Center for Media Research: Product Placement Blazin’ Hot

While ReviewMe isn't exactly 'product placement', the theory behind the service is similar: get a relevant product into the content without annoying the readers (or viewers). I'm not surprised at all to hear that product placement growth is outpacing that of 'traditional' advertising; as users become more savvy (and ad-blind), smart marketers are evolving their strategies. From the report:
PQ Media forecasts that global paid product placement spending will grow at a compound annual rate of 27.9% in the 2005-2010 period to $7.55 billion, as product placement growth continues to significantly outpace that of traditional advertising and marketing. The overall value of the worldwide product placement market, says the report, including the barter/exposure value of non-paid placements, will increase 18.4% compounded annually to $13.96 billion in 2010.
Those are some pretty big numbers they're throwing around! :-)

Saturday Foo & Ninjitsu

In case you missed it, Jim Boykin wrote a great post this week, Why that site with 50 backlinks beats your site with 1000 backlinks. I think we all ocassionally tend to overcomplexify SEO and link building, focusing on numbers or other mostly meaningless data, when instead we should be focusing on macro-trends (in this case, the trend is quality over quantity).

I would also like to use this post as a time to start a little petition for one of Jim's former projects that he canceled:



That is all, please resume your weekend relaxation.

Guy Kawasaki: Online Reviews Important to Small Biz’s

Yes, yes, yes -- online reviews are very important. Heck, Web 2.0 sites seem to live or die by their TechCrunch review. The same phenomenon is observable many other industries on the Web.

Lest you doubt the importance of online feedback, Guy Kawasaki has written a post encouraging companies to embrace online reviews:


Use reviews to improve your operations. Some negative reviews are off the mark, but most provide at least a kernel of truth about problems in your business. Take steps to fix these problems.
Encourage your customers to post reviews. Mention these review sites to your regular customers, and tell them how much you would appreciate them posting an honest review about you.
Use positive reviews in your marketing. Just like a Zagat’s write-up or a newspaper profile, a good online review can be posted in your shop window or on your Web site.


Hmm, I wish there was a company that specialized in these points... oh well... ;-)

Order Matters, Says the Sandbox (Or, Where to start in a link building campaign)

My recently published article, 101 Ways to Build links, shows that you have many, many link building tactics at your disposal. For any given website, you probably need to use at least a few dozen link building different tactics over the course of a year or more to rank for anything remotely competitive.

One thing I didn't mention in the article, though, was that for a brand new site you need to build certain types of links first. Why? Thank TrustRank/the sandbox. To even get fully indexed (now that we have sandbox crawling), let alone ranked, you'll need to get the domain some trust right off the bat, and this is only going to happen by building certain types of links in a certain way.

OK, so what is "certain types of links in a certain way"? Basically, we need trusted links to happen first, and then a "natural growth curve". Want specifics?

When I launch a new site, I go after two types of links right away:

My short-short-very-short list of trusted paid directories (Business.com, Dir.yahoo.com, sbd.bcentral.com)

Link begging/buying/bartering at sites which already rank in the top 1-200 (if they're ranking, they have some trust)

The latter is time-consuming and frustrating -- but it has to be done, and sooner is better than later.  From Stuntdubl's recent post:Other Notes: Authority links are an absolute must for
improving your trust score these days. This is a MUST for a new site,
and should be where you start your efforts, and always be dedicating
SOME time. Suck it up, and take the time it takes to get some quality,
trusted links. The existence of trusted authority links will make or
break your site. Find the 800 lb. gorillas in your field, and **find a
way to get on a dozen or so of them. Failing that, hunt their backlinks, and find a way to get on some of those pages.  Use some creative queries with the combination tool.  Give the tattler a shot.

Anyway, once I have a few authority links (even getting 3 is quite an accomplishment), I wait a week or two, make sure the site gets indexed deeply, and then move into other types of link building tactics -- article syndication, social networking gaming, quality reciprocals, etc. Even if a few (or more than a few) low quality links make it into the link profile, it's not going to kill anything, since I gave the site a spine first.

Buying Links at TLA... The Movie!

Readers, Rich over at MindSmack just completed a real cool video that gives an overview on the link buying process at TLA.  Their team did a great job on the flash video, if you ever need any help in that department, Rich can be reached at: rich (at) mindsmack.com  Head over to this page to check the video out now!

101 Ways To Keep Aaron Wall & Andy Hagans busy!

Readers, I was wondering what Andy has been up to...

Looks like he teamed up with Aaron Wall and they have been doing some killer research to come up with this list:

101 Ways To Build Link Popularity in 2006

Well done and well worth a read.

TLA Account Management Improvements

TLA users, we have made some big design/usability tweaks to your "my account" area today.  As always, Chris did a killer job.  I think you will find it a lot easier to navigate around and manage your account with ease.  As always, if there is anything else we can improve to make your life easier, let me know. Thanks!