Comments on: SEO Guerilla Marketing

By: Living On Dividends

Living On Dividends — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 21:01:16 +0000

He does seem to be doing great for himself these days with theoatmeal.com. It’s funny when family passes links to his content to me and they don’t even know this backstory. It’s just that viral.

RE how he launched the quizzes initially before they went viral, I know he posted the quizzes on the homepage of his first dating site, which was already receiving some traffic so people found them there initially before they spread like wildfire. I’m sure he did other promotions too, email, Twitter, etc, but I don’t know those specifics. That said, if you were to do this nowadays, it’d be even easier to get it going virally b/c you can leverage Facebook likes to spread it widely, some of these people will be bloggers, and then it’ll enter the blogosphere, which is where you want it.

Google slap is always a risk. But you don’t have to always include the link with the embed code you offer to visitors. If you want to start slowly, you could set up a PHP random function to only display the link in the embed code to X% of visitors, let the links build slowly, and gradually increase the % of times that you include the link with the embed code given to visitors. Building slowly is key. I go one step further and use a PHP random function to vary the anchor text too. The embedded content definitely needs to be related to your site one way or another. That’s the biggest mistake IMO.

It’s def a risk, but sometimes is worth taking. When Google dropped John Chow from the index for selling links, he just kept promoting and marketing his site. After a while, he and his brand became so well known that Google looked stupid for not show him in search results. And THAT is really what Google doesn’t want. They don’t want to look stupid. So they eventually made amends and re-included his site. So it’s always a risk. But if John hadn’t done it, would he be just another unknown IM wannabe? Probably.

By: Andrew @ Cyber Sequencer

Andrew @ Cyber Sequencer — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 22:38:57 +0000

How was Matt able to get those quizzes initially in front of so many eyeballs if he didn’t spend any money? Did he post them on forums, send them to friends? That is the key piece of information missing from this awesome SEO tale.

I would think that even if someone could use this same strategy today with a brand new website, they would be punished by Google because of so many links in such a short period of time to a new website.

Interesting to see that Matt is now doing theoatmeal.com considering all of his funny quizzes.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 00:44:31 +0000

Now THAT is creativity. You have to think ahead of the curve like that to win! Great article!

By: Great example of making money doing what you love.

Great example of making money doing what you love. — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 17:54:46 +0000

[...] are backlinks by spreading online quizzes……this was an article linked to from one of his sites SEO Guerilla Marketing | Living On Dividends He has a great site though….I know I was researching SEO stuff for my site and ended up wasting [...]

By: SEO Wanna Be

SEO Wanna Be — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:23:18 +0000

Hi your post is amazing, It’s incredible, I learned a lot about SEO and Man, this thing’s getting better and better as I learn more about internet marketing. Also as part of my ongoing mission to find the absolute best tools to make money, this is without a doubt at the top of my list. Everything happened so fast!

By: AskMichaelHart.com

AskMichaelHart.com — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:56:49 +0000

This was an excellent summary of the effective genius of taking on web 2.0 strategies and seo to effectively dominate a market most importantly, without a marketing budget other than sheer leverage of the search engines through white hat seo techniques.

Its one of the most exciting adaptations I plan to yield for any longterm seo strategy I implement for my existing businesses, or my clients.

Cheers Matt!