SUCCESS! Slow and steady wins the race...

Just two months after the launch of our OP Marketing & Social Media Blog (an earlier ideaLab project that I apparently failed to blog about...), we're celebrating some small successes. 

To backtrack a bit, the blog was designed as an SEO experiment and indirect sales tool for advertising reps. Using Search Engine Optimized keywords, the posts are built to both offer free marketing advice from the sales reps and indirectly promote relevant OP products. For example, the post that discusses using geography to target the most relevant customers is immediately followed by a post featuring Yahoo! Geo-targeted advertising. 

And then to drive traffic to the site, we compiled an e-mail list of current and prospective advertisers to send out a monthly Marketing Tips e-blast. Our first e-blast (which was officially sent out to advertisers yesterday), featured some clips from current posts and will redirect users to the site to read the full article. The e-blasts themselves won't actually contain any form of advertising or promotions; it's simply to offer marketing tips to our advertisers and to drive traffic back to the blog (and thus, the indirect sales tool).

And now onto our successes...

On Sunday, January 30th (happy birthday to me...), a user entered our blog from Google on the organic search term "Marketing Workshop Oakland", landing on a post from January 18th featuring an invitation to our free SEO seminar to promote Matchbin products, just in time to sign up for the workshop!

Then just this week I noticed that another user entered the site on the search term "geo targeted advertising". Out of curiousity, I then Googled "geo targeted advertising" to find our blog nestled comfortably on the first page of search results! According to Google's free keyword tool, that particular term is searched approximately 170 times per month on average. So what does that mean for us? Potentially 170 new Yahoo! customers!

Selling Backlinks

After several requests from advertisers for backlinks on our newspaper sites, I started looking into options to monetize that opportunity. Since our banner ads are all served through ad tracking software, the clickthrough links are hidden and do not serve the purpose of a backlink. 


So the next best solution was to use our online article space for "advertorials". However, when I tested this option last April, the backlink was still not showing up in Google's index after about 6 weeks active on our site. And then I found this...


theoaklandpress.com/robots.txt

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /shared-content/
Disallow: /articles/*/*/*/ara/*/*.txt
Disallow: /*.prt$
Disallow: /*.eml$
Crawl-delay: 10

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /shared-content/
Disallow: /articles/*/*/*/ara/*/*.txt
Disallow: /*.prt$
Disallow: /*.eml$
Crawl-delay: 3

User-agent: MSNBot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /shared-content/
Disallow: /articles/*/*/*/ara/*/*.txt
Disallow: /*.prt$
Disallow: /*.eml$
Crawl-delay: 3

User-agent: Slurp
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /shared-content/
Disallow: /articles/*/*/*/ara/*/*.txt
Disallow: /*.prt$
Disallow: /*.eml$
Crawl-delay: 3

User-agent: Yahoo-Newscrawler
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /shared-content/
Disallow: /articles/*/*/*/ara/*/*.txt
Disallow: /*.prt$
Disallow: /*.eml$
Crawl-delay: 3

User-agent: YahooYSMcm
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /shared-content/
Disallow: /articles/*/*/*/ara/*/*.txt
Disallow: /*.prt$
Disallow: /*.eml$
Crawl-delay: 10

User-agent: Teoma
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /shared-content/
Disallow: /articles/*/*/*/ara/*/*.txt
Disallow: /*.prt
Disallow: /*.eml
Crawl-Delay: 5

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Any thoughts??