I had some time to kill after a long day of hard work and decided to take the SEO quiz over at SEOmoz. I suggest that if your learning SEO to go on over to their site and take the quiz yourself. The quiz at the time of this post is 75 questions long and takes about 25-35 minutes to complete. I was surprised to see there were actually some questions on the quiz that I had trouble answering; it seemed like multiple answers were right for some questions. I guess people can’t know everything! Anyway, it is a good learning experience that I feel readers of this blog shouldn’t miss out on.

Here’s a question for everyone and my second point of bringing up the SEOmoz quiz in this post: What type of internet marketing technique are the guys at SEOmoz making use of by creating this quiz?

If you guessed “link bait” you answered correct. For those of you who didn’t know the answer and are asking what is “link bait” here is how Wikipedia describes link bait:

“Link bait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention. Link bait can be an extremely powerful form of marketing as it is viral in nature.”

Yes, link bait is also a form of viral marketing that I just recently blogged about in the post titled “More Drama Concerning that Wicked Fire Post“.

So how exactly is the SEOmoz quiz link bait? First, the quiz offers people who take the SEO quiz to place a “SEOmoz SEO Quiz badge on your site to let the world know how hard you rock the SEO game” which of course is a fun little thing to do. Placing the badge on a site draws attention to the SEOmoz website and gets other people to visit SEOmoz’s site - basically free advertising. In addition, webmasters will tell other webmasters and friends to go take the quiz so they can compare scores; which is an indirect way of promoting/advertising for SEOmoz.

In a future post I’ll discuss link bait in more detail and show more live examples from other websites that have utilized link bait techniques.

What was that? You wanted to know what score I received on the quiz? Well keep wondering…

Popularity: 20% [?]

Note: Please bare with this post even though I know you don’t want to hear about the “flaming” thread again. There’s actually a lesson we could all learn from it which will be talked about in the end of the post.

Seems like Jon, the owner of Wicked Fire, opened up a can-of-worms with his thread that bashes all the “Make Money Online” and “Super Affiliate” type blogs which I talked about two days ago in my post “Well-Known Bloggers Get Called Out At Wicked Fire”. I guess a member on Wicked Fire decided to take a shot at another “Super Affiliate” blogger Zac Johnson (disclaimer: whose blog I just started reading every now and then), and of course Zac Johnson responds back on his blog with an explanation in his defense. I have a feeling the thread might become one of the most popular threads to-date on Wicked Fire.

So was making that post a marketing stunt that Jon at Wicked Fire hoped would blowup into a flaming thread to gain some attention too his forum? Can anyone say “viral marketing”? Whether it was or not I’m pretty sure Wicked Fire will enjoy the extra exposure and traffic it will be receiving if all the “Make Money Online” and “Super Affiliate” bloggers start talking about it on their blogs. It’s already worked to some extent when Zac Johnson and myself blogged about it. If they are smart enough these bloggers won’t feed the flame (no pun intended), but it is part of human nature to respond back in defense.

So for all you that are just getting into the affiliate and blogging industry this is a good (or bad, however you want to take it) example of viral marketing. If you haven’t heard the term “viral marketing” before just google it. In the next week or two I’ll swing by Alexa to see if Wicked Fire receives a bump in the traffic graph on the day the post was made and a few days later.

Popularity: 18% [?]