Search Engine Optimisation - or ‘Red Cardinal’s risky offer!’
February 12th, 2007 by Frank
Wow, this is going to be interesting. Red Cardinal has offered some basic SEO consultation to EVERY long-list nominee in the Irish Blog awards.
Now, being the cynic that I am I couldn’t help but spot the marvelous marketing strategy behind this - it’s brilliant, but then that’s evidence of why I nominated his blog for ‘Best Business Blog’, as I’m sure plenty of others did.
So first of all, what does Red Cardinal get out of this very generous offer?
Red Cardinal has stipulated some rules that will not harm his profile at all:
- You have to post on your blog in relation to the offer. Straight away you can see the benefit there - you may not have heard of Red Cardinal until I told you about him just now.
- You have to link back to the post in question - increasing his inbound links, always good for Search Engine rankings.
- He has suggested the text for the link -
search engine optimisation - this should boost his own ranking for that term in search engines. - You must title the post Search Engine Optimisation - this should also help his own search engine rankings for this term as Google and pals will see a raft of posts to do with SEO linking into Red Cardinal
- In order to receive your review, you have to sign up to his RSS feed - increasing his regular readers.
The man’s a marketing genius. And this does not take away AT ALL from the generosity of his offer. None of the above costs the nominees anything, and Richard of Red Cardinal gets some benefit from his generosity.
So… what’s this risk I alluded to in the title? Well, there are at Red Cardinals estimate, about 500 nominees, and he’s offering about 15 minutes per site. That’s 125 hours if everybody responded! That’s over three weeks work!
I wonder what percentage of people he’s expecting to take him up on his offer? It seems like to good an offer to pass up, and he has pinged every blog to let them know about it…
Now, I pride myself on being pretty good at SEO myself, and when this site was focussed entirely on the cartoons I got very good results for the search term ‘Funny Cartoons’ - we were very close to the top of page one on Google.
Since letting the cartoons go, we have had to change tack and have slipped from that position, as we knew would happen. Right now, BifSniff doesn’t have the niche focus we had previously. But then that focus was costing us a lot in time and effort which I have now reduced for myself.
Currently BifSniff operates as a creative outlet and a springboard to launch new projects from.
So, in a way my question to Red Cardinal, if he gets an opportunity to review BifSniff, is this:
On first impressions, what is BifSniff and what could it be?
That’s a pretty big question, I know - but maybe a couple of even simple suggestions from fresh eyes would help us refocus and restrategise! He is, obviously, very good at marketing.
The other information Richard of Red Cardinal requested is as follows:
- Nominated in six categories:
- Best Blog
- Best Blog Post
- Most Humourous Post (Two of our cartoons nominated.)
- Best Arts and Culture Blog
- Best Group Blog
- Best Designed Blog
- Topic or niche: WAS cartoons… currently somewhat ill defined. Arts & culture perhaps?
- Your Target Audience: Hmmm. Like minded 18-40 year olds?
- How long you’ve been blogging: In or around 2 years here, and a little longer before that here and there!
- How old is your domain: Seven Years old
- The names/URLs of a few other sites, competitors or friends, in your niche: I suppose TCAL and Clamnuts are two that spring to mind…
So well done Richard, on a wonderful offer and an inspirational marketing effort! You deserve an award 
Entries (RSS)
February 12th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
I’m really enjoying the snappy illustrations accompanying your posts these days Frank. The break from the more structured/laborious?cartoons is obviously freeing up your doodling hand … I look forward to my dailyish issue of “The Illustrated Post”.
February 12th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
Ha ha - thanks Rich - yeah, I’m just trying to keep my hand in, in a an informal way - my theory is that as I’m illustrating some random blog post inspiration will hit me for the next big thing!
February 12th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
Not wishing to get into it but…
“…what is BifSniff and what could it be?”
Pity you were never so keen to hear my thoughts on that.
February 12th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
Our thoughts on the matter simply differed, that’s all.
