Analysis Packages

Basic ($199): The Basic package is a full overview analysis of small scale sites (5-10 pages), looking at all aspects that the average consumer may experience, including visual design, content, structure, and basic on-site SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The recommendations will answer the following questions:

• Clarity of Message: Is your message getting through? How can you communicate it more effectively to visitors?
• Website Navigation: Can your visitors navigate your site easily? Can they get lost? How are you leading them to your target goals?
• Visual Design: Is your design clean? Is it appealing? Does it fit with the message of your site?
• On-Site SEO: Is your site set up to maximize free traffic from search engines? Are you properly using titles, header tags, meta-tags, and other code to tell the search engines what you’re about?

Advanced ($399) : The Advanced package is designed for sites in slightly more competitive niches, or niches with an increased online presence. It focuses on more subtle aspects of On-site SEO, as well as taking a look at the position of the site in relation to the rest of the internet. Recommendations from this package will include answers to the basic package, as well as:

• Key term analysis: What words am I currently ranking for in the major search engines? What words are my customers using to search for me?
• Advanced Site Structure: How do I take advantage of the value of the current site to rank better in the search engines?
• Basic Web Presence: Where should I make sure that my site is included? Where are my competitors getting their visitors and links from?
• Alternate Traffic Sources: Where else can my visitors come from other than search engines? Where should I be so that my visitors can find me and not my competitor?

Elite: The elite package is for those that want a significant web presence in mid- to highly-competitive niches. This analysis focuses on a case-by-case basis and includes recommendations in the following areas:

• Contextual Marketing
• Link Building
• Buzz/Viral Marketing
• Social media

Prices for the Elite package are determined based on the requirements of the task.

Service Packages

In order to achieve full value from your web presence, you need to know what your visitors are looking at, where they’re coming from, and what they’re doing. Armed with this kind of knowledg, you can tailor your site based on what your customers actually want and need, not on guesses and blind luck.

Each purchase of a year-long Service package includes a free Analysis package of the same level!

Basic ($299/quarter or $999/year) : The basic package will meet most small business site needs. It will provide you with a solid idea of who’s visiting your site, when, how often, from where (both from what websites and search engines, as well as geographic location), how long they’re spending on each page, and more. Included in this package:

• Weekly Traffic Analysis Reports: Find out everything you may want to know about your visitors
• Basic Uptime Monitoring Service: Be comfortable in knowing exactly when your site goes down
• Hacker Monitoring Service: Be notified if your site is hacked or defaced!
• Quarterly Keyword Rankings Analysis: Keep updated on your rankings for key terms
• Up to 8 hours of general web consulting: (per quarter)
• Basic Analysis package: (with yearlong agreement)

Advanced ($599/quarter or $1999/year): The advanced package will take a look at the more global position of the site in its niche, as well as provide more advanced monitoring tools. In addition to everything in the Basic package, you will receive

• Advanced Visitor Monitoring: Actually watch recorded visitors’ actions on your site - see exactly what they’re looking at and where their mouse is.
• Advanced Uptime Monitoring Service: For a site that needs even higher levels of uptime, know the minute your site goes down.
• Quarterly Competitor Ranking Analysis: Know how your competitors are ranking for your keywords, and where they’re getting their rankings from!
• Up to 16 hours of general web consulting: (per quarter)
• Advanced Analysis package: (with yearlong agreement)

Elite: The premium package is monitoring for high-end, highly competitive website. Prices are determined based on requirements.

Please contact me for requests or questions:

Throw in the fact that blogs tend to throw in personal posts and rants, and in the end you get a large amount of noise that needs to be filtered through. Tagging sites like del.icio.us and search engines help somewhat in solving the problem of finding good content, but they’re not efficient in properly directing traffic. I won’t even mention the fact that you should never rely solely on a tool you can’t control to make up for design shortcomings.

Frankly, only extreme diligence and focus in tagging and categorizing could result in an organized enough structure for long-term use. Unfortunately, this creates heavy overhead and prevents us from focusing on writing and creating quality content. Instead, time is wasted reorganizing the structure of the content every few months to accommodate for increased articles and new topics.

Instead, a hybrid Wikipedia/blog organization would be ideal for users, and ultimately for the webmaster as well. Unfortunately, this takes more time on startup to setup, and can’t be made into a turnkey solution as easily as a pure blogging platform. If properly set up, it creates significant value for the users at only a miniscule additional cost to the webmaster, which in turn will translate to massive value to the site owner in the long run.

So as to follow my own advice, I’ll be announcing a new site in the next month that will follow this kind of aforementioned structure. I haven’t disappeared entirely

People have been bashing on Mahalo now for a while. About how it’s not scalable. About how it doesn’t work. About how big search terms aren’t there.

And so far, I’ve seen nothing to contradict them.

Hell. Calacanis hasn’t even gotten what around half of all internet revenue is based on: PORN.

That’s right, a search on Calacanis’s engine results in, well, no results. Because they still haven’t made a page for it.

Their related results bring up: Tera Patrick and Jenna Jameson. All right, they’re porn stars - it’s a good star.

But what else does related search suggest? CHURRO’S ???

What the hell do churro’s have to do with women stripping to their birthday suits and getting plugged from all angles? I love churro’s, but churro-nography? Not my cup of tea (now - if it were midget furries…).

Finally, the last related result for porn: Crayfish. Erm… What? Don’t think about that link too hard, you won’t like what you come up with.

Sorry Calacanis. Thumbs down.

This is a post to let all of you know that I won’t be posting (or at least not much) for 2-3 months. I need some time to find a living place in Fort Lauderdale / Miami, get everything organized for a big move, and focus on a web project which we’ll be announcing later.

Look forward to some interesting stuff coming up in a couple of months!

But really, how much value can such cheap visitors have? If even a small percentage of those visitors convert, you might have a fantastic deal on your hands, but you know the old adage: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Additionally, the challenge should have been a three month one, as Alexa rankings are rolling on a 3-month basis. This is a fact that I was hoping to overcome (and possibly could have), but would have required even higher traffic numbers.

Finally, real life got in the way. Graduation, moving, and all that fun stuff took up much more time than expected.

Here’s the original post:

I’ve seen a few posts talking about how to manipulate Alexa rankings, so I decided to come up with a challenge:

I’m going to pick one prominent blogger, and beat his Alexa ranking in one month

The target is Jason Calacanis, rank 13,710, an “entrepreneur in action”. My current rank is 168,726, which means I need to go up 155,016 spots to beat him down.

Here are the rules:

• The start date is today: May 17th, 2007
• The challenge must be completed in one month, by June 17th, 2007.
• No using any of the scripts/sites out there that profess to boost your rankings
• If I beat Calacanis before the end date, I’m going after Shoemoney (Rank: 1860)

Once this project is over, I’ll reveal the secrets on how to make massive Alexa gains.
If you want to help me in this project, please link to this post as: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?http://www.mikebogo.com/the-alexa-project.php

Update 5/23:

So this may be a little bit more difficult than expected. The highest daily ranking that I’ve managed to get so far is about 53k. That means that I’m going to have to work harder on boosting my Alexa, although the amount of effort I’ve put in to getting to 53k was pretty minimal, which already shows how flawed Alexa is.

• Someone starts a link train, they post the rules and links to the initial participants on their blog.
• Everyone who was linked to then copies the original list and adds links of their own to the train, so it grows.
• The newly added participants copy the link train list and add their own links and so on..

This link train’s purpose is to boost the Alexa rankings of its members. While being heavily biased towards the tech industry and easily gamed, Alexa rankings are still used in many places to determine a site’s value. The value of your site is based on a geometric mean of how many people visit your site, and the average number of pages that are viewed - there are other ways to quickly rise your ranking, and I’ll be including that in the next post.

Original List

• Alexa Redirect for kuanhoong dot com
• Alexa Redirect for My Sites Advisor
• Alexa Redirect for Life Rocks! 2.0
• Alexa Redirect for Vince Cordic’s Internet Marketing Tactics
• Alexa Redirect for Criz’s Sanctuary
• Alexa Redirect for Webtools
• Alexa Redirect for MiriGuy.com
• Alexa Redirect for MikeBogo.com
• Alexa Redirect for SEO Ladder
• Alexa Redirect for Derek Semmler

New Tags

• Alexa Redirect for Chris Garrett
• Alexa Redirect for SEO By the SEA
• Alexa Redirect for Stefan Juhl
• Alexa Redirect for Tropical SEO

Enjoy the link love and Alexa boosts! While you’re here, check out my post on The Alexa Project that’s running from May 17th to June 17th.

SU profits in 2 ways: Sponsors, and Sponsored Stumbles. Read on to find out how each of these affects you.

Sponsors

In SU, you have the option of donating a certain amount of money (suggested $20 for a 1 year membership), and you get a cool green icon instead of a blue one next to your name. Additionally, you can start groups, get messages emailed to you, as well as turning off sponsored stumbles.

Sponsored Stumbles

How else does SU make money? Every once in a while, a site that you’re taken to is there because an advertiser paid $.05 to bring you there. This site will generally be related to your interests, and you can’t tell the difference. Generally, less than 2% of all Stumbles are sponsored.

