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StumbleUpon has launched a new advertising system, which the company says helps cost-effectively deliver advertiser content to targeted audiences, while increasing the opportunity for content to go viral.

StumbleUpon finds and recommends ad content it deems relevant to targeted audiences’ interested based on demographic and topic areas. StumbleUpon users by simple nature of the site choose the content topics of interest to them, and are delivered random content based on this). This makes for an interesting way of delivering ads.

"With StumbleUpon Advertising, we’re solving the challenge of how advertisers can get more content that is relevant and impactful in front of their targeted audiences," says StumbleUpon CEO and Founder Garrett Camp. "We are dedicated to providing the tools that help advertisers identify and reach their audiences, measure campaigns effectively and gain real-time user feedback."

"After testing the StumbleUpon Advertising system for eight months, we know it’s an extremely cost-effective way to drive qualified traffic and let the content speak for itself," said Jason Clement, Director of Findability at Wieden + Kennedy. “Since StumbleUpon Advertising targets content to users based on their personal interests, we can be confident that our content is reaching the most receptive audience possible. And when an audience enjoys our content, the reward is a healthy amount of free, organic traffic."

"StumbleUpon Advertising makes it easy and cost-effective to deliver the right content to a new audience of our target users," said Ben Tider, Assistant Director, Audience Development at Time Inc. Lifestyle Digital Group. “With streamlined campaign set-up and management, we can better optimize ads and recommend content based on the individual user. Because readers can self-identify the types of content we show them, they are more engaged and likely to share it with friends."

"StumbleUpon Advertising enables brand advertisers to serve up compelling content while users are searching or ‘stumbling’ around the Web," said Josh Spear, Founding Partner of Undercurrent. "With StumbleUpon Ads, an advertiser’s content is not an interruption, but rather a fully integrated experience that affords an opportunity for additional exposure when audiences like or respond well to the content. It is comparable to a banner that becomes more cost efficient based on positive viewer feedback. The new user interface also greatly enhances the service by delivering advanced analytics and more detailed campaign management tools."

StumbleUpon claims to generate nearly 600 million recommendations per month for its community of almost 11 million members.

Related: About a year ago, we interviewed StumbleUpon’s VP of Business Development about advertising on the site.

With the 2010 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament starting next week (March 16), it’s no surprise the majority (83%) of fans will watch coverage on television, while 44 percent will go online and 10 percent will use a mobile device, according to a new survey by Unicast.

Among those planning to follow the tournament online or on a mobile device, a majority will visit ESPN.com (69%). Other branded popular sports sites fans plan to visit include Yahoo Sports (42%), Fox (24%), CBS (29%), and AOL (17%).

More than a quarter of fans following the tournament (26%) will visit NCAA.com, while 17 percent will type in the URL for their favorite team.

Fans will also gather information on the tournament via search engines (22%), social networks (18%), or newspaper/magazine sites (20%).

"On the heels of the extensive online coverage of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament offers online publishers another premium sporting event that will generate high traffic from consumers looking to follow the tournament outside their living rooms," said Bryan Hjelm, VP of Marketing for Unicast.

"Digital innovations like iPhone apps, online bracket tools and streaming video are bringing basketball fever to a growing online audience of fans.

"Sites like ESPN.com and Yahoo! Sports will dominate traffic due to their inherent sports fan user base, which make them prime real estate this month for marketers targeting the typical visitor – men aged 18 to 35."

The most popular online activities for those following March Madness include:

        *58%    Monitor scores
        *54%    Watch games live
        *53%    Check the status of brackets
        *49%    Watch game highlights
        *42%    Fill out brackets/participate in a pool

Over the years, there have been more than a few arguments about whether online news sites are killing newspapers.  Now, due to some almost startling comments made by the president of CNN, it looks like the next round of old media-new media disputes might concern social networks and cable news organizations.

According to the AFP, Jonathan Klein’s remarks on this subject were in no way ambiguous.  He said at Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s 2010 Media Summit New York, "The competition I’m really afraid of are social networking sites.  That’s an alternative that threatens to pull people away from us."

Klein then explained, "The people you’re friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information. . . .  Well, we want to be the most trusted name in news.  We don’t want the 1,000 people you follow in Twitter to be the most trusted sources for you. . . .  So I’m far more worried about the 500 million people on Facebook than I am about two million people watching Fox."

That’s an interesting take on the power of social networks.  It implies – at the very least – that CNN anchors are going to spend a whole lot more time referencing Facebook and Twitter from now on.  An ad campaign and new apps could follow, too.

On a broader scale, Klein seems to be saying that social networks’ users can easily – even unwittingly – make or break major corporations.

MySpace launched a new gaming experience at myspace.com/games today. The company says it empowers developers with new tools, analytics, and opportunities for driving usage and revenue.

"Gaming is core to the overall entertainment value of MySpace; we are replicating our success from MySpace Music for this next round of platform improvements," a representative for MySpace tells WebProNews. "Nearly a third of MySpace users engage daily in games and there are more than 28 million active app users on the site." She says the site "offers users discovery and sharing of games in a simpler and cleaner experience."

