The Fulfillment Team – 45 Happy Ubuntu Users, Who Needs Disks?!

The single largest department at iAcquire is our fulfillment team and they currently work every day on dual-head Ubuntu 10.04 LTSP diskless workstations. These diskless workstations are what are known as Fat Clients – the entire operating system is loaded via a compressed disk image over our Gigabit LAN, authentication is done via SSH, and home directories are mounted via NFS. All applications are run locally and are very fast – it is nearly unnoticeable that the machine is running entirely over the network. Behind the scenes we have two powerful servers in a hot-standby configuration that serve these diskless clients.

There are many benefits to this setup:

• Viruses and Malware are not a threat
• No sensitive information is ever stored on local disks
• All the great software we need to work and be entertained is easily available
• Hardware failures are a non-issue
• Support costs and IT support time is near zero
• Purchase cost – our raw hardware costs for these diskless machines is minimal

Viruses and Malware? I Don’t Think So!
Our fulfillment team spends their day visiting hundreds if not thousands of websites across the Internet. Diskless workstations have a near zero risk of infection, even in the extreme rare case of an infection a simple reboot wipes out any trace of it.

Redundancy Redundancy Redundancy
All data is securely stored on our backend servers which are locked in our server room and are continuously backed up. These systems have redundant RAID 10 disk arrays and redundant power supplies as well as redundant network uplinks. There is no single point of failure and each of the hot-standby servers is isolated on its own UPS backup power system.

Software, Everything You Need Is Right There
Believe it or not, we rarely have a situation where we find that the applications available on Linux do not satisfy our requirements. Here are our most commonly used applications:

• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• Google Chrome
• Libre Office
• Pidgin Instant Messenger
• Spotify!

Hardware Failures
If a machine fails – which of course they occasionally do, we simply pull the machine and replace it. The iAcquire team member will then simply log back in and continue where they left off. Failures do happen and we’re setup to handle them as if nothing happened. With a typical standard workstation with a locally installed OS this is typically not the case. A single device failure can end up costing the business thousands of dollars.

Lowest Possible Total Cost of Ownership You Can Imagine
And then there’s the cost. The TCO of this solution is absurdly low. Our approximate per-workstation cost is about $760. This price includes all server and network infrastructure and software licenses ($0). Compare this to the cost of managing any other OS configuration and it just blows everything else away.

How On Earth Did You End Up With This Crazy Setup?

Over the past three years iAcquire has been growing rapidly… About two years ago when the fulfillment team simply consisted of 10 or so people, and the “Tech Team” consisted of two people – we were constantly dealing with computer problems, hardware issues, Windows crashing, the occasional virus, managing virus software updates, OS updates, and other typical IT problems. We came to the conclusion that if the primary applications needed were web browsers and e-mail clients, then there was no real need for Windows or Mac OSX. We did not need to use any proprietary or commercial applications and for the users that did we would manage their systems separately.

Today we have a mixture of Windows 7, Mac OSX, and Linux desktops. We make heavy use of cloud services and strive to keep IT overhead at a minimum. To date we have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in unnecessary costs by choosing Linux and open-source platforms.

The Path to Ubuntu 12.04 – Precise Pangolin

Several of the iAcquire developers are currently using Ubuntu 12.04 / Precise Pangolin on our desktops – including myself. And we really love it, it’s an extremely good user experience. Unfortunately we’re not yet able to share the awesome experience of Precise with the fulfillment team due to several squirrels (aka bugs) that are preventing us from deploying it. We will be doing more testing over the coming months and plan to share this experience with the rest of the iAcquire team as soon as we can.

The Nuts And Bolts, Gears And Such

Purpose built diskless workstations can be unnecessarily expensive – sometimes costing nearly as much as full scale workstations including disks and operating system licenses. We’ve found a much better source for our workstations. We actually build our own diskless workstations which consist of a Foxconn bare-bones system, an Intel Sandy Bridge processor, a single 4GB DRAM stick, two 19” LED backlit LCD monitors, a dual LCD monitor mount, keyboard, mouse and an Ethernet cable. It takes about 10 minutes to build and prepare one of these machines for use.

This Is Badass! Where Can I Buy Some Of These?!

Lets look at what it takes to build one of these workstations. Here are the components you’ll need:

• Barebones box: Foxconn SFF R10-H1 or Foxconn SFF R40-H1 ~$120
• Processor: Intel Celeron G530 Sandy Bridge 2.4GHz LGA 1155 ~$50
• Memory: Kingston 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 ~$20
• Keyboard/Mouse Combo: Logitech MK120 Black USB Wired Slim Keyboard/Mouse ~$20
• Displays: 2x ASUS VS198D-P Black 19″ 5ms LED Backlight LCD ~$220
• HDMI Display cable (only 1 required): HDMI to DVI cable ~$10
• Dual display mount: Dual LCD Monitor Stand desk clamp ~$50

Total Cost: ~$490

Servers
We use quality Linux servers from Silicon Mechanics.

Assembling A Diskless Workstation Is EASY

1. Remove case from Foxconn box, remove single screw in center of top cover
2. Cover removed, remove power cord from inside the case
3. Install memory, make sure it snaps in securely
4. Unlatch CPU restrainer and carefully remove protective cover
5. Unpack and install CPU, be careful and ensure that the notches on the chip match up with the notches on the board
6. Lock the CPU into place
7. Install the CPU fan, make sure you connect the power to the CPU fan header on the main board. Push down on each of the fan fasteners (do not twist them!)
8. Power on the machine, press the DELETE key repeatedly to enter the BIOS setup
9. Use the arrow keys to choose “Onboard Device Configuration”, hit Enter
10. Use the arrow keys to select “Onboard LAN PXE OpROM” and hit Enter
11. Use the arrow keys to select “Enabled” and hit Enter
12. Hit Escape, use the right arrow key to select “Save and Exit”, hit Enter twice

For more information on LTSP and Fat Clients – take a look at Ubuntu’s documentation over here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP/FatClients

If you made it this far, make sure you follow me: @jeffnappi

Shout out to Kyle Bastian and Tavit for the help with the comic J

The New Google+ Home Design

The first thing you will notice about the latest Google+ changes is the design of the homepage. On the left, you will see large icons to get you to the main areas including Home, Profile, Hangouts, Photos, Circles, Games, and Pages. For smaller screens, many of these options might be hidden under the More option. Hover over it and then the menu item you are looking for. Even at 1920×1080, my pages are hidden under More.

When you click on one of your pages from here, you will automatically be switched to using Google+ as the page you selected. You can also do this by clicking on the dropdown next to your profile image at the top right of your Google+ screen.

The new item in the left side menu is explore. Here, you can find out what is new and interesting on Google+ including hot stories, trends, and a slider that allows you to incorporate more or less “Hot on Google+” items into your main news feed.

To the right of your news feed, you will see the latest trending topics on Google+, your current hangout invites, people you may know, and pages or people you might find interesting. Be sure to use the trending topics to jump in on conversations that might get more exposure to your profile or page.

At the top of your Google+ news feed, you will see your circles, many of which will be hidden under the More dropdown. Use these to filter your Google+ news feed to show only items from particular circles.

You can also find any saved searches or hashtags at the bottom of the More dropdown so you can view updates pertaining to those searches. To save a search, search for a keyword or hashtag using the Google+ search bar, then click the Save this Search button that comes up with the results. Using saved searches is a great way to keep up with public conversations in your industry and anyone discussing your brand on Google+.

When you change your news feed to view only a particular circle, the area to the right of the news feed will change as well. Now you will see thumbnails of people in that particular circle with the option to add more people to that circle by name.

You will also see your hangout invites when available as well as an option to share that circle as a status update. This is a great way to help your followers on Google+ connect with other key names in your industry.

Depending on how large your screen is, you should also see the option to start a hangout and enable chat on the right side throughout all of Google+. Both of these options will help you create a deeper connection with your audience.

When you sign into chat, you can use the dropdown next to your name to find your privacy settings. Select Custom in the dropdown so you can choose which circles of people you want to chat with.

Since you can’t choose or block individuals, you might want to consider a circle just for the people you want to chat with. You can look at using chat as a way to steer a friendly conversation into a possible conversion!

