Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

The most underused tool in the marketing toolbox – Linking?

August 26th, 2010 by Rand Schulman

Sometimes I don’t understand things - including the inner workings of marketing professionals. Yet I’ve tried to tackle this challenge and have been building and selling marketing applications for marketing folk for decades. I know that working complex web analytics products can be daunting. Marketing automation even more so. How does one create and allocate lead scoring and attribution? What is the LTV of a customer?

But linking?  Gosh, don’t we all know the value of inbound links? Don’t we know how search engines work, for God’s sake? Well, apparently no. This knowledge is not as universal as one would think (Hope! Assume!).

A few months ago we released Linker which, in short, is a dating site for sharing and creating links. A Match.com for SEO link building. The good news? We’ve had thousands of people start to take advantage of the service. The bad news? Only five percent of them have ANY links on their site! This data floored me.

So we took matters into our own hands and today released our findings as well as made our link building tool FREE . We understand that linking takes time, which could explain the incredible low rate, but with our Linker product it should be much easier. At least that’s our hope. So, world, let’s get found. Let’s use the product and link away. I would be happy to hear from any of you!

Posted in Inbound Marketing, Link Strategies, Linker, Marketing, SEO, Uncategorized, link building, search marketing | 5 Comments »

Do You Know Which Referral Source Drives the Most Traffic

August 4th, 2010 by Richard Zwicky


As you may be aware, we collect a lot of data at Eightfold Logic, and have been doing so for a few years. Last week, I was looking at the lists of online marketers, and the voting numbers, and began to think about them in the context of traffic delivered, and its value. I had a broad sampling run from a swathe of web sites across industries and geographies to ascertain which channels deliver the most raw referral traffic. Later, in another post, I’ll dive into quality.

Sample size: 1 week of data, 36,164,959 unique referrals. (original sessions, excluding bots etc)

Referral Source
Search 24.04%
Links 16.64%
Social Media / Social Networking sites 1.56%
Everything Else (including Direct) 57.75%

It’s amazing how much marketing attention is focused on social considering the volume of referrals it drives to businesses, relative to other customer acquisition channels. However, it’s understood that used effectively, social is more about the pre-site-visit experience, and market awareness. That said, very few organizations are using social media marketing effectively. Effectively harnessing this inbound marketing channel opportunity will be of paramount importance going forward for companies to survive and succeed.

Richard Zwicky - @rzwicky

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Posted in Inbound Marketing, Link Strategies, Marketing, SEO, SMM, ppc, social marketing | No Comments »

Observations from the Receiving End - Surprising Results in Poll Lists

August 4th, 2010 by Richard Zwicky


It’s been quite interesting watching the response to the lists about online marketers that I started published two weeks ago. . There have been over 3,000 voter submissions in the last week. That’s a lot more than I ever expected. Additionally, I’ve received many text messages, voicemails, DM’s, blog comments, and emails with suggestions of who else could be included on the lists; I appreciate all these notes.

Some people also chose to send me their own names for inclusion. One person appears to have submitted their name for inclusion ~50 times! Fortunately for you, I’m not publishing your name, but if you’re reading this, you know who you are. You’re claiming to be an Internet Marketer of some skill: Do you honestly not know that it’s easy to determine if traffic repeatedly originates from the same places or computers?

Other than the notes from a couple of manic individuals repeatedly suggesting themselves, lots of people sent me some great suggestions. I’ve been trying to follow-up on them by reading things by and about these contributors. There are some valuable resources I’m discovering, or re-discovering. Thank-you! Some of the useful suggestions are found in the blog comments of the appropriate posts.

The suggestions I’ve received go to the point of the series. It’s not been about who gets the most votes, but, that said, I will publish lists thereof. The attention seeking has been for all these valuable contributors whom I wanted to recognize via this forum. Some of the people on the lists are already well known, and justifiably so. Others are not well known yet, but they provide great information about different facets of online marketing, and should be a resource that anyone with any level of interest in the space can turn to for insights.

I do appreciate all the attention that these lists have generated, and hope that people will share the results widely – that only goes to accomplish the goal of providing these people recognition.

As for the voting; it’s been really interesting to see whose inputs are heavily valued, despite their not being common industry names. It’s also been extremely interesting to observe which channels have been driving the most traffic via social media, and other sources, as well as observing which channel’s traffic has the best user behavior once they visit the site. I’ll likely have a few posts coming out reporting on user behavior trends. Quite interesting really! For instance, as it stands right now, the day of the social media experts tweets drove the lowest RT and clickthrough activity per post or mention. Perhaps that’ll change before the lists close…

Finally, there have been two individuals who received no votes. (Bet you want to know who, eh?) I was shocked at who they were, and presume it’s because their communities did not overlap as heavily with the search or social marketplace community represented here. Hopefully they’ll learn about these lists before I close them.

