Ibis Studio Search News – August 2013

The Ultimate Disrupter is At It Again

Fortune magazine called Amazon.com founder, Jeff Bezos, the ultimate disrupter when he was chosen as its 2012 Businessperson of the Year. Last week, Bezos bought The Washington Post newspaper, a premier brand in the content world, for $250 million. In a memo to Post employees, Bezos wrote that he’s “excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention.”

“The Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs,” he wrote. “There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy.”

Print newspaper is a dying media. So what could Bezos be thinking? Time magazine reporter David Von Drehle speculates that Bezos is “unlikely to spend precious time and capital on trying to re-create the old bundle in pixels while it clings to life in print. Instead, he is likely to look for ways to break it up and give people the content they value in whatever form they want it—for a price.”

Looks like Bezos is getting ready to shake up the newspaper industry! We’ll have to wait and see what opportunities will be opened up for content marketers.

Your Chance to Brag a Little

Effective SEO campaigns are built on content marketing. Press releases can be used as content for an SEO campaign, and they can include numerous mentions of the brand, products, services and anything else that the company wants to promote.

In bygone days, a press release was mailed, faxed or emailed to people in the news media for the purpose of announcing a newsworthy item. Members of the news media decided whether or not they would run with the story. Not every press release made news.

Now, we have online press release services. Some charge a sizable fee to publish the release and distribute it to a network of news sites. Others publish the release on their site for little or no charge. Posting a press release on a free or low cost site is a cost-effective way to add diversity to an SEO campaign.

Websites that post articles and guest blogs typically don’t allow much self-promotion. Press releases are all about self-promotion and branding. And, it’s really OK to brag!

Get Creative with PPC

Recently, Google made improvements to its extension capabilities and the ease with which extensions can be managed in the Adwords dashboard.

Call Extensions allow you to display your phone number in your ad. Smartphone users can click to call from their mobile devices. Sitelink Extensions link directly from the ad to specific pages on your website, saving customers from having to click around to find the page they want. Location Extensions allow you to include your business address, phone number and a link to a map reference in your ad. App Extensions provide a link to an app, making it easy for searchers to automatically download the app. With Offer Extensions, you can attach an offer to your ad. A click on the view offer button goes to a Google hosted landing page where the customer can print or save the offer.

With so many PPC options and opportunities, some businesses have figured out ways to be extremely creative on a limited budget. For example, a well known company bid on misspellings of commonly searched terms—Read this article to find out what happened and maybe you’ll be inspired to get creative with PPC.