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Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Link to ShoeMoney

So, how much is bad SEO worth in a lawsuit and should you cash in?

Posted: 06 Aug 2013 07:00 AM PDT

It was bound to happen, an SEO company has been sued for allegedly providing, shall we say, less than then stellar search engine optimization results for their clients, clients who just happen to be law firms. I'm sure you can all guess where this is going.

The Rainmaker Institute provides search engine marketing and optimization for law firms. They market it through their retreats, seminars, books, CDs, etc.  Oh and in case you missed it, their footer also declares "Marketing Provider For Law Firms. Law Firm Internet Marketing. Law Firm Marketing Plans".  You know, just in case you have any questions about what they did, or more specifically, just to make sure Google really knows they do Internet marketing for law firms. And on their site map, again they clearly think Google can't figure out what they're doing and what they should be ranking them for, because of the bottom of the page again in little tiny print is "Attorney marketing plan, Civil rights attorneys marketing, Corporate lawyer marketing, Injury lawyer marketing,Iinternet marketing for lawyer, Law firm internet marketing, Law firm marketing plans, Legal marketing services, Lawyer marketing, Marketing for attorneys, Marketing for lawyers ,Law firm internet marketing, Legal marketing services, Law firm marketing plan, Marketing a law firm, Small law firm marketing".  Clearly the sign of an SEO company I'd want working on any of my sites… NOT. Oh, and in case you're wondering, I checked a few of the super important keyword phrases and The Rainmaker Institute is nowhere to be found anywhere near the top of Google's search results.

First of all, if you are a search engine optimization company and you are targeting law firms and knowing how many lawsuits law firms file, if I was offering them SEOs services, I would be pretty darn confident that what I was offering was going to help their search rankings, was not against Google guidelines, and wasn't get their sites banned or penalized with Google. But, apparently not.

The lawsuit shows that The Rainmaker Institute was providing link building as well as content. So the links were allegedly garbage, and the filing implies that they are coming from either blog spam or very poor quality blogs.  So they definitely weren't finely crafted and coming from your high-end, high trafficked blogs that Google had a lot of trust in. And not only that, the SEOs company continued to build the spamming links, knowing that Google had been penalizing these types of links (hence the fact it is a RICO lawsuit).

Then they also provided content services, where they were providing original content for law firms to place on their blogs. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that there content wasn't all that exclusive, and was republished on the multiple of their client sites. Now it's true, this probably goes on the lots, and a lot of companies don't actually go and check to see if someone else has published that same article they paid for elsewhere after the fact. In fact, that is what they're hoping, so that they can continue to resell the same article and not have to hire someone to write something new. It's the easy way to do it, providing known as actually looking and checking.

But aside from what the rainmaker Institute did or didn't do, you have to consider the fact that this is opening up a slippery slope.  In the past, shoddy SEO companies simply got a bad rep, sometimes found themselves bounced from Google for what they did for clients (such as the whole iAquire affair last year) but there are always more clients out there who could be tricked by flashy sales pitch, who aren't familiar enough with the industry to know the things they should look at when hiring in a SEO company.

Do you need to be worried about being sued for bad SEO? Well, if you are not producing hot results, it's definitely should be a big concern, especially if this turns into a hot coffee lawsuit where the defendants end up having to pay a bucket load of money to the former clients.  Nothing gets people thinking about suing more than someone else getting a shit ton of money for the exact same thing. Hell, I know some people right now that would love to sue their former SEOs, although in some cases, I think they'd rather see them tarred and feathered in public, much like iAcquire was.

What if you are the one to have been screwed by a bad SEOs company?  There could be money in it for not just suing for the price you paid for the SEO, but you could potentially make an argument for the loss of income related to the loss of rankings in Google or the outright banning Google. There could definitely be some money and that for someone who wants to take it on. Heck, if the company is big enough you could have a class-action lawsuit against a that SEO company that has duped a lot of clients.  If you’re savvy enough, you can probably make more money than you ever would’ve made if the site had number one rankings for whatever fancy term you want to rank for.

Do you think SEOs who are doing incredibly spammy SEO in the name of Google rankings should be sued? Would you advise clients to sue former SEOs, when you're trying to clean up the mess left behind?  Or should it be not doing your due diligence in researching a company before you hire them to mess with your website baby.  Or do you think a public shaming like iAcquire is better, because I know many people who would love to see some specific SEOs companies hung out to dry.

ProBlogger: Jeremy Schoemaker’s Ninja Tricks for Long Form Sales Pages

ProBlogger: Jeremy Schoemaker’s Ninja Tricks for Long Form Sales Pages

Link to @ProBlogger

Jeremy Schoemaker’s Ninja Tricks for Long Form Sales Pages

Posted: 05 Aug 2013 08:10 AM PDT

This is a guest contribution from  Stephan Spencer.