Just because I’m asking Richard his opinion doesn’t mean I’m necessarily going to implement any changes he suggests.
February 12th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
How would you know? You never actually listened to my thoughts on the matter.
February 12th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
Sorry you feel that way Bif.
February 12th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
Don’t be so condescending. It’s not that I feel that way, it’s a plain fact. You would never entertain any conversation that involved the site being based around original content developed by us. You cut off any such discussion by simply saying something akin to ‘but I don’t want to’.
And ok, fair enough, it was the deal breaker for you - much in the same way the lack of focus became a deal breaker for me. I understood why but you would be completly misrepresenting the situation if you tried to suggest you ever sat down and heard me out on my ideas of how the site could evolve, what it could achieve for us and why the focus on creating original content was so integral to that.
February 13th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
And in all fairness Frank, your dismissive reaction there kind of validates my argument.
Either ways, it’s water under the bridge but surely you can’t blame me for being a liitle annoyed having walked away from two and half years work on a site I helped create and a pretty good plan I had developed for the future(which is now pretty much sunk) - only to find you musing on what direction to take the site.
February 14th, 2007 at 11:42 am
Thanks for having the decency to respond Frank.
February 14th, 2007 at 11:51 am
Apologies Bif, I was actually away when you posted these comments but apart from that, I didn’t think you were looking for a response, I thought you were simply stating your case which is fair enough.
I don’t agree with some of your comments, but I understand where you’re coming from on them at least.
I don’t want to get into it further here myself,
Cheers.
February 14th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
I give a fuck if you want to get into it here. I have taken a conciliatory stance on this whole thing from the start, even when you sent me your wonderful bullet point list that read like you were very generously allowing me to take my ideas from the site with me, and I’ve ended up back at square one. While you’re left with the site through, what strikes me now as, bloody minded intransigence and it turns out you didn’t really have much of an idea what you wanted to do with it anyway. You don’t think you owe me some sort of a justification?
And I don’t know what it is you disagree with me on. You did, for a fact, shoot down any suggestion that involved continuing the cartoons on a regular basis and you did shoot it down without allowing for any argument to made for it. The last time, just before xmas, we discussed this I, very early on, attempted to put a case for the cartoons and you cut me off bluntly saying you just wouldn’t do them. So, with the only other option seemingly being we shut the site down, I agreed to give your way a shot.
February 14th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
While I don’t think this is the forum for this discussion, I now want to clarify a few points.
I may decide to delete this comment thread over the next few days, I am giving advance warning on that now.
1. I never said I would not do the cartoons, I said I would not do them every week, and certainly not every day as you requested until they were bringing in some amount of money. I tried to encourage you to get other illustrators on board to increase the level of original content on the site. I suggested you draw cartoons, as you did in the past, and even offered you a Wacom Tablet of my own to do so - you never took me up on that offer.
2. I was always 100% clear with you from the start about my approach to BifSniff - build up a stockpile of cartoons which could potentially generate revenue in the future with the right contacts. When you left you requested that the cartoons never be used for anything outside of the site. Despite the fact that this was in complete opposition to what i considered an agreement between friends, I accepted.
3. The bullet pointed list you refer to above was a list of the things you outlined in a mail to me, which I was clarifying. Not the other way around.
4. As I said in the post above, and as outlined to you before we took this route, BifSniff operates as a creative outlet and a springboard to launch new projects from. That’s clear enough mission statement for me, for now. Your leaving afforded me the luxury of re-evaluating and, if I liked, taking the site in any direction I chose. There is a difference between where we stood before you left and where I stand now.
5. Getting someone elses opinion on the site does not mean I don’t know what I am doing, or what I want to do with it, it means I am considering options.
6. I don’t understand why, instead of leaving you didn’t use BifSniff to launch any other projects you wanted to do with any other people, but that’s the route you chose.
7. I listened to your opinions on the direction of the site while we worked together on the site, to say I didn’t is simply not true. It is true that we only occasionally agreed with each other.
