evilgreenmonkey

Running dozens/hundreds of websites can be an expensive business, hosting alone can cost upwards of $250 a year for each site. SEOs will often look to host each website on a different IP range or in a totally different country. You may want to host country-specific sites in their target country, but not want to have to replicate your CMS or custom platform on every hosting server. A slightly darker reason for spreading your sites across different hosts would be to manage micro-sites that appear independent and use them to point link juice into your website.
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I love those “full service ad agencies” that try to specialise in everything and excel at nothing. My favourite are those that try to embrace online marketing/conversion through offline advertising and getting it oh-so-wrong. As an affiliate, these lapses in judgement can become a big money maker if used and abused correctly.

Have you ever seen an advert for an online product/service on a train, tube, bus or plane that hardly even mentions the web address? As I now live in the sunny beach resort of Southend, I travel for 50 minutes into London each day, surrounded by advertising that everyone ends up reading (it’s the only way to avoid eye contact and social interaction on public transport). I then travel for a further 5-10 minutes into Farringdon on the Underground, where the Ayima office is based. In the train carriages, I’d estimate that at least 75% of the ad posters are looking for people to convert online. This makes sense as 99.999% of people travelling into/out-of London will use the internet regularly and most likely go online within minutes of leaving the train, at either work or home.

The part that the ad agencies get wrong, is the emphasis on brand and slogans over URLs and contact details. They take for granted that the brand they’re promoting has a strong SEO and PPC presence, as a badly constructed ad will result in people Googling the slogan or brand, rather than recognising and responding to the URL. If an affiliate notices an offline ad early enough and reacts to it immediately, big money can be made.

In the UK, many slogans and marketing messages aren’t trademarked as they’re too generic or it’s seen as a waste of budget. This leaves affiliates open to use them for their own means. Is the slogan and brand variations registered as a domain? How many links does the brand have with these phrases in the anchor text? How many links with the right anchor text would it take to compete with the brand for their own brand terms and marketing messages?

If Acme Co. created a “widget” and then launched an offline marketing campaign of “got widgets?” and a discrete web address of www.acme.com/widgets, imagine how many searches there would be for “got widgets”! Imagine if you got in early and registered gotwidgets.com (or any other gTLD) and then set-up an affiliate site on that domain to sell Acme Co’s products. If you bought enough links with the right anchor text in, you could easily outrank the main brand site and also get direct traffic thanks to Acme Co’s ad agency spending $$$’s promoting the term that you rank #1 for. You’d be surprised how well it can work and how many ad agencies are continuously getting it wrong.

Can’t wait for your new domain to rank naturally? I usually do a nice PPC campaign for their brand terms during the weekend until I get good listings. Because commuters will recognise the slogan in your domain, you’ll get massive clickthrough and conversion rates.

You may find this a little sketchy on the legal side of things though, so make sure you consult a lawyer before using any of these ideas.

I’ve been moaning to people about this for a while, although as it still hasn’t been fixed I thought I’d shout a bit louder.

I’ve recently bought a house in mighty Essex and currently pondering over whether to buy a car or not (I never needed one when living in Central London). As a result, I’ve been running searches for terms like [mortgages] and [cars]. For both of these terms, Google Universal kicks in and displays news results, which is totally understandable. What I don’t get is why they insist on showing US news for searches that clearly require domestic information.

Google already knows that if I’m searching for these terms, I’m only going to be interested in information relevant to me – so why bother showing me stuff that I’m never going to click on? I don’t want news about Bush screwing up the US economy even further, or that the Hummer now comes in Lavender Blue. I do want to know what’s happening to the Bank of England base rate and that I should hold off from buying a Mini until a new model is released in the UK next year.

Please stop showing me news results from New York Times or Wall Street Journal; I’m on a UK IP address, with a en-GB browser and searching via Google.co.uk – why on earth would these sources be of interest to me on these terms? It’s understandable for terms such as [poker], where global news is more relevant, but at least stick in a filter that thinks before it sticks “Paulson Says Housing Woes to Worsen” on the first page of UK mortgage results.