My friend said, “We always used a measuring cup to scrape out the innards.” The light went off in my head and I immediately got one out for him and one for me. We went at it and we had the pumpkins cleaned out in no time with no strings left over.

Since this was such a huge breakthrough for me I thought I’d look up some other pumpkin carving tips and here’s what I found. I hope you enjoy.

I especially liked the use of acronyms—was I the only one that had to look up what C.O.B. meant? It means Close Of Business (day).

Wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to increase ROI through SEO by the end of the day?  Unfortunately that is not reality.  It takes at least two days…at least;)

But hey, at least I know I can rent a B.I.G. car from National. Enjoy!

A recent post on Mashable.com by Alex Fitzpatrick talks about Obama’s Digital Team versus Romney’s Digital Team and which team might be the best at social media. It was mentioned that Obama’s team is seen as superior in the sense that Obama has significantly more followers on Twitter and Facebook (19.2 million and 28.1 million respectively). Romney currently has just over 1 million Twitter followers and 6.2 million Facebook followers .

Zac Moffatt, digital director at Mitt Romney for President says that those are “vanity” metrics and that the more important metrics are “actionable” metrics, when it comes to social media.  Zac goes on to say,

“It’s about quality over quantity. It doesn’t matter how many people you have following you if you don’t have people engaging with you.”

I agree with this. Especially since follower totals can be manipulated by spam accounts. I’m in no way suggesting that Obama is manipulating his follower counts. It’s simply a fact that all accounts have some level of spam accounts following them and therefore this metric in and of itself is meaningless. If you don’t believe me you can use this tool by Status People to find out how many fake followers you have on Twitter.

So what are these “actionable” metrics. Engagement metrics like comments, shares, likes, retweets, favorites, etc. Moffatt says that when the Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act came out, the Romney Facebook page had 27% engagement with their audience (with just under 5 million followers at the time). While Obama’s Facebook page had only 1.5% (with 27 million followers).

If you do the math on that, it is 405,000 of Obama’s audience engaging on his Facebook page and 1,350,000 of Romney’s. That’s 3.33 times more engagement on Romney’s page than Obama’s. While there could be other variables as to why there was more engagement on the Romney page than the Obama page, I think we could all agree that engagement is more important than number of followers.

I would also argue that actionable (engagement) metrics, in the end, aren’t the most important metric either. They are just better than vanity metrics. In the end it’s votes that matter. And in business it’s sales. I would bet, however, that there is a strong correlation between sales and engagement with your audience.

*For the record, I’m not voting for either Obama or Romney.

1. Procrastination
2. Zero-tasking
3. Failure
4. Not original
5. Poor networking
6. Do anything to get a “yes”
7. Poor judge of people

Go ahead and read it for yourself here: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Mediocre People

• 3.5 people search for the term “SEO” every second
• Los Angeles is the #1 city to search for “SEO” in the U.S.
• Thursday is the most popular day of the week for looking up SEO

An infographic by the team at BlueCaribu

]]> http://www.ioventuresinc.com/blog/how-many-americans-search-for-seo-each-month.htm/feed 0 http://www.ioventuresinc.com/blog/why-are-links-so-important.htm?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-are-links-so-important http://www.ioventuresinc.com/blog/why-are-links-so-important.htm#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 13:47:36 +0000 James Smyth http://www.ioventuresinc.com/?p=838 It can seem in the world of SEO that all that is focused on is getting links. While this may be true to a point this is not the main focus of SEO. The real reason that getting links is so important is to improve site authority. Imagine you are looking at a new pair of shoes. You ask yourself, “Will this do what I need it to?” “Will this fit my style?” “Can it last a long time?” Similar questions are asked if you are searching for information online.

A search engine has to try and answer these types of questions for you “Is this I am looking for?” “Does it provide me with enough relate information?” “Is this going to be useful in the future?” Well how does a search engine figure all that out. Well it uses a huge and fancy algorithm that is almost like magic which groups together web pages of a similar topic and then rates them in order of most relevant.

Getting into the category can be fairly simple. Make your site about a desired topic let the search engine find it and you are in. Getting to the top of that group is the hard part. Of course you have to offer good information that will be useful but even that won’t do it. Now back to the shoes. What if your friends told you those were a great pair of shoes, would that influence how you decided? What if it as a shoppers magazine? What about a Consumer’s Report? Each one of these adds a different type of value to the information you have and your overall decision. Then think about those recommendations you get from you don’t trust or is always selling junk. Would you trust those sources? Generally not.

