I only just noticed a video interview (above) that I did with Dr. Ralph Wilson of web marketing today on how to attract affiliates. In it, one of the things I talk about is looking for affiliate link signatures to track down your competitor’s affiliates. I should probably explain how you might do that. For example, let’s look at Amazon affiliates. I just searched the web and found an Amazon affiliates link for a self help book. A right click on the image lets me copy the link into, so that I can see how the affiliate links to Amazon. It is a link like this:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1572244135/theguidetosel-20

Looking at another book on the same site we can see this link:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1572242205/theguidetosel-20

So between the two, we can see the difference between the two links. If we want to find all the people that are affiliates of a particualar book at Amazon, say the “anger control workbook”, then we are looking for links that START with http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ … MajesticSEO’s link analysis let’s you sort by url – or even by part URL. So you can use MajesticSEO to find affiliates of a certain genre and use this to attract them to your program.

Here’s another example, more suited to most of us in small businesses. Mary Ferrin writes and runs www.dinnnerandamurder.com one of her affiliates is http://www.great-murder-mystery-games.com/death-by-chocolate.html and you can see that his page links to: http://www.dinnerandamurder.com/games/chocolate.htm?family=acc396a2&game=6a49e062 For a much more reasonable cost, I can find other affiliates linking to that page with the same ?family prefix by forcing an analysis in Majestic for links that ONLY contain “http://www.dinnerandamurder.com/games/chocolate.htm?family” in them.

He presto! Here are her other affiliates!

boardgamecentral.com
murderandmysterygames.com
partymerchant.com
play-dead.com
great-murder-mystery-games.com
signaturestyledecor.com
book-club-queen.com
corporateeventchannel.com
mbtb.com
mainlymurder.co.uk
mysterygamecentral.com
movil.be
registeredsite.com
murdermysterygames.com.au
adultthemepartyideas.com

Guess what you should do next with this data as a Merchant? Check these against your own affiliate list to see who you haven’t got. Since I own Murder Mystery Games… guess what I plan to do next week?

by Dixon Jones

Attracting Affiliates

Today I had a look in at the work in progress…. Lan cabling lining the floorboards, roofing and the walls.

Apparently… nearly 3 miles of it!

I asked if this would mean we could dispense with the central heating. Apparently not.

So is this necessary? Well without it, any business would need 10 times as many meetings, which would mean loads more travel. So I bet that if it was “carbon tested” so to speak, then yes.

by Dixon Jones

3 miles of Data Cabling

by Dixon Jones

Save Rishil Campaign

I’ve been impressed with both and thought it was time to really put both systems through the test. Which one is better and which one is priced right?

To clarify – I am looking at the PAID versions of both systems. I covered the following areas:

• Index Size
• General Look and Feel
• Manipulating data
• Pricing
• Global reach

Index Size

Both sides could shout about the size of their index. Indeed – Majestic certainly is, claiming that they now have 539 billion urls indexed – which they say compares to only 170 billion indexed by Yahoo and only 38 billion indexed by Linkscape. In fact Linkscape’s Meta Description puts their own number higher at 54 Billion+, but even at this level, Majestic’s data (if true) is 10 TIMES the size of Linkscape’s at the moment and about half the size of Google’s. So let’s test this with a few examples – from popular to unknown
Small site test: http://swanh.org/ (Software association of New Hampshire)

I chose this one for several reasons. The first is that I have never heard of them. I just went through the DMoz directory randomly starting with a state I’ve never been to. The second reason is that they 301 the www onto the non www so will avoid a potential flaw in results. Third, the site does not have an architecture that is built upon multiple subdomains.

Majestic found:  5,127 external back-links from 882 referring domains. with 229 unique anchor texts.
Linkscape found: 25 external links from 6 domains & subdomains. Linkscape only shows the top 50 anchor texts in this report.

Well on this basis – Majestic is absolutely crucifying Linkscape – but let’s be careful… Majestic may be giving so much data that we are not comparing like with like.

