I believe in community involvement as marketing. Commenting and adding value to forums, commenting in and creating compelling blogs and email newsletters, interviewing community members, writing articles and answering questions are all excellent methods of marketing (well, for one of my clients at least - I’m not here to make one-tactic-fits-all statements 
.
And so it was with interest that I read Aaron Wall’s post What Communities Does Your Site Belong In?
Wall presents the hypothetical and highly likely concept of community relevance, something that, with the rise of social search, we are likely to begin experiencing this year (especially if Yahoo can get its act together).
I believe that my community-involvement theory could use some ninja-fication from Boykin, though unfortunately in his post on Link Ninjas vs. Linkbaiters he doesn’t talk to much about strategies. Boykin posts
“A Link Ninja can control what pages get the link…and can get links to specific pages , homepage, product pages, etc….A link Baiter gets a link to a great content page mostly….but it’s not usually the page the site owner really wants to rank for anything.”
I’d counter that though by asserting that a strong content page should at least seek email newsletter and feed reader subscriptions, so if you’ve got your subscription-fu working your linking ninjitsu skills can slack slightly.
And I’m not exactly clear from what he wrote but suspect he’s largely indicating that if you know what site’s the most important to get links from in your industry you should be prepared to get on the phone and start talking with folks from that site about exactly why and how they should link to you. And how much you should pay them I suspect. Am I right Jim?
So underscoring the importance of strong, link pulling content this week we see a job opening from Todd Malicoat for a position I’ve long thought would be coming - the editorial marketer. Or Content Manager/ Linkbait Writer as he calls it
And just so you don’t think that I’m going to write about linking all week this week too here are my takeaways from Aaron Wall’s takeaways from Gord Hotchkiss’s “Enquiro Eye Tracking Report II: Google, MSN and Yahoo! Compared”
“On average for Google and Yahoo the ads are viewed as more relevant than the organic results.”"We like to scan things in groups of 3s.”
“We scan for information scent rather than fully analyzing, with a bias toward a semantic map that matches our goals.”
And here’s a brief Wall business building meditation on “unique data sources = profit”
And if you’re a crafty geek like me (I silk screen and make comics) you will dig the opening of a brick and mortar Etsy. Check out Etsy labs.
Being that you’re a search marketer you’re also likely to enjoy chewing on the fact that:
Google Moving Into In-Game Advertising; In Talks To Buy AdScape Media.
Posted on January 22, 2007
