Post-Cyber Monday Marketing Ideas
BIG BIZ By Aaron Shear, Search Engine Watch, Dec 2, 2008
Columns | Contact Aaron | Biography
Many of us have been waiting for "Cyber Monday" to come around and show its colors. The Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend is, of course, the online shopping version of "Black Friday," where brick & mortar stores offer deep discounts to kick off the holiday shopping season.
As this is such an important time of year for e-commerce companies and a key indicator of how well the rest of the quarter is going to run, we must be very careful of how sites are maintained and operated during such times.
I've written several times in the past about how overall site performance is a very important factor in your organic search campaigns and paid search efforts. Search engines like Google are trying very hard to maintain a level of quality that their users expect.
A heavy load can lead to a degradation of user experience and will cause your paid ads and natural search rankings to vanish. Thus, enforcing a development moratorium is a great idea to make sure that the sites are performing well and won't go down over tinkering.
Most large sites that work under Sarbanes-Oxley, or SOX, compliance won't allow any changes to be pushed to the Web site from Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, up until the end of the year, with all changes being backed up until a large release on January 1.
While you're waiting to put out any new releases, consider investing more effort into other forms of marketing that may have an indirect impact on your overall SEO coverage. Videos can be a great source for driving visitors. Videos may drive a ton of traffic if the content is intriguing enough.
When selecting your subject matter, don't make the video into a product advertisement. Take an example from Will it Blend? None of their videos initially tried to sell anything. You would never see anything about buying their blenders, but their compelling content drove 40 million dollars in blender sales.
The key to placement: don't just upload the video to YouTube and let it go. Upload the video, tag it appropriately, and make sure the words you use are related to the information about your video and not fancy marketing terms that no one looks at.
Imagine the difference between having a billboard in Times Square versus a cornfield in the middle of the country. Search keywords are very important to consider.
After you post your video, make sure to write about it in a blog post and make sure to embed the material in the post. If you're sure this video is compelling enough, post it to Digg and see how people respond to it.
Simply creating 30 accounts and Digging your same post on your machine will be seen as spam -- don't abuse it, it's a waste of your time. If anything, ask your friends to consider Digging the video. If they think the video stinks, no one else will Digg it, and it will get buried.
Consistency is very important. You should always try to convey a message from the same person. This will drive trust to the person and can possible drive a consistent level of viewers to come back and see your antics time and time again.
Join us for Search Engine Strategies Chicago December 8-12 at the Chicago Hilton. The only major search marketing conference and expo in the Midwest will be packed with 60-plus sessions, multiple keynotes and Orion Strategy sessions, exhibitors, networking events, and more.
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Biography
Aaron Shear is a partner in Boost Search Marketing, an enterprise-level global consulting firm. Offering expert advice to many of the most trafficked sites around the world.
Previously Aaron was the Global Director of SEO with Shopping.com an eBay Company. At Shopping.com Aaron spearheaded the global optimization efforts of Shopping.com, Dealtime.com and Epinions.com. Prior to joining Shopping.com, Aaron was the CTO at SEO Inc. where he spearheaded optimization efforts, with clients such as IGN Entertainment, VEGAS.com, Sierra Trading Post, Sony Motion Pictures, Archer Daniels Midland, Alliance Business Centers Network to name a few.
Before becoming an SEO Aaron worked at Inktomi, as a Technical Account Manager, where he learned SEO from the creators of the search engines first hand. Aaron's primary responsibility was managing client relationships such as MSN, IWon, Hotbot and HP to name a few.
Aaron has been optimizing websites since the late 90's, and has provided hundreds of businesses with countless top SEO and SEM returns.
Article Archives by Aaron Shear:
» Post-Cyber Monday Marketing Ideas - December 2, 2008
» SEO Dreams are Made of This - November 18, 2008
» Maintaining Your Company's Image in the SERPs - November 4, 2008
» Video Search: Can You Live Without It? - October 21, 2008
» Google's Algorithm is Shifting - October 7, 2008
» Worried About the Economy? Why Not Try SEO? - September 23, 2008
» More Articles by Aaron Shear
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