Big Site Test: http://BBC.co.uk (The UK’s most well known news brand)

Large sites will be especially interesting to compare because they tend to have many subdomains (like http://news.bbc.co.uk) I tried to find a big site without significan subdomains, but even Wikipedia uses them for language, so I think we need to accept that any link analysis tool needs to cope with subdomains. So what did we find with the BBC?

SEOMoz found:  16,424,105 links from 315,686 domains/subdomains
Majestic found:  345,383,557 links from 598,475 domains.

Again, Majestic shows considerably more backlinks. Majestic;s data, though, includes 23 million image links, 22 million nofollow links, 1 million, 15 million DELETED and 2.9 million mentions (links in plain text, without a hyperlink). On the other hand, SEOMoz’s number appears to count subdomains as seprate domains, instead of limiting their advertised number to the number of Top Level Domains (TLDs).

If we take all of Majestic’s deleted domains out, and even if SEOMoz’s data had already excluded these, (which it doesn’t) then I think we can safely say that Majestic’s index is considerably more developed than Linkscape’s at the moment.

How can Majestic’s Index be so much larger? Majestic started indexing in 2004. That’s a lot of crawling time that Linkscape needs to catch up on. In addition, Majestic’s method of collecting data was ingenious – using distributed crawlers, similar to the bit torrent idea of using multiple partners to use their spare computer downtime to crawl the web. This has given Majestic considerable processing power at a relatively low cost.

General Look and Feel

Majestic’s hands down win on the index size is entirely reversed when it comes to Linkscape’s considerably better “look and feel”. Linkscape looks usable – whilst Majestic looks like it is built by a techie who never quite got around to thinking about it all from the user’s point of view.

Linkscape lays the data out logically, with a dashboard containing the most important information readily displayed and intuitive tabs to drill down to the referring domains or the URL anchor text. When you delve into the “links to domain” tab, SEOMoz lets you filter the result on the fly. This is an especially nice feature. For example, you can easily hide or include particular types of links. To do this with Majestic, you need to go right back to the options menu and force a new analysis of the data. You can get the same sorts of data, but it just takes more effort in Majestic and looks better in Linkscape.

By comparison – Majestic tries to display Top anchors, top referring domains and top pages all on the same page, offering a drill down on each table. It’s all too much data for a single screen. This has now also been augmented with some new graphs – which are nice… but MORE DATA! I also think people will be confused between the two graphs on this dashboard – entitled: “External backlinks discovery for domain.com” and “Referring domains discovery for domain.com”. I know the difference – but I guess you’ll have to look twice… and I would prefer if these defaulted to cumulative graphs.

Manipulating Data

The thing that strikes me between the two systems is that Linkscape only gives you detailed data about the 50 most common anchor text phrases, and the 50 most important links. Looking at www.swanh.org as my example, I also found that all the most important links were internal! Now that may be – but if I want internal link data I can use Xenu Link Sleuth… it’s external data that I want – and by comparison, Majestic gave me so much that I immediately need to start filtering out what I feel may not be appropriate.
Majestic gives 200 results to SEOMoz’s 50 per page on the screen. You can drill down to up to 3,000 l of SEOMoz’s results, page by page – but this makes it hard to extract the data.

On both systems, you can export the data to a CSV file and then you get the whole lot! This is incredibly powerful, except that Linkscape limites their data to just under 3,000 URLs, whilst Majestic gives you the complete data dump if you want it all. There is, however, a considerable learning curve here for using Majestic. To get the data you REALLY want, you need to manipulate the “options” and then force a new analysis… THEN you need to download the data into a CSV. That gives you vastly superior information than SEOMOz, but it does take a while to be able to see the data from different perspectives.

Majestic also has some useful tools for power users. You can, for example, group your different accounts (SEOMoz calls them reports) into sub-folders. SEMoz let’s you compare two competitors side by side, but Majestic’s folders allow you to compare a whole industry sector if you had enough funds to collect all the data.

Pricing

I am not going to go into pricing for the real high end users, who may be spending several thousand every month to use the data. For mere mortals, the pricing models are very different.

Comparing the prices is like comparing apples and oranges.