I hope this answers some of the questions you have about how StumbleUpon makes its money.

First, a recap of some of the major theories:

GigaOM had the first feasible argument: “By marrying the toolbar to Skype client, eBay can do an end run around Google’s dominance of the search business. ”

Valleywag claims that it’s basically a random purchase: “Ebay has more money, from its outrageous monopoly on online collectibles and other auctions, than sense.”

eBay Strategies presents a detailed analysis of the situation and believes that eBay may be looking at a long term angle to getting into the search business that will sidestep Google. If not, at least they’ll have a powerful recommendation engine for eBay.

My thoughts? eBay is acquiring it as a defensive measure.

I don’t think StumbleUpon and eBay can directly integrate, although I can easily see the StumbleThru feature recently introduced as working on the eBay domain - this wouldn’t require a buyout though. Frankly, SU is mainly an entertainment, and not a product-purchasing tool, and converting users into buyers will be a difficult task.

I do think eBay considered how powerful of an asset Google would have if they bought it out, and so part of the value of the purchase is in a defensive measure. Google could easily integrate Stumble into it’s toolbar (what it half-assed with the dice) and reach millions more users, receive direct feedback on websites, as well as acquire a strong social network. eBay already feels threatened with Google Checkout (competing against PayPal) and Google checkout products (against eBay) - they don’t want to give Google more ammunition.

And eBay strategies has a valid point - if they can build a recommendation engine on eBay with StumbleUpon-level relevancy, it could easily increase sales and mean massive profit boosts. Could eBay be considering entering the search with SU? Doubtful, unless it plans to buy out Ask.com or Live and integrating the two - StumbleUpon is NOT a search engine, its primary purpose and use is entertainment.

Thoughts?

Installation is easy - just add a javascript to any page that you want to hold the content, and you’re golden.

My biggest problem? Deceptive statistics. We know Apache logs are flawed because they can’t tell robots from people, and we know javascript logs are flawed because they miss people with javascript turned off or adBlock.

Since Kontera and Statcounter are both javascripts, they should return approximately the same number of impressions. Right? Apparently not - for the same period of time, Kontera received 872 impressions, and Statcounter had 1,818. Somehow I lost 52% of my page impressions in Kontera’s count. Does it just not load for some people? What’s going on here? If someone could explain this discrepancy, I would greatly appreciate it.

Beyond that, how profitable was Kontera? According to their statistics, I had a CTR of 1.26%, 11 clicks, and a revenue of $1.30 (about $.12 per click). This amounted to an increase of $1.49 CPM overall, since it doesn’t interfere with advertising.

However, taking into account the actual impressions, CPM only increased only by $.72, which isn’t worth the time it takes to load.

Add to that the fact that there is no automated process for adding additional sites to your account (you have to email them), it just seems like too much hassle for too little gain. However, it doesn’t conflict with other forms of advertising, so if you’re looking to squeeze out every buck out of your site, this may be just what you need.

Goodbye Kontera!

Update Monday, May 14, 2007: I just received a reply back from support about my issue - total response time: 35 hours, 37 minutes. That’s already much better than most companies, but that includes weekend time. Business hours: 3 hours, 21 minutes. Not only that, but the person that responded to my e-mail, David, had already taken the time to look at my site and see if there were any obvious issues and suggested several possibilities. A+ so far for customer service.

I’ve put Kontera back up temporarily to see if we can find what the cause of this may be. Roman commented (below) that the impressions are ones where the ads actually ran (”prods”) which can vary depending on page content, page length, geo-location, OS, browser, etc. Since I’ve noted it sometimes takes a few seconds for the highlighting function to run (page has to load fully), it may be that certain groups of people who only visit for a few seconds (Digg, StumbleUpon) are mostly ‘lost’. Another possibility is that a sizeable portion of my audience is using AdBlock.

Additionally,  David informed me that they are currently working on an automated system for submitting additional sites, which I’m looking forward to using for additional sites later on.

You da man!

P.S., Regular posting will resume once my finals are over. I love blogging and the internet, but reality still comes first. At least until Google Life comes out of beta.

and lo and behold, 10 of the top 12 responses were from Yahoo! answers, including duplicate content from malaysia.answers.yahoo.com.

While this isn’t a malicious action on Yahoo!’s part, it does show that Google’s duplicate content filter isn’t foolproof.

• apple.com
• apache.com
• statcounter.com
• ibm.com
• cisco.com

Just a fun fact.

In any case, I decided to dip my fingers into the flash gamespace and see how that does. I created a prototype website called Zombie Haven with an assortment of random zombie games. As you can see, the design is basic, the layout is basic, and the advertising is minimal (One line AdSense). I stumbled the main page and started seeing hits almost instantly - over the last four days I’ve had between 1.5k and 3k visitors, mostly from StumbleUpon (about 2/3), and 1/3 from www.motika.com.mk  (I’m going to assume that’s Greek).

Advertising revenues, as expected, have been pretty dismal. The first 3 days had a CPM of about $.03, although today it bumped up to about $.27 CPM. If this level of traffic and CPM is maintained or increases, this may be an area I’d be willing to look into, although it seems that it would be a high maintenance project. There are additional monetization possibilities that I’ll explore and experiment with once I believe traffic is more stable.

I’m curious to see if there’ll be an upswing in traffic around  the time that 28 Weeks Later is released. Personally, I’m just a huge zombie fan and can’t wait for the sequel to 28 Days Later to come out.

They do have some good articles, such as “How to Get Cheap Broadband” and “What is broadband?“, which is a good step to gaining the trust of a visitor, as well as decent link-bait to attract more links. As for their link profile, Yahoo! and Google show drastically different numbers - 30,300 to 200, meaning they have a lot low-value links, but this still puts them #4 for “cheap broadband” on the Google.co.uk search, which is pretty damn good. This site proves that a large quantity of low-value links are still useful in gaining good rankings.

The idea behind it is that you can explore the Caveman’s (named Joe Dyton) house right before he hosts a party. Exploring the site, I found an iPod with a few songs, and profiles for nine artists in the magazine (who also had music on the iPod):

• Royksopp
• Napoleon da Legend
• The Fabulous Entourage
•  Arthur Loves Plastic
• Riding Paper Airplanes
• Rick Davies
• Corina Bartra
• Particle Zoo
• d-fuse and Hiratzka

As well as ads for Cairo Jeans, Philippe Frais (fake ad?), and Flory Company (also fake?). You’ll find an article on Joe Dyton starring in a new movie called “Smart Casual,” a TV with a Geico Gecko commercial, a computer with the Caveman’s intelligently pompous blogs. Heck, you can even voyeuristically pop into the bathroom and watch the caveman shower, help him get dressed in the bedroom, or read annotated versions of “War & Peace” and “Don Quixote.”

Notice anything about all of these activities? They’re boring as hell. Sorry Geico, you’ve been doing well, and you’ve put a a lot of work into this site, but for those of us that don’t already love the caveman, give us something more interactive than just reading.

Once you sign up, you’re given a list of sites to go and Stumble positively. Once this has been done, the system goes over to SU and checks whether you’ve accomplished the list. While you’re doing this, you can also submit your own links - Stumblexchange only allows one link, AVUW allows you to add as many as you want. Theoretically, people then will Stumble your page positively and attract more Stumblers.

However, in a test, StumbleUpon was surprisingly effective in filtering out traffic. I chose a page that had already been heavily Stumbled before and was still receiving a small amount of traffic, so I expected a small increase assuming that it would be Stumbled positively.

Looking at the logs, Stumblexchange sent me 2 extra visitors (although not necessarily thumbs up), and AVUW sent me about sixteen. My increase in traffic? 0 - it had been an average of 2 a day, and it remained 2 a day - AVUW sent me more direct traffic in that time than StumbleUpon did!

There are two possibilities as to why this happened: StumbleUpon had no one else interested in the topic that hadn’t already visited it OR the Stumblers were essentially discounted by the algorithm, because their voting interests were unlike anyone elses, and often stumbled positively really bad content. Most of them are also most likely using a secondary account without much of a Stumbling history.

Hence, the Stumble effect of these services is minimal, and isn’t a significant risk to destroying the quality of the content added to StumbleUpon. At some point, I’ll have to try this service on a new page and test the effects. Maybe after eBay confirms their purchase of StumbleUpon?

The first site in this set of features will be a language learning website. At first look, they seem to have adopted a friendly blue, slightly 2.0-ish theme. They miss the idea of 2.0 cleanliness though, and their front page is a little busy with a lot of extraneous information (recent clients, 6 step program that doesn’t immediately take you to it). Their menu has 12  items on it, with 6 of them dropping down into an ~80 item submenu that goes past the bottom of the page, and is essentially replicated for each of the items. This could be condensed into a single search rather than 400+ menu items. Then they also have 4 additional menu options below this, giving the user literally hundreds of options to go through (475 internal links from this page alone - talk about spread out link love).

