THE SIG-LINK BLOG

Interview With The Avatar Master Stuart From Site Sift

December 9, 2006 on 9:28 am | In Interviews |

In my last post I was raving about the DP avatar phenomenon, where every second poster has the Sift Sift Web Directory Logo as their avatar - (though now the Seven Seek Directory avatar looks like a strong competitor). So I thought I’d try to get the story from the man himself:

<--Starts--> (Questions are in bold)

Could you give us a brief history of yourself and the Site Sift Web Directory.

Sure… I started Site Sift in Sept. 2004 after being frustrated with the customer service and submission guidelines of *some* directories. Often directories had no time frames to review your submission and some had very strange submission guidelines. I saw an opportunity for a directory that had fast review times and submission guidelines that actually made some sense.

It would be great to hear the story of the avatar promotion from the horse’s mouth.

Not a whole lot to it I guess… I’m just the first person to do it on such a large scale. Many webmasters come to forums on a daily basis for information, services, tools and social interaction with peers. The Digital Point Forums is by far the most popular webmaster forum and I often spend numerous hours a day in the Buy/Sell/Trade section. For our web directory (Site Sift) we couldn’t have a more target advertising demographic than the Digital Point Forums.

Signature advertising has gone on for quite some time and provides a great ROI. I wanted to give Site Sift a little more exposure while focusing on the brand. I figured if we could get our Site Sift avatars in a good number of posts on a single forum it would make an impact. Banner and contextual advertising just doesn’t have the same impact because most webmasters are blind to them.

My goal was to get our avatar in 100,000 posts on the Digital Point Forums. I think within 3-4 hours we had more than 150,000 avatars out there. We spent a few dollars renting avatars for 30 days but most of the webmasters that have been around Digital Point for sometime did it without compensation. The last time we counted we had our avatar in over 247,877 posts.

The avatar promotion was obviously a great success in terms of branding, but have you actually seen much of an increase in traffic?

Yes… we are experiencing a huge increase of traffic through Google for the term “Site Sift.” Those are obviously the webmasters that don’t know who we are and they Google us since there is no direct link to our site from the avatar. Plus there are numerous threads on the Digital Point Forums where people have linked to our site.

I think anytime you get someone to type your business name into a search engine they are more likely to remember you than just following a link and closing the browser right away.

Would you care to share your avatar buying budget?

We didn’t spend very much… again many forum members did it because they wanted to. Total spent was in the low to mid $XXX range.

Owning a directory, you must know a fair chunk about search engine optimization. Do you think signature link affect a sites backlinks and hence the site’s position in the search engines?

In the search engine optimization world that is an *it depends* question. If you have a new site and hasn’t gained the trust of the search engines yet then having your link in thousands of post in several forums might not be the best thing.

Webmasters (in general) are notorious for whoring off their sites/blogs/signatures/avatars etc. Do you think you could achieve something similar to the avatar promotion in a non webmaster forum?

Sure… why not! We own several non-webmaster forums and someone could do something similar to what I did and create buzz and increase traffic. Most people outside of webmasters never see any money for their online contributions (posting and blogging) and changing an avatar would be nothing to them but a quick buck.

Your promotion has clearly shown the power of forum marketing, do you see a future for business’s based around this?

Advertising through webmaster contributions has only increased in the past year… I see no end to this in the near future. With that being said currently it is easy to sell your signatures or avatar yourself and doesn’t take up much time. There may be a small market place for a broker but I bet most webmasters prefer to facilitate these simple transactions themselves.

Thanks again Stuart

Thanks Jules! Have a good holiday!