Linkscape is part of my SEOMoz Gold membership. That start from 25 reports a month for about $80. When I run a report, I get the data for that domain, at that point in time. I get to keep it for as long as I want provided I remain a member of SEMoz. By contrast, on Majestic, I buy access to a domain’s data, for a given amount of time – from 7 days upwards.

Majestic similarly uses a “credits” system to get around the international issues, but the price of a domain can vary dramatically. In the examples I used, Swanh.org cost just a couple of credits, whilst analysing the BBC would cost 600 credits for seven days access (or 3000 for a year’s).

So which is cheaper actually depends on what sites you are analyzing and how you are using the system. If you only have $20 though… you probably only have Majestic as an option.

Functionality

Both systems are function rich and I probably have missed a few. If either Linkscape or Majestic think I’ve missed a trick here, they both know how to contact me and I will correct the table below – but only for functions available at the date of posting.

Summary

Linkscape is considerably more intuitive at the present time, but here is much more depth of data at Majestic and for professionals, the leaning curve will be worth the effort. By contrast, though, SEOMoz has a huge variety of other tools available within its membership fee which you will still need for Internet Marketing even if you do go for Majestic.

by Dixon Jones

Linkscape vs Majestic

Can MS change the market share just by a uniformity of message?

When we talk about the search engines, we say “Google, Microsoft and Yahoo”; Not “Google, Live and Yahoo” or “Google, MSN and Yahoo”. Indeed – Microsoft’s Adlab tool confirms the clear relative strengths of the three brand names that I associate with Microsoft’s search product:(Source: http://adlab.microsoft.com/Keyword-Forecast/Default.aspx)Now it seems to me that there really shouldn’t be much debate here. Couldn’t Microsoft dramatically increase its profile in search if they simply accepted that they were called “MSN” or “Microsoft” instead of trying to create new brand messages?There is confusion amongst the search community as to where to find Microsoft’s organic search technology. A few years ago, Microsoft had to ask Webmasterworld to change a forum name from “MSN search” to something more appropriate because the product wasn’t “MSN”. They eventually settled on “Microsoft Search Live” to make sure nobody was confused. I am not sure that this isn’t more a case of covering the bases as much as promoting a clear brand message.

Can MS change the market share by changing the paradigm?

Over the last year or so, agencies tracking these things have decided to expand “search” to include social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. In doing this, they should rightly bring in Instant Messenger and other MSN products. If they do this, then we should really start to see a different model of the search landscape.(Source: Compete.com)So if Microsoft starts to really mine properties like Microsoft.com and MSN.com, we quite clearly start to see a very different picture of Market Share. Compete suggests that adding MSN usage and Microsoft usage together we en up with similar unique visitors to Google… and we haven’t even included Live.com or other Microsoft owned properties. Of course – the traffic is qualitatively different… people are not at Microsoft.com just for search purposes – but at the moment, all the metrics seem to be judging Microsoft on its core search platforms in terms of market share. If Microsoft can educate the monitoring companies to include much of their other web properties in the calculation, then they start to look like a much more serious contender.About the Author:Dixon Jones is the managing director of Receptional, a UK based Internet Marketing Consultancy. He also runs a personal blog at http://dixonjones.com and can be found on Twitter.

by Dixon Jones

Microsoft Concealing True Market Share Potential?

Rubbish.

I’ll demonstrate.

Seasoned SEOs have been trying to tell you for years to stop looking at that little green line on the Google Toolbar plugin. I only found out this morning that the toolbar has recentlly been updated, when Evilgreenmonkey twittered verbal abuse at realizing Jane Copland was Page Rank 5 from nowhere. First things first… congratulations Jane, but that’s certainly no disrespect to Rob, who (apart from being far too young) certainly knows his stuff! I admit that vanity then got the better of me and I looked at my own page rank. (Note to self – listen to your own advice… ignore that green line, at least for link purposes.)

Let’s look at these three bloggers – PR5: Dixon Jones (your unworthy narrator); PR5: Jane Copland (Erstwhile Mozzer) & PR4: Rob Kerry (Evilgreenmonkey).

So two at PR5 and one at PR4. Evilgreenmonkey must have the least links, yes? er… no. He has the most. He has ALWAYS had the most. Rob started actively blogging (it seems) back in April 2007. Compared to myself – latecomer – in September 2007. I’ve never caught him on links as you can see below.