Your Google+ Profile

Along with the change to your homepage is the change to your Google+ profile.

The main changes here are…

• You can now have five small photos thumbnails or a solid banner image. InlineVision created a guide to the new Google+ banner size plus a Photoshop template on their blog if you want to get creative with yours. The photostrip is particularly important as it will be shown when someone hovers over your name almost anywhere in Google+.
• Your profile image is larger. This means you might want to upload a higher quality image if yours is looking grainy.
• Beneath your profile image, you will see your latest employment listing, where you attended college, and where you currently live. These pieces of information may also show up in the little popup when someone hovers over your name in Google+, so be sure they are up to date.
• Your tagline has been moved into a less prominent area above your Introduction.
• The number of people in your circles and who have you in circles is beneath your profile photo (depending on your privacy settings).
• Your links to other profiles, contributor to, and recommended links are at the bottom of your profile beneath your introduction, bragging rights, occupation, employment, places lived, and contact information.

The links moving to the bottom is probably the biggest heartbreaker. Previously, the links were pretty close to the top or your profile in the right sidebar which meant a higher click through rate to your website and other social profiles. Now that they’ve moved, you will want to make sure the links you want noticed the most are added to your Introduction information. Don’t remove any of your other profile, contributor to, or recommended links though as these are still used for your Google authorship and sometimes shows up along with your Google+ profile in search results.

Hangouts to Join

Ever wanted to jump into a hangout to test the waters of video chat, but didn’t want to set one up for yourself or wait for an invitation? If you go to the Hangouts section, you should now see a listing of public hangouts that are currently ongoing that you can either watch or join.

Click on the view more link next to hangouts to join to see what is going on, and jump in when ready! You might see someone hosting a public hangout that you have wanted to get in touch with, and there’s no better way to make a great impression than by jumping on with them in a video chat!

Getting the Most Out of the New Features

As with most social network changes, regardless of whether you like it or not, the changes are here to stay. To get the most out of the new Google+, be sure to:

• Create some saved searches to keep up with industry topics and reputation management.
• Update your photostrip images or create one banner image that represents your personal or professional brand.
• Update your location, employment, and education information.
• Add the most important links you want people to notice to your Introduction section on your profile.
• Check out live Google+ Hangouts.
• Create a circle for people you want to chat with and enable your chat window.
• Keep adding links to your Contributor To section to help boost your exposure in Google search results next to articles you have published.

Do you like the latest changes to Google+? What other features have you noted are different?

It’s said that only 2 industries call people who use their products “users”: the tech industry, and drug dealers. We here at iAcquire strive to rise above that stereotype, challenging ourselves to break the mainstream and create an environment conducive to explosive, but controlled growth. Central to that strategy is the culture we’ve developed, not actively, but naturally.

Though for the most part, much of our development work has revolved around our internal application called the iRank Platform but the lessons we’ve learned herein could still be applied in part to your situation.

Listen, listen here.

Here’s news for every programmer out there: you do not know any better than your average user. What we find time and again is the simple fact that those who use the product day in and day out are often at a better vantage point to discover when something is wrong or identify what needs improvement.

The tech team is officially offline... yes, Neo made it out just in time.

Our job as developers is not to ignore requests and prance around acting like we know what’s best; it’s to take note of it, put it in a backlog and tackle it based on importance. In the grand scheme of things, keep going on with blissful ignorance and you’ll find yourself playing as a parakeet’s parlay. Yes you’re an important player(with a commanding voice, if I may add) but the people who use it are the boss of you. Remember, you’re building stuff for them, not because a book or some blog told you so. Ignoring your users might buy you time, but their issues will never go away, it’ll just continue on doubling up.

“Should I babysit my users then?” No. Absolutely not.

“But they’ll keep doing the wrong stuff!” No, no they won’t.
We, as an industry, need to trust people more. We need not assume they’re going to crash the servers – granted that sometimes it does indeed happen but it’s 2012 for Pete’s sake, why do we still act like it’s 1992 and that only WE know how things work?

Tossing the ole pigskin while working the phones.

There’s a commune in communication.

A conversation is not a one way street. Communication often goes one-way, that is: we tell them what to do, end of story. That often is the fastest way to be out of touch. Ask for feedback. Observe what’s going on. Listen. Once you’ve got what you need, then provide feedback. Explain how it works, why it works that way. Go back to the first step – ask for feedback and so on. No, this is not for the bosses, this is for the team: the same people who live, eat and breathe what it is you’re crafting.

What we find most effective too is writing up post mortems directed to the users affected – especially to internal users. If you hire a plumber to fix a leak, how would you feel if he just tells you: DONE! You will ask what was wrong and you will ask how it was fixed. You need closure. In the same way, your users also need closure. It’s not just an emotional yearning; it’s just inherent in how we think. If we do not know why it was leaking, and how it was patched, would we be confident in using the faucet? Or are we going to constantly be second guessing ourselves, slightly wincing every time we turn on the tap?

We’re also Gymnasts

Being in constant communication allows for instant feedback – and that is both a boon and a curse. It’s a boon because we know right away what’s wrong or what’s right. It’s a curse because we know right away what’s going wrong and what should be going right.

Pairing up with partners, including around the ping pong table

More importantly, we know right away when something breaks; and at times, we have to batten down the hatches for protection against an avalanche of bug reports. Say when one of our data sources suddenly decide to change formats, we must have the flexibility and the bandwidth to roll out a patch and keep things humming smoothly, especially when particularly gnarly situations bubble up, such as:

When keys collide

It was a regular wintry Wednesday when a team member noticed something peculiar. A page he was evaluating was returning wildly different results when checked by our platform versus his very visual inspection. He brought it up, it was escalated, and we watched him replicate it. This was just one page out of millions of pages we were examining – we were more than willing to chalk it up as a fluke. But we’re iAcquire. We did our due diligence and ran a system check against that case.

We verified that it was indeed failing for that particular case. Great! Why? Still, we’re talking about one case out of a million. It’s so easy to turn around and look the other way but we didn’t. It wasn’t going to let us sleep that night. We just had to know why.

Ultimately, we finally tracked it to our key generation mechanism. As it turns out, it wasn’t generating enough unique request keys for the scale of our operations. Once identified, the fix was on its way. All within a couple of hours, we were able to turnaround and put up a solution with minimal impact to the user experience.

But our work wasn’t done yet, we still had to explain what happened to the team, and only then were we back to our regular Wednesday programming.

Understanding is so underrated.

@samharbison is the type of guy who can find tasks to work on in the middle of the Pacific

At a time when massive corporations, wielding enormous power over sovereign nations, don’t even understand just what exactly it is they’re selling, we take a different approach. Each and every one of us understands the business, ensuring everyone is current and kept abreast of what’s going on. And again, at a time when everyone is just expected to hit the ground running, we actually expend a substantial amount of time in training our new partners – mostly on making sure they realize the value of the duties they’ll be tasked with.

So when a squirrel crawled into a transformer, short circuiting the electric grid of the block we were on, there was no panic. A few groans here and there but overall it was orderly, there was no screaming “the zombie apocalypse is upon us”, paper planes didn’t magically start taking to the air, nor was there any mass exodus towards the front door.

Every one held their place as the servers started chirping audibly about their dwindling battery supply. Within a few minutes, everyone was coalescing into their groups and talking strategies and catching up. As the server wailed and warned of imminent death, we decided to boot it down and continue having our people move up meetings when applicable. Some who were mobile kept powering through and took care of offline tasks. But of course after an hour of no A/C and the full glory of the Arizona heat, inasmuch as we wanted to stay and keep productive, we headed down to the local bar and toasted a few drinks to the squirrel that unexpectedly helped improve camaraderie – and testing the mettle of our culture.

@TheCindyNieves interviewing then candidate @Me_Nela - she joined, welcome aboard!

Understanding – that is the key. It is imperative in our culture that everyone understands their task, because it’s integral to one of the first points made: trust. Trust everyone in the team will do the right thing. If something or someone fails, watch out for it. Listen, because there will most definitely be a loud clang. Communicate what happened and what needs to be done. Be flexible and be willing to roll with the flow. Ensure everyone pertinent to the discussion is involved. Mistakes happen, it’s not the end of the world. What’s important is how resilient the team is in handling roadblocks – and though tech people tend to have a bit of Messianic complex baked in, we need to realize that we’re but part of the team and we really do need to work with other people.

