Lifeline Blog

National Pasta of Cambridge, Ontario has selected Lifeline to help them build a new online presence. Stay tuned for more!

The Music Plus Corporation of Kitchener, Ontario has selected Lifeline to develop a new e-commerce store front for their business, we’re looking forward to working with them on this new project!

We’ve been selected by Weinberg’s Meats to develop their new web presence and e-commerce store front.

We’ve been selected by Clarion Co-Operative Homes to help them develop a new website. Their new website will serve as an information hub for their residents, providing quick and easy access to information, forms and other materials related to the Co-Op.

Mitten Vinyl,  a Brantford based manufacturer of high quality vinyl products since 1959,  has selected Lifeline to revamp their online presence.

Our wonderful client Summit Learning has decided to contract us to refresh their website and add some new features. Summit Learning is a Private Career College and also provides student tutoring.

Consider the following scenario: you attend an offline trade show as a representative of your company and exchange business cards with the organizers. Do you consider this an expressed permission to receive emails, snail mail and telephone follow-ups?  The organizers would likely say that of course it is, you fully expect to be contacted; you were there to build business relationships.  You might not agree, being sick and tired of incessant communication from business contacts that serve no purpose other than to annoy you.  So which is correct?

Like most things, it’s probably somewhere in the middle.

The CAN SPAM law, the only one that regulates how emails may be sent, doesn’t even require that the first-time collection of an email address be an opt-in. You are free to email anyone you ever had a business relation with. The only restriction is that if you had someone in your mailing list who unsubscribed and you want them back, you should get an affirmative consent. So technically the organizer in the aforementioned example has every legal right to email you.

But just because you can do this, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should.

The CAN SPAM law is a pretty low bar that defines the border between an unethical approach and a criminal offence. Don’t take it as the guideline to a fully-fledged business ethic. Just because your recipients can’t sue for the (allegedly) unsolicited emails it doesn’t mean they can’t report it as spam. It doesn’t keep spam filters from blocking you (read more about how spam filters work here, here and here). Popular smart filters are crowdsourced, which means you don’t need a conviction from a jury to be flagged.

It’s pretty easy to run an email campaign that complies with the CAN SPAM act. Just offer your recipients a way of opting out and you are okay from a strictly legal point of view. The regulations are so loose that you can even email people you have never had a business relationship with and get away with it. However, the price may be quite steep and not worth the hassle. You will get:

• Oodles of unsubscribe requests. Those who aren’t interested in receiving emails from you and are kind enough to click the unsubscribe link rather than the SPAM button will opt out.
• Complaints that may wreck your reputation. Get ready to handle lots of spam complaints. Your IPs may get blacklisted or, if you outsource your campaigns, your account with the email service provider may be terminated.
• Poor campaign performance. Unless you are after a quantity over quality approach, you will find that your clickthrough rates and conversions are hardly worth the hassle.
• All in all lots of work for little results.

There is hardly any difference between B2B and B2C marketing when it comes to the recipient. Who reads messages when you email a company? A person. Who can report you for spam? A person. Who buys your products? A person. Who opens the emails and clicks on your links? A person. You got the idea: treat your B2B and B2C customers the same and you’ll be safe.

You can find the previous three episodes here:

• Part I: Guest posting and theme distribution
• Part II: Crowdsourcing (running a contest) and directory submissions
• Part III: Social bookmarking and forum posting

This article will show you a few insights on how to use Yahoo Answers.

Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers is a popular service where people ask questions (and get answers) on various topics. Once you have answered a few questions and got a certain point threshold, your account is allowed to post “live” links, which is what you will be looking for.

• Difficulty: hard. If it’s not your area of expertise, you may have a hard time researching the topic and providing quality replies that will actually help people rather than solely promote your link.
• Time: Quite a lot. It takes time to reach Level 2 where you can post clickable links, otherwise your answers won’t carry any SEO benefit.
• Quality: High. All search engines regard Yahoo Answers as a high authority site, so a link from there can make a big impact.

Be reminded that it’s against Yahoo’s terms of service to reply to your own questions using multiple accounts. It is considered spam and your accounts will be blocked. Yahoo takes spamming very seriously and there are lots of reports where genuine accounts are flagged, which is one of the reasons you shouldn’t be spending all of your time building links with Yahoo Answers.

Yahoo Answers is also known as a good way of providing decent amounts of traffic. The pages where your links are posted get consistent organic traffic, so if your answer is chosen as the most relevant one, whoever searched for that question will likely be visiting your link.

Offline networking

Face to face meet-ups can help you build up your backlinks profile. Trade conferences can be a great way of networking with people in your industry and acquiring one-way links.

• Difficulty: hard. You will have to get out of the office, which can be quite scary!  Jokes aside, networking with other people in your area of expertise isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Inter-personal skills should prevail here.
• Time consumed: A lot. You may need to work  for weeks or more to get under someone’s skin enough to have them write an article on your product or service.
• Quality: A+. These are the kind of links you should be looking for. Relevant, contextual links that look natural.

