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- Sphinn It!
Went Hot: December 12, 2007 - 12:07 pm
Posted By: jeffquipp 572 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.searchengineguide.com)
Category: SEO
Accordingly, Jennifer is now letting the search engine spiders back into her site.
9 Comments
Comments
Interesting experiment.....and it seemed to work!
Nice recap of Jenn's findings, but I don't think this would work for all verticals.
Agreed Mike! Personally, I had no question that it would work, though I was still really interested in seeing the results. She's definitely an 'out of the box' thinker. Wish I'd thought of it first.
Read, stumbled....forgot to sphinn!!! :o
Can you get traffic without google? Sure. Is it a good idea? No. I could have told you that without 6 months of lost sales.
All this is, is link bait, and not overly imaginative at that. A futile endeauvour with predetermined results isn't an interesting experiment.
Um wheel - Jen didn't have 6 months of lost sales. You might want to read the whole series. The main point was education, not cash.
Highlight with your brightest yellow marker:
"The biggest take away here is the need to approach social media marketing as an ongoing thing...That puts social media marketing into the same category as paid search. While it can be used for short term boosts in traffic, branding and sales, you only reap the full benefit if you budget and plan for ongoing efforts. Turn off the campaign and while you'll still see residual benefits from the traffic you've already built, you'll significantly reduce the flow of new customers."
Hats off to Jennifer for her Bento-rrific experiment and analysis.
I found point #2 most helpful. Without passion, a business seems shallow and site visitors can often pick up on it.
Wheel, as Kalena pointed out, this wasn't really about making money. It was about helping to change the way people view both social media and search traffic.
No site should rely only on one source of traffic. It's simply bad marketing. Yet tons and tons of web site owners can track 50, 60 or even 70 percent of their sales to Google. While it's true that's simply a product of the search marketplace we live in, it's also made people lazy. Why do any marketing work when Google sends so much for free?
Of course if something happens and you end up losing those rankings...well, your business goes under.
So I was aritifically handicapping myself to try and show the tactics you can use to grow NON-Google sources of traffic.
I also wanted people to understand the "social" side of social media marketing. It sounds great to say "spend an hour or two writing some juicy link bait and you too can make the front page of Digg/Sphinn/Reddit" but for most businesses, that's going to result in a "flash" of traffic with no ongoing benefit in sales or repeat visitors. The type of social media marketing I was trying to share with people was the kind that builds relationships and helps you get a better understanding of your marketplace. It's the kind that serves up value in ALL areas of your business plan and marketing.
I'm still bummed I didn't get to take it as far as I wanted to, but nonetheless, it was a great learning experience.
To me, the big take away is that it takes hard work to get traffic and make sales. Jen and Abigail getting too busy to spend the time on it, and their subsequent loss of traffic and sales, illustrates that very clearly.
Although, I'm sure they (and most here) knew that already, it's amazing how many clients and potential clients don't!