There aren’t many places on the web today, where you can place your highly valued, original content and wait for the traffic to come. Most of these content sharing sites are spammy and don’t contain any non-commercial content. Since I’m an SMO freak and really obsessed with finding new ways to promote our content via various web 2.0 and social media channels, when I ran into the flagships idea I couldn’t avoid trying it.

What is Hubpages.com and what is a Flagship?

Hubpages defines itself as an online content publishing eco-system. The “hubbers” (hubpages users) use this platform to create “hubs” (their own unique pages), in which they upload content. This is a useful and friendly platform to share the world with your knowledge and expertise.
Flagships are actually the top-quality-hubs, which follow a long list of requirements and demands. The main idea of the flagships concept is to create unique and valuable content database. Furthermore, flagship hubs are SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly, and when built properly, can gain very good rankings, as well as revenue (Hubpages offers incentive based on revenue share with the writers).

How can you leverage Hubpages for Web Marketing purposes?

Hubpages is a great online platform that enables you to create content pages containing videos, images, links, RSS feeds, related tags lists and more.
The main advantage of this platform, which is more significant in flagships, is that an excellent and popular content can be promoted independently on search engines, thanks to the friendliness of this platform to search engines.
Suppose you’re a nutrition expert, and you write this great article about the importance of eating in various colors. Creating a flagship in this theme is much better than any article syndication act or even a blog posting. After submitting the nutrition flagship, the hubpages staff will review your flagship content, and once accepted, they will actively promote the page and you may do the same. So basically, your high valued content does the work for you! You can reach the top of the search results pages very quickly (suppose they aren’t that competitive) and your target audience will stumble upon your flagship. Since this types of pages are very informative and professional, they have a high tendency to to convert later on.

In order to create a flagship, you have to register to the flagships program, choose a unique subject from the subjects’ pool and sign the flagships contract. You can view some finished flagship examples here.

Some Flagships Tips

1 – Write creatively, use unique images, videos and news updates.
Don’t spam or use the flagship as a link farm (in this case, you will also be banned by the flagships program).
2 – Link to other unique and interesting sources that have a real added value to your readers. If your flagship will be a real information source for a high-searched term, you can make great profits.
3 – Let’s not forget the SMO and the full circle SEO strategy! Always create social media links to your new flagship – Facebook it, twitter it and so on… If it’s a niche flagship, don’t hesitate to create links in niche blogs, forums and more. Just be creative about it. Another important thing is that every link to your flagship increases the chance to earn more money.

To conclude, hubpages.com is above all a content sharing platform, which can be used as a web marketing tool, especially when using the flagships with unique and high quality content. Don’t forget to follow Hubpages requirement and you’ll probably get great results. Of course, there are many other similar content platforms that you can use (such as Scribd.com, Squidoo.com etc) but I’ll write about them specifically next time.

]]> http://www.compucall-usa.com/2008/11/24/flagships-and-using-hubpages-for-web-marketing/feed/ 1 http://www.compucall-usa.com/2008/11/17/wordcamp-2008-israel-seo-wordpress-slides/ http://www.compucall-usa.com/2008/11/17/wordcamp-2008-israel-seo-wordpress-slides/#comments Mon, 17 Nov 2008 08:43:26 +0000 http://www.compucall-usa.com/?p=545 Yesterday I had the privilege of being invited and to speak at Wordcamp Israel 2008. I was asked to give a presentation about optimizing your WordPress blog for SEO. To tell you the truth, what I thought would be a pretty easy subject matter, turned out to be very hard to fit into 20 minutes. What started off as a big explanation of SEO add-ons for WordPress and linking and keyword research, turned into something much more simple.

To make a long story short, I realized that in order to properly SEO WordPress, then what you really need to do is keep it simple. Have a sound platform or theme, research and write great content, and share it with the community relationships you’ve developed and are actively developing.

Here’s the presentation I gave, WordPress & SEO, slides only. If you have any questions, please share them with me. I’ll be uploading the video later on when tech gets it done.

Finally a relevant professional affiliates conference in Israel. For years, me and my colleagues have been flying abroad to attend professional conferences in various cities in the States, London, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Beijing, Shanghai and Sydney. We are all used to spending $5000 and more to attend each one of these conferences where 50% of the attendees are speaking Hebrew. Affilicon, the Affiliates Conference is planning to attract 100s of vendors and affiliates and the agenda leads me to believe that the planned conference will be as good as the ones I have attended abroad.  There is no reason why the land where Empire Online, 888 and Playtech were born and where some of the largest affiliates exist will not be where the best professional conferences will not be held. I hear that around 100 attendees are due to arrive from abroad.

I strongly recommend you to attend the seminar. Look to www.affilicon.com.

See ya there

The original phrase tells you that “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”. I don’t necessarily agree with that when it comes to marketing and especially web marketing. I think you can definitely convince a horse to drink, if you know the horse well enough.

