Entries from August 2007

Alibi Makes the Power 150

August 30, 2007 // Drew Stauffer

Ad Age2007 has been a pretty successful year here at Alibi. First we were added to the BIGLIST of Best Blogs on the Net by Lee Odden, Andy Beal asked me to be a contributing editor at Marketing Pilgrim, and now I am proud to announce that we have been added to the Power 150 over at Advertising Age.

The gravy train is rolling and I couldn’t be a happier passenger. Thanks to everyone for helping out.

The Power of Confrontation

August 22, 2007 // Drew Stauffer

Many professional bloggers will tell you that creating controversy is a great way to get traffic. You can read about some of them here, here, and here. Obviously you don’t want to seriously offend anyone but a heated argument is sure to stir the pot. This past week I wrote a post on my design blog, Stealing is Never O.K. and man it got some attention.

I usually only post one or two times a month on that blog because I devote most of my attention to this one. On average I only get about 5 visitors a day on drewstauffer.com, but this weekend that all changed.

I posted the article on Friday night and when I came into work on Monday I had 49 comments awaiting my approval and when I checked my analytics I had over 8400 visitors over the weekend. My RSS subscribers jumped from 12 to 63 as well.

Creating controversy is a powerful way to get people’s attention and it does work if you can play the right angle.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Readers Poll: Clients vs Competitors

August 17, 2007 // Drew Stauffer

I was recently approached by one of my client’s competitors and they insisted that we do their new website. Apparently they saw their competitor’s site (our current client) and how well it’s doing and they want a part of the action too.

In my career I’ve worked with companies that only take jobs in a specific niche so naturally they have dozens, if not hundreds of competing sites. It was an international company so obviously the competition is very spread out, but in major cities you’re definitely going to get some competition on the same block. At the end of the day, business was business.

I’ve also worked with companies that will ONLY take on one client from each specific niche. Here again I can see the value in this business plan. When you take on a client you give them your absolute best. But it seems like in these cases you can keep drinking from the same well. You can consistently go back to that client with new ideas and keep the money coming in or have some sort of monthly contract. SEOmoz is a big believer in this business model:

“We NEVER work with two competing firms in the same space. If you work with SEOmoz, you can be assured that you are our ONLY client vying for your particular market and keywords.”

But then again their first bullet point about their services is:

“Our current contract minimum is $10,000 per month”

So if I can get a client to pay me 10,000 a month (minimum) for my services I’ll gladly only take one client in each specific niche.

But in all honesty, I’m not quite there yet.

What is a smaller firm to do?
View Results

Technorati Tags: , ,

Easy Inbound Links

August 14, 2007 // Drew Stauffer

Here’s a Quick Tip:
Getting easy inbound links (IBLs) isn’t always the easiest assignment. The most straight forward way is to create good useful content that other users will naturally want to link to. This method is great but it takes time. Another technique for getting easy inbound links is to follow the leader. Just like with keyword research, it’s often suggested that you look at your competitor to see what terms they are targeting. This works the same way for inbound links.

Use Yahoo Site Explorer and analyze your competitor’s links. If you take some time and go through their list you can get a lot of the same easy inbound links for your site. Download SEO for Firefox from Aaron Wall and you can also analyze which links are passing PR. Visit each one of these sites and look for your competitor.

// Continue reading

Alibi Gets Hacked

August 6, 2007 // Drew Stauffer

Every once in a while Wordpress releases newer versions of their popular blog platform urging people to upgrade to avoid hackers exploiting security loop holes. I always told myself that I would get around to it, but never actually made the time.

Yesterday I got a phone call from a friend asking me if I changed my site. Since I view my site quite a few times a day and actually viewed the site hours before, I confidently told him no. Much to my surprise, when I viewed my site I was greeted with a new screen.

alibi gets hacked

In a post from Threadwatch you can read about shoemoney, wolf-howl, and stuntdubl also being hacked.

The moral of the story is if Wordpress offers an upgrade, you should seriously consider doing it immediately. Here is the latest Wordpress 2.2.1 version.

Technorati Tags: ,