That’s a big mistake - you want to guide your visitors, especially if you’re selling a product. The less work they have to do, the better. The .co.uk version and .com version target appropriate audiences, but this separation of sites could be replaced by simple geo-targetting and they could then be melded together, creating for a consolidation of link value and content (each of these home pages has a PR of 5). An internal organization of pages would also be beneficial, as Google, Yahoo! and MSN (who index between 500 and 4000 of this sites pages), show mainly very specific pages as the highest ranking ones, and most have significant amounts of duplicate content.

Google only shows 73 backlinks, whereas Yahoo! shows 1190. This suggests that a lot of these links are low value - for higher organic search position, this site should focus on getting more prominent, high value links. This will also help their traffic as well.

The focus on the business market could be taken advantage of through linkbait to get large amounts of free advertising. Perhaps an article on “The 21 Biggest Language Snafus” would grab a lot of attention - such as when President Kennedy proclaimed “Ich bin ein Berliner!” Rather than showing solidarity, he had just claimed he was jelly donut.

So the overall recommendations are: a reorganization of the navigation to make it easier for the user as well as consolidate multinational sites, an increase in marketing targeting high value links, and a humorous contentbait campaign to draw out the business crowd.

Here are the top 10:

1. Google with $66.4 billion
2. General Electric with $61.9 billion
3. Microsoft with $55 billion
4. Coca-Cola with $44.1 billion
5. China Mobile with $41.2 billion
6. Marlboro with $39.2 billion
7. Wal-Mart with $36.9 billion
8. Citigroup with $33.7 billion
9. IBM with $33.6 billion
10. Toyota Motor with $33.4 billion

The sources:

• News Release (PDF)
• Rankings (PDF)
• Report (PDF).

Danger 1: Loss of quality and relevancy

Danger 2: Hidden Costs

Danger 3: TMI: Too Much Information

And then there’s more recent Tweet that said too much by Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion (which is a blog I also follow).

Oh, and Jason Calacanis’s (who’s blog I don’t follow) $237 extra phone bill charge for 2367 extra text messages. 2400 text messages - I barely have enough time in my life for what I’m already doing, much less reading 2400 extra messages.

Just to do the math: @ 10 seconds per text (to open phone, read, put phone away, and distraction time), that’s 24000 seconds of used time. Or 6 hours 40 minutes. At a cost of $50/hr, you’ve basically spent about $600 in money and productivity on this service. I’m sure Jason is earning closer to $100 per hour, meaning he lost about $900 this month.

Are the benefits worth this? I see few.

TC: High-flying startup StumbleUpon has been rumored to be in acquisition discussions since at least last November. Recently we’ve heard that talks have heated up again, with Google, AOL and eBay as potential suitors. A source with knowledge of the deal now says the company has signed a term sheet with eBay to be acquired. The price is somewhere between $40 - $75 million.

Giga: By marrying the toolbar to Skype client, eBay can do an end run around Google’s dominance of the search business. A simple search box inside Skype client is all it would take. It is not that far fetched: Skype has been slowly integrating various different services (including PayPal) into its client, and slowly becoming eBay’s desktop backdoor.

Take, for example, Google’s new toolbar button. You click on it, and it takes you to a site that your search history would suggest that you like. Hmm… does that sound at all like StumbleUpon, where you click on a thumbs up or thumbs down, and it takes you to a site that your voting history suggests you would like?

However, an initial use of this tool suggests that it still has a long way to go before the quality of the sites is anywhere near that of StumbleUpon. My initial 20 site spree took me to sites which I recognized why I was visiting (text-link-ads, local newspapers, a few mmorpg sites as I’ve recently picked up Guild Wars). However, none of these sites were actually interesting to me, and it fails as a discovery service.

The question is, could it work in the future? With Google’s toolbar power and reach, it stands a chance. It all depends if the content delivery is as exciting as that of StumbleUpon.

“Fans” are pretty easy. It’s the number of friends you have, plus the number of people that have subscribed to your pages (which they’ve done by friending you, or possibly just by thumbs-upping your SU profile).

Audience was a weird one. Sometimes mine would only go up by one or two, then it shot up by hundreds, then dropped hundreds. My closest guess is to assume it was an expression of an internal algorithm that showed your SU Karma or vote weight.

And now its gone, which is a good thing. That was a useless (although) fun bit of information that confused the hell out of a lot of people. And people were obsessing about it. And people were trying to increase it, likely by not honestly stumbling pages. Overall, this should now create a better user experience and better stumblers.

It’s SearchStatus! Here are some of the sweet things about it:

1. It’s lightweight. I can’t stand things that slow down my computer - I’m way too ADD for that.
2. It’s not a toolbar. I HATE installing toolbars because they take up too much screenspace. Most of my work I do on my travel laptop which measures about 14.1″ diagonally.
3. It shows Alexa and Google ranks at a glance. This means I can get rid of the Google toolbar too, since I already have a smaller searchbox standard with FireFox.
4. It boosts your sites’ Alexa ratings. Yes, Alexa ratings are bullshit, but some people still use them, and a higher one is better than a lower one, always.
5. Highlights nofollowed links.
6. Quick Keyword Density Analysis
7. Easy access to Whois, Archive.org, meta tags (no looking through source code!), robots.txt
8. Indexed page and backlink checks in MSN, Yahoo, and Google
9. Quick link report on links on a page
10. Again, it’s lightweight. Another good SEO plugin is SEOBooks Tool, but it’s very heavy and useful more for intense market research rather than just getting a snapshot of a site’s popularity.

So if you’re interested, I’d recommend installing it. Enjoy and happy surfing!

Click to see full screenshot.

The changes include:

1. A navigation and profile simplification— This is a decent change. Everything is organized more logically, but it takes more clicks to get to certain areas that you were able to get to in once click. However, it is a necessity for future features.
2. The introduction of “Inbox”— Messages and Shares are now combined. This is a great change as before it really made no sense in the way it was designed.
3. Network Pages— This is probably the coolest thing of all the changes. Basically, it’s kind of a network social hub which shows people, events, etc. for an entire network on one page and gives a more cohesive feel. It has a lot of extraneous information which may prevent it from becoming a true ‘network hub,’ but it’s a good start and a nice snapshot of the networks that you’re part of. Click here to see yours.

Here’s my FaceBook profile - send me a message or poke if you’re on it.

Check out what they had to say about StumbleUpon:

Mike Bogo: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

RChobert: My professional background is in education and has morphed into the e-learning field. I know enough programming to make me dangerous in regards to developing some radical new ideas on the web, such as virtualvideomap.com. I enjoy developing web sites that give the user some kind of experience.

StarSpirit: I’m a woman from Arizona. I started stumbling in January of 2005.

GSSPP5: I am a 25 year old guy. I am into sports, movies, etc. I also want to know everything and I get bored very easily.

MB: What got you involved in StumbleUpon in the first place?

SS: One of my favorite blogs went on vacation and left a comment page open, and somebody mentioned Stumbleupon. I had a science and a art blog myself which I soon dumped after joining StumbleUpon, which I found easier, more fun, and friendlier.

GS: I got involved in stumbleupon through a buddy of mine. It wound up working out well. It generally only sends me “good” sites and it allows me to forward most of the sites that I like to friends who are working.

RC: My Video Map was submitted by StumbleUpon user “ChaseLightning”. Never heard of SU until then (June 06). Signed up, started another blog that corresponds with my StumbleUpon blog, which is virtualmagic.blogspot.com. This blog has videos of various topics of interest. My StumbleUpon blog leads visitors to each “video topic” on Virtual Magic. I’ve also blended in two other blogs, comprisal.blogspot.com and blendedexposures.blogspot.com. All three blogs are integrated with each other so the user does not feel he/she is leaving the site. This was due to the fact of the homepage on Virtual Magic becoming too large. My StumbleUpon blog was not always this way though. I started off photoblogging like most users.

MB: How did you get into the top Stumbler position? Did you actively try to get there, or did it just happen?

GS: I did not know I was a top stumbler until you told me so I guess it just happened.

RC: I am not sure how StumbleUpon determines their “Top Stumblers”. Basically, I was just browsing that page one day and saw myself listed, so it just happened. I do believe, however, that one thing I have started doing more often just since I got to be a “Top Stumbler” is stumbling and thumbing up my friends pages. This must be important.

MB: StumbleUpon has a lot of different features and aspects to it. Which features do you like best, and which things annoy you the most?

RC: I like most of the features I guess or I wouldn’t use it as often as I do. I think the search tool is probably underutilized my most people. Lately, I’ve found myself searching SU instead of Google because of ALL the spam web pages on Google.

SS: I like the comments, sometimes they’re hilarious, and I like to see who visits. (I wish they would expand that because I miss some sometimes). The stumble video is very annoying.

GS: I like the way it allows me to email directly from the page I am on. What irks me to no end is that every couple of days I have to reenter the email addresses I send to.

