Psst! "Hide and Speak" meets more success

If you haven't read my posts on Jennifer Laycock's "Hide and Speak" project, do it now! Just kidding, but check them out, or else the following won't make much sense.

The numbers are in! The Bento Yum site, which is being promoted solely through word of mouth, blogs, and social networking sites, continues to improve its Alexa rank. Over the weekend, the rank fell (in a good way) by nearly 100,000, coming in at an impressive 426, 538.

Keep up the good work, Jennifer!

Bento Yum statistics show promise

Last week I wrote about Jennifer Laycock and her “Hide and Speak” experiment. To recap, she’s hiding her Bento Yum blog site from search engine crawlers and relying instead on blogs, social networking sites, and other forms of online speaking to demonstrate that e-Businesses don’t need Google to get business.

I’ve been tracking her Alexa traffic ranking, and it seems that this weekend represented a pivotal shift. The numbers are in!...(for now, anyway). Last Wednesday, the traffic rank for BentoYum.com was 1,339,092. Less than one week later, the rank has more than halved itself, coming in at an impressive 595,788! Keep up the good work, Jennifer!

For more on Jennifer’s progress, check out her latest installment in the “Hide and Speak” series.

Attention small e-Businesses: Google is so last season

In the name of all small e-Business owners, Jennifer Laycock, editor of Search Engine Guide, is charting an unknown course. Her mission: to successfully market an e-Business without the help of Google or any other major search engine. Her chief experiment: Bento Yum. Jennifer is inviting all interested e-Business owners to track her progress—her marketing successes and downfalls— through an article series she will post online. She writes, “I've dubbed this new series ‘Hide and Speak’ because we'll be keeping the site hidden from search engine spiders and will seek to market it by ‘speaking’ to customers via links, blogs and communities.”

This new approach to e-Marketing most likely has great appeal to small e-Business owners, who have grown irritated by the heavy dependency on search engines for success. With the “Hide and Speak” method, she plans to show us that “those four engines (Google, Yahoo, Windows Live and Ask) are not the only sources of search traffic.”

Jennifer’s goal is “to build the type of content and link foundations that will help the site quickly rise to the top” without Google PR or any help from search engines at all. In fact, she will only reveal Bento Yum to major search engines once it has independently achieved ideal popularity.

Jennifer’s plan to “market via community” rather than through search engines truly represents a break from the traditional form of e-Business marketing. But could it work? According to Jennifer, Bento Yum has already showed signs of great success. So watch out, Google, e-Businesses might not need you after all!

(Note: this is a revised copy.)