Currently I am running  a behavioral targeting and multi variable test for one of our sites. The main purpose being to improve our marketing strategy and online advertising campaigns for our sites and our clients.

Multi Variable Testing (MVT) why is it so important?

According to wikipedia:

“In internet marketing, multivariate testing is a process by which more than one component of a website may be tested in a live environment. It can be thought of in simple terms as numerous split tests or A/B tests performed on one page at the same time.”

Or in other words, Multi Variable Testing is a good way of convincing your horse to drink, increasing your conversions and improving your ROI

Multi Variable Testing on your landing page:

Using Google’s Website Optimizer I am testing a landing page and have created 3 variations of the original. Once the test gathers enough information I will be able to see which landing page did better, conversion wise, in regards to a specific target audience.

It is possible that for visitors that match one set of criteria the first landing page will be better and for another group of visitors the 4^th one will be better.

The marketing strategy:

Using the information I got while doing my web marketing research and combining it with the results of my MVT, I will be able to create a better match between the visitors that searched for a relevant keyword, entered the site and are then more likely to convert.

The most important thing to remember when compiling the marketing strategy is that the ultimate goal of a site is not to have a high amount of traffic but to convert visitors from visitors to buyers and, hopefully, to leads (depending on the purpose of the site).

I believe that multi variable testing and a correct analysis of the results combined with a good understanding of your market will help achieve your goals and make your site convert better both for paid and non paid organic traffic.

I’ll keep you updated once I’ve run the tests and seen the results.

The Tel Aviv-Yafo Entrepreneur August Meetup, organized by Mr. Gadi Guy and Ms. Or-Tal Kiriati, will cover different topics around social networking where local entrepreneurs will be able to share in a unique occassion, together with Mr. Pulver, their ideas and techniques, get advice and discuss business models.

Mr. Ophir Cohen, Compucall’s CEO, will also give a lecture about the hottest web marketing trends, prior to Jeff’s speech.
We at Compucall believe that educating and sharing are key for the success of our community.

Now, let’s assume you won the seo gold medal and are sitting on the top position in Google for your most important keywords, the same question can be asked “What now?”…

Michael Phelps actually answered this question in one interview he gave after his last win and said that he might now compete in different swimming styles. So basically “Try New Things”

In the wonderful world of SEO, winning the Gold doesn’t mean you can rest. Unlike swimming, in web marketing there are no limits to the number of gold medals you can have. There are an endless number of keywords (long and short tail) that are out there and every single one represents its own podium finish. Moreover, web marketing is a constantly growing and changing field which means that the gold you hold right now might not even carry you through the end of the day.

Whether the gold is getting top positions in Google, raising your traffic by 70% or increasing your online sales, there are many ways you can choose to achieve it.
Today one of the most popular ways to achieve your target is using Social media websites and online communities. Social media generally referred to as Web 2.0, can be a very rewarding way of achieving your online goals. It is however, also a demanding one.

Writing good and interesting titles, descriptions and choosing the most relevant keywords are only one aspect of the equation. The cliché “Content is King” remains true today and without content that will capture your readers attention and imagination, you’re going to be treading water To effectively use social media you need to be web 2.0 active.

As I’m sure we’ve all found out more then once, just posting content and forgetting about it doesn’t work. That’s the main reason many web marketers found Social Media to be disappointing when it didn’t deliver the traffic they thought it should.

A good Web 2.0 strategy must have at its core a well developed social persona. Someone that others can believe is real, relate to and most importantly want to keep in touch with.

For ongoing Web Marketing you need to not only bring in the masses, you also need to keep them coming back and bringing their friends along as well.

According to numerous surveys done over the past 2 years, and out of personal experience (unfortunately) I can say that most web 2.0 users have an instinctive dislike towards spammers and fake users, and to be perfectly honest that’s a good thing. That’s the quality check, spamguard, call it whatever you like.

Spammers are very easy to spot as are most of the fake user profiles. Most social sites such as Facebook, Youtube and Stumbleupon have a few unwritten rules, the first and most important one being “be real”: don’t spam and don’t promote yourself without having anything of value to add.

For example, if you’re watching a video about SEO, and you add a comment, then a link to your site will appear in your signature; which is the correct way of doing it.  Comments along the lines of “I have a great SEO site check it out at:  www.mysite.com” will not be received well and will be marked as spam.

Think before you add content to the social sites. Make sure it is not just self promotion but has real value to your would be site visitors and potential clients. People will respect you more, follow you and probably end up following you, twittering you or digging you.

Once you manage to find the right combination of quality content and marketing, the next important thing is to be consistent and persistent. Unless you want a one time only rise in traffic, you should be active online and let people know you’re out there not just to market yourself but also to interact and listen to others.

As your online community will grow and expand so will your ability to better market yourself and your site. It might take some time and hard work but it’s definitely worth it.
After all, if getting a Gold medal was easy it wouldn’t have any value.