RC: Which things annoy me the most? The 200 friend limit. Why not just have fans or no limit at all. Makes no sense to LIMIT friends. This is an annoying feature and I hope SU will do something about it soon. And what is the “Audience”? Does anybody ‘really’ know? What also annoys me is not knowing how it is determined what submissions are shown to others right off the bat after submitting them. I’ve submitted some pages, and they are NEVER stumbled by one person. I know not all of my submissions are going to go viral on SU, but how is it determined that NO ONE views a submitted webpage? Does SU management filter submissions???

MB: The social aspect of SU is something that isn’t necessary, but is an interesting feature. How much time do you spend interacting in the StumbleUpon community?

RC: I spend 0% of my time associating with the StumbleUpon Community. Besides thumbing up their blogs I like and maybe adding a friend here and there, little or no regular communication is going on. It is very nice to receive comments, though I rarely comment on others SU blogs. I am happy to thumb up any SU blog though.

GS: None.

SS: It ‘IS’ necessary. It all depends - I have spent several hours cowriting poetry, joking around, or arguing about the latest issues, but usually a half hour a day in email. I spend more time on IM with fellow Stumblers than email.

MB: Free write time - anything else you’d like to say about anything?

RC: Thanks to the regular readers. Thanks to for the nice and encouraging comments.

SS: I think drugs should be legalized and anybody in prison or jail for simple posession should be released.
I think the top ten polluters in the world should be closed down every month till they get there act together with help from all the scientific communities and a paypal fund.
I think birthmarks are a result/scar from the sperm entering the egg.
And, even though the founders of stumbleupon are very handsome, I’m WAY cuter.

Thanks for all of the great responses! Happy Stumbling!

If you’re interested in more info about StumbleUpon, check out the StumbleUpon Resource List or the other articles written during StumbleUpon Week.

There’s apparently a 2-week ‘ramp-up’ period in which Kontera is figuring out what your site is about, so I’ll let you know in about two weeks whether this service is useful or not.

In my test run, I was making $.37 eCPM. That isn’t worth the space that AdSense was taking up.

Someone might argue, “But Mike, you didn’t place them properly! You need to place them squarely in the middle of your content!” And uglify it beyond belief while simultaneously destroying usability? That may be acceptable on a random junk site I’ve made, but not on a site that has my picture on every single page! Especially in a highly competitive market like web marketing and monetizing.

AdSense is easy, but it’s nothing more than a starting point.

Obviously, it’s difficult to do a study of this nature as killing people in the course of research would be slightly unethical, and you’d have a tough time disposing of bodies (trust me - it’s not easy to make bodies disappear).

However, the state of Texas, in all its wisdom, posted on their state site the last meals of all the people executed from 1982 to 2003. This information is no longer available from their site, but it has been copied and can be found here.

The results?

Of the 301 inmates listed, 52 declined the last meal. Of the 249, 37 chose Coke as their final drink (14.8%). Only 3 chose Pepsi (1.2%). I’m impressed Coke has so much market pull, and a smart marketer would take advantage of this - either side can spin it favorable.

Coke: More people choose Coke as their final drink than Pepsi!

Pepsi: Death row killers are 10x more likely to drink Coke than Pepsi!

Of course, the entire ad would have to have sort of a parodied feel to it - something like this:

Quick photoshop job, but something along these lines would catch people’s attention. Incidentally, Dr. Pepper was served 13 of the 249 last meals (5.2 %), beating out Pepsi, despite a much smaller market share. Dr. Pepper is made by DPSU, Inc (Dr. Pepper / Seven Up). They can easily grab a share of this marketing and can go in either direction - especially if either one of these companies picked it up.

What’s the lesson? Coke has fantastic branding, and branding is powerful enough that it will even be on people’s minds in their last moments. Brand on!

Part I - Setting up your profile

1. You are female. Even if you’re not, you are now.
2. Your age should be higher than 15, but lower than 30.
3. Find a picture either of yourself (if you’re female) or of someone else (if you’re not, and remember you are now) which meets the following criteria:
–a. It’s slightly ambiguous (i.e. not just a standard head shot, unless you do happen to be devastatingly attractive)
–b. It’s slightly flirtatious (looking up into the camera helps)
–c. Hotpants help (see putain.stumbleupon.com)

Check out the rest of Alex’s tips here!

• What is StumbleUpon?
• How do I add pages to StumbleUpon?
• How do I make my vote more influential?

In this portion, we will answer the following questions:

• What kind of pages do Stumblers like?
• How do I get even more visitors from SU?
• How can I convert a Stumbler into a regular visitor?
• What are five big mistakes people make with StumbleUpon?
• How does StumbleUpon make money?

Let’s start off with the last one, since it will help you understand the average Stumbler better.

How Does StumbleUpon Make Money?

SU makes money by delivering advertisers’ web pages directly to the user. Every few times that you click ‘Stumble’, you are actually visiting a website that paid five cents to get you there. A big tipoff of these if you’re taken to the home page of a commercial site, since they don’t do their homework and just assume all pages will have an equivalent return.

Most stumblers know this, and so they’re very wary of paid-stumbles. They’ll often go out of their way to give a thumbs down, preventing any free visitors from coming in. As a result, anything that has a whiff of commercialism is going to do poorly, and you’ll lose that visitor and more in under five seconds.

What kind of pages do Stumblers like?

The last paragraph gave you an idea of what the average Stumbler doesn’t like. Home page, commercial products, anything that seems spammy. Keep away from that.

What do they like? Eye-catching content. If your site looks boring and doesn’t have an article with a catchy, off-beat title, they’ll hit the button and move on. Seriously - their mouse is already over it, and it’s so much easier to go to the next page than figure out what they should be looking at.

Definitely put the best content above the fold. But what kind of content works best? Stumblers are perusing the web without a purpose - they’re channel-surfing the web, so you have to catch their attention immediately. A funny photo, or a video with a good title. A ridiculous or original headline, or something truly unique - like dontclick.it, a website designed entirely without the need to click. Concept websites like dontclick.it are perfect for SU.

Whatever it is, it’s crucial that the Stumbler can tell what the site is about and be interested by it without having to work too hard at it, and without scrolling down.

How do I get even more visitors from SU?

You already know that stumbling, rating, getting more friends, and adding new pages that other people like will increase your Karma and make your vote more effective, so it makes sense to vote for your own pages. There’s no taboo against adding your own pages, and there’s definitely no taboo in voting for yourself.

But how do you get even more visitors?

Add additional tags - if your page is in the category of website development, add a tag for anything related - perhaps website design, websites, blogs, anything that may be related. SU will see these added tags and send people that are interested in blogs, but may not have listed website development as one of their interests.

Send it to your friends. They’re most likely to vote positively for your site, and more positive votes (especially in a short time period) will mean more visitors. 10 votes in 10 minutes are more valuable than the same votes in 10 hours.

Make sure that you only Stumble the best pages on your domain. SU takes into account the average quality of pages Stumbled, not to mention that visitors will also remember bad pages and hurt the branding of your site, preventing them from exploring further.

Finally, rate positively any sites or pages that link to your pages. The massive influx of traffic on their page will be good for them, but it will also mean that some of those visitors will click on your link and go to your site. This may seem like a unrewarding work, but it means the other site is filtering out the Stumblers that were going to leave anyway, and you only get the highest quality visitors.

How can I convert a Stumbler into a regular visitor?

One thing that you need to accept: most Stumblers will leave immediately after they first see the page. You’ll lose the majority, guaranteed.

However, SU sends so much traffic that if even a small percentage of these visitors are converted, you’ll add quite a few subscribers or repeat visitors.

Here’s how to do it:

• Have an RSS button and email subscription form clearly visible above the fold.
• Have an RSS button and email link clearly visible at the end of whatever content you’re presenting. Pretend the Stumbler is the laziest person you ever met and has a horrible case of ADD - make it as easy possible for them.
• Give them other places to go at the end of the content
• If you’re noticing StumbleUpon traffic, mention it if you can. Many Stumblers love their service, and if you acknowledge it and welcome them, you’ll be seen as part of the in-group of Stumblers.

Easy tactics, and the first three are tactics that you should already be doing, but it’s even more critical for SU visitors (as well Digg, Reddit, and all the other social sites). The fourth will significantly increase your conversion rate because it will make the site more personal and human.

Finally, the big one:

What are five big mistakes people make with StumbleUpon-bait?

1. Stumbling the home-page. Big mistake - if I have to look for interesting content, I’m already gone and assuming it was a paid advertisement
2. Lots of intrusive advertisements, especially above the fold. If it looks like AdSense is your primary content, I’ve already gone on to the next site. I will not scroll down to look for the good stuff.
3. Tons of unbroken text. Boooring. Unless you have something really hilarious or important, I don’t care. At best, if it’s extremely educational, I’ll bookmark it and go back to it later.
4. Mis-tagging or mis-categorizing. That’s a thumbs down, and no, I won’t recategorize it for you.
5. Pitching a product. I’m not in the mood to buy something. If it’s really, really cool and fun, show me a video of what it does. Tell me a story. I’m not in a purchasing mood when I’m stumbling, but if it’s something unique and you entertain me, I may come back to it later.

This should get you well on your way to getting more visitors and more conversions with StumbleUpon. Look for another article coming up in a couple of days - this one will look at some of the other features of SU that are newer, such as StumbleVideo and StumbleBuzz.

