"Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." - William Morris

Squidoo – Crowd Sourced SEO Friendliness

Posted: November 16th, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: SEO | Tags: , , | No Comments »

For some reason that escapes me now I started to spend a few hours playing around with Squidoo to create my own ‘lens’ on Smorkin’ Labbits, those cute little collectible rabbits that smoke. Squidoo was created by Seth Godin, amongst others, to enable experts (and fans) with minimal internet experience to create, manage and write their own spiel about the subjects they love. It’s sort of a crowd-sourced About.com, with the added fun of having to identify spam type posts.

The overall experience of creating my lens was straight-forward and powerful, although I found that one limitation of Squidoo is that it doesn’t like you uploading pictures to make lists – something that I really wanted to do to list out the colourful little toys. The solution: create a false Flickr account, upload my pictures there, then hand transfer every image URL since the ‘Plaxo’ image grabbing code seems not to be working right now. Ug. What’s interesting now is whether or not I make any money off this activity, as Squidoo borrows another crowd sourced site idea (ePinions’) to share any affiliate revenues they make with us, the creators. Somehow I think the percentage payback on a $5 plastic toy ain’t so great, but guess that’s why all the camera focussed lenses are already highly developed.


10 Ways to Make a Book Popular

Posted: October 16th, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Internet Marketing | Tags: , , , | No Comments »

The UK’s premier yearly book awards, the Man Booker prize, has just been won by the rank outsider Anne Enright, for her book ‘The Gathering’. The Booker prize has a habit of being un-predictable, and it certainly isn’t a popularity contest, but winning the prize is a boon to any novelist’s sales. To help the rest of us who haven’t won, the BBC offers a handy list of ten ways to make a book popular, ranging from word of mouth, TV shows like Richard & Judy or Oprah and three for two marketing offers.


The Dangers of Unexpected Viral Marketing

Posted: December 1st, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: Internet Marketing | Tags: , | No Comments »

Threshers, a large UK high street based supplier of alcohol, are bracing themselves for unexpected waves of customers after discount voucher was spread rapidly round the web. The 40% voucher was intended for trade partners of Threshers only, but the web mob got hold of the offer and told their friends – now the voucher has been downloaded almost a million times.

Threshers have no idea how much this will cost them – but hopefully for their sakes the 40% discount still gave them a slight profit. In the meantime, it’s a great cautionary example to the rest of the world to never expect any good offer released on the web to stay within the intended group – so be prepared for a) the hoardes of people who may take up the offer, and b) the media backlash if you handle it badly. For an example of how bad it can turn, remember that Starbucks got sued for one of their online vouchers being refused. Never good press.