This morning, I wanted to find out what events might be going on for Memorial Day Weekend in NYC. So I googled "memorial day weekend 2009 nyc". The first 2-3 results were legitimate, but then after that these weird mini search sites plagued the rest of the results. The pages all looked like a google search results page: http://navy-party-nyc-2009-memorial-day.reallusion.us/. These sites all had sponsored links, of course. So they are basically parasites who have figured out how to beat Google's own algorithm so they can profit from the search giant.

I'm wondering if Google's algorithm just hasn't caught up to this recent scammer or if they are losing the war against these kinds of illigetimate sites. As a searcher, this was an extremely frustrating experience and I pretty much gave up on Google for this search. I'll just have to go to time out for some legitimate results!

There have been some changes to our management structure these past few weeks. I won't go into specifics right now, but I will say that there has recently been more interest in optimizing our native site. It's something that I've always been interested in and I've been working on it here and there as much as I've been able. Since the priority hasn't been there, it's been challenging.

I have seen astounding success with our natural search traffic through each SEO change I've been able to implement, however. The most recent change I implemented brought another surge to our natural search traffic. We reformatted our category pages with more content rich and strategic copy. We also brought in a few lines of copy for each product that shows up on the category landing page. Our default sort was also changed to sort by bestseller.

Recently, there was a question as to why a competing website in the fitness category was showing up 1st in search for keywords like "mp3 workouts" and "workout downloads". One of the key reasons that they are showing up so well for these terms is because they are niche to fitness and able to target these keywords on their homepage, where they are able to get the most link juice. Our challenge is that we have many categories and are not really afforded the luxury of targeting one category on our homepage this way. Not only that, but because our website does not allow for subcategories, we do not have a top level category to target generic fitness keywords.

So what is the solution?

We decided to launch an "all fitness" category. We are creating some keyword rich copy on our homepage that will link to this landing page (among other top category pages). I'm hoping this will help us rank for those generic fitness keywords. I'll give you an update as I start seeing results.

I'm also launching a box on the homepage titled "on the web" which will link to one of the iAmplify blogs I write, our facebook group and page and our YouTube channel.

As usual, I've been working on several different initiatives to market our company. Not only have I been trying to grow our own social network, I've been working at providing our Amplifiers the tools to grow theirs. We've compiled tutorials of the most popular blogs and social networks with important implementation information specific to posting our Amplifiers' affiliate links and media player widgets. I started the posts on the iAmplify Marketing Blog with a Blogger Tutorial. I will be posting one tutorial a week over the next few weeks.


To grow iAmplify's social networks, I've created and am still optimizing a Facebook Group page, A Facebook Business page and a couple of twitter accounts (@iAmplify & @SuzanneSanders). I'm also working on ways to integrate all of these social networks plus our iAmplify's content blog together on iAmplify's site and via our marketing emails. I've mocked up a design spec for our site and hopefully will have something to show you in the next few weeks.

I was talking to a search marketing agency recently who claimed they had figured out the long tail. I can't tell you how many times I've heard that one, but the person I was speaking with from the agency was very knowledgeable on the subject. It's not that he was trying to sell me anything, as he quickly learned we weren't in any position to hire an agency. He just opened a dialogue hoping for a referral and was interested in picking my brain about a few things. He had contacted me at the end of the summer and at that time told me his agency had enjoyed some success with a large online retailer and were running a pilot program with another large online retailer and would share the results with me after the completion of the pilot.

This recent conversation was about the results of the pilot program. The pilot program was a continuing experiment they were conducting with a performance based payment model. Apparently, the program was a success. But it appeared that they were still trying to figure out how to transition the performance based model into something truly profitable for their agency. They were still grappling with a payment model that made sense for both parties and whether to continue on the direction of being a supplement to the paid search efforts of their clients. The opportunity to truly work with the long tail was there, yet how would the metrics work? The larger retailers his agency had serviced were either doing search in house or had another agency or both. Could they truly be profitable with this model and could they grow this model in any real way?

I have my doubts. It's not that I don't believe in the long tail. I believe there are long tail keywords that can be successfully mined. But I don't think it can be the crux of your business. There is just too much synergy between the broader keywords, including brand terms and the longer tail keywords. I'm just not convinced that the two should be separated into two distinct efforts that most likely wouldn't talk to one other. If you are working with an agency, that agency should be controlling your whole program. If your agency is not doing this, than you should shop around for another agency. If you are doing your search in house, there has to be a point where you look at your program and decide whether you can successfully grow the program to the fullest extent it can be grown.