Always aim at one-way links when networking with people offline. After all, you will be putting in a lot of time (you can probably build hundreds of social bookmarks in the time it takes you to attend a conference), so don’t settle for anything less. Reciprocal links are a dime a dozen, you should be getting something better.

I’ve already shown you how you can fail with link baiting, let’s get a bit on the positive side and discuss something that does work: LISTS. People love lists, they often get Dugg and tweeted and can sometimes become “authority resources”. How do you build a list that goes viral?

Give value

Don’t simply list the, let’s say, “Top 10 gadgets sold in 2010”. Your readers are likely to know about them. Instead,  put in some of your personal thoughts on each – what works, what doesn’t, why you put them in your top ten list and such. Don’t put up a “Top SEO tools” list with ridiculous links to tools no one (or everybody) uses just for the sake of building a top-x list, make sure your list brings value to your readers. Also, choose your topic carefully. It’s 2011, so no one cares about a “Top 10 free webmail providers” list – everybody uses Gmail these days, you won’t raise any interest with sites like Gawab or GMX.

Be original and interesting

Yes, you can write a list on top 10 cellular phones sold in 2004, but it won’t probably raise any interest, let alone go viral. Find something that no one or only a few people have written about. I know, it’s not easy, but I never said link baiting was. Take your time to research your field – and do it well – then come up with an original list that people would actually enjoy.

Size matters

The longer the list, the better. A “Top 100” list catches more eyeballs than a “Top 10”. However, make sure all 100 items are worth writing about and don’t just fill your list with fluff to get the total count. Don’t add All in One SEO Pack or Akismet to a list called “Top 50 WordPress plugins you never heard about” just because you ran out of your unheard-of plugins after the twenty-first item. Size your list carefully and don’t expect to go viral with 10 or so items, unless it’s something extraordinary.

Don’t be afraid to shock

People love the absurd, twisted, out of the ordinary. With everyone praising the new iPad, “101 reasons why I won’t get iPad II” might raise an eyebrow or two. Similarly, “Top 10 people I’d like to injure” might trigger some reactions. Stay away from utterly conventional topics like “Top Firefox plugins” unless you can document more than 100 of them or have an authority site the size of Mashable. A dull list like “Top 3 email clients” might work for your audience, but it won’t go viral since a million or so other bloggers already wrote about it.

Some may argue that lists are overused and no longer work. I beg to differ. If you have a look at Smashing Magazine you’ll notice that five out of their top six posts in 2010 were lists.

Google Places is a great service that can provide an immense boost to the popularity of your offline business. If you run a brick and mortar venue, I strongly advise you to sign up for an account and have your shop listed.

However, just like all great services, Google Places comes with its downsides. Here are three of them.

Impact of Google Places on Adwords advertisers

The worst impact is probably on Adwords advertisers. The whole right hand side column on the search results page is shifted down by hundreds of pixels to make place for the map on the upper right corner. Visitors with a low browser resolution will see the ads way below the fold. Also, as you scroll down the page, the map remains in a fixed position and overlaps the ads column. Users with a 1024×768 browser screen can see as little as three ads from a total of ten or more.

Since positions 4 to 10 are shifted down the page, cost per click bids for the first three spots will increase dramatically since they are the most visible. It’s one thing to have your ad placed slightly below the fold and another not to have it seen until the user scrolls down.

This is a downside of the service as a whole and shouldn’t impact individual Google Places users.

Impact on SERPs – an assumption

This hasn’t been tested nor thoroughly documented yet, so take it as an open question. Google Places is definitely great for helping users find nearby brick and mortar businesses. Let’s take the (fictional) example that I was running an IT support shop located in Hamilton. A user in Hamilton searches for “IT support” and lands on my page. Great. But what if another user from Ontario searches for “IT support”? It would be natural for offline businesses to be shown first, but would my page’s rank be significantly worse because Google “knows” I’m located in Hamilton? Would my rankings be better if I hadn’t used Google Places in the first place?

We haven’t tested this yet, but I feel the concern is legitimate and you might want to do some split testing if you aim at a wider market.

Bad publicity through fake negative reviews

There is not much an unethical competitor can do when it comes to lowering your search engine rankings (Other than re-posting your content all-over the Internet hoping Google will trigger a massive duplicate content penalty, but that rarely works).

When it comes to Google Places, your competition can post false negative reviews that can lower the credibility of your service.  Unfortunately there is not much you can do about it, other than contacting Google and explaining that whatever your “fan club” wrote about you isn’t true. If the reviews are cleverly written and don’t look spammy at all it can be quite hard to have them removed – Google might give your reviewers the benefit of doubt and just leave their opinions there.

Again, I do endorse the service (we at Lifeline Design use it). This article is only meant to let you know about some of the potential pitfalls if you sign up with Google Places.