Merry Christmas With Internet Marketing Presents
As I am soon off to spend Christmas with the family, I just wanted to give any readers of this relatively new blog a couple of Internet marketing related Christmas presents. The gifts are two “old skool” books that you can start reading right now, free (I am actually using the word as it is described in the dictionary) and without any strings attached.
The first one is the book Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Goodin. That link goes directly to the PDF-file hosted on his blog.
Jay Levinson, author of Guerilla Marketing has said this about the author:
“Take Leo Burnett, David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach and Mark Twain. Combine their brains and shave their heads. What’s left? Seth Godin. “
Among other things you probably know him as the man behind the immensely popular Squidoo. If viral marketing is something you are interested in, Unleashing the Ideavirus is definitely a book you don’t want to miss – if you really want to learn what the concept is all about, that is. Viral marketing isn’t some golden bullet, gizmo or secret sauce that you can just attach to anything and expect it to have profound effects. Or as Seth himself puts it:
“Being viral isn’t the hard part. The hard part is making that viral element actually produce something of value, not just entertainment for the client or your boss.”
The second book I wanted to recommend to you is one I haven’t read myself yet, but so far I think it seems to be an interesting read indeed. It is the 1998 book New Rules for The New Economy, by Kevin Kelly. In the middle of the dot com boom of the 1990s, Kelly seems to have written a book that in fact predicted much of the Internet of today, with all its very viable business strategies revolving around new types of communication (today known as social media) and the selling of ideas rather than all the physical stuff the Industrial era generated.
I have personally subscribed to this book in the form of an RSS feed, simultaneously taking it as an exercise to check what’s new in my Google feed reader more frequently (sort of an early new years resolution). But if you prefer you can also download the whole thing in PDF format.
With that I am off for my Christmas holidays, and would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and (in case I do not get around to writing another post before then) a Happy New Year!
Photo credit: Jonas N
WebComp Analyst Review
As the first product review on this blog, I’ll have a look at a new keyword tool called WebComp Analyst. But before the actual review, let’s begin with a quick look back on some Internet marketing history.
I remember a few years back, when the “Bum Marketing method” was being taught. If you’ve never heard of the term for some strange reason, the strategy basically involve (mostly) affiliate marketing with various forms of article submission as the main source of traffic.
In order to maximize the strategy the early bum marketers advocated you to go to Google and lookup your potential key phrases in quotes – the theory being that it would be easier to rank well with a piece on Ezine Articles for a keyword where there weren’t too many competing sites.
Today of course, we all know that this was a gross oversimplification of estimating what it takes to rank for certain keyword phrases. But if you are building niche sites and submitting articles it is still a good idea too try and estimate what phrases you actually have a chance to rank for.
And that is where the software application – WebComp Analyst by Jonathan Leger – I’ll be reviewing in this post comes into the picture. It is designed to give just the quick overview you need in order to target the appropriate keywords.
Not The Whole Truth, But Valuable Nonetheless
Google uses hundreds of various criteria for ranking sites in their search results, and with many of them we really have no idea how they work or how much they actually influence the search results. However, among the things we CAN measure with some accuracy, it is a well established theory that backlinks with the appropriate anchor text can help boost rankings a great deal. And for this reason analyzing the backlinks of competing sites it is a great indicator of how difficult it will actually be to rank high for certain keywords.
As a smaller, niche site building player this is something you should pay attention to. Naturally you need to do all the right things with your on-page SEO as well, but for many phrases a few links with the appropriate anchor text really can do wonders. It is also one of the reasons you will never likely outrank about.com for the search term “about”.
When it comes to analyzing backlinks to other people’s sites, Yahoo Site Explorer is currently the search engine of choice. Google offers only a glimpse into their real database of recorded backlinks, so they aren’t currently a good alternative. But it seems the much more thorough numbers you get from Yahoo are highly relevant for how sites rank in the big G as well.
There are many ways of using Yahoo to check backlinks. In order to illustrate some of them I have made this short video, that compares WebComp analyst to some of the other alternatives out there.
It should be added that there really are lot’s of free backlink checking tools out there – just do a search in Google – but most have the same limitations as I mentioned in the video. Generally speaking you are analyzing one URL at a time, which is a more appropriate strategy for deeply analyzing a particular competing site. On the other hand, some of these free alternatives – SEO for Firefox for example, provide you with much more information.
