How to create Link Bait with Widget?

Link Builing is important for SEO and there is major impact of getting rank well. There is also less important of Reciprocal Links and also No-Follow Links still widely used (just recent news that Google now crawl the links even though it is no-follow or do-follow , they will judget on their own alogrithms not human control of linking method anymore). Link Baiting is one of popular techniques that make the large acquisition of links through word of mouth and quick spread throughout the blogs and niches website.

Today, I would recommend you to use Widget as Link Bait Strategy. Before you have widget , you have to thinking about these following.

- What is your target audience and what they are looking now?

- What function or information that can serve them and let them stay and get update of your information?

After that you will get the ideas what should be build for your targets. I would recommend you to start building widget from free website like http://www.widgetbox.com that you can also distribute through various channels.

There is some case study like Superpages widget that they got 22,000 links back from widget.

Post Digital Marketing 2009

I really love this awesome presentation, there are some great quotes that hit your heart about digital marketing and branding. There are some quotes that my favourite as following.

• "There is no real life and digital life" It's the same place.
• "a Brand is not a place, it's a direction"
• "Marketing is not about selling stuff, it's about giving the parcipant a reason to buy stuff"
• "the problem: if you think your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail."

That's so cool quotes, take a look more and get fun of it!

Vacation Ideas Website

This post, I would bring my experience and favourite on this website. I would just give you some website that help you plan your vacation from the scatch that you don't have any idea for the destination in your mind yet. This site is Tripbase.com , I really like the User Interface and their Data Mining system. There are some hightlight different points from other websites as following.

- Travel Habits Selection : Nightlife , Dining , Shopping, Nature, Attractions

- Departure's Base (Not Destination Base)

- You can set Budget and Type of Trip upon your need.

- Have information about Estimate Cost of Living, Average Hotel Price , Average Flight Price

- What is the best time to visit and What will expect to see in each month! That's cool!

Priceline & Ticketmaster Partnership

The big OTA player, Priceline has become the official travel partner with Ticketmaster. The partnership will bring special offers for airline, rental car and hotels through Priceline, allowing customers attending an out-of-town event to make travel arrangements while purchasing tickets to an event. Also, The exclusive partnership allows Ticketmaster, a unit of Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc., to provide customers various hotel, airline and rental car offers from Priceline.com. Ticketmaster estimates that 20-30 percent of an event's audience is from out of town.

This is interesting point that they mention to expand internationally that first market that I guess, will be UK that now the existing big player is Lastminute.com (Division of Travelocity) , direct competitor of Priceline. From my opinion, They might use Ticketmaster to integrate with Booking.com (which is leading online travel agency) which own by Priceline to compete with local players there.

Review : Cyber Grand Prix (Cannes Lions 2009)

You will not surprise who will be the winner of this year Cannes Lion Awards for Digital Campaign. The winner of Cyber Grand Prix (Cannes Lions 2009) is Tourism Queensland: Best Job In The World , which every known about this campaign. Let's see what is details inside of this campaign.

Describe the brief from the client(Tourism Queensland)

The target audience were new customers, with a vague awareness of the Great Barrier Reef (and Australia), but no awareness of the islands. Our goal was to raise internationalawareness of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef (a new brand for Tourism Queensland) and transform a popular day-trip destination into an international tourist’s dream holiday. Classified press ads, a PR campaign, in-store posters, online recruitment listings and display ads worked together to drive traffic to the website. Visiting and engaging with the website would drive visitation to the islands in the long term.

Creative Execution:
The best aspect of ‘The Best Job in the World’ is its location, and although the generous salary is appealing, the real reward is in spending six months living above the reef and exploring the region. The ‘Best Job in the World’ idea was born out of the brand’s positioning – Life Above and provokes Global Experience Seekers to engage with a unique brand asset – the Great Barrier Reef. This would be one of the only integrated international recruitment campaigns, and the only recruitment campaign used to launch a tourism brand.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

We tapped into a universal desire and created a job that sounded too good to be true - anyone from anywhere in the world could apply. The Islands Caretaker role is a completely genuine employment opportunity within Tourism Queensland, living on the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef and reporting back to the world. To apply, candidates had to create a persuasive and entertaining video application demonstrating their knowledge of the region. Tourism Queensland wanted to achieve 14,000 application videos from 8 key markets, plus news coverage in mass media and popular social networking sites.

