Hearst is one of the largest traditional media empires around. I’m talking about major brands such as Car and Driver, ESPN, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Hearst owns newspapers, magazines, TV stations, and more. As a savvy media company, Hearst is now involved in online marketing. It makes perfect sense, the statistics are staggering. More and more online media is being consumed each year. Of particular interest, Hearst now operates an online marketing agency and I feel that the way they are marketing their agency via PPC is quite unique.
In the screenshot below, you can see that I searched for “PPC Ian”. I like to search my own name from time to time to make sure my PPC ad is displaying properly. You can never sanity check things enough, and that’s why I have Six Essential Campaign Checks that I run multiple times each day.
The search results in the screenshot show both myself and SF Gate showing up. What is SF Gate? It’s a cool, local website here in the SF Bay Area. I’m quite familiar with SF Gate and have been to the site before. I was surprised to see SF Gate displaying on a PPC-related term and I assumed the SF Gate ad broad matched to the “PPC” in my name. After seeing who was advertising, I started reading the ad and it piqued my interest. I had no idea that SF Gate offered online marketing services.
Upon clicking the ad, I landed on a page within the SF Gate website illustrating the Bay Area Hearst Media Services agency (you can check out the landing page here). I guess SF Gate is owned by Hearst. I personally feel the landing page could target a higher conversion rate, maybe with a prominent email capture. However, that’s not the core takeaway here.
Hearst Could have just sent this traffic to their core website for Hearst Media Services. However, they instead decided to send the traffic to a local brand, SF Gate. I think this is quite the strategy. Here in the Bay Area, I’m sure more people have heard of SF Gate than Hearst Media Services. They are leveraging their well-known, local brand name to draw the user in and then introduce them to Hearst Media Services. I really like this strategy and feel like it’s a great way to leverage an existing portfolio of local brands for improved click through rates. Way to go Hearst Media Services and I hope to run into you at one of the upcoming industry conferences!
Blogs With Top Commentators Are Now Rare
Posted by: PPC Ian Comments: 38 comments so far
One of the most popular posts on PPC Ian is my Blog Commenting Strategy. I’m a huge fan of blog commentating for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, it’s fun! It’s great to be part of the conversation. Second, it’s a great source of traffic. Write an insightful comment and you will quickly gain new readers. Third, blog commentating can be a great source of SEO-optimized dofollow links. That is, if the blog you comment on has a top commentators widget (like the one I have here on PPC Ian in my footer).
I used to do a ton of commentating. I originally purchased my iPad so I could commentate on the go. I would write comments on the train to and from work. I would bring my iPad to lunch and would write comments during my meal. I would even commentate on my mobile phone while away from my computer. I got a little bit obsessed.
These days, I’m still commentating but not quite as much. Why? Many of the big bloggers such as John Chow and Jonathan Volk have done site redesigns and have removed their top commentators widgets. I used to comment on these blogs multiple times per day because I got my name in the top commentators lists. This gave me thousands of dofollow inbound links, from blogs closely related to mine by topic. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a huge fan of both of these fine blogs, it’s just that I don’t comment quite as much since there is less of a reward.
So, you may be wondering, why are these big bloggers removing their top commentators widgets? If I had to guess, it probably comes down to preserving link juice (5-10 outbound links on each page of your blog can add up). It probably also comes down to comment quality. When you have as top commentators widget, the comments can sometimes be of lower quality. I particularly saw this happening on John Chow’s blog, although not anymore now that the widget has been removed.
As a blog owner, I’m a huge fan of having the top commentators widget. In addition to my top commentators widget, I even ran a Blog Commenting Contest. I feel passionately about rewarding those readers who support my blog by commenting. It takes time to write comments and I do my best to reward those supporting my blog.
The moral of the story: My blog commenting strategy is still very viable, but it’s more difficult finding blogs with top commentators lists. They still do exist, however, and I highly recommend seeking them out. You can even search on Google for directories of blogs that have dofollow top commentators lists. Moreover, don’t give up on blogs without top commentators. You may wish to throttle back your comments, but I still write many comments to this day on blogs without the widget.
Image of comment © iStockPhoto – pagadesign
Posted in: Blogging Tags: blog commenting, top commentators Comments: 38 so far