There are also several services out there, Compete.com for instance, that gives you all the information you get in WebComp Analyst and then some. They really represent another level of link analysis altogether. But this is usually also clearly visible in the price tag, and such services do not tend to be a one-time purchase.
Personally I think that Jonathan Leger, found a gap among the current offerings of keyword analysis tools and filled it with a decent enough application. I would say that WebComp Analyst is a great little tool to have if you:
- Are on a relatively small budget
- Produce niche sites targeting mostly long tail keywords
- Submit articles to article directories
…or any other scenario where you frequently want to determine for what phrases the amount of link-juice you can create will be sufficient.
If you always need a lot of additional information, you can afford it and/or represent a bigger company you might probably want to go for some of the keyword analysis services that give you all the technically possible bells and whistles in one package. If your keyword research is primarily for Adwords and other PPC advertising WebComp Analyst probably isn’t for you either.
As you saw in my video, and can see even more of if you watch the demo video over at the main site for this software, WebComp analyst is a rather simple application that you run on your personal computer. This also means that it isn’t terribly fast. Don’t get me wrong – it still beats any of the free ways of doing the same thing by hand by several miles – but on my computer it seems to take about a minute per keyword you want to analyze, so analyzing hundreds of keywords at a time would take a considerable amount of time.
The ability to analyze backlinks in many various languages also make this an application that works well even if you produce your content in a language other than English.
The application also has functions for querying the free versions of Wordtracker and ask.com, but personally I usually prefer to use Google’s free keyword suggestion tool instead.
Conclusion
To sum it up; WebComp Analyst is somewhat of a one trick pony. But it does what it is intended for very well, and is a very affordable one time investment. If you are an online “infopreneur” it is certainly a tool worth a closer look. Like the other offerings from Jon Leger that I have used, the software runs well without any noticeable bugs or other problems and the user interface couldn’t be easier to understand.
If you want to purchase WebComp Analyst through my affiliate link, because you found this review helpful, I’d be much obliged.
If that is against your principles, here is a non-affiliated link to WebComp Analyst.
If you have any additional questions about this software, feel free to post them below and I’ll do my best to answer them.
Daft Comments On Youtube and Christmas Gifts for Real Guitar Heroes
In today’s post I am going to explain why I rarely pay any attention to comments on Youtube anymore, why I don’t play the video game Guitar Hero, as well as give some suggestions for what would make a great Christmas gift for someone who plays guitar. In the process I will also recommend a few guitar related sites that those of you interested in Internet marketing might want to check out, even if you have no intention of ever picking up an “axe” yourself.
Youtube is a great, great invention and with things like high definition videos it is getting better all the time. What I really don’t like about the Google owned video site however, is the commenting function – or rather many of the comments that are made there, I should say.
The space below the videos, where you find the comments to any particular video, is often filled with two much nonsense and outright daft remarks to be worth spending any time with.
This is somewhat of a general problem online of course, as many people seem to think they can say anything when they are anonymous and will not ever have to encounter the people they are speaking to online face to face. But I feel the problem is even worse on Youtube than on many other platforms and forums that encourage user interactivity.
Youtube comments can be moderated of course, but that function seems to be used fairly rarely by most users (people just want as many comments as possible?). The function that hides comments that have had too many thumbs down votes also helps of course, but on many videos there are still too much nonsense to my liking.
Granted, Youtube may not be the best place to have serious online discussions in any case, but I still think there is too much clutter. Also, many of the semi-serious comments are often very self centered.
Let me take an example:
I play the electric guitar purely as a hobby, and to that end Youtube is a veritable treasure throve of information and inspiration. You find clips of guys like Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and Paul Gilbert playing live or even giving small mini-lessons of how they do some of the things they do.
Then there are also loads of videos of lesser known guitarists showcasing their playing, or how about this dude:
Saying that Gustavo Guerra is unknown is of course simply wrong by now. But he did get known to the world through his videos on Youtube and the fact that he won the Guitar Idol competition in 2008. This competition by the way, is an excellent case study in how Youtube can be used in a smart way, as an element of online marketing. The event is staged by the magazine All Out Guitar, the membership site licklibrary.com and The London International Music Show.