We are a technology company at heart.

That’s why much of this post is dedicated to the company and the process because as a whole, we’re all techies. To discuss the culture of a tech company without bringing up the culture of “the company sans everyone but the tech team” is impossible. We all understand that fact. For this reason, we are non-standard. After all, we’re a company that’s used to eschewing standards – we use Zimbra for our email platform, not Google or Microsoft; we’ve deployed a fat client linux distribution to run from a centralized server to our individual workstations, not Microsoft Windows or Apple iMacs at each and every desk(though they do look nicer).

For this reason, we don’t delineate between techs and non-techs. Everyone is a part of it because iAcquire understands that technology is a tool for the business – the business is not a slave to the technology. Sure it might be hard to work if a piece of tech is down, like electricity for example, but we’ll still keep cranking. The best way to embody that is to invest in the people, trusting in their judgment, and creating an open and thriving environment. At the end of the day, we pride ourselves on the fact that everyone is empowered – not because we were told “you are empowered” but because we all know where we’re at, and where we’re supposed to be.

Yes, that's a ping pong table, in the break room, right in the middle of the office. We're Jobs-ian that way, it's hard NOT to run into everybody when the break room is right in the middle of the very open office.

The key to this is finding influencers in the right verticals so that any mentions you get from them will reach your target audience. So how do you find influencers in the right vertical? Here are six top tools you will need to find them.

Follower Wonk

Follower Wonk is one of our favorite tools for finding Twitter users with a specific keyword in their bio. You can also add a location filter to find Twitter users in a particular region.

The best part is you can sort users by the number of followers they have. While numbers don’t mean everything, follower count will show you what kind of reach you might get with these users.

Twitter Elite

Attached to HubSpot’s Tweet Grader, a tool that you can use to determine how effective your Twitter profile really is, is the Twitter Elite. This section shows you the top Twitter users whose profiles have scored the highest on the Tweet Grader tool.

What’s nice is the fact that you can see the top Twitter users by city – the Top Cities page lets you select from 100 top cities and see the most influential users in them. If your target demographic is women, you might also be interested in the Top Women list.

For B2B businesses targeting brands, you can check out the Most Powerful Brands on Twitter list. It includes brands worldwide in different industries such as news, sports, retail, music, and restaurant.

Twellow

If you are more concerned about finding people in a specific vertical and less concerned about their overall popularity, then Twellow is the place to go. This Twitter directory allows users to add themselves in over 3,000 different categories which means you are bound to find some people with influence in your industry.

If you register for Twellow (which you should so you can be found by others), you will also be able to filter results in each category by your location which can help if you are targeting a geo-specific audience.

Each listing in the directory shows the Twitter user’s number of followers. People who have signed up on Twellow may have additional details in their profiles, including links to their other social networks.

Klout Topics

While you may not be a fan the Klout scoring system, you can’t ignore their topic lists. If you don’t believe in Klout scores, you will want to skip the Top Influencers section and jump into the Top +K Recipients for a particular topic. This shows you people who have been voted for by others in the Klout system with a +K (kind of like a +1 or Like in the Klout world).

So how do you find topic pages? Klout has a featured topics page that works (sometimes) or you can use the following URL.

http://klout.com/#/topic/keyword/

Just replace keyword with your topic of choice. Add a dash between multiple keywords like http://klout.com/#/topic/social-media/. If you can’t think of any topics off the top of your head, just look up the Klout profile for a known influencer in your industry and check the topics listed under their profile.

The best part about Klout is that you can find additional social profiles for anyone who has signed up for Klout beyond Twitter including Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other popular networks. This will allow you to connect with influencers on multiple networks which is a great way to find out where the influencer spends the majority of their social media time. Once you figure that out, you will know where you have the best chance of connecting with them.

Social Statistics

Looking for people with a large audience on Google+? Then check out Social Statistics. You can see the Top People on Google+ based on their number of followers. Next to each name on the list, you might see a short description and location.

What’s so great about influential Google+ users? The more followers a user has, the more likely their Google+ posts are to show up in search results. Therefore, if an influential person on Google+ happens to mention your name or link to your content in one of their posts, it will have a great reach with their audience and potentially search results as well.

Want to search for people by industry? Just enter a keyword into the search box on Google+ itself, then use the dropdown to filter results for just people and pages.

For some keywords, you might be able to find people by using the main Google search as Google+ profiles and pages now come up in results above or below AdWords ads.

Technorati

Last, but not least, if your online marketing goal revolves around getting exposure on popular blogs, then you will want to check out Technorati. Technorati Authority measures a site’s influence in the blogosphere based on the sites linking behavior, categorization, and other data over a short period of time. This means that blogs with high authority will be current.

You can browse the Top 100 Blogs or blogs within specific categories including business, entertainment, lifestyle, politics, sports, social media, and technology. Use the search box to find blogs and blog posts on specific topics.

You’ve Found Influencers… Now What?

Once you’ve found some great influencers in your industry using Follower Wonk, Twitter Elite, Twellow, Klout Topics, Social Statistics, and Technorati, your next step will be to actually connect with them. This part is all about engagement. The nice part about networks like Twitter is that you can follow and engage with someone regardless of whether they are following you. You can also put your influencers in Twitter lists and sort those lists by verticals if you work with more than one. With Google+, you can segment influencers into specific circles so you can filter your news feed to see just their updates.

From here, your goal is to simply watch their updates and jump into conversations. Some great engagement techniques include:

• Replying to influencers, and especially answering questions.
• Retweeting or sharing their status updates.
• Tweeting their blog posts including their @username on Twitter or tagging them on networks like Facebook and Google+.
• Watching to see if they use smaller niche networks and connecting with them on those.
• Monitor their updates for opportunities to write for their blog, contribute to surveys, and other invitations.

Overall, just consider building engagement with an influencer like talking to someone you want to be friends with. Don’t make it all about business – if you see they talk about personal items, try to relate to those things and comment on them too. By showing your human side, you’re likely to make a great impression!

What tools do you use to find influencers in your industry, and once you locate them, how do you connect?

Forgot how to play barrel of monkeys? Here’s how:

Dump the monkeys onto the table. Pick up one monkey by the arm and hook the other arm through a second monkey’s arm. Continue making a chain until all monkeys are connected. Your turn is over when you drop a monkey.

When you pick up the first monkey it’s easy to link the second and third monkey. As the chain gets longer with six or seven monkeys, the chain begins to sway and the pace of making connections with the next monkey slows down. The most successful players of barrel of monkeys have and understand five key concepts:

1. Established goals- they know how to play

2. Established expectations-they understand the rules of the games

3. Resources-they have 12 monkeys in a barrel

4. Feedback- Understand the importance of making a connection and adjust technique and strategy according to the response of the last connection

5. Recognition-they connect all 12 monkeys in success or they drop a monkey and start over

These five concepts are not only important when playing barrel of monkeys but they are the keys to developing the culture of any organization. The Harvard Business Review said it best in their July-August 2011 issue where the spotlight article was on building a culture of trust and innovation based on collaboration.

“Interdependent processes are shaped more by people involved in the task than by those at the top.”

When building a team once goals, expectations, resources, feedback and recognition are established the execution of the processes are molded by the people on the team. Imagine if as a kid while playing barrel of monkeys your mom told you that you were doing it wrong when she has never played.  Doesn’t really motivate you to keep playing, does it? Cultivating an environment based on shared ideas to achieve a common goal is certain to keep all the monkeys connected on the chain.

RECOGNITION for connecting all 12 monkeys without dropping one from the team! A team on the court, on the field, or a team in the office, recognizes that there is something about giving that high five, a pat on the back, and even the occasional “good game” that fosters a culture of trust and success.  Just like in the game, recognition is a feedback mechanism that contributes to the development of the culture. The sitcom The Office is proof of how feedback mechanisms impacts office culture.