With over 2.5 mil skus at B&N we had a distinct interest in growing our long tail. During my stint there, we made several attempts at casting that wide net to mine our catalog to the fullest extent possible. We were never quite satisfied with the results. We worked with our agency at building out the long tail as well as a search affiliate who worked within strict guidelines about what they could or could not bid on. The attempts were mostly unsuccessful. I'm not saying we didn't find some sweet spots, some unlikely success stories. But as a whole, the effort and expense to find the sweet spot was not worth the return without the coverage of our broader revenue driving terms. We were only able to successfully pay for the experimentation under the umbrella of these other more profitable terms. Without them, I cannot imagine we would have been able to convince our management team that the program was working. I cannot imagine it would have been profitable for our agency either since they worked on a performance based model.

But I do strongly believe in search as a strong customer acquisition tool. I believe you have to look at the bigger picture. If you are receiving a good deal of revenue through your inexpensive brand and broad keywords, you should be able to balance your spend on other less profitable keyword experimentation. To me, it is really an inexpensive alternative to traditional advertising and much more effective at driving brand awareness. Your non brand keywords will be what is driving your customer acquisition and should be treated as a customer acquisition spend. You have to decide how much a new customer is worth to your business. It is always a balancing act and search is a moving target.

I would encourage this agency to continue the dialogue with prospective clients. If their customer acquisition efforts are worth these tests they offer perspective clients, then they should continue this effort. But I would encourage them to make the case for the holistic management of their client's paid search efforts. If they are truly experts at the long tail and they are a good service agency, then there is no reason why they won't be able to make headway in this area.

Google recently announced a new way for website owners to deal with duplicate content issues. They've created a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL:

If your site has identical or vastly similar content that's accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

This is welcome news for many webmasters who have created complex workarounds for their duplicate content issues related to normal issues like the slight variations of a URL based on tracking parameters, sort format, etc. This will certainly make our lives easier if and when we make the decision to give preference to our native site URLs over our Partner Store URLs.

I recently read an article from Media Post's Search Insider titled "Hyperlinking Reality"which intrigued me. It was about the future of search and brought to mind some recent science fiction movies like Minority Report. It referenced another article from Media Post One Search, 17 Ways, which was written after the Consumer Electronics Show and was a review of the emerging technology which would allow us to search in new ways when we are on the go. One of those ways could be by using a pair of special glasses from Vuzix which can now be hooked up to portable devices such as an iPhone or Camcorder. So from what I understand the article to say, is that it would take a picture of what you see and then it would upload that picture to the portable device where it would identify the place and show you reviews and informational links about what you were looking at. Apparently, Vuzix is also adding more functionality in the devices themselves, so it doesn't seem like it would be too far into the future before we can interact with our environment much like a virtual reality.

It looks like local search is going to become much more robust in the very near future and if this isn't a reason to get your business optimized for local search, I don't know what would convince you. It's too bad iAmplify is an online only business! I would love to experiment more with local search. I must find some side projects soon.

I'm very new to the blog world. Besides one stint in 2005-2006 with a personal blog experiment, I haven't had much experience blogging. Since taking on iAmplify's marketing and customer blog, I've been experimenting with a few of my own. This blog being one of the experiments. One must have an online resume these days and if you can't market yourself then who else can (should) you market?

I've started to look around at other blogs to gather ideas. I really like the content of Debbie Stier's blog The 26th Story. It's among other things a conversation with and about the authors of HarperStudio. It's a conversation about publishing, about books and current events as well. But I focused in on a few of her posts about the authors: How their authors can better market themselves. How they can use online tools to better share their story. It's about promoting their authors and their authors promoting themselves. This is the conversation that I would like to have with our experts via our marketing blog. What tools can we give them to help market themselves most effectively? What topics concern them the most? What are they most interested in reading about?

I'm in sort of a unique position in that I don't have many interactions with our experts. I know more about their products. I merchandise them, listen or watch them, I write about them, I know what sells and what doesn't. But I don't have much of a view into the people behind them. So recently, I've started to meet with some of the business development and Amplifier management team to brainstorm marketing ideas for the blog etc. We started the year off sharing New Year's promotional ideas and we are planning on writing about the different social media tools next. We've had to postpone one of our bi-weekly meetings so I might post something in-between as well. At first I was very reticent about my writing. I still am somewhat, but I figure that if I don't practice and practice A LOT, I'll never get better. So post post post I shall.

I am going to keep researching more blogs. I hope to find more interesting ones to write about.