"Nearly one-third of MySpace users engage daily with games. We believe the new experience will empower even more of the MySpace audience to discover, share, and showcase games, which along with music and movies, are core to our content strategy," said MySpace Co-President Mike Jones. "We’ve been working with our developer partners to understand where they’d like to see MySpace go; based on that feedback we started rebuilding MySpace Games. These are the first steps in offering robust tools for developers to help their businesses thrive."

MySpace says developers can now:

- Review application-specific analytics via a new API, including invitation conversions, active users, notification responses and demographics.

- Build games in rich, 3D-like quality with Unity’s powerful 3D engine and allow MySpace users to access the games with a new plug-in. For example, Paradise Paintball utilizes this technology.

- Encourage cross-platform competition with Scoreloop, which allows games on different platforms to share the same high scores, achievements, challenges and buddy lists.

- Utilize GroovyCortex, which is a cloud-based solution for onsite application developers, to provide low latency push data for multiplayer games.
 
- Track the source of application invitations and utilization to learn how users are finding and choosing specific games.

Along with the new MySpace Games site, MySpace announced a MySpace Games iPhone app, nine new social games, and a Gallery. Earlier this week, MySpace announced that it has the most popular social app on Android.

It appears that the new MySpace Games experience hasn’t fully rolled out yet. 

Nearly all consumers (97%) now use online media when researching products or services locally, according to a new report from BIA/Kelsey and ConStat.

Among consumers surveyed, 90 percent use search engines, 48 percent use Internet Yellow Pages, 24 percent use vertical sites, and 42 percent use comparison shopping sites.

"The Internet has indeed become an integral part of consumers’ local commercial activity," said Steve Marshall, director of research, BIA/Kelsey.

"The data suggest we’re at an inflection point where the balance of power in local shopping is shifting to online."

The study found on average, consumers are using 7.9 different media sources when shopping for products or services locally, up from 6.5 sources in 2009 and 5.8 in 2008, indicating an increase in audience fragmentation.

Additional finding include:

   * 58 percent of respondents report using an online coupon when shopping for products or services in their local area in the past year.
   

 * 19 percent of respondents made an appointment online in the past six months for a service besides a restaurant reservation (e.g., business appointment, health-care appointment, auto service or personal service).

"The increase in audience fragmentation presents challenges for advertisers looking to connect with local consumers," said Peter Krasilovsky, vice president and program director, Marketplaces, BIA/Kelsey.

"These challenges may be outweighed by the targeting opportunities available with tools like coupon promotions and appointment scheduling, the latter being among the best lead sources possible, since you know where people are actually going."

The significance of longtail keywords can be exemplified by thinking about the following two people:

Bill is a cafeteria worker who spends his spare time fishing and has heard that his favorite TV shows will look even better on on this new-fangled technology called “HDTV”. He might as well upgrade from his 20” to something a little larger while he’s at it his friends tell him (though they don’t know much more about it than he does). He sits at his computer and enters “hdtv” into the Google search box.

Steve also works in a cafeteria but is a bit more tech-savy. He has and uses a Facebook account, watches videos on YouTube and looks up information on Google when he’s looking for an answer to one of his questions. He too is interested in HDTV but decides to check out a few review sites first before making the leap. He reads a great review on CNET and likes the specs of the “Panasonic Viera TC-P50G10” and decides to look around for pricing. He heads back to Google and searches for “panasonic viera tc-p50g10” or perhaps even “buy panasonic viera tc-p50g10 online”.

The difference between these two? Other than the fact that one has a dismal likelihood of conversion and the other a high likelihood – the difficulty in attaining top rankings for the two phrases is very different as well. Now, I’m not saying there isn’t a place for going after the generic, high-traffic phrases but ignoring the higher converting, less-work-per-conversion phrases that are easier to attain rankings for – well – that just doesn’t make good business sense does it?

So – how do you rank for the longtail?

We all understand that the factors of SEO are the factors of SEO. Just like any other phrases – your ability to rank is quite simply based on a combination of page strength and relevancy (yes there are tons of signals Google uses but they essentially break down to these two points). To affect these areas we use a combination of onsite optimization and link building. Sounds easy so far? Perfect. So let’s take a look first at onsite optimization.

Optimizing your site for the longtail

I can’t possibly cover the different technologies and how to make sure your site is crawlable. Let’s just say – the first step is to make sure that the crawlers can get to your internal pages and that strength passes down. If the crawlers can’t get through to the internal pages then you’ve got bigger problems than tweaking your content and building some links. Contact a developer immediately and get that sorted out first – then continue reading.

Once you know that the crawlers are getting through and strength is passing we move on to the actual optimization. The first thing one wants to look at it how to push the items with the highest ROI potential up in the hierarchy of your site. Let’s use Amazon as an example of how that should be done (they know a thing or two about ranking for products).

Amazon uses one of my personal favorite tactics in that they automate the process but it’s not necessary. You probably don’t have the same number of products so you can likely do manually what they have to automate but let’s look at what they’re doing and you can apply the strategy as you see fit.