Describe the results in as much detail as possible.
No single tourism campaign (and potentially no single campaign) has ever had such a significant global reach across the spectrum of media and generated such a high volume and highly impassioned response from consumers. -34,684 applicants from 201* countries created 610 hours of video content which passionately promotes our product. - Over 450,000 votes for the Wild Card applicant. - In 56 days islandreefjob.com had 6,849,504 visits, 47,548,514 page views with an average of 8.62 minutes spent on the site. - Media coverage has been estimated at over $US100M from a campaign budget of $US1.2M.

*Value of media coverage estimated by Tourism Queensland, as at 19/3/09. **Web-coded countries (only 195 countries are recognised by the UN).

Interactive will reach 21% by 2014, Social Media is Biggest Growth!

I just read the recent research paper from Forrester Research about the growth of Interactive Marketing. There are some interesting points that I would brief as following.

- Marketers will not expand the marketing budget but will shift to interactive marketing, such as social media, mobile marketing, and search and e-mail marketing and display ads.

- The biggest growth area for interactive is expected to be social media. Social Media assets will be more than $3 Bilion USD

- Marketers will improve how they use social media to engage — not just reach — target audiences. This means more spend on multichannel social media campaigns instead of just buying banners on community sites

New Update : Google Chrome OS

Finally Google has updated officially that they launch new Operating system, they called "Google Chrome OS" . It will be open source which is lightweight operating system designed for netbooks. " Speed, Simplicity and security are key aspects of Google Chrome OS. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. That's really cool like Mac OS X that can work in GUI environment and command line. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications will be written using your favorite web technologies.

Chrome OS will run on x86-based PCs, as well as machines built around the ARM processor.

That's really interesting that they have separate project from Android. Google Chrome OS is built for people who spend most time on the web.

This will be impact the search engine market share for sure, as now Microsoft integrated all search channel to Bing.

How to set up PPC budget for a New Product?

If you're planning to launch the new marketing campaign, but you don't have any data about your KPIs? How do you set up the budget for you? You will have no idea what is Average Order Value(AOV), Close Rate(CR) Google Adwords just given you the bids and daily budget, but these are only guesses. In order to set up initiatl campaign budget for PPC , you need to calculate your Cost per lead (CPL), like this

1. Estimate the amount of revenue you expect to make in one month. You need to use minimum amount of revenue that you can stay in the business. Worst case scenario of estimation!

2. Guess at your close rate, for every 100 leads , how much you thinks that you can convert them into customers or transaction. 10% is quite fairly conservative. You will get better of number when you run a new product for a while.

3. Use your estimate close rate to estimate how many leads that you need to be breakeven or reach the minimum number of sales.

4. Calculate your target CPL . I think you talk with other people to get feedback and some comment what your thought.

5. Multiply the number of leads by the Target CPL . You will get how much you will have to spend per month to buy the leads you need.

For example, you want to sell 100 transaction per month. You have 50% close rate, you need 200 leds to sell 100 transactions. If the target CPL is $10 and you need 200 leads, you will need to spent about $2000 per month. Now, you got the idea what is PPC Budget for your new product.

ASCII Art in AdWords Ads

I am accidently found about ASCII Art in Google Adwords Ads, that's really cool! That created significant boosting in CTR. You may try this idea with your A/B testing to see whether it make you change in conversion or not!. Never tried never know. Do something creativity.

PepsiCo's Biggest Online Campaign

I got the recent news about PepsiCo appointed Microsoft to run the biggest ever online campaign, that's so exciting. The campaign will run for nine months and will initially include a Pepsi Max microsite in the UK, Norway and Australia targeting 18 to 25-year-old men.

They have aim to engage users with the brand by allowing them to share comments, games and photo galleries with friends on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, encouraging them to join Pepsi Max's Club.Microsoft's portal MSN will host specially created editorial content, which Microsoft has guaranteed will drive at least one million people to the micro site. Microsoft Advertising will also drive consumers to the microsite through ads around its MSN Messenger service. The Pepsi Max's "Club" microsite has been built and is being hosted using Microsoft technology.