Texture design

Posted by randfish

You have great content ideas and the motivation to create, but if your site isn't link-friendly, you might still be up the proverbial creek. Let me give a perfect example from one of my favorite bloggers - Andrew Goodman (from a blog entry called monetizing your site):

I was about to link to this site because they had a relevant article to my next post. But their article was nearly unreadable because of all the monetization around it. Hey, it's nice to sell ads, but...

So now they're officially in the usability hall of shame.

And they're in the "no link for you hall of shame" to boot. Yes, folks, the quality of your design, the delivery method of your message and the user experience you provide all heavily impact the links you're able to earn. Let's look at some of the site attributes that can make or break a link:

Achieving all of the positives on the list while dodging all the negatives is incredibly hard, but there are a few sources that do so with impressive results. Wikipedia is the first that comes to mind, but the BBC, the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the Discovery Channel and many of the top blogs fulfill a great number of these criteria.

In addition to these, there are specific elements that you can use to "encourage" link creation, but I've got an early presentation tomorrow so we'll have to save that for Thursday morning content

Technorati Tags

link-friendly, linkerati

Achieving all of the positives on the list while dodging all the negatives is incredibly hard, but there are a few sources that do so with impressive results. Wikipedia is the first that comes to mind, but the BBC, the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the Discovery Channel and many of the top blogs fulfill a great number of these criteria.

In addition to these, there are specific elements that you can use to "encourage" link creation, but I've got an early presentation tomorrow so we'll have to save that for Thursday morning content

Technorati Tags

link-friendly, linkerati

Posted by JaneCopland

Rand sent me an email on Monday and asked me to review Twitter for the blog as it's been getting some coverage in the blogosphere lately. I'd heard of the site, but had never really investigated it in depth, so I signed up. I don't know if it's my fault, but I can't get any page to load within a time-frame of about ninety seconds. Some pages never loaded.

Loading... Loading. Still loading...

I decided to leave the investigating until Tuesday when, hopefully, the site would be working a little quicker. Back on Twitter's case this morning, the site was loading even slower.┬? When I tried to get to my profile, I was greeted with this:

Oh my God, it's the new MySpace. Every second click elicits an error alert. Rather than sit and watch the "Loading" message, I went on a search of the blogosphere for information about what Twitter does. I found that, as is the case with most start-ups that garner a lot of quick attention, Twitter has its fanboys and its haters.

Because I'm a little behind on what Twitter does, I probably don't need to write a lengthy description of the free service, but here's a quick overview. Everyone on Twitter is answering the question "What are you doing." For you Facebook users out there, it's an entire website dedicated to the sidebar status box. When you sign up with the site, you can add existing users as friends or invite other friends to sign up. Once you've amassed some buddies, their status messages can be viewed on the website, sent to you via text message or instant messaged to one of three IM services: AIM, Jabber and Gtalk.

Rand wanted me to review Twitter from a marketing standpoint, but despite the numerous things people have dreamed up to justify Twitter's existence, the only real role I see Twitter having is that of an entertainer. I have friends living all over the world, from New Zealand to South Africa, England to New York City... yeah, it would be entertaining to have them all engaged in a constant conversation that appeared on my computer screen, but I already have AIM, Design Messenger and a couple of other social networking sites to waste my time on.

From a marketing perspective, my initial experience with the service has not been particularly inspiring. Quite honestly, I don't see Twitter doing anything that hasn't been done before; it's just been packaged differently. People have posted defenses of the site, such as Amit Agarwal's list of things that one can do on Twitter aside from finding out that friends are going to get coffee. Most of the arguments seem to be quite easy to shoot down, such as the idea that Twitter makes contacting busy people easier. Say one of your friends gets so many emails that he or she can't possibly get through them all. The idea is that a Twitter message will get through to them faster. But how is this quicker and more simple than sending the person a text message, calling them on their phone or sending an IM?

The only decent defense of Twitter's marketing potential I've seen is in fact a list of thing the site could or should do from Search Marketing Gurus, and even this list could be expanded quite substantially. However, notice that this is a list of things that the site doesn't do currently. In addition, some people are already hypothesizing that Twitter is reaching critical mass and is going to lose its appeal due to chronic overcrowding. Add marketers to the mix (which means everyone from the pros to the cheap-mortgage-foreclosure-experts-car-insurance-cialis-xanax spammers) and you really will have another MySpace where the vacuum of garbage sucks in every useful function the service once had.

The useful information currently available on Twitter's "Recent Updates" Page

To me, people who make up professional reasons to be on Twitter are simply looking for a way to justify some fun time-wasting. I don't begrudge them this; Rebecca and I have been known to IM each other at work and even write messages to each other (and to a couple of other Designs) on Facebook. However, I don't call this networking or marketing or try and make up a good reason why my linkbuilding campaign should be put on hold while I see where Sugarrae is spending her weekend.