In the meantime, if you haven’t checked out the lists of great contributors (or voted), please do so now at:

Search Engine Optimization Professionals
Pay-Per-Click Marketing Experts
Social Media Marketing Specialists
Link Building Masters
Amazing Cross-Channel Online Marketing Contributors

I’ll hopefully start publishing results next week.

Richard / @rzwicky

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Posted in Commentary, Inbound Marketing, Link Strategies, Marketing, Poll, SEO, SMM, link building, ppc, social marketing | No Comments »

List of Amazing Cross Channel Contributors

July 28th, 2010 by Richard Zwicky

Over the last few days I’ve been publishing lists of people I read or whose online marketing comments I find useful / interesting.  I hope you’ll add all these individuals to your bookmark list of people to turn to when you need advice across various search and online marketing disciplines. 

The challenge with putting together any of these lists is to make sure that you don’t forget anyone.  I have missed some along the way, and once I realized the error I added them to the appropriate list after publication.

There’s also some great contributors I wanted to note who write scant amounts themselves, but rather highlight great resources for others to read. Finally, there are some individuals who mainly contribute via public speaking engagements; they’re perhaps the most difficult to reference, as it’s hard for non-attendees to understand the context of the contributions.

On each of the earlier lists, I’ve had comments from people about why “XYZ” wasn’t on the list.  In some cases it was an obvious error, in others, it’s because they fit on so many lists that I was saving them for this final one. The most obvious name in this category was Danny Sullivan. As I wrote in my first post, he really should be on everyone’s reading list!  He contributes across so many areas, I could have included him throughout, so instead of listing him five times, I saved him for this list.

Today’s final list in this series is about amazing cross-channel contributors; I’ve tried to include mostly people who didn’t fit the other lists. Being on any of these lists reflects a very broad range of contributions to the industry.  This list in particular is of people who have made contributions spanning multiple areas of online marketing.  These people write authoritatively, OR, they provide commentary about areas of interest and point their listeners or readers in the direction of great, meaningful content.  In the latter case, they’re like great filters for all of us, pointing people to the essential nuggets they should keep track of, but sometimes miss.

As this is the last list in the series, I’ll be closing voting on all the lists within a week, and then getting around to publishing some interesting results, with links to the places to find the best contributor’s content.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me: Richard Zwicky - zwicky@, tweet me @rzwicky, or leave a comment below.

If you’ve missed them, please read further down the blog for the prior lists of great online marketing contributors across SEO, PPC, SMM, and link-building!

Thanks again for participating!

Richard Zwicky

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Posted in Commentary, Inbound Marketing, Link Strategies, Marketing, Poll, SEO, SMM, link building, ppc, search marketing, social marketing, twitter | 9 Comments »

Whose writings / comments assist you the most with your SEO work?

July 22nd, 2010 by Richard Zwicky

I thought it would be interesting to put together lists of people, by discipline, whose writings I have found useful, and ask you: Who are your top 5?

Every time I tell someone what I do, and at every conference I go to, people ask me: what resources should I read to learn more about online marketing?  It’s easy to whip off a few good resources, but what about particular writers?  There’s tons of great content being generated all the time, but who provides the most useful information for putting skills into practice?  Lots of people publish articles, blogs and  tidbits to share knowledge and wisdom with others.  Some will also balance out original contributions by using Twitter to highlight other people’s articles of interest for their readers.  That’s a tougher question.

When I started trying to put together a list recently, I found that it was easier to create lists around themes, not just “search.”  There are some great online marketers whose knowledge spans multiple disciplines, like paid and organic; social marketers v. search marketers; or organic and link-building (yes I consider that separate!). So why not break them down into concept groups accordingly?  Some people are better known than others, but that doesn’t mean their writings are more (or less) helpful. Conversely, some people are incredibly knowledgeable, and while they don’t write a lot, or do so with flair, what they write matters.

If there’s someone you think I’ve missed, send me a comment.  If you’re not on this list, perhaps you’ll be on one for another discipline, or perhaps your knowledge is so broad it’s hard to pin you into any one group!  There are two people I’ve not included on purpose:  Danny Sullivan and Matt Cutts.  I like both of them personally, and enjoy what they write.  But, let’s face it, they’re on everyone’s reading list.  I’ll be running more polls across more of the disciplines in the coming days.

Top 5 Results will be published at a later date.

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Posted in Commentary, Inbound Marketing, Marketing, SEO, SMM, Search Engines, ppc, search marketing, social marketing | 31 Comments »