Surprisingly, it gave me an answer! And it would only take me 29 days, 17 hours to do, traveling a total 4,524 miles! Google assumes that I can swim about 6.25 mph - personally, I’d rather take a rowboat. Spending that much time in the water would make me all pruney. Click to see the full image.

It’s a nice little easter egg. What I’m more impressed by, is that if I’m going from a European countery, it gives me kilometers instead. I have to give Google points for paying attention to other countries customs and making sure that they’re following them. It’s a much better usage policy than assuming everyone knows how to use miles, feet, etc., (none of which makes any sense anyway).

Can Google get sued for this? I’ll bet someone will try, when a family member drowns trying to get to Paris.

The Basics of StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is the channel-surfing tool of the internet, with over 2 million users. It allows people to quickly and easily visit and “discover” new webpages that they otherwise never would have.

The process: You install a toolbar (see below), you signup, and then you hit stumble. Pick some interesting topics, ranging from photography, web development, humor, gardening, and hundreds of others, and Stumble will start giving you pages that other users have rated positively.

Over time, as you rate pages, Stumble will learn what you like and match you up with similar Stumblers, giving you pages that they’ve marked as “thumbs up”.

You’ll end up finding amusing, interesting sites that you otherwise would have never even thought of looking for.

How it Works

StumbleUpon gets to know what you like when you rate web pages, and matches you up with similar users. Additionally, when you add new sites that are quality, you start getting good “Karma” and future sites that you submit and your votes will have more weight.

Adding a site is easy - just give a page thumbs up that hasn’t been stumbled yet, and it’ll be added to the database, and you’ll get credit for it.

Then there’s the entire social network aspect. To be honest, this isn’t a thrilling aspect, but it could be interesting for some people, since it automatically matches you up with people with similar interests. If you invest more time, you can make “friends” with other users, and they’ll be more likely to see your pages.

How to make it benefit your site

Stumble your own pages. There’s nothing against the code of StumbleUpon that says that you can’t Stumble your own pages. However, you have to choose content that will attract Stumblers’ attention, and keep them on the site for longer than a few seconds.

The ease of stumbling also leads to one of the downsides of StumbleUpon - it makes it really easy to leave sites.

In the next article, learn how to capture a Stumbler’s attention and how to convert Stumblers into regular visitors. Read it tomorrow!

I’ll be posting about:

• The Basics of StumbleUpon: What is StumbleUpon?
• Advanced StumbleUpon Tactics
• Off-Beat StumbleUpon Tips
• Why Black-Hat StumbleUpon Strategies Don’t Work

Look for these articles coming in the next few days!

What’s going on here? We already know FaceBook is one of the worst advertising platforms in terms of ctr rates, but is MSN testing out Google AdSense now? Or is the partnership breaking down - because MSN can’t deliver publishers, or because FaceBook’s traffic is just too low quality?

Catching up on the last few days of news stories, Google AdSense has launched their new pay per action program for AdWords advertisers, meaning that publishers can now earn referral money through the AdSense program. The program is in beta for both advertisers & publishers, and AdSense publishers can apply to be a part of the beta, as can AdWords advertisers.

As you will remember, Google first began testing pay per action ads last summer.

A Belgian court dismissed a lawsuit filed by a company that said a feature for Google Inc.’s search engine offers up password-cracking tools and serial numbers to unlock their software.

ServersCheck BVBA, based in Leuven, Belgium, charged that Google’s Suggest feature could drive users who were interested in their network monitoring software to pirated versions, said Maarten Van Laere, CEO.

The lawsuit, filed in May 2006, sought to make Google modify Suggest to not offer up piracy-related terms but did not seek financial damages.

The question as to whether Google should filter out this kind of suggest is obvious to me: absolutely. It’s one thing to provide information people are specifically looking for, it’s another to “suggest” illegal activities when looking for legitimate products. However, should Google be held legally responsible for making sure that this doesn’t occur?

ABC has done both, creating the highly addictive Lost, and being forethinking enough to allow people to watch online at their convenience, so that they don’t have to watch at exactly 10pm on Wednesdays. Because no matter how addicting their show is, people still have lives, and they have BitTorrent and YouTube.

So ABC did the smart thing and monetized it by putting streaming TV episodes with commercials online. No extra installs needing, no plugins (other than flash). Then it messed up.

I go to watch yesterdays episode earlier this evening and suddenly ABC.com demands you give some demographic data - name, year of birth, and sex. All right, all right, fair enough. Then they demand I install a plugin. GRRR, but I really need my Lost fix, so I go ahead and accept, and Firefox freezes. I’m addicted so I restart my browser and try again. Freeze.

I figure it may be a plugin complication, as I have a decent amount installed,  so then I try it on my other computer, which has a virtually unmodified Firefox. Freeze again. I assume they were just idiots and didn’t test for Firefox (which is a terrible mistake), and so after dinner I launch the evil Internet Explorer. Now I have to register with my email and password and full DOB, in addition to the previous information, but it doesn’t freeze.

And what do I get for this new plugin that they claim is for my own good? The same exact player I had before. Except now it only plays on my computer screen, and not the 32″ TV set it’s attached to. Yes, I know that’s not that huge, but I’m in a dorm room, so it looks massive. My girlfriend still complains that it’s too big.

There are several lessons to this:

• Don’t offer your customers something and then take it away, make it worse, or mess it up entirely
• Do testing before you launch your products on multiple platforms, and if you’re a big company, don’t modify on the fly
• Don’t make video any more difficult than it needs to be. Almost everyone has flash, so just use a flash player

ABC, hear me out. I like what you’ve been doing, and you’re gaining brand loyalty with me. Don’t mess it up by breaking things that are already working!

I’ve been researching finding good band sites to make suggestions for a client, and unfortunately, they are few and far between. Just in terms of layout, most are really, really bad, like RedHotChiliPeppers.com, Alanis.com or the aforementioned Jessica Simpson site. However, I do like Keane’s site, because it’s clean, intuitive, and has personality (and has the added bonus of being spiderable). Moby’s is a bit dull, but at least it’s understandable and doesn’t have random butterflies flittering everywhere.

Looking at it from a non-webmaster or SEO standpoint, as I know many of you are in that profession, what do you look for in a band site? What band sites do you like, and what ones are complete crap? What’s the info that you want when you visit the first time, and subsequent times?

Why would you stick an ad in prime visual real estate? Especially when the websites purpose is to sell the ARTIST (and her CD’s, incidentally). Here are just a few things wrong:

• If you’re trying to sell a product, DON’T monetize with advertising
• If you’ve made a flash site that’s supposed to be pretty, DON’T destroy the design with an ad designed to integrate with text content.
• Don’t put it it prime visual real estate.
• Don’t make sites entirely in flash. Please. There’s no good reason for it.

That’s about it. End rant.

Bruce Clay summed it up well:

Fogel’s ruling read, in part:

“While Yu has brought a novel challenge to a major corporation, it is apparent that to some extent he has overreached in doing so…Yu had a professional responsibility to refrain from filing such allegations if he did not have appropriate supporting evidence.”

That last line is the kicker! Not only was the case thrown out for being unmerited, but the judge found the whole thing so frivolous that he’s allowing Google to collect attorney fees from KinderStart. Huzzah!

…

Something we often try to explain to clients is that, for better or worse, ranking in Google, or any of the other search engines, is a privilege, not a right. You don’t get to start in the big game simply because you showed up. You have to earn it. It goes back to the Bruce-ism that search engine optimization isn’t about making a pig fly. It’s about genetically re-engineering a site so that it becomes an eagle. Google rewards eagles; KinderStart is a mutated pig. (Please don’t sue me for defamation.) That’s why they’re not ranking well.

Other good related links: Search Engine Land (links to past articles) and Matt Cutt’s.

In this experiment, a script randomly rotated Yahoo! and Google ads whenever the page was loaded (Google and Yahoo! ads never appeared at the same time). I threw out the data of the first few days to allow for Yahoo! to stabilize, as AdSense had already been on the site. No special settings were used for either set of ads; Publisher’s option to self-target ads was not used. This report is based on the last 7 day of activity.

Ad Impressions

As for the results: Google showed  1609 page impressions (meaning 3218 ad impressions, since there are two ads per page). Yahoo! showed 2935 ad impressions, which is notably less and also an odd number. Considering that every page shows 2 ads, it should be impossible to have an odd number of ad impressions. As for the lower number, this could be due to simple randomness, but a ~10% difference is a large amount for simple chance to create. I’m a little sketched out by Yahoo!’s reporting capabilities, and this isn’t a good thing.

Ad Relevancy

As for the relevancy of ads, AdSense wins hands down. Take a look for yourself:

Google  Adsense

Yahoo! Publisher

As you can see, Google Adsense has 4 of 4 related ads, with additional text. In Yahoo! Publisher, only 1 of the 4 ads are even remotely related, and no additional text is shown. This is likely due to an issue of advertiser volume, but it also hurts CTR rates, as seen next.