We had a strategy meeting today that began with a discussion around Twitter but morphed into a discussion about all social media applications. From LinkedIn to Facebook to Self Growth to Twitter ...to name only a few...how does a small start-up decide where to put its limited resources? Plus our marketing efforts are split into two main foci: customer and expert. How do you decide which group to market to and can you market to both either simultaneously or separately?

I have started to navigate into these areas, attempting to start conversations mainly to our consumer. I've created a Facebook group and business page. I've also created and uploaded sample videos to Youtube and other popular video sharing sites. Since we don't have any marketing dollars to draw in viewers, I'm mainly relying on my own community and anything that goes viral. We have a few unique and popular videos on YouTube featuring Phil Hellmuth, which invites a lot of discussion. People are very passionate about Phil. Sometimes they leave terrible comments and give him bad reviews. Unless it is spam, I don't delete any of the comments. I find it is far better and adds more value to your advertising efforts to allow freedom of expression. More often than not, criticism can actually increase your visibility. Specifically to Phil Hellmuth, the negative reviews incite discussion and equal amounts of positive reviews.

I also write a marketing and customer blog. I want to add value to both our experts and consumers to increase the stickiness of these efforts. But it is hard to compete with so much chatter that is in the online space. One of the ways that I increase visibility to our customer blog is to synchronize it with our content emails. The blog was actually born from our desire to experiment with content emails. We were doing basic commerce emails and we wanted to experiment with something that added more value to our customer. We thought it might increase the our open rates and customer loyalty. Recently, I've been testing the amount of content I include in the email with a link to read more on our blog. I'll write an updated post with the results. It's an ongoing experiment.

One of the challenges I've faced at iAmplify is developing an SEO strategy for our partner stores. Our business model hinges upon our partners' success. So for some of our larger partners, we will build a custom store that is hosted by us, but utilizes their branding. One of my responsibilities is to create meta data (URL keywords, title tags, meta keywords) for these stores. With Partner or Co-branded Stores there can be an issue with duplicate content as it relates to search engine rankings. If Google finds duplicate content on multiple landing pages under the same domain, it will make an educated guess about which page to present in the search results. Not only do you lose control over which listing you want to show up in the search results, having your content divided between several different pages essentially pokes holes in any weight the original content held as an authoritative results page for a specific keyword search. One of the ways to combat this issue is to "nofollow" the duplicate content pages. I carefully considered this option. But I didn't move forward with it for a couple of reasons, one of which I will detail below.

Since joining iAmplify, I've worked tirelessly with our technology team to improve our main site's search engine rankings. By improving the site's architecture, title tags, url structure etc. our traffic has increased by over 100%. However, since the company's focus right now is on our experts' sites rather than our native site, we have chosen not to make changes to the native site that would most certainly help improve conversion rates. So the increase in traffic to our site has not been met with an equal increase in sales. Meanwhile, having the Partner Store -- with duplicate content, yet often better built and merchandised -- show up higher in the search results than our native site is actually a plus, because that site will generally convert much better. Right now, I actually want our partner store results to show up before our native site results.

So for now, I've let the duplicate content remain. Until we have multiple sites with the same content and it clearly starts to affect our search engine rankings, there is no reason to block or filter the content. Once we add many more partner stores that feature the same content or we improve our native site's conversion rates, I will reconsider the nofollow solution.

Since joining the start-up company iAmplify in July 2008, I've come to utilize marketing muscles which in the past I had rarely flexed. Before landing this job, I'd honed my skills in affiliate and search marketing at Barnes & Noble.com. I was part of the online group tasked with marketing acquisition, and my role expanded into many different areas. But at iAmplify I've had to master the true talent of multi-tasking. I wear such a variety of hats that it's sometimes hard to keep up. At the same time, I am naturally a perfectionist so it's been a challenge to learn how to let some of that perfectionism go. When you have to tend to multiple projects and concerns, you don't always have the luxury to fine tune. It has taken some time to adjust, but I'm finally getting the hang of it.

One of the most surprising muscles that I've been stretching lately has been my writing skill. I never thought I'd be writing content emails, writing business and customer blogs, et cetera. The strange thing is, I almost got a degree in English. I always loved to read more than anything, but when I took my first creative writing class...I became convinced writing was not in my future! Now, I find that writing is not only part of my present, it's come to play a very significant role in my career. It's funny how life turns out sometime.

I've also been looking into social media platforms like twitter, facebook and youtube. In-between managing paid search, SEO, email marketing and marketing our partners stores...I've had little time to truly build these areas out, but am hoping to expand upon them in the New Year.

What is great about this position is that my skills have been pushed beyond what I thought was possible in such a short time. I'm excited for all the possibilities this New Year brings.