The Office had the Dundie Awards which was their way of recognizing their employees for ridiculous achievements like the “whitest sneakers.” Despite the awards’ over the top humorous achievements, Dunder Mifflin employees still were excited to be recognized for something they accomplished. Unfortunately, this contributed to an office culture where ridiculous individual achievements were “high five-ed.” It’s very hard to connect 12 monkeys with the chain violently swaying back and forth with the monkeys swaying in different directions. The chain needs to be still and the monkeys need to be carefully connected working to make the last connection.

Is your barrel of monkeys swaying back and forth on the verge of dropping a team member or is it quiet with careful connections ready to keep all team members connected?

FULFILLMENT AWARDS RECOGNIZES BARREL OF MONKEY MAVENS

The Fulfillment Awards is our opportunity to recognize the iAcquire Production team using excitement and humor to say “thank you for your hard work.”  The Awards Ceremony creates an atypical office atmosphere packed with fist pumping music played by our resident DJ’s, comedy skits, costumes, and plenty of nonstop entertainment.  The team designed deliberate, yet comical awards to portray individual and team achievements. Awards like:

• Sexy Beast Award- Beauty and the Beast dolls nailed to a plaque exemplifying the individual on the team that placed the most “sexy media” for the month. Jenna H. was last month’s SEXY BEAST winner!
• Sixth Man Award- glorifies a B-Ballin’ Justin Bieber doll, ready to shoot the “J,” that is glued to wooden podium. This coveted award goes to the team player in fulfillment that puts the team ahead of all else. Sylvia L. won this award in March for her extraordinary efforts in leaving the “I” out of TEAM.
• Team of the Month Award-three teams go head-to-head all month working on exceeding new outreach goals, total outreach goals, and quality placement standards. Link-o-holics and Writers Bloc teams fought tooth and nail for the month of March but in the end the Hustlin’ Honey Badgers emerged victorious!

The best part about the awards is that it establishes a precedent where collaboration and team work are recognized. You cannot be successful in barrel of monkeys without solid connections and without each piece working together. This is exactly why building a team is like a Barrel of Monkeys.

The following is our step-by-step guide for infographic promotion:

A few quick thoughts

• Pay attention to the design – one of the pillars of a successful infographic is that it is nice to look at so make sure you hire the very best designer you can – avoid infographics that make us all irritated.
• Infographics for the sake of it – infographics should be the method of presenting a concept rather than the actual concept. Infographics for the sake of it aren’t cool.
• ‘Going interactive’ isn’t a necessity – contrary to what feels like common wisdom at the moment, ‘flat’ infographics are not dead and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel with some HTML5-scrolling-parallax-flashy-graphic. Of course, they are an option but a great visualisation of a popular topic with some targeted outreach is still a winning strategy.

PHASE 1 – Concept

The promotion of your graphic really does start before your designer has even fired up Photoshop.

If you build ‘hooks’ into the graphic from the outset, it makes promoting the thing infinitely more fruitful.

Working up the idea

Successful infographics need to have a solid underlying concept otherwise all the outreach in the world isn’t going to make this thing fly.

The way we come up with ideas is to discuss with the client their goals and expectations, we’ll then brainstorm some initial concepts and discuss these with the client.

A key consideration for us at the idea stage are to ensure that the concept fits well with the client – unrelated topics often feel contrived.

Map each market

Once we have a handful of refined concepts we map and assess the potential markets for each of these. This will include looking at the key people who might be interested in sharing and hosting your graphic, we look at the graphics already out there (and whether we are bringing something new to the market) and we will also look at how well previous closely related graphics performed.

Very often we’ll contact a few of these individuals to get their take on the concept and ask if they have anything to include perhaps a favourite case study or maybe even a blog post they have on their site. We find that this makes outreach once the graphic is done much easier since the individual will feel like they have a stake in the success of it.

Followerwonk is a quick and easy tool for doing this.

PHASE 2 – Settle on the idea and get it done

Refine the concept and the target markets

Make a decision on the concept that you are going to run with and nail down the different target markets. We’re generally thinking about the bloggers and websites who are going to host the graphic when we talk about the ‘target market’.

Obviously enjoyment and uptake by the ‘end user’ is important but a lot of that takes care of itself if you produce a top-notch graphic and reach the right publishers since they’ll know their audience better than anyone and will likely only help promote something they are behind 100%.

Even if you think your infographic is going to have widespread appeal, at this stage you really need to pin down the specific markets you will be targeting so that you can tailor every bit of work after this point to your prospective link partners.

Targeting everybody is targeting nobody. We usually aim to target around 2-3 different audiences with the graphic to maximise the linking opportunities e.g. finance blogs and parenting blogs if for example the infographic discusses the cost of raising a child.

Research

A poorly researched infographic is dead before it even got started.

Be meticulous and thorough in your research so that you have all the data you could possibly need to create a great infographic. You can always whittle down the data and work out the key points to highlight (see structure & design below).

Capitalise on the promotional potential of this step also by selecting sources (perhaps slightly less well know bloggers) who you can reference and then ego-bait later in the process. Don’t let it compromise the integrity of your work but definitely keep this in mind.

Structure & Design

The structure and design of your graphic are really important factors when it comes to promotion.

Design is not my area of expertise which is why we always hire really great designers to put together our graphics (and this is why you should to).

A few things I do know:

• Make sure your graphic flows well – you want people to read or scan, top to bottom and then take action (either sharing or embedding).
• Identify the key data points that are going to really drive interest – make sure these are highlighted and obvious.
• Make sure your graphic looks on brand – not only does the idea need to fit well with the client but it also needs to look like it came from the client.
• Your copy is important – text heavy infographics are definitely decreasing in effectiveness but including explanations of data is important and considered use of copy can help drive engagement.

PHASE 3 – Setup for success

Now you have a finished graphic there are just a few more things you’ll need to do before you launch it…

Select your image hosting carefully

Nothing destroys the momentum of an infographic promotion like a website going down or the image breaking.

Ensure your hosting setup is robust or host the image somewhere else for example AWS.

Make sure you have code and make sure it works

We always include the HTML embed code with the infographics that we create and promote as it reduces the friction for readers to embed and share the graphic on their own site.

The Embed Code Generator by SEOgadget is a very handy tool that will allow you to generate the code with ease.

We nearly always include a byline to the graphic but be careful with the anchor text you choose just in case your graphic suddenly gets embedded all over the web (YAY!) and you end up attracting a keyword level penalty (NOOO!).

Where should you host the graphic?

The obvious answer is your website or your client’s, however, recently (in situations where the client’s brand was less well-known) we have had some good results by giving big name websites or bloggers “the exclusive” on infographics and using their website as the platform for outreach.

Obviously there is absolutely nothing wrong with hosting the graphic on your website or your client’s and this is a smart option in most situations.

PHASE 4 – Identify your prospects

Think at this stage in terms of prospect categories. If you have followed this process so far you will already have a fairly good idea of the market; who the influencers are, which websites host graphics and so on. You may also have a number of individuals who were involved with the graphic coming together.

Now you need to really nail down your link prospecting plan. Here are the categories we generally focus on:

• Bloggers (sub-categories; industry A bloggers, industry B bloggers)
• Key influencers (often bloggers too but some markets have prolific social sharers, or individuals with massive email lists who might help promote your graphic but not via their blog.)
• Media (journalists, both traditional and digital)
• Involved in the research (any individuals that helped you put it together, acting as a sounding board etc)
• Infographic galleries (quick wins in terms of links, not always immensely valuable but many are often pretty good)
• Your rolodex (the personal or professional connections you can leverage to really push this graphic.)

Since late last year, we have also been using a technique which we picked up from the guys at SEOgadget where you reach out to publishers that have hosted your graphics in the past but didn’t attribute it to you – this has worked equally well for us. See here for full details on the process. This would obviously be another category all on its own.

I count this as a standalone phase because we found that if we weren’t structuring our link prospecting effectively it took much longer and was much less effective – breaking it down and concentrating hard on a very specific area makes the task much more manageable.  It also helps to start thinking about your prospects as categories since the method and style of outreach is often very different.

PHASE 5 – Link prospecting, research & evaluation

We create a Google Docs spreadsheet when we start the prospecting stage and we separate into tabs according to their category e.g. blogger industry A, journalist and so on.

