by RebeccaKelley on September 23, 2011
The latest “Meh, it’s a slow news day” story comes courtesy of Mark Davidson, a self-described “Internet marketing and sales professional” who managed to scrounge up over 55,000 Twitter followers. Is he an Internet rock star? Does he hold the secret to making millions of dollars from the pantsless luxury of your home office? Is he BFFs with Lady Gaga? It’s a mystery as to how he accumulated so many followers, but regardless of his method, Davidson has a pretty strong Twitter account. Must be a lot of work for one dude to maintain such a popular profile.
Or so we thought. A couple nights ago, Davidson’s Twitter account supposedly got hijacked while he slumbered, no doubt dreaming of high conversion rates and new Facebook layouts. It turns out that the so-called Internet marketing expert employed not one, not two, but three ghostwriters to maintain his Twitter account for him. Because you know, we Internet marketers are as busy as Jay-Z and need to hire a whole PR team to manufacture 140 character tweets on our behalf. Either Davidson has too much money than he knows what to do with or the economy is really that bad that people are desperate enough to pretend to be a middle-aged white dude for a pittance. Read more >>
by Dawn Wentzell on September 19, 2011
Let’s be honest: there is a lot in the day-to-day job of an internet marketer that is downright tedious. But every once in a while you come across a tool that helps make those tiresome tasks enjoyable.
Citation Labs new Outbound Link Scraper and Contact Finder are two such tools, that make the task of link prospecting just a little bit easier.
I’ve spent the last several weeks at work reaching out to bloggers. It’s been a time-consuming, boring chore. When I started using the two new Citation Labs tools the other day, I wanted to stay late at work to keep playing with the tools and keep finding more link prospects.
So what do they do?
Outbound Link Scraper
Say you’ve found a really great directory of sites that is related to your niche. There are several categories and pages with links that you want to look at, but you don’t have time to open each one individually. Collect all of the URLs of the pages with links, and throw them into the Outbound Link Scraper. What you get back is every outbound link on all of those URLs, neatly collected in a CSV file.
I put in 11 URLs, and got back nearly 300 outbound links. It took just a few minutes to run the tool, and saved me 30 minutes or more. It also saved me from the carpal tunnel of copying and pasting that many URLs into a spreadsheet.
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by Brian LaFrance on September 15, 2011
It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of Target’s new site. We have had quite a bit of attention on that post about Target’s failure of a new site and people from all over the world have read it. There have been a few instances where someone comes to the defense of Target and due to logs and tracking that we use, we have been able to find out that those people were at least partially involved in the project.
Logging Visitors with Loggly.com
A couple days ago, we saw a large number of visits coming through IP addresses we didn’t recognize. Checking the logs and doing an IP lookup tied allowed us to tie those to Target Corporation in Minnesota. Without having Loggly to do some of the analysis automatically, we may not have noticed. Sure, the data is available through Google Analytics too, but how many people dig down to that level?
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by Dawn Wentzell on September 6, 2011
You’re likely seeing a dramatic increase in the use of QR codes in marketing materials lately. Despite being around for quite some time, they’re really beginning to be recognized by marketers as a great way to integrate online and offline marketing efforts. And it makes sense; smartphone use continues to rise – Comscore reports that 82.2 million Americans have one now. Comscore also reports that 14 million Americans scanned a QR code in June 2011 alone. The demographics tend to skew towards young, affluent males, so if that is your target audience QR codes can be of immense benefit to your campaign.
The huge benefit of using QR codes is in how many ways they can be implemented. A QR code can be placed almost anywhere; on print materials such as flyers, posters, and product packaging, or even displayed on websites. The single most common place I’ve seen them is in advertising in restaurant bathrooms. The bar codes that are created can display a phone number, email address or plain text message. The most common use is to direct the user to a URL.
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by Brian LaFrance on September 1, 2011
Well, the time has come to crown the winner of our We Suck at Running Contests, Contest. I know there were a lot of people that wanted Mike Halvorsen to win. Heck, we even had people here at AuthorityLabs pulling for him, but the mustache just didn’t cut it. Fortunately, we had quite a few good anonymous celebrity judges that weren’t being bribed or threatened like we were. This ticket was apparently a hot commodity. Looking at the agenda for BlueGlass TPA, who wouldn’t want to go?
Soooo…without further ado, the winner is…
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by Brian LaFrance on August 31, 2011
I don’t even know where to start with this. Target launched a new site last week. I guess they’re pretty proud of it, but they’ve managed to completely fail in so many ways.
The Backstory
In 2001, Target elected to partner with Amazon in order to leverage Amazon’s e-commerce technology. This may have made sense at the time, but Target should have started to move toward being off of Amazon by the time the 5 year deal was done. Instead, it has been renewed a couple times and was extended through 2011. The last renewal was announced 2 years ago and Target knew at the time that they were going to move off of Amazon. That means they’ve had at least 2 years to get this right. That’s a LONG time.
The Good
Honestly, I haven’t found a lot that’s good about their new site. It’s possible that getting away from Amazon’s technology will benefit them in the long run and that would be a good thing.
The Bad
There is a lot wrong with this site. It’s definitely not ready for prime time and was either rushed out to meet a deadline or there is a big team of idiots behind it. Maybe both. A quick run through the site exposed a lot of basic items that are being handled poorly. I could probably spend days picking this piece of junk apart, but here are a few things you guys can learn from:
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by Brian LaFrance on August 30, 2011
A couple weeks ago, we were seeing everyone jumping on the 20 year birthday of the public internet. That got us thinking about what’s really happened over the past 20 years and how the internet evolved into what we see today. It really is impressive to think that a Cold War relic like DARPA that was essentially for used for government spying has come all this way to become this amazing tool for government spying.
WTF??? Really? That’s it? Just 20 years of the evolution of spying? Not really. There have been some pretty sweet advancements in how we organize and retrieve information and all kinds of new ways to break up a marriage.
We decided to have our friend Jeremie at Big Red Ape throw together an illustration that summarizes the evolution of the internet over the past 20 years. We think he did an amazing job. Click the image to see the full size version.
So what do you think? Are we missing anything important? What do you think is the most important innovation in the first 20 years of the internet?
