Bids On Yahoo! Appear

Further to my post last week about lower minimum bids I’m now starting to see 5p minimums on several of my keyword phrases in Yahoo. Not quite as great as it sounds because on a proportion of these I was already bidding in excess of the old 10p minimum.

My ‘meols’ test is still showing as 10p minimum though so maybe the complete keyword database (or whatever it is that they need to tweak) has not yet been fully updated?

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