Click-Through Rates 

Adsense had a per-ad CTR rate of 1.3%. Publisher had a CTR of .3%. Ouch. Google wins this one as well, although this problem will solve itself once more advertisers start working with Yahoo!. In the end, Google had 42 clicks and Yahoo! had 10 clicks.

Total Money Made

Now this is the most important section for most people. Who ended up making more money? The average CPC of the caller area is relatively low, so this hurt Google’s CPC. The lack of Yahoo!’s targeting actually increased the CPC and increased it’s return. Without further ado, I present the results:

1. Google: $6.74
2. Yahoo!: $6.54
   

Yahoo! loses by a bit. Ouch. Sorry Yahoo!, between the lack of contextually topical advertising and the low CTR, I’m going to have to argue AdSense is still a better result, and a better service for customers.

Winner: Google AdSense

• Eric Ward, the Link Moses behind URL Wire
• Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz
• Roger Montti, the VP of Verticals at Best of the Web
• Todd Malicoat of Stuntdubl and SEO Class
• Rae Hoffman of Sugarrae and SEO Class

Questions:

Question One: What are the factors you would take into
account before buying a link from a directly contacted site (not a link
broker or seller)?

Question Two: In sectors where links are particularly tough to come by (retail, B2B in boring industries, etc.), what are content tactics you’ve taken to appeal to relevant sites in those industries (specific examples would rock)?

Question Three: What is the current climate with paid links, and how can I navigate the paid links landscape so that I come out smelling like a rose on the other side?

Question Four: Automating the link acquisition process: How far do you recommend going with it? What are the benefits and pitfalls of automation?

Question Five: Name 5 specific techniques (queries, tools, process, or starting points) you would use to get links for a statewide real estate agent.

Question Six: What are the top 3 over-rated and under-rated criteria
for determining how valuable an individual link will potentially be to
your site’s search engine rankings?

Question Seven: If you were in control of the search engine algorithm at Google, what are the top three changes you would make specific to how Google values/counts links?

Question Eight: What’s the most common mistake you see people making in their link building activities?

Question Nine: How do you think that nofollow links and redirected links are treated by the various search engines and do you see any value in obtaining these types of links?

Question Ten: So many people complain about competitors who are ranking solely on reciprocal links. Do you believe reciprocal links still works as a complete strategy or do you believe age, trust and grandfathering (for lack of a better word) are taken into account? How important do you feel age is to a link?

AdAge claims that both publishers and advertisers have had good responses using the programs.

At The Seattle Times, the test has already produced six-figure incremental ad revenue, said Mike Lemke, the paper’s senior VP-sales and marketing. “After the test, we think that it’s a viable new channel that meets the specific needs of certain advertisers who probably would not otherwise give our products a try, just because they’re either out of market or they don’t tend to use newspapers.”

…

EHealth spent $100,000 on newspaper ads in 12 markets including Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Chicago. “We specifically designed the test so we could measure lift in website traffic,” Mr. Telkamp said. “We are very pleased with the results. We definitely felt that the platform made buying print media across a broad array of alternatives convenient. It was easy to enter, modify and place bids. Plus, we were able to upload our ads to the platform, so no additional work was required. The platform’s tracking tool was also very good.”

…

Eric Mastel, president of Max Media in Virginia Beach, Va., was a skeptic when he signed a deal two years ago with dMarc Broadcasting — a company Google bought in January 2006 for its automated radio-advertising platform. But after he tested the system in two small stations in North Carolina, it impressed him with its efficiency and, even better, by delivering ad rates triple that of the regular networks in the market.

Good words all around. Let’s see more.

Facebook is a great tool, but it’s not a great marketing tool. Sorry guys.

Why is there so much crap out there? The blogosphere isn’t an ideal publication frame unfortunately - it’s great for news or timely items. Anything else, I really believe a traditional style website would be more useful, because then you can organize the information more efficiently and clean out the bloat.

The blogosphere, however, rewards frequent posting. In fact, posting less than 3 times a week will cost you readers. And posting more, as long as 1 out of 10 times it’s a worthwhile post, will get you more readers and more visitors.

I use my blog as a personal bookmarking tool, in addition to a platform. However, the stuff that appears on the front page (and feed) is only what I believe is worth reading by you. The rest of the stuff is thoughts, news, posts, that are relevant to the many category topics - I treat them more as tags, and will eventually only have a few top level categories once the content level increases. If you want to know more deeply about a topic, you’ll find info about it in those categories.

This is a self-indulgent rant. Blogs aren’t a fad, but it’s still an immature medium, with a “Hey! Look at me, I’m blogging!”-vibe. It’ll be nice once we all grow up.

 “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.”

1. Digg	16. Flickr
2. Del.icio.us	17. WikiHow
3. Reddit	18. BlueDot
4. Technorati	19. StyleHive
5. Squidoo	20. JotSpot
6. Netscape	21. Wetpaint
7. LinkedIn	22. Shadows
8. Newsvine	23. Yahoo! 360
9. Wikipedia	24. Furl
10. Ma.gnolia	25. Ning
11. StumbleUpon	26. Frappr
12. Shoutwire	27. The Best Stuff In The World
13. Facebook	28. MySpace
14. 43 Things	29. Yahoo! Answers
15. YourElevatorPitch	30. Rdiculous

I’m definitely going to have to spend some time looking at all the info in this article.

So word has it that I haven’t made many good posts lately that help people make cash. Well, I agree, so here’s how you can make some bank quickly and easily without breaking the bank too. Let’s take a quick look at Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing and see how underrated it is and how you can seriously make some cash without getting too wrapped up and hung up on the usual things that stop you from moving forward.

Introduction
When considering paid search, it’s really important to set some goals. As you can tell, I’m very big on goal orientation. Some of these goals can be:

• Better targeting (keywords and position)
• Better messaging (ad copy/description and landing page)
• Lower cost/reduce waste
• Increase conversions
• Improve ROI
• Measure success

PlusBox is a new plus sign that appears next to search results and shows additional information related to the query, such as stock prices.

Will this deprive users of additional traffic? Yes. Will it provide users with a better search engine experience? Yes. If this process continues, then all basic queries will eventually be answered by Google.

Will this be better for the internet? Perhaps. Many websites will lose significant amounts of traffic, and people will be forced to create more unique and advanced content. In any case, Google’s content advancement threatens many more basic websites and will rearrange the nature of the internet itself.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t been coded very securely (thanks to Shoemoney for pointing some exploits out, for which he got banned temporarily). It’s prone to spamming, and only provides marginal benefits. Really, it only worked because everybody was excited about the idea and checking it out, but in the end it just doesn’t give any real value.

The fact that it tracks all clicks made on my site is also sketchy. To top it off, I had the following error on my site today:

<b>Warning</b>: mysql_connect() [<a href=’function.mysql-connect’>function.mysql-connect</a>]: Host ‘p2.mybloglog.com’ is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with ‘mysqladmin flush-hosts’ in <b>/home/myblogpub/public_html/comm2.php</b> on line <b>390</b>

I don’t know about you, but I don’t like getting errors on my site. Hence, MyBlogLog will be leaving my site. Maybe someday you’ll return, but only once you’ve matured. Bye-bye, MyBlogLog!

The .com  version shows a much higher CTR rate, but more importantly, a much higher conversion rate as well. He saved 1 pound per conversion as a result.

This test was run in the UK (so people shouldn’t distrust the .co.uk domain), and Kev plans to run it in other countries as well.

This just shows how much more trust is associated with a .com.

AWstats is annoying in that it doesn’t tell you which search engine sent you this, or from what page. So I dug into my logs, and I found this as the referrer:

http://search.live.com/result.aspx?q=sex&mrt=en-us&FORM=LVSP

Now, we all know the Live! search engine is still far from perfect, but why is it sending me traffic from the keyword “sex“? Unfortunately, this link doesn’t work, so I can’t tell exactly how this one person found my site through this search, but if anyone knows what FORM=LVSP stands for, I’d like to know, because this blog has nothing to do with sex.

That’s just more proof the Live! isn’t going to be competition anytime soon.

MSN recently filed a patent for removing duplicate search results, including removing organic results if the same page or site appears in the paid section. I have a feeling this is a “feature” that will never see the light of day because of how absolutely idiotic it is. I know why they’re doing this: the bottom line. It makes sense - if the organic listing is removed, people will be more likely to click on the paid listing, and M$ makes more money, right?

Wrong. Any decent search marketer with good, quality sites will immediately pull all money out of AdCenter because it’ll remove their natural ranking. And natural rankings are better because 1) they’re free and 2) they’re more trustworthy.

Once all these guys have pulled their money out, cost-per-click will drop drastically, meaning that the bottom for AdCenter earnings for publishers will drop out and they’ll be looking at a penny-per-click. Ouch. MS would, in one fell motion, blow the brains out of its entire ad operation.

On the other hand, Google just filed a patent for allowing people to remove pages from search results, and using this information to determine spam pages and affect ranking. That’s smart. Let the masses do the work of finding bad pages for you, and people have an incentive to do it.