But WAIT… maybe back links is a bad measure? Maybe it is actually the number of referring domains that we should be looking at? Well I would be inclined to agree, but here, Rob trumps me even more:

Now Janecopland’s site is so new that I can’t even see her site in the Wayback archives and Majestic hasn’t gotten around to analyzing her backlink data yet, but Receptional’s own backlink tools take a more up to date source and we can see that she is even further behind Rob at the moment in every metric:

Heck – according to Google and Yahoo, Jane’s only got 11 pages indexed!

So there you have it. That PageRank green line is not all about links.

So why DOES Google give the green lines out the way it does? Well Google says it in the first screenshot… it is about “Google’s view of the importance of this page”, not “Google’s view of the importance of links to this page”. It is a long way away from the “PageRank” described in the original Stanford patent and is more like a horoscope reading than a scientific measure.

Let’s face it, you don’t need to go far to see why Google makes the distinction. Prior to Evilgreenmonkey posting on 4th April, his previous post on that domain was September 3rd (presumably 2008). Before that, July 4th. When he writes, Rob gets heard and plenty of people comment, but you still need to actually write content for Google to chew up and digest.

I think that Jane will have to work hard to maintain Google’s impression of her site, though. From the limited data I have, Compete.com concurs that Jane’s site has some traction – but we have seen time and again new sites doing well in Google for a short period and then retracting back as Google gets more data.

I hope that’s cleared things up a bit about that green fairy dust as Mike Grehan calls it.

Dixon.

by Dixon Jones

Why the Page Rank Toolbar has Little to do with Links

Then I went to publish it and lost the whole lot when the connection was lost.

FAIL.

Let’s hope the next version fixes that. There’s nothing worse than crafting something you hope people will enjoy and then having it destroyed by technology.

Dixon.

by Dixon Jones

Wordpress for iPhone review

My company, Receptional Internet Marketing are now making use of a new Google product called Website Optimizer. I am at a conference in Dublin where Jon Myers and Russell Sutton from Conversion Works are talking about landing page optimization.

I know that Russell is one of the few Google Optimizer professionals in the country (we have Nick Gaunt at Receptional) but up first was Jon Myers who is from Mediavest. Like Receptional, Mediavest is a Google Certified Adwords company. Their presentations give a compelling case for using this technology.

Jon talked a little about Website Optimiser, but then really started to concentrate on the “quality score” metric in Google Adwords. He pointed out the need to ensure that the quality score of your advert is “good” or “great”.

To improve your Adwords campaign, you can test different landing pages for your adverts. Within the Google Adwords system, you can set Google up to alternately send traffic to first the home page and then alternately the product specific page, for example, and Google helps to tell you which page engages the user better and – assuming you have conversion tracking set up in Adwords – you can work out which page generates a higher return on investment.

Jon also noted a few other tools. www.usertesting.com was recommended as well as a particular favourite of Receptional – crazyegg.com. Jon also noted that www.conversion-rates-expert.com has all the decent  free tools listed in one place for conversion and landing page testing.

Jon than went on to the main course – A:B Testing and Multivariate testing and used a case study  of Skype, who tested three different layouts for their “buy” page (which is pretty close to their home page). Using Google’s website Optimizer, they were able to randomize the three variants for the users and track the orders and revenues generated from the three layouts. The audience were asked to guess which page worked best… and most got it wrong.

Jon showed some nice screenshots from  Website optimizer that showed how you can easily drill down and understand the effects of what you test, but did warn about the issues of some mathematical principals surrounding test using limited amounts of data.

Jon feels times are changing and that the marketer is really starting to get in control of the message from search, but you only have 1.8 seconds to attract your user from search these days. This means that you now need to start treating Google itself as a landing page. Local business listings in Google can have phone numbers ON the Google results, for example, meaning that  now your customer doesn’t even have to come to your wesbite to convert.

As an aside to Jon’s presentation, Receptional have a number of technologies that allow us to track users by ohone number – one of which can even tie phone numbers into Google Analytics results.

