Happy Friday, everyone! I hope you all had a great week. Here are my five favorite marketing pieces from this week:
- Silk Road Was the Fastest Growing Online Marketplace Ever — Here’s Why – Ok, this post is pretty damn cool. Silk Road is an anonymous black market website for selling drug. (The founder was arrested and the FBI shut down the site. They opened Silk Road 2.0, the FBI shut it down, and then they opened 3.0.) Over $1.2 billion dollars was transacted through Silk Road 1.0 in a 2-year span and the business made $120 million in that same time. Most marketplace businesses can only dream of these kinds of numbers in their first 2 years. This post looks at Silk Road’s “secret sauce” and how any startup can use their strategy for success!
- How We Fought Webspam in 2015 – This is a quick but good read from Google Webmaster. Their search quality team makes sure that people who are searching for something are only presented with relevant, quality results—and not spam. They use algorithms and manual reviews “to ensure that sites don’t rise in search results through deceptive or manipulative behavior, especially because those sites could harm or mislead users.” This post shows their webspam insights from 2015, trends, how they’re fighting spam, etc.
- How to Get More Organic Traffic (FAST) – This awesome 7-minute video from Brian Dean shows you how to get more organic traffic in ways that you might not know. Most people think: keyword research, link building, on-page SEO. But Google is using a new ranking factor, and Brian explains this ranking factor as well as showing you a quick 3-step process to get more traffic from Google, a 2-minute tweak on competitive keywords, and the 8 words you need to have on any page for serious SEO.
- Google : End Of The Online Advertising Bubble – This excellent post from Kalkis Research is about how the online advertising market is becoming way too saturated and the consequences of this. Ad space is shrinking because more and more people are using ad blockers, so ad placement companies have not only started to display ads on lower-quality websites, but use pay-per-display advertising rather than of pay-per-click. This is not as efficient or easy to track, and Kalkis says that the smaller players are in danger of being wiped out.
In case you missed it:
Latest blogs from Growth Everywhere:
- GE 149: How High Spark Co-founder Eugene Cheng Got 1M Views On Just One SlideShare Presentation (podcast) – Interview with Eugene Cheng, co-founder of HighSpark, who shares the secret to how he got 3M total views on his SlideShare channels!
- The Turkish Rug Funnel (How A Rug Store Got Me To Shell Out A Few Thousand Dollars with ZERO Initial Interest) – I’m going to tell you a story about a beautiful rug that I purchased in Istanbul, Turkey. Why? Because this Turkish rug funnel is pure sales effectiveness.
Latest blogs from Single Grain:
- Here’s How Targeting Cold, Warm & Hot Traffic Builds Successful Customer Relationships – Not all digital marketers understand the difference between cold, warm, and hot traffic and how to best target each group. If you’re unclear on this and sending traffic to the wrong landing page, you’re missing out on valuable sales opportunities!
- What Is Digital Marketing? – The short answer is: digital marketing is an umbrella term for the marketing of products or services using digital technologies. Read on for the (epic) long answer!
