Angela Booth’s Creativity Factory

Wherever there’s money to be made, people will try to scam the system.

TechCrunch has just published an excellent article about click fraud on Facebook. It’s scary the lengths to which scammers will go.

Facebook Click Fraud 101 reports:

“So the bad guys just create thousands of fake Facebook accounts with a wide variety of demographic information. This sounds like a lot of work, but it’s highly automated. One advertiser told me how he paid $200 to an Indian operation for 2,000 Facebook accounts. Another said the going rate was just $10 per 100 accounts if you supply the unique email accounts. Once the accounts are created, they use software to fill out the varied demographic information, and that software also manages all these accounts.”

New to Web marketing? Your first task is to create a Website. This may seem a complex task, but it’s not. In this article we’ll discuss four basic types of Web content, so this information is useful even if you already have a site.

1. Structural Web Content: What Your Site Visitors Expect to See

A site’s basic content (your home page, About page, Contact and Privacy pages) is structural Web content. This is content which every site needs; it’s uninspiring, but necessary.

Are you new to copywriting? If you’re new to writing copy, there’s one vital question you must answer. It’s easy to miss answering this, because it seems so obvious to you. It’s far from obvious to anyone reading your copy however.

Here’s the question: “Why should I buy from you?”

In a sense, if any of your readers ask this question, you’ve already failed, because before they get to your sales pitch, they should be warm. You warm up your customers by pre-selling them.

(That’s mostly outside the scope of this article, but see tip #3.)

“Twitter is stupid, it’s a waste of time…” This is the response I often get from my marketing clients when I introduce them to Twitter, the social media micro-blogging tool. Then I give them four reasons they should be tweeting.

Here they are.

1. Twitter Increases Your Brand’s Credibility Online

Twitter helps you to answer several important questions, such as:

* “Who are you?”

* “Who else does business with you?”

* “Can I trust you?”

Never underestimate the importance of answering these questions: not once, but many times.

Is great Web content enough for SEO? In an ideal world, just as virtue is its own reward, great content should be enough to get you both links and traffic, and conversions.

Unfortunately these days however, it’s not.

A few years ago when I started a new blog, I’d add content, and just like magic, traffic would appear. Then everyone got the “content!” blog, and suddenly great content went unread. In any competitive niche, content is growing like mushrooms after rain, there’s a lot of it around, which means you need to make an extra effort.

Still wondering whether you should dip your marketing toes into the Twitter stream?

You won’t know whether it works for your products and services until you try it.

Here’s an interesting story. What’s Ghetto? Pushing Digital Album Sales On Twitter (Video) reports:

“On a panel at the 140 Characters Conference yesterday, Xavier Jernigan (@xjernigan, the director of digital marketing at Universal Motown Republic, described how Twitter help put one of his new artists, Asher Roth (@asherroth), on the map.”

Here are three benefits of social media marketing:

Are you obsessive about your content? It turns out that rather than using PageRank sculpting, you may be better off creating more good content.

SEO Newsletter - FEATURE: Matt Cutts on Nofollow and the Siloing Solution reports:

“According to Matt Cutts, PR sculpting may not be worth it. SEOs now have to contend with at least two reasons why PageRank sculpting is a largely inefficient use of resources. First, most pages on the Web have a low level of PageRank and a high number of outbound links. In this scenario, when the nofollow attribute is used on a handful of links, only a small amount of additional PageRank is allocated. The potential PageRank gain is worth arguably less than the effort required to implement PageRank sculpting. Second, pages lose PR when the nofollow attribute is used. Together these two facts support Matt’s statement that PageRank sculpting may not be the best use of time.”

Over the past few months, Twitter has become mainstream. It’s featured in news stories, and celebrities have their staff tweet for them.

But has it the potential to be a source of traffic greater than Google as this article reports?

Fred Wilson: The Value Of Twitter Is In “The Power Of Passed Links” reports:

“Wilson predicts that at current growth rates, Twitter ‘will surpass Google [as a source of traffic] for many websites in the next year.’ And that just as nearly every site on the Web has become addicted to Google juice, they will increasingly try to find ways to get more links from Twitter. Because Twitter equals traffic. (We’ve noticed a similar trend at TechCrunch, where Twitter is now our second largest outside source of traffic after Google). “