So, aside from the fact that the site is currently running slower than is acceptable in our current internet culture (or in 1996's internet culture), I don't see Twitter being the next influential social media marketing tool. However, I'm completely open to the (inevitable) suggestions as to why I'm horribly wrong. Does Twitter have anything really substantial to offer? Will it ever finish loading?

Technorati Tags

twitter

Posted by randfish

Yesterday, in my post on the Secret┬?to Ranking at the Search Engines, I promised to unveil what exactly the "Linkerati" want from a website's content. Today, I'll do my best to explain, but first, I need to explain the motivation of the Linkerati and explore their level of influence.

Seeing as the word "Linkerati" is completely new and┬?invented by yours truly, I feel that I have the right to expand its definition. Hence forth, Linkerati does not only refer to the tech-savvy, Digg-using, social media addicts of the web. It encompasses virtually anyone whose goal is to find external content and link to it, or whose own content creation on the web naturally means that they will create and/or share links. Thus, the following all fit the definition:

• A┬?legal researcher tasked with writing articles on Findlaw.com that reference articles or blog posts about conflicting legal opinions
• The editor for the Harvard Crimson newspaper who needs a photo of a car being egged by 5-year olds (don't ask why)┬?and will give link credit to the photographer's site
• A new blogger for Cranium seeking websites to add to her blogroll (Hi! Mystery Guest)
• Forlorn interns at the Washington Post tasked with gathering information about popular bedding styles (they may not link to it directly, but they're bringing that data back to a reporter who might write about it, which could produce a lot of links)
• Creators of a new directory on pet supplies and accessories who are looking to list the most interesting and┬?innovative┬?companies in the space as a start

The list above makes a much broader point than what many interpreted my last post to be about - it's not that every site needs to attract the Diggers or the guys at Lifehacker or Boing Boing in order to be successful (though with the latter two, there's always a subject you can come up no matter what your industry). However, your content and your website must appeal to whoever in your sector DOES provide natural links - they could be researchers, professors, journalists, bloggers, forum commenters, passionate hobbyists, directory builders, research interns or middle management.

Now that we've got the Linkerati straight, we can explore just what it is that makes them link. Let's start with some examples in some very unsexy sectors:

Cleaning Supplies:

• A list of the worst stains possible with information on how to clean each of them, photos and a secy chart displaying degree of difficulty (i.e. red wine is twice as bad as balsamic vinegar). Scientific explanations (ala Alton Brown) would go a long way, too. Boing Boing would probably love this one, as would tons of stay-at-home parents and OCD neat-freaks

Used Books:

• Demographic trends of book ownership - what income groups, geographies, racial, gender and age brackets are most likely to own particular books in the US (actually, I'd love to read this article right now; I bet it would go straight to the top of Reddit, too).

Nanny Services:

• A list of rare but effective techniques to help with potty traiing, learning to read, putting kids to sleep, getting them to enjoy vegetables, etc. (there are a lot of parenting blogs out there who'd eat this stuff up).

Paper & Packaging Products:

• How the packaging guys used their expertise to design devices that would protect an egg from a 100MPH impact - forget those science classes off the first story roof! You could pick up some serious link love from every high school physics teacher in the country with a website.

What do each of these pieces of content have in common? They're all unique, interesting and tell us something we don't know. They're also easy to digest and consume, easy to share around a dinner table or a water cooler and make for good first-date material - "hey, did you ever do the egg-drop thing in high school? No? I saw this crazy article about it today..."

It's very hard to create a strict list of rules for content meant to attract links and I'd hate to limit anyone's thinking by doing so. I can, however, give you an easy litmus test for determining value.

1. Find someone in your industry who won't steal your idea (a colleague, a coworker, a boss or even a web-unsavvy competitor)
2. Tell them that you read or saw the article somewhere and describe it, including the reasons it's so interesting
3. If they ask you to email them the link (independent of you offering), you've got a winner on your hands

Armed with the knowledge of your Linkerati's motivation and ideas about how to create and test content, you're ready to start generating the material that will earn natural links and give you a huge advantage of your competitors. Tomorrow, I'll try to cover the ways to make earning those links an easier task and strategies to make your site, independent of content, more generally link-friendly.

Technorati Tags

linkbait, viral marketing, content creation, linkerati

Here we go again, yet another free Design tool from Beanstalk. Let me know when you're getting tired of them.

The tool launched today allows for a simple comparison of some of the key onsite elements between your page and the pages of your main competitors. It takes a look at titles, meta tags, body text and even shows you the top 2 and 3 word phrases used on each of the sites to give you an idea of what else they may be targeting. You'll find this new tool here.

The tool we'll be launching is one of my favorites of our current offerings though we have some great ideas for future enhancements. So be sure to come back again tomorrow or bookmark our free Design tools page.<