Just like these recommendations for shoes that give you needed information and confidence a link does the same thing for a site. When other sites link to your site it says “I think this is important.” “I want to recommend it to others.” Getting one or two of these is a great start but what if all those in your category have 1,000 or even 10,000. Unless your link comes directly from Zeus that one recommendation doesn’t hold up against 1,000 recommendations very well. Also if the links you get are from spammy sources such as a site called diet-miracle-pill.com (not a real site) that just posts links on their pages to diet sites and that is all they do, not caring if the site is good or not, or true or not. ?Links like these are like recommendations that are from not as trusted sources. If the majority of your links are these kind of links it can really hurt your site.

So by getting more links (that are quality) you are basically getting more recommendations for your site. Get them to vary across different websites and you will be in business. Links are not everything but they do have a huge impact.

In the past it has been almost impossible to track your popularity on these Social sites. It would take hours and hours to comb through the sites or even the alerts you can set up. Recently though we have found a new service called Shared Count (http://sharedcount.com) that is great. You simply enter your URL and press enter and it takes it from there. Track the number of Facebook shares and Tweets your site has gain, it is interesting to trend this data and watch different marketing campaigns get more or less social attention. Tracking these stats can be powerful.

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What is tremendously popular in Japan and practically obsolete in the US?

Hello Kitty?

Sumo wrestling?

Nope. It’s QR Codes.

QR Codes (QR for Quick Response) are like  bar codes but are meant to be scanned by ordinary people (not check-out scanners) to quickly gather information from the digital world about the physical world. QR Codes can be scanned with cell phone cameras taking you to web pages without typing a single word.  Many free apps and non-smart phone software is available for scanning QR codes.
Imagine sitting at your favorite sandwich shop and wondering how many calories are in the delicious steak and everything sub you’re consuming. Snap a photo of the QR Code and voila! The complete nutritional information of your sandwich – without typing a word.

Or perhaps you’re perusing the record store wondering what the tour schedule is of the band whose album you’re ogling. Scan the QR Code and see a list of tour dates, song lyrics, or a MP3 free download.

Japan has been using QR Codes for years.  They’re present on everything from billboards to the takeout.

The use of QR Codes is limitless. I just wish the US thought so, too.

Here’s a report CBS did in March 2010 on QR Codes:

Scan the QR Code on this site for a free gift from ioVentures.

1. Start Early – Before we started this contest we tried to contact blog owners by email offering them a discounted service if they would publish a short post announcing our contest. About a week later when the contest was about to begin we had only heard back from one of the blog owners that we had contacted. We continued on with our contest announcing through other means we had previously decided on. The period of time we ran the contest was two weeks. By about a week and a half in we received a few more emails from the blog owners but by that time it was almost to late. We realized that some blog owners may not check their emails very frequently or that some were just busy and had more important things to do. If you are looking to run a contest I would suggest emailing those you wish to announce through early.

2. Do Your Research Before The Contest Starts - Another thing that we did before the contest started was research to find different forums that we could announce the contest on. We made a large list and then started registering to these forums so that we could post the topic of our contest. We discovered that with a lot of these forums you have to have to be a member for a certain period of time before they would allow you to post a new topic. So of the large list we compiled only a handful of them would allow us to post.

3. Make It Easy To Enter - When running a contest there are a few things that need to be done to have a successful contest. One thing that is very important is to make it easy to enter. If you have started early and had great success announcing your contest but the ways to enter are complicated or confusing chances are people are not going to waste their time on it. Even if the prize is something very appealing to the reader, they aren’t going to put in much time into figuring out what they need to do.  Also, depending on who your target audience is, you will want to gear your entry methods toward them and their general abilities and knowledge.

4. A Contest Run On A Blog Is Much Easier Than One Ran On A Website - The client, at this point in time, did not have blog associated with their business. We decided that we would run this contest by creating a new page on their website containing the information about the contest (prizes, rules, ways to enter, etc). The reason we found it easier to run a contest on a blog is because it is much easier to get readers to interact with a blog and enter a contest. Posting a comment on the blog was a huge success in our other contests. Also people who generally read and are associated with the blogging world are typically (not always) more familiar with the link building methods used to gain entries. To sum up our reasons for thinking it easier to run the contest on a blog, it is easier to put up the contest content and it is easier for the readers to interact and enter.

5.  Leverage The Losers - As we know, anytime there is competition there is a winner and a loser. In the case of a contest, often times there are many losers. These losers can be a great audience to target. For one, these losers have enough of an interest in the product or service that was being given away to have taken time out of their day to enter. One of the ways you could target this audience is by offering a small discount as thanks for participating.  This will not only help give you a good reputation but gives those that entered reason and incentive to come to you for your product or service. Also many times you will have their E-Mail addresses, You could occasionally send them a special offer or a product update to keep your company fresh on their mind for when they decide the time is right.

There is no instruction book that tells you exactly how to set up a contest, and there probably never will be. Every contest will be different because each contest is geared toward a variety of people. However, there are certain things that are general to every contest, and as you (and I) continue to run contests we will learn many things that will be beneficial to running a contest.