Dot Tactics

I don't claim to know anything about the Secret Shopping industry, but I will say that it looks suspicious. I did a quick search for secret shopping on yahoo and while the top natural search happened to be Victoria's Secret, most of the Overture ads were focused on secret shopping and secret shopping scams.

Whats interesting to me is how can all these sites which claim to “help people” avoid scams afford to buy traffic off of Yahoo? See for yourself:

• BeASecretShopper.Org


• Top Site Reviews


• Product Reviews


• Consumer Protections Compnay


• Mystery Shopping Scam Revealed

Notice anything funny? That's right. They all start with an article and they all end with “product reviews” designed to help people find legitimate companies to work with. Fortunately all of these companies charge a small fee which is no doubt shared with the helpful article's author.

For all I know these sites are all part of the same company, but it is interesting to see people market services from the standpoint of scam prevention. Hopefully people do enough clicking to figure out that the scam prevention isn't as angelic as it claims to be.

As you can see here, and here, and (of course) here, it has become really important that the forms a user fills out stay above the "fold" in the page. That is to say that the submit button at the bottom can still be seen without scrolling once the page is initially loaded. Gone are the days when everyone built forms that took three real pages to print. Now we have optimized marketing forms.

Have you ever wanted to access Yahoo's search results? I know I have. Despite Google's dominance in the industry I have found Yahoo's results to very good and in certain cases (like images and local) better. If your interested in how to build software to use these results then you need to check this out.

A new user tracking study (where they watched the eye movement of searches) has found that it does indeed pay to be in the top set of natural search results. The full story can be found here.

Of note...

Organic Search Results Viewed:

• Rank 1 - 100%
• Rank 2 - 100%
• Rank 3 - 100%
• Rank 4 - 85%
• Rank 5 - 60%
• Rank 6 - 50%
• Rank 7 - 50%
• Rank 8 - 30%
• Rank 9 - 30%
• Rank 10 - 20%
  

Sponsored Listings Viewed (right side):

• Sponsored listing 1 - 50%
• Sponsored listing 2 - 40%
• Sponsored listing 3 - 30%
• Sponsored listing 4 - 20%
• Sponsored listing 5 - 10%
• Sponsored listing 6 - 10%
• Sponsored listing 7 - 10%
• Sponsored listing 8 - 10%
  

Check this out from SlashDot. Is google breaking its own keyword stuffing rules to promote its own services?

Just a quick note to point out one of the best online marketing resources out there: the LED (pronounced lead) Digest. Check it out.

Someone sure hopes this will work: e-Battery.com

Check out the entire network:

• Laptop Battery FAQ
• Cell Phone Battery FAQ
• Power Book Battery FAQ
• Digital Camera Battery FAQ
• Camcorder Battery FAQ
• Power Tool Battery FAQ
• PDA Battery FAQ
  

Well, it has happened. Overture is no more. Enter Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions.

Welcome to the dot tactics blog! This is just a little blog I setup to post and comment on activities in the online marketing space. I love learning about advertising, search, and visitor conversion strategies and I decided it was finally time to join the blogging community with this passion.