scarcity

There are 2 posts tagged scarcity (this is page 1 of 1).

Reading Best of inbound: January

I can remember when inbound.org launched publicly in February this year. It’s a great site, like hacker news for online marketing – however, sadly with less discussions. Even if you read inbound daily, you may miss some article or forget another over time – so I decided, to read the top 25 (up to 50) most popular each month and summarize the insightful ones. Like always, these are mainly notes, i.e. I won’t write down things that I talked about before. Enjoy!

Introducing Scrape Rate – A New Link Metric

  • Scrape rate: number of intitle:“your post title” / number of checked posts (at least 1 month old)
  • Guest blogging: host blog with high readership vs. blog with high scrape rate

Google+ SEO: The Ultimate Guide
Great guide, however extremely long. Check it out, if you’re interested.

Strategic Link Building: Why You Don’t Need To Outrun Lions

  • SEO isn’t about cracking Google – it’s about beating your competitors for a keyword
  • SERP and competitor analysis should be a key component
  • Look into more developed country markets to see the future of your country market
  • The rest of the article is an interesting case study

Second Tier Link Building for ROI

  • Links aren’t just useful for SEO
  • For example, an article reviews your product, ranks quite high
  • If you push that article, it may rank higher and gives you more referral traffic and conversions
  • Often low competition => just push the article instead of your own site, esp. if the article just reviews your product alone

21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic

  • Use AdPlanner to find related sites / communities
  • Create graphics / illustrations that can be shared
  • Conduct keyword search for writing posts
  • Reference to useful other posts (internal & external(!))
  • Guest post and invite guest blogger: http://myblogguest.com/
  • Interact with other people: social media, commenting, boards, etc.
  • Create contests, ranking and similar vanity objects
  • Competitive intelligence(!)
  • Don’t give up

Why These 3 Ranking Factors Matter (but Nobody Seems to Care About)

  • Authorship Markup: builds trust & stands out; How to add author information in search results
  • Freshness: content change of page, new links, age of page
  • Category Authority: Focus on a very narrow topic, create tightly linked content, build links

How to increase the odds of your content going viral

  • The right format: easy to find, compelling visuals, print version gets more shared – make them the standard
  • Get buying from your influencers before you publish it
  • Get content from influencers: reviews, survey, opinion, lessons learned
  • Topic, Timing, Seeding: Topical news, Mo – Thu for B2B
  • Analyze everything and test!

Golilocks SEO

  • Start with mid- to longtail keywords on new sites and go into highly competitive keywords later on
  • Mix keywords, related words and synonyms
  • Split your budget into content and marketing for the content
  • Grow your site strategically using data from analytics & CI
  • Diverse anchor texts
  • Point links to the most relevant pages & boost pages that need more attention
  • Mix different link qualities
  • Gradually build new links and try to get viral campaigns going

5 Forms of Scarcity

  • Classic limited stock: “only 2 books left”
  • Geographically limited stock: “currently out of stock at the store in Boston, but in stock online”
  • Real time scarcity: basically all flights
  • Auctions: Holland, English, n-price auction, etc.
  • Treasure hunts / limited offers

#55/111: Influence

What is it about?

What influences your decisions? What have citizens’ action committee and Chinese communists in common? Robert B. Cialdini writes about different studies which analyzed how people’s decisions are influenced.

What can I learn?

Rejection-then-retreat: This technique is often applied. You request something greater to get a smaller thing done. Let’s imagine that you sell dining tables. You could take your customer to the cheapest table in the hope that he will buy that, at least. Or you could take him to the most expensive, which he will probably reject and then move to cheaper ones. Not really surprisingly the second approach works far better. However, it is surprising that your customer will also be more satisfied because you retreated.

Lowballing: This is an interesting technique outside of business, where it is probably illegal. Cialdini talks about an experiment where citizen signed for an initiative to make their city prettier. Some weeks later they were asked if they would offer their garden to place a huge sign saying “please drive slower for your own safety”. Many more people accepted who signed for the initiative than those who didn’t. Why? Signing the initiative shifted their self-perception to being a responsible citizen. More interesting, the Chinese communists used the same technique for prisoners in the Korean war.

Social proof: This one is relatively well-known. Cialdini quotes a statistics that says that about 95% of all people are followers, i.e. if they see that most people use a product, they will also use it. If you take a step further and apply scarcity it will become more interesting. So, we got a product that people want but there isn’t enough for everybody. The triggered response will probably to buy the product as fast as possible.

Conclusion

What a great book! There are lots of insights and awesome stories, raging from door-to-door sales people to Chinese communists in war to a doomsday cult which was infiltrated by two psychology professors. If you haven’t read this book yet, go to Amazon, your next bookstore or the next library and read it! Recommendation!