Web entrepreneur and founder of hugely successful ShoeMoney Media Group and the Shoemoney blog, Jeremy Schoemaker has found incredible success in the use long form sales pages. Although at an early point in his web-marketing career he questioned the effectiveness of such approaches, once he actually started using long form sales pages to market his online products, he was amazed by their success.

Surprisingly, they work.

People actually take the time to read the page and become familiar with the product you are offering. And if you're still hesitant to believe this, consider that Jeremy uses these pages to generate well over a million dollars in annual infoproduct revenue.

The long form sales page alone won't necessarily make you millions, but the use of Jeremy Schoemaker's personal Ninja tricks to optimize your page will take you well on your way to online riches.

Ninja Trick #1

Pre-populate fields on your sales page 

Pre-populate your sales page using information you have already gathered from people visiting the site. This will shorten the time it will take to fill out the form and decrease the amount of effort visitors to your site will have to put forth.

Some information you can gather from affiliates, like the visitor's email. The affiliate will encode it, you can decode it, and then on the actual form when people submit it, you can pre-populate their name and their email. You can do that for all sorts of information based on whether the user sends that information.

You rarely see pre-population in action, but it helps conversion incredibly because of the amount of people that type in their email or name wrong or make an error filling out the form for whatever reason.

In addition, you can use geo-targeting data to help you pre-populate location-based data. You can fill in the state they live in and the city for the most part. By the time you are done pre-populating fields for the visitor on the form there are only a small number of boxes they will have to do themselves. It makes signing up convenient and simple, thus increasing the likelihood of conversion.

Ninja Trick #2

Take actions based on the merchant response code

In addition to information you can gather from affiliates, be sure to take advantage of the information you can gather from your merchants. When you're logging this stuff in real time, you can see that some of the merchant response codes give you valuable information. For example, a 201 code means "insufficient funds" and a 202 code means their "credit card is over the limit".

This is interesting in that you can pitch that potential customer instantly at a lower price point if they qualify, offering them a special deal, knowing that they would be unlikely to purchase at full price. A message like "Congratulations! You've been randomly selected to receive 50% off!" would help to legitimize your offer.

In addition, if you see a number of visitors fail to sign up due to language difficulties or for whatever reason, it may be beneficial to automatically take them to a PayPal checkout or to show them a PayPal icon on the page. These consumers may not have a credit card readily available, but they tend to have a PayPal account.

It is important to use the merchant codes to your advantage, so you can take advantage of otherwise lost sales.

Ninja Trick #3

Include international traffic first

If you are going to do an offer like this and you're going to optimize it, Jeremy highly recommends including international traffic first. This is because you can get it for around 12-13 cents CPM and it will actually help you to optimize, using very cheap traffic.

You could look at this like a "cart before the horse" scenario: you can't really optimize until you have traffic, but you don't want to buy traffic until it's optimized. International traffic helps you solve this conundrum.

Ninja Trick #4

Make use of Visual Website Optimizer 

Visual Website Optimizer is Google Analytics Content Experiments (formerly known as Google Website Optimizer) on steroids. You can tell it which URLs you want people to go to and assign goals to it just like you would do with Google. However, while Google's tool has problems with delay and cross-domain tracking, Visual Website Optimizer excels at those things.

The best thing about Visual Website Optimizer is that it is amazingly simple to set up.  It offers a simple interface to continually edit and optimize your pages through real time multivariate testing. Changes are made as soon as you save, so it eliminates the painful delay you can have with other testing tools.

Once you load in everything you want to test, Visual Website Optimizer will try out all your variables in varying combinations and then hone in on the very best performing combinations and only run those, cancelling out the poor performers.

This is really what Google Analytics Content Experiments should be, and it will help your optimization efforts incredibly.

Ninja Trick #5

Make use of ClickTale

ClickTale tells the story of what your visitors are doing. It records the sessions of each visitor to your site so you can see exactly how they interact with its elements and its sales form. You are also able to create funnels and perform form analytics that identify the stumbling blocks on your form (where people are constantly having trouble) and demonstrate how your form converts.

ClickTale records each person that visits your site, allowing you to watch their session and see in real time how they interact with your page.  It also combines all of those sessions into heatmaps so you can see where people are moving their mouse on your site.

In addition it shows JavaScript errors that your sales pages may exhibit. It will show you the error, what page it was on, and offer you a chance to replay that and see the popup box the visitor received. This will help you build a bulletproof sales page that works on every browser.

The online world is very competitive, so every little advantage helps. Whatever gives you that extra edge, use it, because the competition doesn't play by the rules. Jeremy's aforementioned Ninja techniques will help you gain this advantage and thrive online.

Stephan Spencer is co-author of The Art of SEO, now in its second edition, and author of Google Power Search. He is the founder of SEO agency Netconcepts, acquired by Covario in 2010, and inventor of automated pay-for-performance SEO technology platform GravityStream. He is a contributor to the Huffington Post, Multichannel Merchant, Search Engine Land, Practical Ecommerce, and MarketingProfs.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
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Jeremy Schoemaker's Ninja Tricks for Long Form Sales Pages