Interview with Cracked Columnist John Cheese

John Cheese talks SEO

Cracked columnist and longtime internet comedy writer John Cheese put out a call for interviews recently, and I jumped at the chance to talk to him. Out of all the writers on Cracked, a site I have been fairly addicted to since about 2007, John Cheese has probably spent the most time eloquently weaving his own life experiences into his always funny and often moving columns.

John ended up really driving home a rather simple yet all-encompassing idea that we have adopted as a mantra at Search Influence: fresh content is king. It really doesn’t matter whether you are advertising a novel, a list-based comedy site, or a small business anywhere in the world – if you can produce quality content that people find interesting on a regular basis, everything else will fall into place. It doesn’t hurt if you are as insightful, funny, and talented as John is either.

Take a look at the results of my email interview with John Cheese:

New Kid on the Social Media Block - How to Generate Brand Awareness and Valuable Links using Pinterest

As an admittedly addicted Pinterest user, I’d like to clear up a few things about the relatively young social media site and its potential use for marketing and SEO linkbuilding. With Pinterest quickly rising in popularity, I’m constantly hearing it referred to as a social bookmarking tool for sharing images.  Pinterest is in fact a social bookmarking tool, but it is not only about the images. The site allows users to “pin” or save links to external sites in an organized way, with few limits to what type of site or image can be pinned.  Users can save anything from a favorite blog post to products they love, from recipes to tutorials. Each and every pin not only pulls in an image, but also a do-follow link back to the source site! Can you smell the SEO potential yet? The brilliance of Pinterest is that it combines some of the most compelling features of social media in general: visually stimulating content and the opportunity to share your ideas, interests and inspiration. Upon signing up, users are provided with fully customizable “pin boards” and can easily find friends to follow using the Facebook and Twitter connected features.

As a marketing tool, Pinterest has great potential for small retail businesses that may have a hard time competing in search results. For example, a local boutique clothing store may find it incredibly difficult to outrank Macy’s and Saks in the SERPs for a keyword like “New Orleans shopping.” When users find something they like (usually pinned by someone they follow and are influenced by), chances are they will, at the very least, click the source link. Everyday I’m introduced to new brands and products on Pinterest, and more than once I’ve used what my friends are pinning as inspiration for making purchases. There are currently few brands using Pinterest, but with its popularity and the site’s high (and still growing) domain authority, all signs are pointing to increased use by brands and businesses in the near future.

A few tips for putting Pinterest to work for your brand:

Google+ Opens For Businesses — Potential And How To Get Your Face In The SERPs

Are we not men?

The new kid on the block has opened itself to businesses in two principal ways. Unlike Facebook, which focuses on admin-managed pages, and Twitter, which couldn’t care less if a person, place, or animal is represented in a feed, Google initially maintained its focus on people in its business-level implementation of its social network, not announcing any kind of branded pages. Then Monday’s announcement of Facebook-style business pages opened a new avenue for marketers, if only those in selected niches. Both new tools allow for the implementation of the “authority” metrics hinted at in numerous Google quality documents.

Take A Breath Before You Tweet, OR: Internet ADD Wrecks the Good Ship Netflix

Jeez, it’s been practically seven minutes since I checked for new notifications on Facebook. Refresh, nothing. Ohhh, there’s a picture of a kid I vaguely knew from high school and now he’s linking his tweets into the Facebook feed, let me click over there. Do I follow Kim Kardashian or just Khloe? Any new tweets from the Biebs?

Netflix Pulls Plug on Qwikster

You may recall that we were mulling over the whole Netflix situation only a few weeks ago, which has seemed to be getting more ridiculous ever since the company announced pricing changes in July that made users choke on their dinners. Twice the price for what they were getting before? Streaming-only services? People were just starting to recover, but Netflix had clearly spent a lot of time sitting alone in the dark listening to sad music; they knew they hadn’t pleased their audience. And so they decided to try to make it better (which as, many men can attest to, never works).

Social Media For Readers and Writers: Cursor Takes the Publishing Industry To The Next Level

Is the traditional trade paperback and remainder-bin production model of books doomed? With new devices for the digitization of books appearing every day, from the freshly-announced Kindle Fire to slick iPad e-reader apps, the conclusion that the publishing industry will soon go the way of the dodo is easy to come to. After all, literacy rates are plummeting, book sales are down and one of the original giants of big-box retail bookstores has recently crashed and burned in a spectacular fashion. Despite the failing numbers of traditional methods of publication, there are more novels and poems and stories and essays being written and consumed now than ever before. In the face of the instant-gratification model the Internet provides, where does the written word go from here? Richard Nash, former editor of Soft Skull Press, has an idea.

Starting Out on Facebook: Small Business Marketing Solutions or Useless Sales Pitch?

That's some brand love.

A few weeks ago, Facebook Marketing Solutions, the advertising side of the social media giant, released its new education portal for small businesses just starting out online, titled Facebook for Business.

Kenneth Cole/Cairo Twitter Debacle: Businesses Learn A Valuable Social Media Lesson

Last month, the world saw their attention turned to Egypt and watched media coverage unfold as its citizens protested in an effort to force long-term President Hosni Mubarak out of office. Subsequently, and like most hot button topics, the issue carried over to both Facebook and Twitter and lingered on them for several weeks.

Radiohead and Social Media: The Twitterized Release of “The King of Limbs”

The members of Radiohead are a private bunch, often very selective with their interviews and keeping low-profile lives in their hometown of Oxford, England. As such, the press scrambles over every utterance that the band might put forth, which isn’t much. But their online presence, long established, is staggering. Their website, entitled “Dead Air Space,” has gone through countless incarnations, including wormholes of old information about their previous art and music. It primarily serves as the band’s blog, strewn with “office charts” of the music they’re listening to and links to new music or websites of political and social issues. Some of the members keep more-or-less active Twitter accounts, including one for the band itself, and the people they follow seem to form some of their inner circle, like the artist Stanley Donwood, amongst others.

Are Facebook Ads for All Businesses?

Facebook Ads. Are You Doing it Right?

Recently a slew of articles have been popping up about the ineffectiveness of Facebook advertising. While we recently touched on this subject in a previous blog post, I thought I would explain why this statement has little credence when Facebook ads are done properly. If you’ve read any of our previous FB blog posts, you are aware that for Search Influence, Facebook yields a low cost per lead making it one of our most effective ways to drive leads to clients’ sites. With that being stated, I can proceed to explain (in a Clarissa-esque manner) why Facebook is effective and ineffective for some online marketers and industries.