If I was Amazon and I wanted to rank my site for longtail phrases I’d want to rank for the phrases that had the highest search volume and highest chances of conversions. I’d have to apply global rules to a massive site (you don’t have to – you can likely do things on a case-by-case basis but I’m sure we can all agree – Amazon cannot). So to keep the most profitable phrases high in the hierarchy but still not ignore the other longtail phrases they have created a hierarchy that puts the top product categories one hop from the homepage (Laptops & Netbooks For Example) and on that page they have links to all the major brands and uses but my favorite tactic is that they have the bestsellers. This information is easily created from their database and insures that the more popular products are two hops from the homepage and linked to with the brand and model number. At the time of this writing they have a link to the “ASUS Eee PC Seashell 1005PE-MU17-BK 10.1-Inch…”. If I search “asus eee pc 1005pe-m” who do you think shows up first? Amazon.

So step one – make sure you’re linking to the product pages with the brand and model number of the item and also put the more important items higher in the hierarchy of your site. Now this doesn’t mean cram all your products on the page. You have to apply the same principles to links with onsite as you do with offsite optimization. A page has a vote. It you have a page with 10 products listed on it – each product gets 1/10 of the weight passed to it. If the page has 500 products listed on it – well, you get my point. Figure out what matters and focus there.

Of course – you don’t want to ignore the other potential phrases. You’ll notice that as well as linking to the top products in each category they link to sub pages with brands, specs, etc. This is why they rank so well for so many phrases. Well – that’s part one.

Once you’ve got the internal linking sorted out you need to follow that up with some onsite relevancy. Here we’re referring to optimized titles, descriptions, H1 tags, content, etc. I’m going to have to leave a full breakdown of onsite optimization for another article but I can discuss some of the differences you’ll encounter with longtail optimization with ecommerce sites.

With “traditional” optimization we visit a page and adjust the relevant aspects (titles, content, etc.) manually. With large ecommerce sites we need to come up with rules that apply site wide. Developing titles, descriptions and content for each and every page one-by-one is likely not an option. If you look at Amazon again you’ll see that they automate the process by using the brand, model and categories in the title, description, keywords and H1 tag. Easily automated. Through their use of automated elements (“Customers bought with …”, specs, descriptions, reviews, etc.) they are also able to insure that that the brand and model number appear on the page.

Now that works well for Amazon. They have millions of links and huge site strength. But what if you don’t have that behind you. They can build a page, put it on their site and rank. You may need to invest some of your time in link building.

Link building for longtail optimization

There are two primary aspects of link building that one needs to address when we’re looking at longtail optimization. The first is to the homepage for site strength and the other is to specific internal pages. The reason that we’ll want to link to specific internal pages is that like it or not, you’re not as strong as Amazon and so you need to build links to compete where they do not.

I’ll leave the discussion of how to build links to other articles (you know – one of the 800,000 written on the subject) however we will discuss the purpose of the links and thus you’ll understand the pattern of the link building.

The homepage links are in place to simply build overall site strength and should be geared to your generic, homepage phrases – it’s the internal links that are specifically geared to brands and models. So we’ll focus on those links in this article.

How to build links to internal pages

Building links to internal pages is virtually identical to homepage. True you can’t use directories but that’s about the only link building tactic that doesn’t apply. There are two points that you’re going to want to direct links to:

1 – the category/brand main page.

The first point you’re going to want to direct links at is the main category page and the main sub-category points of the ecommerce site. You’ll want to direct these links in with anchor text that suits the brand and/or category subject. Let’s use Amazon as an example again.

For the purpose of longtail optimization – the links we’d direct to http://www.amazon.com/Netbooks-Computers/b?ie=UTF8&node=679517011 would primarily be geared to strengthening the page. Oh I’d use anchor text geared at “netbooks” and the link but the main point is to make that page stronger and in turn – the pages it links to. These links will also get the page spidered more.

What this will do is make the links to the brands stronger but most important – the links to the top sellers stronger and more quickly picked up. This is why they rank for new products in a matter of hours.

The individual brand and usage pages are the same from this perspective./ You’ll want to optimize the pages and you’ll want to focus the links for long term gain but the short term purpose is to pass strength to the product pages.

2 – the product pages.

On top of building links to pages one level up (as we’ve just discussed) you’ll also want to build links to the individual product pages. Amazon can build a page, link to it and have it rank – you probably cannot. For products and models you know will stand the test of time – building links can be a long term strategy but not my favorite (due mainly to the fact that it’s not exciting). Personally I like building links to “Coming soon” product pages and getting them spidered before there’s any competition and then adding in the product the day it launches giving you a one-up over your competitors in both timing and strength. Heck, you might even win out over Amazon for a while.

Don’t overdo it in the link building. You’ve got a lot of products. Unless you know a specific product is going to be HUGE you’ll want to just build a few links and move on. You’ve got a lot of products to cover.

Moving forward

Obviously I can’t cover all the various aspects of ranking for the longtail in a single1800 word article and in fact, if I turned this into a 180 page book I’d still not be able to cover all the variables but my hope is that I’ve given you food for thought in the tactics and timing you’ll find helpful in moving forward and ranking your website for the longtail phrases that convert so well and for which you can rank so quickly if you do it right.