Russell came on next. His business really only concentrates on conversions, not traffic generation. He started by asking the question: “What’s in it for you”? and said that it is all about outcomes – in terms of money or actions or market share or any other chosen metric. Knowing what you want to get “more of” is key to knowing what to test.

Russel; says that when you know what you want more of, you then need to use analytics to find the pain. (Receptional has Google analytics and Yahoo analytics expertise in-house). He took an example from Google analytics which clearly showed two pages that had a much higer bounce rate on a site than any other and chose these to start testing variations. He pointed out that the higher the traffic to those pages, the more the pain for your business.

He recommended starting with a super small test to get used to the Google Website Optimiser technology. You then need a hypothesis of why you think a particular page may be broken. You then should be bold – try some  changes that look really different and test the outcomes.

Russell used a courier company case study. The home page had a huge bounce rate and their hypothesis was that the “get a quote” button was tiny. They then came up with 8 variations on a theme – not just one.  Again – the audience was asked which variation worked best. It turned out again that we all guessed wrong.

The winning result increased the click through to the quote page by 101%.

Russell and Jon’s presentations – together with Receptional’s own experiences – show that Google optimizer can make an incredible difference to your buttom line. The maths is compelling. At Recetional, Nick Gaunt has taken on this specialism and has taken the Google website optimizer exams. If you would like to contact him, you can do so via www.receptional.com/contact .

by Dixon Jones

Landing Page Testing

How to get a thousand followers on Twitter

Well frankly it looks really easy to get that many followers. Just go and follow all of the followers of the biggest twitter pimps in the industry. The one I’d start with are http://twitter.com/guykawasaki (73,087 followers) and if you want to find the biggest pimps in your own vertical, just find a name you respect in your vertical and plug them into http://friendorfollow.com Then click on the “friends” tab and then sort by “followers”. My most popular friend is http://twitter.com/stephenfry (238,870 followers). But he’s one of the very few people I follow for no logical reason.

Presumably Twitter have something in place to stop this sort of thing, but in principal (you can either do this manually, or using a script…)  you can manually follow one person in Stephen fry’s follow list every 5 seconds, that would mean you are following 5,760 in an 8 hour day. Presumably around one in four blindly follow you back. So the next day, you un-follow any person that didn’t follow you back and you have well over 1000 followers.

So let’s say you didn’t trip Twitter’s filters… maybe did this but at a slower pace and less obviously. What have you achieved? Well you now have over 1000 followers who are – for all useful marketing purposes – a random sample. They have no allegiance to your area of business and no knowledge of who you are. If I did that, then talking about SEO on Twitter would be receiving Nigerian phishing scams in the follower’s inbox. It won’t work talking to these people.

But it’s still going to work for your target audience… just carry on being you and I guess what will happen is that people in your industry will then start to follow you and those not in your industry will start to fade away. People may look at you and see you have lots of followers – and they make the tragic assumption that the followers are genuine. Oh… wait… that’s scuppering my intended argument to say don’t do that. Hmm…

There’s something very wrong here. I can see how to double my followers – and I suspect I won’t even upset my “real” friends in the process. In doing so, I create an illusion of being more important than I am, which might have the effect of creating a self created mantle. I don’t like the sound of that – do you?

So – the moral of the tale. Only follow people you know or admire. Un-follow anyone with followings greater than a field of sheep. Otherwise you play into a cycle of deception which is already being played on a huge scale of twitter.

by Dixon Jones

Why a big following on Twitter is a scam

I just heard today that this service is to close. This follows a multitude of closure announcements from Yahoo as it tries to turn its hand from everything to a presumably much leaner machine.

I would have thought that before they just close all these services, they should consider giving them to entrepreneurs that never had billions to protect them in times of crises. I think I could have made a small fortune selling a service like that. I just had to work with a Russian web development team to build something similar for a friend. Sure – mine’s better (now… thanks Nick!) but I doubt it has the scalability that Yahoo had.

Yahoo – you know all these free services that you dropped… didn’t you think to try just puttiong the price up to something profitable before just dumping services on your customers?

Ah well… your recession… your rules.

by Dixon Jones

Yahoo Briefcase Closing