We will include all the usual information such as name, contact details and company but we also include detailed notes on why the individual is suitable for being contacted for example they may have written an article on the topic previously or shared an infographic by your competitor.

How to find link prospects

The Link Prospector tool from Citation Labs is a fantastic piece of kit if you are looking to build extensive and effective outreach lists.

Using the “Find Content Promoters” report you can source an abundance of prospects to contact who may be interested in embedding your content.

Remember to keep your prospects carefully organised to make the actual outreach far more effective.

You can also source prospects by analysing the link profile of any infographics that have been published previously using your site explorer tool of choice. (I like Ahrefs.com).

How to find the key influencers

You may well be familiar with the fantastic tool which is Followerwonk. This service allows you to identify the key individuals in a given industry and will even sort them by influence.

Prospecting the media

Journalists can be hard to get hold of.

The Link Prospector tool will bring up a number of media websites that may be interested in hosting your infographic, BUT remember it isn’t the sites that are interested in your infographic, it is the writers so you need to find and research the right people.

Glean as much information as you can from the article to enable you to build a picture about the writer (and record those details in your notes for outreach).

One of our favourite services for finding more information about journalists is to use Journalisted.com. Unfortunately, this website is UK focused but it is essentially a search engine of journalists which allows you to find all their articles and contact details where applicable in one place.

As a last resort, we sometimes email a department catchall email but address to a specific journalist.

Infographic galleries

Use Paddy Moogan’s list of infographic galleries found here as your starting point for sites that need to be submitted to.
Your contacts

Very often you don’t even realise who you actually know or are least connected to, we use MentionMapp as a quick and easy way to visualise your relationships.

You can also use Snap Bird to search your own friends and followers on Twitter to see who is tweeting around the topic of your infographic.

Evaluation

We simultaneously prospect, evaluate and research. Using your favourite SEO toolbar you can quickly sift and sort the opportunities not only just into the tabs but also organising according to value. Only you’ll know the specific metrics that matter in your campaign.

Doing your homework

Develop an understanding of your prospects using all the information publicly available to you. High value prospects are worthy of investing time in – build a picture of the content they are interested in and make useful notes about the prospect to bring genuine context to your outreach pitch. See this excellent post on the BlueGlass blog – Required Research for Better Blogger Outreach.

PHASE 6 – Contacting

Making contact and actually securing a successful outcome is definitely the most challenging aspect of this whole process.

Nearly all of our contact is made via email or by social media in private (e.g. direct message on Twitter).

Recently we have been focusing much more on contacting via Twitter first as this often gets them intrigued but it isn’t always possible to do so, especially if you are working behind the scenes for a client.

Subject line

Keep it simple and focused on your message. In my experience mentioning anything about a link in the subject line is likely to get your message auto-filtered into spam or manually deleted by the recipient.

Try Copyblogger’s Email Marketing Essentials for more tips on writing great subject lines.

Opening paragraph

We simply cover the 3W’s

• Who am I
• Why am I sending this email to you
• What do I want

Persuasive body copy

You now have a few sentences to really drive home the conversion, explain in a little more detail the context of your email, what inspired you to contact this particular prospect.

Highlight some of their work that you like or respect (be genuine) and draw similarities between the stuff that matters to them and the particular graphic you are promoting.

The closer

Finish with a strong call to action making it clear what you want the prospect to do next. For example including a link to tweet the graphic if you are reaching out to a social influencer, linking to the page with the graphic and encouraging the embed and so on.

You can in most cases create an email template and customise according to your link prospecting notes in a way which personalises the email whilst ensuring there is a possibility of some scale.

Example Outreach Email

Here’s an example of an actual outreach letter we sent to a journalist at a UK newspaper which secured a placement on a number of sites…sometimes you strike lucky !

(Click to enlarge)

Further reading on outreach

• How to craft high-conversion outreach emails
• Outreach letters for link building
• Outreach emails from 4 industry link builders

Who to contact when?

1. PRE-LAUNCH – Contact your rolodex get them excited and willing to help you launch this. Contact the bloggers and the media to give them the head’s up
2. DAY OF LAUNCH – Contact the individuals who were involved with helping put the graphic together. Share with the key influencers to seed your graphic.
3. POST-LAUNCH – Infographic galleries – don’t leave it too long but there’s no real need to rush to submit to these sites since they are pretty much guaranteed links but it can give you a nice set of links within a week or two of launching the graphic.

PHASE 7 – Extending the life of your graphic

Paid social media

There are various ways to pay for advertising your infographic (sites like Buzzfeed look good if you have the budget). We usually work with clients that don’t have several thousand to throw at advertising on one website so our favourite paid social media option is StumbleUpon paid discovery which is superb (as far as we are concerned) in terms of driving genuine engagement with content like infographics – we find it often leads to a flurry not only of visitors but also social media activity on other websites.

Guest Posting

Infographics are a great source of guest post ideas as you can embed the graphic and write around 300-400 words (much less than a typical guest post) and still provide great value and insight to a new audience.

Highlight a particular piece of data, include data that didn’t make the actual graphic for one reason or another or just extend upon what the infographic is visualising.

This keeps the infographic ‘alive’ and allows you to write quite a few guest posts without the usual volume of words necessary. It also allows you to take your infographic to blogs that wouldn’t otherwise have hosted it i.e. blogs that don’t usually just publish infographics.

Monitor Google Alerts

This was an idea that Wiep Knol gave me for resurrecting failed linkbait but in theory this can also be used to extend the life of your infographic.

Setup Google Alerts to monitor for the relevant themes and keywords, this allows you to keep an eye on the topic and then potentially contact the publisher of a new article or study and discuss the possibility of referencing your infographic in their work as it likely brings additional context to their work.

Hypothetical Infographic Promotion Walkthrough

The following is a real infographic and is an illustration of how we could use the process discussed above to launch and promote it.

It ISN’T a real example of work from my agency because as much as we can sometimes provide examples in private to highlight the work we do, publicising the promotional campaign we have executed for a client could result in a loss of competitive advantage.

EXAMPLE – http://sortable.com/blog/how-green-is-the-ipad/

Obviously since this graphic isn’t anything to do with us we weren’t involved at the concept, research, design or setup stage but I do have a few points to make in these areas.

Nice choice of topic with a number of clear markets. It is topically relevant to the “client” Sortable.com which helps buyers find the right gadget/electronic item for them (which includes a tablet).

They have an embed underneath the graphic but it isn’t amazingly obvious and you have to copy and paste rather than being able to just click on the textarea box and hit copy. (It’s all about reducing friction!)

They have a good range of sources which might indicate that there were various parties involved in the pre-publication stage who have subsequently helped promote the graphic when it was published.

It is too early to fully determine the success of the graphic but it has appeared on Mashable which has consequently led to placements on Yahoo and ABC News by virtue of the fact that these outlets syndicate Mashable content.

Here is our hypothetical promotional plan…

Identify prospects

I would approach this graphic by promoting to the following categories of prospects and tailor my outreach accordingly, e.g. focus on the iPad when talking to the Apple and iPad bloggers but focus on the environmental aspect of the graphic when building rapport with the eco-bloggers.

• Apple bloggers
• iPad Bloggers
• Eco-bloggers
• Journalists
• Data sources
• Infographic Galleries

Link prospecting & evaluation

*It is worth remembering that we don’t go into this much detail for every prospect but these are high-value prospects I have highlighted for the purpose of illustrating this example*

Apple Bloggers
e.g. http://www.tuaw.com/

High-authority website, high-income tech-savvy audience which is precisely the type of crowd Sortable will be looking to attract.

Steven Sande (one of the TUAW editors) published this infographic in 2011 (http://www.tuaw.com/2011/09/29/infographic-illustrates-10-years-of-the-ipod/)

A quick search of the site also reveals that he has in the past written about eco-friendly accessories for the iPhone (http://www.tuaw.com/2011/01/03/bioserie-bioplastic-iphone-4-cases-review-and-giveaway/) and even just a few days ago did an update which covered some of the environmental impact Apple has (http://www.tuaw.com/2012/04/18/daily-update-for-april-18-2012/) so whilst he isn’t necessarily a real eco-enthusiast, he is at least open to these issues and likely sees their importance.