According to their own site they had over 400 000 site visitors for last years installment of the competition. Certainly a great example of using Internet as a medium/publicity stunt, and without actually selling something by forcing it down people’s throats á la conventional Internet marketing sales pitches. Nonetheless, I am sure this move meant many more customers for the companies involved.
But back to the tube comments.
What do you think people have to say about a guitarist like Guerra, that certainly can hold his own compared to most very famous guitarists? Well, if you go and look now I am happy to say that there are mostly positive and slightly envious comments. I guess the man has built a solid following. But when I first started watching his videos there where many comments saying thinks like:
“U’re shit. Guitarist X is much better”.
“On 1.37 he screws up”.
“Your playing deviates too much from classical technique”.
…and a whole lot of other comments essentially saying nothing but “Okay, that was pretty good, but I am MUCH better!”.
Then, as of lately, we have a new type of person always commenting videos like this with:
“This is much harder to play on Guitar Hero”.
Really, you are comparing a computer game and a plastic toy guitar with big buttons to the real six stringed instrument?!
I am not disputing the fact that it is vary hard to play these games at the higher difficulty settings, but it is a simple fact that learning to play the real guitar is very different to playing these video games. It’s not a sensible comparison.
Why I don’t play Guitar Hero
As I got started on Guitar Hero, I’ll abandon Youtube for this post and tell you why I do not play this game. I’ll conclude with a site I want fellow Internet marketers to check out as an interesting case study.
Guitar Hero, Rock Band etc. are of course great examples of innovation in the video game industry, and if you happen to enjoy playing said games – rock on!
For me personally however, these games aren’t worth more than a casual acquaintance. The reason for this is that it indeed requires some serious time and practise if you want to nail the songs on the more difficult settings. And since I actually know how to play the real instrument, I’d rather spend that time practising on a real guitar. Passably playing Satriani’s Crushing Day at 50-75% of the original speed of the song on a real guitar gives me much more satisfaction than acing it full speed on Frets on Fire on the PC.
I would be the first to admit that my attitude on this may appear as slightly self limiting, but this is just the way I feel about this. And it’s a good thing that there are now many products out there that cater to the kind of wannabe guitar hero that I am.
One of the exciting new products to hit the market recently is the JamVOX from legendary amp-manufacturer Vox. That is a combination of a small amp/speaker and a software program that, thanks to what they call GXT-technology, allow you to play along with your real guitar heroes, using a real instrument and your computer. As the software also features comprehensive amp and effect pedal simulation you’ll be able to tweak your guitar sound to sound just like your favorite guitar player too – without actually having those 50+ stomp boxes scattered all over the floor.
I have only tested this product at the music store so far, but I have hopes of finding this package in my Christmas stocking this year, if “Mrs. Claus” thinks I have been good this year, that is… 
If the JamVOX is outside of your current budget, there is also a very passable second alternative for guitar players like me. A piece of software, that has been around for quite some time now, that combines tablature and using your computer to generate backing tracks. It is called Guitar Pro, and I have actually been using this software long before the Guitar Hero games ever hit the marketplace.
The quality of the backing tracks will of course not be as realistic as when you are playing to an actual CD of your favorite artist, but it is certainly great fun anyway. Many of the guitar tablature archives/communities also provide their tablature in a format/backing track ready for Guitar Pro, so you’ll likely never run out of material to play.
Speaking of community, I have one final recommendation for guitar players and Internet marketers alike. It is a membership site called Guitar Master Class, where you literally get tuition from guitar teachers from all over the world. There are other similar sites out there, but this is the one I currently subscribe to myself so I feel happy recommending it. The fees are also very reasonable.
From an Internet marketing standpoint said site is very interesting both from a technical standpoint and from how they generate the content for this site. They pay knowledgeable people from anywhere in the world to contribute their guitar lessons, and if your lessons are popular you earn even more. I would imagine that it is a great way for talented musicians to promote themselves a bit while earning money at the same time.
I don’t know what kind of profits this site generates, but I sure like the concept – if you come up with this good a platform and content I wouldn’t be surprised if it virtually sells itself.