When I run into a bad, spammy page, I don’t ever want to run into it again, so it would make sense spend the few extra seconds to remove it from my personalized search. Additionally, pages that deceive me in the search results would also earn my wrath. This new Google option would allow me to vent my anger by knocking the page out of my own listings, and putting a vote against it in the grand scale of the index.

Of course, there is the possibility of abuse, but I have faith that Google will have a stringent enough system in place to make it difficult, and have enough human fall-backs to catch the few cases that fall through the cracks.

Google: 1. MS: 0.

Here was the experiment: Annalee Newitz decided she would try an experiment and write an article about it. She would create one of the worst blogs ever - it’s at http://www.crowdhacking.com/blog/, not even going to give it nofollowed-link-love.

And then she would hire a Digg promotion company to promote it. For $100, she hit the front page (and incidentally, came up with some of the best link-bait I’ve seen in a while). Here’s a quote from Adelson saying Digg can’t be gamed, but obviously this experiment proves that wrong:

If the corporate brass at Digg were right, this would be a complete waste of my money. CEO Jay Adelson told me before I conducted this experiment that all the groups trying to manipulate Digg “have failed,” and that Digg “can tell when there are paid users.” Adelson added, “When we identify a (Digg user) who is part of a scam, we don’t remove their account so they don’t realize they’ve been identified. Then we let them continue voting, but their votes may count a lot less. Then the scam doesn’t work.”

So what can we learn? Digg can be gamed. Gaming Digg can get you a lot of link love. More generally, uncovering hard fact that proves rumors gets you lots of link love.

No information gathered in any way through this site will be sold to anyone for any reason.

Furthermore, it will not be given to anyone unless a U.S. court orders me to do so.

Period.

What if there’s no status attached to it? Shoemoney recently made a post containing info from a book called Pinpoint Pricing. This snippet of info showed that an increase in price for an e-book from $19 to $29 (what’s the status in an e-book?) actually increased sales. It could have been an issue of perceived value, or it could have been an issue with the number itself (aren’t you sick of those $19.95 TV Ads?),

Or it could have been a reference point issue: “$19 - that’s like $10, but double!” vs “$29 - that’s like $50, but a lot less!”

Sounds ridiculous? It is. The fact is, humans often act completely irrationally. Take some examples:

Your offered the chance to bet $100, with a 50/50 chance you’ll lose that $100 or win another $100. Studies show most people will choose to risk-averse and not bet. Additionally, theories that suggest that winning $100 isn’t as valuable as losing it because it will create a proportionally smaller change in your current wealth.

You’re offered either $100 or a 50/50 chance to get $0 or $200. Studies show most people will choose to risk-averse and pick the solid $100.

You’re offered the chance to either lose $100 or a 50/50 chance to lose $0 or $200. Most people will actually choose to gamble, despite the fact that this goes against the previous theory (since the second $100 is actually a larger change to your current wealth), and if you reorganize the question slightly:

You lose $100. You are then given the option of winning it back or losing another $100. The results of this question are identical to the previous one, but people, if they were rational, would choose to not gamble again, since this scenario is the same as the first.

Or look at any lottery - if you have a 1/1000 chance of winning $500, and the ticket costs $1, the average return you can expect is $.50. And yet people play lotteries all the time (some with better odds, some with worse), going against all “rational” judgment.

So what can we learn from this? People are never truly rational. Things that may make complete sense may actually be damaging you.

So Google responded by sending them an advanced pen whose architecture is based on “redundant arrays of inexpensive drafting stuff.” Included was a letter, shown below (click to view in full size).

So my question is, where can I get one of these sweet, light-up pens? Matt?

She breaks it down nicely into five (six?) phases:

• Phase 0 - Demolishing Misconceptions
• Phase 1 – Creating the list and checking it twice
• Phase 2 – Befriending the keyword research tool
• Phase 3 – Finalizing your list
• Phase 4 – Plan your Attack
• Phase 5 – Rinse, Wash Repeat

Easy, enjoyable read too. Nicely done, Lisa!

I’m sure it doesn’t want to give up that lead, since that’s where the majority of its income comes from.

Look at Netflix and Blockbuster. Blockbuster offers a cheaper, comparable service and allows you to take movies home from their physical locations, in addition to millions spent on advertising, yet it still has less than a third of the market share. Wal-Mart tried to enter the arena, and crashed and burned - never making it above 2.6% market share.

Basic econ claims people would switch, but the risk of switching to another service that they think they’d have to learn how to use isn’t worth the $2 per month they’d be paying. If it even costs them one hour to cancel Netflix, set up a Blockbuster account, and learn the new system, that costs the average person $20 - it would take almost a year to recoup those benefits.

So how do you break people out of the mindset that “even though my service isn’t the best, it’s good enough that I won’t waste time switching”? Make your service the first - by creating a new category that didn’t exist before.

If you’re in your own category, you’ll have no competition, but how exactly do you break out and make a brand new sector? Take something that’s unique about your site, and tout it everywhere - exaggerate its significance on the site. Don’t label yourself as part of the crowd you’re like, but do label the new category.

Look at Digg. At its most basic level, it’s people voting for content. This idea isn’t new. Digg’s new features were:

1) Socialization. It got implemented at the right time, and it caught on.

2) The time-based algorithm. Votes were not counted equally, but rather based on how frequently they were coming in, hence allowing for an automated and real-time system.

Then look at Coca-Cola and Pepsi - who’s to say one product is better than another? Both have their fans, but Coca-Cola came first, and so people still trust and like it more.

Here’s another: Google. It wasn’t the first search engine. It was the first search engine to use backlinks as a criterion. Yahoo! was already a search engine, but not in Google’s “new” category, and as a result, it’s still struggling to catch up (although it never will until it breaks into completely new territory - fact).

So to sum it up: Take your most unique asset or assets (focus on one or two), and advertise it/them as much as possible. Base a new “category” around it. Reap the rewards of no competition.

If you don’t have a unique asset, then you’ll never break out. Sorry.

Sidenote: “AJAX” is NOT a unique asset.

Besides, if I can’t win on skill alone, who can beat an avatar that looks like this? Besides Shoemoney - he wouldn’t hesitate.

My guess is the last - damn those dirty apes!

In any case, I apologize, but there’s still a lot of stuff they didn’t steal, like my dignity, or my underwear (they really wouldn’t want to steal that), so look around and see if there’s something that you like!

Basically, rel=nofollow in a link means that the bot won’t follow that link, but if the target page is linked from another place, Google can still find it and index it. Robots.txt is a better way, but more for domain-wide stuff. Finally, it explains how to use meta tags to not index, and not cache pages. Some useful info - thanks Google!

Also, if you want to check me out on SU, my Stumble username is thebogo. Italicized entries have been recently added (Saturday, May 12th).

• Increasing your StumbleUpon Audience
• How to get StumbledUpon
• Advanced StumbleUpon Tactics
• Five Ways to Grow Your StumbleUpon Network
• Increase Your Website Traffic and Make More Money with StumbleUpon
• Building a Large Audience for your StumbleUpon Account
• Comprehensive StumbleUpon Resource
• How to Use StumbleUpon for Business: The Definitive Guide
• Stumble Ads Review
• The Why, How, and Who of Marketing in StumbleUpon
• Off-Beat StumbleUpon Tips
• StumbleUpon, You’ve Stumbled into My Heart
  
• An interview with Garrett Camp, Chief Architect
• How to Increase StumbleUpon Traffic
• Black Hat StumbleUpon Tactics
• I Wouldn’t Submit That to StumbleUpon
• Why Stumble is Superior to Digg
• StumbleUpon Vs. Adsense ($25 experiment)
• Don’t Email Us, Use Our Self Serve Ads (Customer service experience)
• The StumbleUpon Experiment ($25 experiment)
• Hello, Stumblers! (Claims Stumblers are better visitors than Diggers, with 2x the page views per visit)
• Stumbled Upon (Collects quotes with statistics of conversion rates - dismal as expected)

If you have a quality article, or know of one, comment or email me and I’ll add it to the resource. Read more for extra articles that didn’t quite make it to the top of the list.

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And the few nuggets of goodness get lost in the mire of retread junk.

Is there a solution?

What was it about? A man with a dream, striving to get his idea heard by the big corporation. The idea itself is a complete secret, and all the page has is a simple blog of the events of the last week or so.

This has a lot of elements of successful buzz and viral marketing:

• Not overtly for commercial profit (no ads anywhere)
• Has an element of secrecy and exclusiveness (we’re not part of the club, but we’d like to be)
• Story of little guy versus the big guy (David v. Goliath story)
• Story of a man pursuing his dream (something we all want to root for, a common denominator)

Within 5 days, he was able to get quite a few visitors, and more importantly, he was able to convert them into a small but thriving community. And no one knows what his idea is. I know I’m anxiously looking forward to see where this site leads.

Consider these elements the next time you’re planning a buzz or viral campaign, and they’ll help make it make it more successful!

Enjoy the link-love!

Of course, you could also tell me how I’m doing by commenting. I’m still new to this scene, so I’d love as much feedback as possible!