His Twitter handle is http://twitter.com/stevensande

No publicly/easily accessible email address but a contact form http://www.tuaw.com/contact/feedback/

iPad Bloggers
e.g. http://ipadinsight.com/

Blogger is Patrick Jordan

Patrick appears to be involved in day to day management and will likely pick up the emails to the publicly displayed contact@ipadinsight.com address.

A quick search of the site doesn’t reveal any particular coverage of eco/environmental issues in the past. We can attempt to approach Patrick as a key iPad blogger highlighting the interesting new data that this graphic offers and how much his 17,000 readers are likely to enjoy this.

Eco-bloggers
e.g. http://www.ecogeek.org/
(This one intersects two of the markets = WINNING!)

EcoGeek appears to have a small editorial team which includes Megan Treacy who published an infographic last year (http://www.ecogeek.org/efficiency/3561-white-roofs-could-save-a-years-worth-of-global-co2)

https://twitter.com/#!/mtreacy

Get confirmation for the email which is likely to be megan@ecogeek.org based on the other email addresses publicised.

Journalists

A quick search for eco journalists in Google reveals David Derbyshire at The Daily Mail/Mail Online (a UK newspaper) – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/search.html?authornamef=David%20Derbyshire

He has written various articles on the environment AND a few on technology and apps so he definitely looks like a good fit for pitching.

He has a Journalisted profile http://journalisted.com/david-derbyshire

There is a publicly listed email address david@davidderbyshire.co.uk and he has Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/DDerbyshire which in the profile confirms he is indeed an environment journalist.

Data Sources

One of the sources is http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/may/24/how-green-is-the-ipad

A quick click over to that site reveals that the original article back in 2010 was by a writing duo called Leo & Lucy, it seems that they still have a series going on The Guardian covering eco-friendly living http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/series/ask-leo-lucy

They even offer up their email address ask.leo.and.lucy@guardian.co.uk

Infographic Galleries

Get submitting to these sites

Making Contact

TUAW

Prime on Twitter http://twitter.com/stevensande
Then contact via http://www.tuaw.com/contact/feedback/

Listen to his update from the other day (http://www.tuaw.com/2012/04/18/daily-update-for-april-18-2012/) and make a comment in the outreach email before bringing the discussion around to the infographic

You could in theory contact via his personal site http://www.dailysteve.com/contact/ but he clearly states that not to do this. This serves to highlight a good outreach rule which is to always question where to stop when it comes to seeking out someone’s email address or directly contacting someone. Sometimes they have contact forms in place for good reason so always respect their wishes.

iPad Insight

Straight in with the email as this is likely to result in a positive outcome with relatively little friction given how close the graphic is in terms of the topic to the blog.

Also, communication with the blogger appears to be open with a publicised email address.

EcoGeek

Prime via twitter > https://twitter.com/#!/mtreacy

If possible secure a firm email address to contact or tell her to look out for your email which will have further details.

The Daily Mail

We have plenty of contact details for David (See above), I would personally email him off the bat with a carefully constructed pitch highlighting how this graphic is relevant to him and his work at The Daily Mail.

I would probably directly ask about the possibility of a placement on The Daily Mail and whether or not “I’m talking to the right person” as he may be able to point us in the right direction if he doesn’t have any forthcoming articles for Mail Online or needs clearance to cover this for example.

I would offer up “assistance” to facilitate publishing explaining we are happy to help in any way we can in to help him publish e.g. adding some words to give the graphic context, resizing slight or something similar. Again, reducing the potential friction and making his life that bit easier.

The Guardian

Again, with this prospect, I would go straight in with the email seeing as it is publicly displayed.

I would certainly use the egobait angle with this pitch and thank them for publishing the original article before suggesting the idea of a follow-up article (featuring the infographic) to update a piece which is now two years old.

Extending the life of the graphic

• Google Alerts for Apple & environmental related news – highlight the graphic to bloggers and journalists covering the issue
• Guest posts about Apple & the environment – using the infographic as the conversation starter.
• StumbleUpon Paid Discovery
• BuySellAds.com – sponsored Tweets to extend the reach of your graphic by seeding to an engaged following. They have a section dedicated to “All things Apple” and for anything from $25 to $250 you can drop a tweet to the graphic.

This is just a quick hypothetical run-through of how we might promote the graphic if we were tasked with this. Obviously we’d need to play the numbers game and contact far more than the few highlighted above but I just wanted to provide an example of each to help illustrate the point.

Any questions? Let me know in the comments below

James Agate is the founder of Skyrocket SEO – the content-led link building agency that offers services including guest posting and infographic design & promotion.

What Exactly Is A Distributed Web Crawler?

Let’s define the terms so we know what we’re talking about here:

• Web Crawler – a computer program that pulls down a set of URLs and processes the pages in an automated fashion. A typical web crawler runs on a single computer and churns through a list of URLs in a linear fashion one by one, or in parallel using multiple simultaneous connections from a single computer.
• Distributed Web Crawler – a web crawler that runs on multiple computers simultaneously substantially boosting crawler performance.

There Are Many Ways To Build A Web Crawler But None This Simple And Powerful

Sure you can write yourself a Java crawler and deploy it on your own Hadoop cluster or use Amazon Elastic Map Reduce. You could write custom plugins for an existing solution. Nutch comes to mind, its a nice crawler, but it’s not something that you can use to gather live data with. We’ve made heavy use of Nutch and we know what it takes to implement ­solid solutions on top of it – time. Today we’re presenting a simple distributed crawler pattern we’ve affectionately named GearNado. It brings two easy to use, wonderfully designed systems together in harmony. GearNado enables you to build out real-time crawl/parse operations to test your theories out and get you results faster than you’ll ever need.

Demo Time – Introducing TweetHandler And TweetScout

We’ve built a simple proof-of-concept Twitter username crawler on top of GearNado. Lets say you have a list of authoritative URLs and you want to find the Twitter accounts that appear most frequently on the pages within the set. You don’t have time to sit around and wait for a desktop crawler app to crunch through the massive list of pages you’ve got. In comes our distributed real-time crawler – capable of fetching, parsing and analyzing over 50 pages per second on a single node and capable of being distributed to a nearly limitless number of nodes.

Get Yourself A Relevant URL List In Your Target Sector And Get Ready To Rock

There are numerous ways to obtain lists of authoritative URLs in the space you are researching. To get a good sample set for this post, I used a browser toolbar to export the top 400 results for the following Google keyword searches:

• python web crawling
• tornado web crawling
• gearman web crawling

This resulted in a list of over 1,134 URLs after filtering out PDFs and other unwanted URLs (twitter.com, etc). Lets see what it looks like when we process these with 30 TweetScout workers:

OK, I Get It – This Distributed Web Crawler Kicks Ass… How Do I Use It?

First off, you’re going to need a Linux machine to get started. I’m going to provide instructions for getting everything set up using Ubuntu, but just about any modern Linux Distribution will do.

Setup Instructions For Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install git gearman libgearman-dev python-setuptools build-essential libxml2-dev libxslt-dev python-dev

$ sudo easy_install pyquery gearman tornado progressbar

 
Note: If you are looking to do more than 1024 simultaneous connections on a single machine make sure you edit /etc/security/limits.conf and increase the soft/hard nofile limits.

Clone the Git Repo:

$ git clone git://github.com/iAcquire/gearnado.git
$ cd gearnado

Launch 30 TweetScout workers in one terminal:

gearnado$ for i in `seq 1 30`; do ./TweetScout.py & done
[I 120501 15:32:57 TweetScout:24] TweetScout initialized and ready for work
...