8. You have several times alluded to a plan you had for BifSniff, but apart from asking me to draw a cartoon every day, you have never outlined this plan to me, in person or in email or on the site.
9. You point blank refused to meet up before leaving the site to discuss anything, despite several invitations from me.
10. As far as I am concerned I owe you nothing, Bif, and you owe me nothing.
I will not be responding to any further comments on this thread.
February 14th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
Excuse me but why isn’t this the forum? Where better?
1. You refused point blank to do the cartoons on a regular basis. Every day was something that was mooted a long time ago and had you being listening to me, you’d know I had gone cold on it. My argument was that the site needed to be based on original content. The cartoons were only ever a part of that. I never took you up on the wacom tablet because, in the end, I’m not an illustrator and I’ve no interest in being one. If I were to take on a new illustrator, what is it - from my perspective - that you were going to be bringing to the table? Besides I still very much believed that your art was integral to the cartoons.
2. Yes you were clear but you also intransigent. There was never any give on your side. I always made it clear that I considered the cartoons as a springboard to bigger things. The fact that you kept sticking to your stockpile idea was just continued proof that weren’t listening to me. Again Frank, I could have quite fairly have pulled the plug on the site but didn’t. Making it sound like you were the one making concessions is horseshit.
3. It was the tone of the bullet point list that annoyed me. I outlined the one simple thing I wanted from the site - considering you were getting everything else - and you responded in a way that suggested you were being gracious in allowing it. I could have just said I want to close the site down, end of story, but I felt that would have been unfair. All that was called for on your part was that same level of dignified respect.
4. That is the response you could have made to my first comment instead of dismissing me like I had no right to query. It’s actually fair enough and would have prompted a very quick climbdown on my part. Rightly so.
5. True but I do have a right to query.
6. Because it was becoming more of an interference than an aid. And I was initially open to returning should a suitable project arise.
7. In the early days you did. As it went on, you stopped listening. By the end, I genuinely felt almost like you were consulting me as an after thought. I can remember at least one occasion where I disagreed with you on something, an SEO issue as it happens, and you went on and did it anyway. It always seemed that if you disagreed with me, it didn’t happen but if I disagreed with you, well what did it matter. As a clear example - The Top Chumps. I directly stated that I didn’t think we should commit to the project yet, if it meant not continuing the political cartoons. You subsequently went and told Cian about the idea and stated it would be as a replacement for the cartoons.
8. I on numerous occasions outlined ideas. You never listened. I was always pretty fucking vocal about wanting to work towards developing a television project and repeatedly spoke of producing mobile content as an intermediary. There wasn’t a plan, as such, I viewed it as an organic process. Maybe I should have outlined it as a bullet point list?
9. There were not several invitations and I refused to meet you because your attitude had rubbed me up the wrong and I felt it better to wait til I’d put some distance between me and the whole affair. That would have at least given us a chance to remain amicable. Any meeting would have been pointless because I had come to the conclusion that you were never going to make any concessions.
10. Does that include respect Frank?
All too often Frank you refused to respond and, in part, that is why we’re here now. I have been nothing but respectful in reference to you and the site. Ask anyone I’ve spoken to on the subject. All that was called for was a respectful response to one comment - not hard considering you had an utterly reasonable response to give.
February 14th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Myself and few others know you both from a long, long time ago. What you guys did with Bifsniff was fantastic, a realisation of a creative friendship. We all happily watched it grow, develop and evolve into what it is. It has changed and you both have direction but are lacking compromise which is an awful shame. I really hope you can sort it out guys. I have nothing more to say. A fan and a friend.
February 14th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
You might have happily watched it grow, develop and evolve. I didn’t but that is neither here nor there. It’s also entirely inaccurate to suggest that I didn’t compromise. I compromised to the point that broke my heart and I could do little else but leave. There was no reciprocation in the end. There isn’t really anything to sort out. I wish I hadn’t even brought it up. I was just annoyed at how snippy Frank was in dismissing me, considering how diplomatic I had been up to this point.