But imagine going to your local WoW shop and seeing an AdSense banner - “Buy a real axe! Real axes at i-love-axes.com!”

Kind of kills the gaming buzz, doesn’t it?

Thanks to SEO By the Sea for the heads up!

How does Stumble do it? In premise, it’s basically channel-surfing the web, but the concept is so easy and unique it gets fans. And it’s like gambling, where you’re betting your time for interesting content (it follows the most addictive kind of reward schedule - read more about that here).

And because it keeps giving us cool stuff, and because it’s completely unique in the web world, we end up being loyal, addicted SU junkies. And it gives website visitors directly to their site - no hoping for high click-throughs, they see your site.

What can you learn from SU when designing your next web project? Make it dead easy to use. Make it fun. Make it addictive. Give them a reason to keep coming back. People will keep coming back for more, and Stumblers will become part of your community.

Happy Valentines Day everyone, and don’t forget to support your local pro. They need their love too!

Most bloggers are individuals that are working by spreading their knowledge, and are in essence, a business. As most businesses have logos, the bloggers’ have their faces. Why is it important to spread your face as much as possible (and part of the reason why MyBlogLog has caught on)? There are two reasons as to why plastering your face on your blog is important: one scientific, one realistic.

The scientific

A lot of facial recognition is done in one of the most basic, emotional centers of the brain: the amygdala. This center also has some of the highest concentration of neurons and interneural connections, meaning a HUGE amount of processing goes on here. If you use a face, you touch someone on a very basic, very emotional level, and they’ll remember you (and like you) a whole lot better.

The Realistic

When was the last time you forgot someone’s face? And when was the last time you forgot someone’s name?

Wish I could be there!

Of course, some legitimate webmasters will also undoubtedly get hit, and they’ll have no idea, as they’ll never see it in webmastertools.

SEOBook has a fantastic summary of the current situation.

In Google we trust?

On Feb. 8th, I wrote that Digg needs to get in on this trend, considering how much information it already has. On February 9th, BusinessWeek talked to Digg founder Kevin Rose - Kevin announced that “Digg will be smart enough to know what interests you.” By the end of the year, Digg should have a recommendation system out similar to Stumble and be able to give you stories based on what you’ve dugg and buried.

I’m going to give myself a cookie for calling it. Look for a  post on this new trend of personalization and all of the sites that have or are starting to implement it.

Unfortunately, I’ve restructured the site so that only certain items appear in the main feed, and this feed includes everything I want to record for myself. That means you’ll be getting a lot of fluff and some of the good stuff will get lost in it.

Have no fear! All you have to do is grab the main feed instead, which is right here!

I highly recommend checking out Colors on the Web!

I think it’s the best damn thing ever.

In fact, I think it’s almost herald of the “new” generation. Granted, I use this term loosely, but if Web 1.0 was content based on computer algorithms, and Web 2.0 was user-chosen content, then the next logical step would be to have a hybrid; one that would take the user input, throw it into a personalized algorithm to give you an absolutely unique set of highly specialized results.

StumbleUpon has already done this - their algo matches up our interests with other peoples similar interests to give us personalized results. Unfortunately, their system is a bit too haphazard to work as a search engine, but is a fantastic tool for channel-surfing the web. In terms of idea, it’s far more advanced than Digg.

And what about Digg? Why isn’t it jumping along on the personalization bandwagon? It would solve many of their problems - how can you scheme onto the front page of digg if everyone has a different, customized page? And you already KNOW what people like - they’ve been telling you since Digg’s creation. Take that information and USE IT.

There’s going to be a lot of negative reaction in the web development market, because people aren’t going to know how to react, and testing will be more difficult - forever. That’s a bad thing for legit SEO’s, but an even worse thing for spammers and black-hatters.

Things are getting shaken up. Let the fall-out begin.

It’s a symbolic release. Beta forever!

Anyway, Live still has a ways to go until is algorithm catches up to Google and Yahoo!

If you log into Google Sitemaps / Google Webmaster Central, you’ll notice that there’s a tab for links. Going into shows you what inbound links Google knows about. It’s useful, and very similar to Yahoo’s! Site Explorer. As a comparison, Google has 593 inbound links to MikeBogo.com, Yahoo has 588.

Couple of important caveats from Matt Cutt’s anouncement -

1) Not all the links are showing up yet. Much better than what link: provides, but still not 100%.

2) Just because a link is in there, doesn’t mean its passing rank.

So there’s still a lot of guesswork, but we’ve got a much better tool to work with now. Cookie to you, Google!

That’s kind of cool, but how does it apply to you? Hey, wouldn’t you love to be able to control your visitors like that?

Maybe you don’t want them to pull a lever, and making them stand up is the last thing you want them to do, but what if you can get them to comment, click a link, or do anything else more often?

When the rat pulled the lever, or stood on its hind legs, I gave it a small pellet of food. The rat ate the morsel and then went back to work, pulling my lever for me.

As an offhand note – the rat’s name was Cain. For some reason, my girlfriend thought this was uncute and decided to rename it “Sparklefairy.” In retrospect, she realizes this is an absolutely ridiculous name.

Fortunately, when it comes to training, human beings haven’t evolved much beyond rats. We see examples of this constantly, and we can use it when creating a site design.

There are five “schedules” of reinforcement. All of them are good, but one, the fifth one, keeps people coming back for more, and more, and MORE…

It’s the kind of thing that causes people to get addicted, and who doesn’t want addicted visitors?

Give it to ‘em every time! (Constant Reinforcement)This is the simplest kind of reinforcement. Every time Cain did something that I liked, I gave him a treat. Easy and effective, and he learned his tasks quickly.

Unfortunately, this schedule is much more costly than any of the other methods and you run the risk of satiating your subjects (meaning they’ll be full and won’t pull your lever anymore, because they’re not hungry).

Examples of constant reinforcement are purely information-based websites such as Merriam-Webster or Wikipedia. When you search for information on these sites, you get a result that fills your need, and therefore no longer need to look.

Make ‘em wait! (Fixed Interval)

Sometimes I’d set it up so that Cain would have to wait one minute after he was rewarded before he could get more. No matter how many times he pressed the lever, nothing would happen. Once the minute passed, the first lever pull rewarded Cain, and then he’d have to wait again. Quickly, he learned that pulling the lever right after a reward wouldn’t give him more food, and so Cain stopped working for me for free. Boo, Cain, boo.

This strategy by itself isn’t very useful. Forcing your visitors to not act is counter-productive. However, in conjunction with other strategies, it can have a very positive effect. For example, Yahoo! Answers rewards you for visiting the site once a day, giving you a small incentive to check in and see what’s going on in the site, and maybe answering (or asking?) a few questions. Blingo.com allows you to search ten times a day with a chance of winning a prize each time.
Try and Try Again (Fixed Ratio)

With a fixed ratio setup, I made Cain pull the lever a certain number of times before he received food. Once he learned the setup, Cain would pull the lever slowly after each reward, and then more quickly as it came closer to the last pull – knowing you’re closer to your goal makes you work harder for it. On the other hand, knowing you’re far from your goal may make you put off working for it.

Many pyramid scheme sites employ a fixed ratio reward system – “Get five of your friends to sign up, and get a free iPod!” Many of these types of sites also use points as a midterm reward - a constant reinforcement - to achieve the periodic reinforcement of the end result (an iPod, XBox 360, etc.)
Is it ready yet? (Random Interval)

With this schedule, Cain didn’t get reinforced until a random amount of time had passed since his last morsel of food. This resulted in similar learning to fixed interval, although slightly faster.

Generally, I’d stay away from this kind of reinforcement, as either fixed interval or random ratio is more appropriate and effective for almost any occasion.
Gambling Addiction! (Random Ratio)

Here’s the one I mentioned before – the schedule that gets people addicted. And frankly, what’s better than addicted users? Casinos make money hand over fist. Cigarette companies are still posting a hefty profit even with massive taxes and legal costs. Alcohol is a booming industry in good times and bad. And there’s almost no chance your site will kill people (Digg hasn’t – yet…).

Getting a royal flush in poker doesn’t mean you won’t get a full house on the next hand, so you’ll still try just as hard to win the next, and the bite of the gambling bug is something we’ve all felt at one point or another. At the same time, getting twenty bad hands doesn’t mean you’ll get another bad hand either.

Random ratio is simple in that every lever pull or comment or click will have an equal chance of winning, and often times the system allows you to win far more than you lose. Cain learned the system, and he realized the more and the faster that he pulled the lever, the more food he got. And he started working hard.

Now if you can implement a reward system in which essentially every action has a chance of achieving a (big?) reward, your visitors will be much more likely to do that action in a frenzy. Mix that in with the fact that people overestimate small odds and overrate their chances of winning large prizes, you’ll be able to create a site that people won’t be able to tear themselves away from.

And that means more money for you.

Search Engine Land has a good article discussing what this may mean.

Other than that, it’s good to be back

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Fact #1: Google is God
Fact #2: Links, Links, Links!
Fact #3: There’s No Substitute for Good Content
Fact #4: Build for the User, not the Search Engine
Fact #5: Making Money Online is HARD

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