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American Idol: How the Internet can influence viewers

I’m not sure how many of you watch American Idol, but an Indian kid named Sanjaya got very far. With only a handful of contestants left, no one thought such a bad singer would get this far. There are many factors that caused him to get this far, but here is how offline and online media
played a role.

Indians

Before I go into offline and online media affecting the voting, let me dispel any rumors of him getting far just because of other Indians. I personally do not watch American Idol, but even I myself thought one of the main reasons he got so far was because he had a large following of Indians and as many of you already know there are tons of Indians in this world. Based on a survey I did of 50 random Indians, I concluded that isn’t the main reason why he got so far. The 50 Indians I surveyed watched American Idol, but only 1 voted for him because the rest did not either know how to text message or were afraid that American Idol would charge them for voting.

From my understanding (I could be wrong) you can also call by phone and vote without paying a dime… but either way many Indians were afraid of getting charged. Because of this the main two other factors that I can tell caused him to do so well were related to both offline and online
media.

Offline and Online Media

As we all know the combination of offline and online media can be very powerful. With social media sites like MySpace, YouTube, Vote for the Worst, and Netscape covering Sanjaya it’s no wonder he racked in all those votes. People who use these sites as well as read blogs are very tech savvy and probably text
message (vote for Sanjaya) quite a bit. Then if you combine this people like Howard Stern telling America to vote for Sanjaya because he was the worst singer out of the group and his support from stars like Jennifer Lopez, no wonder he got so far. Here is the buzz he created through this last season of American Idol:

• Over 1.4 million web pages have talked about Sanjaya Malakar, not counting those that misspelled his name.
• There is a Wikipedia page (with over 581 incoming links) on Sanjaya Malakar.
• Over 3000 blogs have talked about him.
• He become so well known online that people started talking about his sister.
• There are thousands of videos about him on the web.

If Sanjaya would have actually won American Idol it probably would have been humorous as well as ironic. I don’t think too many people would have bought his CD if he won, but we had a great laugh getting him this far or at least watching him get this far. Either way this just shows how powerful
offline media and online media are when they are combined, so the next time you do a marketing campaign try to combine both offline and online media.

Buying Links? Make Sure You Have a Well-Rounded Link Profile

One of the most common questions I get about link building is what the best type of links are. While I’m partial to building natural links through linkbaiting and remarkable content I also like to throw a few paid links into my overall link building campaigns.

One of the reasons I like to use paid links with my link campaigns is that you can not only pick high authority sites that are relevant, but you can also pick the exact anchor text you want to use. Those are things you can’t always do with linkbaiting. You just can’t always dictate who will link to you or what anchor text they will use.

Although it might be a little hard to argue in favor of buying paid links after the latest from Matt Cutts you can’t deny that paid links are still effective, if done correctly.

In my opinion, Matt’s post can almost be interpreted as a sign of weakness on Google’s part. They’re fighting an unnecessary war they know they can’t win and itâs obvious they’re having a hard time finding paid links with their algorithms. But that’s not really what this post is about. Instead I want to give a little insight on strategies for buying links.

The biggest problem I see with people who get dinged for buying links is that they’re lazy. Instead of working on creating remarkable content that will naturally attract links they throw a bunch on money at buying links and call it a day. If you’re guilty of this then you’re asking for trouble.

Buying links effectively is all about staying away from patterns. If you’re whole campaign is entirely based around paid links that will create a very recognizable pattern that can be picked up by the algorithms and filtered out. It may even result in penalties.

Paid links aren’t bad as long as your overall link profile is clean with no recognizable patterns that lead back to the links you’re buying. When those paid links are mixed in with hundreds of natural links they won’t stick out. If you don’t have those natural links the paid links will stick out like a sore thumb.

As you can see by the images if you don’t balance your paid links with your whole campaign they will stick out and sooner or later big brother will find out what you’re up to and ding your for it.

Whether or not Google’s new defense against paid links will work or not is still up in the air. In the meantime I’ll continue to throw a few paid links into my link building campaigns. What about you?

How to Increase Your Search Traffic through Writing

We all know that search engines can drive thousands of visitors to a website within a short period of time, but very few of us actually get that kind of traffic. If you are looking for more organic search traffic for your blog, here are a few blogging tips that can help you:

The long tail

In the past I blogged about going after long tail keywords because they are a lot less competitive, but how many of you actually go after them? Programs like HitTail are great at helping you determine which non-competitive terms that you can go after that drive tons of traffic. For all the blogs that I optimized such as TechCrunch and Mashable the majority of their search traffic comes from long tail keywords. You would be surprised at how long tail keywords can add up to 10,000 or even 20,000 daily search engine hits for these blogs.

Product / Website reviews

If you are a blogger you probably hate getting hit up by people with products who are requesting a review. In most cases these products or websites will not get popular so if you rank for them you will not get much traffic at all, but some of these terms will turn into brand names and can drive thousands of visitors. Just look at terms like youtube, bebo, myspace, facebook, and ebuddy.

You don’t always want to blog on things just for traffic but the goal with reviews is to write on stuff that will benefit your readers as well as drive tons of search engine hits.

Breaking News

The thing with breaking news is that you have to blog about it right away or else you will not get much search love on the topic. If you have the time to blog on news right when it hits it will not only drive tons of traffic right then and there, but it will drive traffic months after the news is old. One good example of this is all of the people who blogged about Utube.com suing YouTube. They got tons of traffic for the phrase "Utube". On our company blog, Pronetadvertising.com, we get tons of search traffic for the term utube.com, even though the news is really old.

If you are having a hard time finding breaking news, you may want to check out sites like TechMeme.

Linkbait

Writing quality content for links and social sites is always a great way to improve search traffic. Sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and Netscape can drive thousands of visitors and more importantly thousands of links. If you write how to guides or lists you will have a great chance of getting tons of natural links which will improve your overall sites search traffic. An easy way to find out what works well on these social sites is to do some searches and look for what was popular in the past.

There are probably tons of other techniques you can use to increase search traffic to your blog, these are just the ones I use on a regular basis. What specific methods do you use to increase your search traffic?

Exclusive: Hagan’s Digg Ring

LBB Readers, wanted to pass on an update on the adventures of Andy Hagans.  He just got back from an SEO meet up in India and I couldn’t resist posting this picture from his trip because something about adding a monkey to anything makes it funny.