Run the TweetHandler in another terminal – you can use any text file containing a list of urls one per line as input:

gearnado$ time ./TweetHandler.py --url_file=python_crawler_urls.txt
100% |##########################################|
Found 419 Twitter users in 1098 successfully parsed pages:
getafreelancer,43
freelancer,43
elance,7
freecode_com,6
odesk,6
SlideShare,6
bestopensource,6
mongodb,6
scribd,5
theanti9,4
bytes,4
databigbang,4
devcomments,4
japerk,3
brutuscat,3
apponic,3
rap4,3
github,3
brainpicker,3
wowcity,3
OLTW,3
boxmonkey,3
donanza,3
sfnet_ops,3
lanyrd,3
zomobo,3
developerIT,3
Dzone,3
bwhitman,2
xntrik,2
repos_io,2
securityninja,2
newitfarmer,2
drchuck,2
CBM,2
deviantART,2
codinghorror,2
ordonnancement,2
srirangan,2
mpmorningsun,2
TNWapps,2
tedxsomerville,2
nkpart,2
MPRNews,2
dreamincode,2
looprecursion,2
...

real    0m26.887s
user    0m0.172s
sys     0m0.036s

Clone GearNado And The TweetScout Example On GitHub: https://github.com/iAcquire/gearnado

If you made it this far, make sure you follow me: @jeffnappi

Content Strategies

As we all know, content is the way to go if you want to give your visitors a great user experience and help ward off the big bad Panda – Google Panda, that is. Here are five simple questions to help you see how a competitor is using content in their online marketing strategy.

1. Do they have a blog?

One of the best content strategies any business can utilize is maintaining a company blog. Find out if your competitor has a blog and note some important things like whether their blog is on their own domain (domain.com/blog), a subdomain (blog.domain.com), or a separate site altogether (companyblog.com or companyblog.wordpress.com).

2. How often and how much do they post?

Does your competitor blog daily? Weekly? Monthly? Are the posts standard length (up to 600 words) or longer? Note your competitor’s content production frequency and quality, plus additional details such as topics they blog about.

3. Who writes for their blog?

Does your competitor have their employees writing blog posts? Do they invite guest bloggers or industry experts? Are they hiring freelance writers? The latter might be hard to tell, especially since some companies hire freelancers and use them as ghostwriters by having the writer produce the content and the company slaps their name on it as the author. But noting how your competitor creates great content for their blog will give you an idea on how you can get great content for yours.

4. Do they produce other kinds of content?

Aside from blog posts, what other content does your competitor have on their website? Do they produce videos, infographics, webinars, eBooks, reports, whitepapers, tutorials, or case studies? If they do, check out a few of them, note the kind of topics they create these different types of content for, and see how successful they are in terms of gaining social sharing and backlinks. This can help you determine what types of content you should be producing and whether it will resonate with your audience.

5. Do they write for other websites?

This one you might not discover until you do some backlink checking later on, but see if your competitor writes articles for other sites including general article directories, niche article directories, industry blogs, or industry news sites. Guest blogging in particular can be a great way to build links and incoming traffic to their website which means if they are doing it, you probably should be too!

SEM Strategies

Once you’ve gotten a glimpse into your competitor’s basic content strategy, you will want to dig around in their search engine marketing practices. Here are some key things to look for.

Onsite SEO

Most people think competitor research and SEO just has to do with checking backlinks, but first, we want to take a peek into their on-site optimization strategy. Here, you’re looking for just the basics.

6. What keywords do they target?

If your competitor has done any on-site optimization (good or bad) they’ve likely left a nice trail of keywords that they are targeting in their website’s title tag, meta description, and meta keywords. And particularly, if they haven’t had their website updated in a couple of years since an over-zealous SEO got a hold of it, you might find some keywords stuffed in the footer too!

7. How do they write their title tag / meta description?

Going beyond their keywords, now you will want to look at the title tags and meta descriptions for the homepage plus key internal pages. Extensions like Google Chrome’s SEO Site Tools make it easy to view meta tags on any page you are visiting. Here, you are looking to see what kind of verbiage they use to attract clicks to their website from search results. Remember that while meta descriptions may not count for SEO value any more, they do often appear as the snippet in search results which makes them important for click through conversion rates.

8. How many pages do they have on their website?

Answering this question will simply give you a better grasp for how large your competitor’s site really is (and how much content they have on it). You can go to Google.com and enter site:domain.com in the search box to see just how many pages Google indexes from your competitor’s site. Note that they might have a higher amount of indexed pages if their blog is on their domain vs. on a subdomain or offsite.

Link Building

Next on the list of competitor exploration is backlinks. Some great tools to use for this include Link Diagnosis and Link Detective.

9. Where are they getting their links?

Depending on the amount of time you have, you can click on several of the competitor’s backlinks to determine their overall link strategy such as mostly article networks, guest blog posts, link exchanges (look for those words on “resource pages” where their link appears), blogroll links, blog comments, forum posts, directories, and so forth. If a competitor is outranking you, then you might want to consider a similar linking strategy unless the competitor is going after low-quality links. While they might outrank you with those now, Google is cracking down on sites with unnatural / spammy backlinks.

10. Do links look like they are paid or natural?

This is sometimes hard to spot, but if you notice that your competitor’s links often show up next to other companies that don’t make sense on one website after another, it could be a sign that they are paying for them. Links in a blogroll or footer are typical areas where people sell links – within guest posts that have nothing to do with the competitor (aside from their anchor text) is another paid link warning flag.

11. What type of anchor text do they use?

If you see the same keywords over and over in the Anchor text column of your competitor’s backlinks, then you will know that those are the keywords they are targeting the strongest. Remember that no matter what they do, you don’t want to follow their lead if they are over-optimizing by building lots of links to only a few specific keyword phrases. It’s best to mix it up and use branded anchor text as well.

Social Strategies

Last, but not least in your competitor research is their social media marketing strategy. These next few questions will help you find out what social networks and strategies are working best for your competitor.

12. What social networks do your competitors use?

You can start by looking at your competitor’s website or blog to find links to their main social networks (typically Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and, lately, Pinterest). If that doesn’t work, you can simply search your competitor’s name on Google to find their top social networks. You can also try entering the username they use at KnowEm to see what networks they have reserved for themselves.

13. How do they brand their social profiles?

Chances are, your competitor has everything branded with their company name. But branding goes deeper. Do they use a company logo, well-recognized personal, CEO, or product as their main image? Do they use individual employee profiles to communicate or do they always communicate as their brand? What does their Twitter and YouTube background look like? Is their main profile link pointing back to the homepage or another internal page? Looking at these elements can help you see how your potential audience will respond to your brand based on personal or corporate interactions.

14. How often do they post on each main network?

Different social networks require a different rate of updates. You might notice that your competitor tweets more than they update their Facebook page, and they might post videos less often than they add new pictures to Pinterest.

15. What types of posts do they share?

A successful social media strategy usually involves a variety of update types including plain status updates, links, videos, and photos. You can gauge how well different types of updates are received by their audience by looking at comments, likes, +1′s, repins, and other reactions.

Now it’s your turn. Aside from basic stats, what other information do you gather about competitors to determine their actual online marketing strategy? How do you use this information to shape your own tactics? Please share in the comments!

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• Motivated to achieve results in a dynamic team atmosphere

• Be a proactive problem-solver and strategic thinker / doer.

• Be an active participant and member of a fun, fast paced, hardworking team.

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Contact: cindy@iacquire.com

If you have recently received a warning from Google Webmaster Tools about suspicious inbound links to your site you are not alone… Google’s Tiffany Oberoi shared with the SMX West crowd in late February that Google has sent out over 700,000 messages via Webmaster tools in the first two months of 2012.  This number is unprecedented:  the first sixty days of the year has seen roughly as many messages as were broadcast in 2010 & 2011 combined.  Juxtapose this with the recent announcements from the Inside Search blog about the change in link evaluation and then by Matt Cutts during SXSW around Google’s intentions to discourage not reward over-optimization, and you can see where things are heading.

Google is well aware of the power they have over the SEO community and it’s their ambiguity that leads unseasoned marketers to scramble to make changes to their sites. Rule of Thumb: Until you have data that backs up Google’s claims, it’s better to not make a move.

There’s a lot of discussion buzzing around the community regarding this topic, so we’ve taken the last few days and discussed experiences and perspectives with several of our partners and colleagues across the industry to try and provide some clarity and context.  Our job as SEOs is not just to reverse engineer algorithms, but human intention as well.

Sorry to drag up what may amount as bad memories (for at least some of you) but that statistics class you took years and years ago:  remember type I and type II errors? Type I describes a false positive, and type II describes a false negative.  The easy example for this is to think of a base concept of our justice system: given a choice it is far more preferable to allow a dozen guilty persons to go free (Type II error) rather than accidentally hang one innocent person (Type I error).  This is the tacit cost of a free and just society.

This same logic has and always will be applied by search engines when it comes to suspicious links pointing to a website.  Since any site can link to anything, it’s difficult and risky for search engines to identify suspect third party website links and penalize the recipient.  If that were not the case, the SEO industry would (unfortunately) be filled with Google Bowling services building suspicious links to your competitors’ sites.

The search engines recognized this conundrum and long ago resigned to the reality of living with type II errors.  String every outwardly guilty looking site up by the neck with a penalty and pretty soon everyone will be hanging around with their feet off the ground… The only real thing the SE’s could do is discount links that appeared contrived.  And that’s been continual process over years and years.  Florida Update and the Hilltop filter long ago wiped out thematically irrelevant sites and A↔B linking schemes.  We’ve seen the rise and fall of effectiveness of services that offer automated link networks that utilize ad servers, link boxes (standalone anchor text links resting on the sidebars and footers often stacked up on top of one another), and the like.  Despite popular rhetoric, these kind of sloppy automated link building approaches don’t tend to cause penalties; they are just simply discounted by the algos and rendered moot.  We’re simply witnessing another aggressive step in this evolutionary process.

Reverse Engineering Human Intention

Naturally, Google has the ears and eyes of the search marketing world, and if you’re in Matt’s role and you must improve search quality, what do you do? Asking people to turn each other in didn’t work so well, so what is the next logical tried and true approach by leaders throughout history? Scare tactics! Google delivers in extremely vague messages along the lines of I know what you did Last Summer, but point out no specifics and as a result panic ensues!

You’re sure to get a percentage of folks to have a come-to-Jesus moment, report themselves, and request reconsideration.  They’re likely to not only acknowledge the things that were suspicious, but they may well additionally remove things that were not considered suspicious. You’ve almost got to admire this crafty textbook example of manipulating human psychology. Ladies and gentlemen we are in the middle of the Google Phishing Expedition of 2012 and you are the fish.

Of course a larger subset of recipients will not admit anything around removing existing links nor apply for reconsideration.  They may however have the fear of God Google scared into them and discontinue any future initiatives. Large volumes of vague and looming threats are going drive behavior change: it’s a smart play if you are working at a SE and your mission is to discourage artificial activities.

What’s the aftermath behind these emails?  In a small minority of cases rankings are eventually being affected.  There certainly a lot of articles posted to help companies seeking remedy from the cut corner tactics that have landed them in the Google pickle jar.  After conferring with several agencies and knowledgeable practitioners it’s apparent that a small percentage of sites that have been warned are subsequently seeing instances of certain head term rankings taking a hit a few weeks after receipt of these emails.  It’s important to note however that in most instances folks are reporting no noticeable consequence…

However, it is important to note that Google announced nearly 50 updates to Search at the end of March and many sites across many verticals experienced “flash crashes” in number of pages indexed and rankings during the middle and end of the month. I call these flash crashes because large portions of sites dropped off the face of the SERPs for as many as 4 days and rebounded completely. You can see this for yourself across many sites in the STAT Codex. As these are not clients of ours there is no telling whether these sites received Webmaster Tools messages or not. But, if a site has these flash crashes and has read news of the devaluation of link networks like BuildMyRank,  Google’s scare tactic might cause some sites to jump the gun and admit to artificial linking done in the present, past, or even distant past.

These emails aren’t forewarnings of an impending penalty.  Things are not plummeting fifty spots down, nor disappearing off the face of the Google universe. These hundreds of thousands of warnings are simply saying that there may be as little as one backlink pointing to a site that appears suspect. We even heard of one instance where a site that did some not so intelligent link building back in 2007, and has been stagnant for five years (no new activity at all), suddenly got a warning email last month. There’s no statute of limitations to be found here.

Whether there’s a slipping in ranking following the receipt of one of these letters has everything to do with the makeup of a domain’s backlink portfolio.  Whatever Google is deeming as ‘suspicious’ is now getting filtered out much more aggressively than in the past. If 1% of your backlinks is deemed suspicious and suddenly gets filtered, there’s not likely to be any effect.  If ~70% of your backlinks are suddenly whacked by this newer more aggressive filter, then yes, rankings will certainly slip significantly.

The kind of backlinks most exposed to this recent update are the over optimized insert-your-main-keyword–in-the-anchor-text-every-single-time kind. Until recently, these keywords were being considered by the SE’s, and for competitive head keywords they were often an important pillar for these sites to rank for hugely competitive queries. Now we are hearing weekly about one spammy, automated network after another being obliterated.  Many find it surprising it’s actually taken this long…

From our vantage point we see some basic commonalities existing from an off-page perspective when sites experience a significant ranking loss subsequent to a warning letter.  The sites commonly feature:

• Volumes of over optimized anchor text (generally to the most competitive head terms)
• Links coming from multiple outside websites which show clear signs of being networked (same IP or C-Block class, cross linking, same Google AdSense ID,same/similar coding or CMS technology – double check the links your vendor gets you using SpyOnWeb.)
• Poor overall deep linking ratio to the site
• Low quality sites (repurposed content) and off topic sites

So You’ve Been Baited by a Webmaster Tools Email: What Do You Do?

There are a lot of options on how to play this out, and a wide range of opinions on what to do.  There’s no perfect answer, but here are some thoughts:

1. You have the right to remain silent. Probably best to exercise this Miranda right.
   1. If the links in question are a small portion of your overall backlink portfolio, you will probably not face a serious threat to rankings or traffic. Ignore the email.
   2. If you have engaged in heavy over-optimization of anchor text links, and/or link building from heavily networked sites, you are not really penalized from these links; they’ve just stopped taking effect.  If it’s not a penalty, then turning yourself in for something artificial within your backlink portfolio is likely not going to help you.

One of the most important points to be clear on is the difference between a penalty, and filter.  Make sure that everyone on your team understands this critical difference.

 



2. If you have seen a large portion of your links suddenly become discounted and rankings are tanking, there’s no immediate fix.  Build the right expectations within your company to understand what has happened and what the timeline will be to remedy the situation. SEO Directors are witnessing things called out today from sloppy link building programs conducted by predecessors years ago.  Make it clear that these warnings may stem from activity from yesteryear, and sell folks on your plan to lead the domain (and the business!) to salvation.

 



3. (Re)Build your domain’s authority and trust the right way. Some sidesteps may have been taken to achieve an artificial level of authority for your most competitive keywords.  These shortcuts may have worked for some time, but now they do not.  A material percentage of (what was) your meaningful backlink portfolio has been lost.  Make up for that loss through proper link building initiatives that drive the process naturally.
   

 



4. The old school rules are the right rules. Nothing has changed. Go back to the old fashioned values, they work!  Develop citations and links from trusted sites that are independent of other sites you work with.  Your backlinks should be as independent and distributed as the SERPs themselves are.  Focus on domain authority and trust, not on anchor text optimization and keyword jockeying.  Stay away from automated approaches, networks, blog posts from school children in the Philippines…
   

 



5. Link Reclamation services are often essential. Reach out to the domains linking to you:  see if you can de-emphasize your anchor text or find some other way to work with the site owner.  Use this as an opportunity to promote new products or enhancements to your services.  Drive a higher natural deep link ratio: get more sites to link to a more diverse number of deep pages. Don’t discount the value of an experienced consultant or agency to do this right way and maximize the reclamation opportunity (yes, there goes our shameless plug).  You only want to reach out to websites that link to you once:  have the right conversation the first time- one shot!
   

The Last Word

Finally, understand that Google’s transparency is made to serve its own objectives. Stay aware of the announcements from the Google Search Quality team, but don’t treat them as gospel until you can verify what they’ve said with your own experiences and data.  Ultimately, we are all swimming in Google’s pond but it’s up to us decide whether we are going to swim with the school of fish caught in the net or if we’re going to be the whales that offset the tide.

For more information on the iAcquire process and insights on how to improve your own outreach link building download our Quantifying Outreach study now!