Last night a blogger saved my life…
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 20th, 2007
Tagged as: Problems
Before I do anything today I wanted to share yesterday morning with you.
I normally get into the office at around 8.00, switch on the PC and either go and grab a coffee or sift through my notes getting ready to start the day.
Yesterday was just like any other only something weird happened when I booted up.
While the PC was going through the usual start up procedure, I noticed a little pop up message that I have seen on three occasions beforehand. On each one of those I had no choice but to reinstall Windows which wouldn’t be so bad if I could have reinstalled a series of other programs I had bought online (thanks Virtual Thesaurus).
Took about two days to get me back up and running.
Now I rack up a lot of computer hours but that doesn’t make me an IT pro, so when the window with the words
“svchost.exe — application error the instruction at “0×745f2780″ reference memory at “0×00000000″. the memory could not be ‘read’â€
popped up, I don’t know where to turn, particularly as the computer becomes unusable (no new executables would start).
As re-installing Windows is almost as traumatic as moving home or getting a divorce, I tried to think of what it was I had done to provoke this but the only thing I could remember was that Windows had run one of its scheduled automatic updates. Bingo. Windows had fried the PC!
Like most freelancers/consultants my PC is my lifeline. Without it I’m in apnoea.
This time I was determined not to lose everything so I googled the error message and found this which led me to a Microsoft patch that fixed the problem
Here’s the link: Download updates for Generic Host Process for Win32 Services Error and I thoroughly recommend you bookmark it for the day I hope never arrives for you.
More than thanking Scott Swigart and Chris Koester, who elicited comments like “You are a GOD!!!†I would like to ask Microsoft to investigate why this happens and STOP PUTTING MY BUSINESS AT RISK!
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Can Adsense really work?
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 19th, 2007
Tagged as: Asides, Copywriting, Gab Gab Gab, Internet Marketing, Long Tail, Search Engine Marketing
The thing about Internet Marketing, and by that I mean businesses set up to take advantage of the Internet’s vast, cash-spending audience is that the only ones that actually seem to make any serious money out of it are the ones selling the dream to others.
Like a 21st Century Ponzi scheme on a mass scale, Internet Marketing fuels the promise of easy money by creating 2nd and even 3rd tier affiliate programs, each getting a “cut†out of the diminishing sales that pass their way.
The problem is that if you work at it (and leave your morals at home) you can actually make affiliate marketing turn a handsome profit. Want to know why those “free†pornography picture sites pop up whenever your 9-year old daughter uses Google for her geography project? Affiliate marketing.
It might not be ethical, but I know a man who knows a man that spends all day putting TGP codes into his various sites, generating an effortless $10,000 a month for himself in the process. No brainer that one.
Apart from subscriptions (we’ll get to that) there are times when I can’t help thinking that info products are the only thing outside the adult industry that actually “workâ€.
Take this article from the New York Times. It’s a fascinating piece about the earnings potential of Adsense sites that really puts things into perspective.
The article asks the question:
Let’s say you wanted to build an advertising-supported online media business that took in $50 million a year in revenue. How many users would you have to attract to get there?
To make $50 million with a big staff-produced content-rich guitar site, sponsored by, say, Fender and Gibson, a site would have to generate more than 200 million page views a month, Mr. Liew estimated.
A site aimed at a specific demographic, like teenagers or Asian-Americans, would need to generate 800 million page views a month, by Mr. Liew’s reckoning.
And for a general-interest site, the ad rates go even lower, so traffic would need to be much higher to generate $50 million — about four billion page views a month, which would put it in the top 10 of all the sites on the Web.
I just had a quick look at B5Media’s (falling) Alexa ratings. Remember this is a project based on advertising revenue with, according to its home page: more than 170 blogs, 14 vertical channels and 2.5 million unique visitors a month.
UPDATE: Jeremy Wright from B5Media correctly pointed out that this graph only describes the visitors to theB5Media homepage and doesn’t reflect page views across all their blogs which are of course hosted on separate domains. Mea culpa.
Even with 2.5 million unique visitors per month, how the hell is B5Media making any money? Even if these “unique†visitors subscribe to more than one of B5Media’s blogs, we’re still a long way off that 200 million per month target. I must be missing something somewhere…
So where does that put me and my opinion? Nowhere new really. I have always been a little suspect of single income channels for online businesses as the numbers just don’t add up. But Jeremy Liew’s results certainly illustrate the daunting battle to remain financially viable faced by content-dependent Long Tail businesses.
I personally think that Adsense only works if combined with other sources of income, for example combining advertisements and affiliate programs within a paid subscription product. Sounds far fetched and you’d have to tone it down to avoid being slapped constantly by Google, but there are plenty of successful marketers doing this already. That way there is subscription revenue from one product and advertising and affiliate revenue from another that is seamlessly integrated into the first. What’s more, as the reader base actually wants to be there, integrating the two might also increase advertising CTR.
Just a thought, or at least it was as it’s the model I am developing for Web-Teach, but I’ll write more on this as I go along.
UPDATE 2: Jeremy also mentions that B5Media is planning to abandon Adsense as it isn’t a business model and I can’t say I blame them. Even with an average RPM like theirs you’re always going to need to be stretching it a bit too far to make any sense (sic) out of Adsense.
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Social Linking sparks Adaptive Learning
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 18th, 2007
Tagged as: Long Tail, Projects, Social Media
I am going to be absorbed by two things this week:
The first is something I caught off of Jack Humphrey’s fabulous Friday Traffic Report blog.
Called social power linking, in essence the theory is that Search Engines do not have the monopoly on surfers. By that I mean that surfers don’t start at a SE, visit a site, go back to the SE, visit the next site and so on. Once they’re surfing, they’re probably bouncing from one site straight to the next. I know that’s true for me - I use a non-personalized Google page as my homepage (to get off it ASAP), and only ever go back there as a starting point when my personal search conversation changes.
In between, I’m clicking around a lot, using one site’s links to head off to another, that I probably wouldn’t have found in in SE’s.
Here’s where the “social” aspect comes in and it’s particularly important in blogs, after all we bloggers will link to anyone!
Just like in SEO, Social Power Linking gets you in the way of passing traffic but not just SE traffic generated by a few, carefully guarded keywords. It’s about giving and getting. Being part of communities, throwing up and promoting your feeds within them and getting much more efficient and effective in what Jack describes as “marking your turf”.
There’s quite a lot to pick up on here so I’m going to spread it out over the week ahead and share a little of the experience online every day.
The other thing I’m involved in this week is getting my Web-Teach project into first gear. This is one of those ideas I’ve had in the back of my mind for longer than my pride will allow me to admit, and the reason it’s surfaced now is thanks in no small part to a recommendation by Shel Israel when replying to Tom Shelley of the Economist.
The idea of paying bloggers part of the Adsense (or similar) revenue from their particular page is as simple (and obvious) as it is pure genius and exactly what my Web-Teach project is looking for.
Web-Teach (not its final name BTW) is essentially an adaptive online language teaching project, designed to offer language students access to relevant content (personalized fields of interest) that is also didactically in line with their linguistic needs. A way of giving what they want AND what they need. A kind of B5Media for language-learners if you will.
Trouble is, this idea is so far down the Long Tail it’s mind-bogglingly complex to undertake alone and that’s where Shel’s revenue-sharing idea steps in (if you’re reading this Shel, thanks for that).
So Web-Teach is now almost viable. It’ll have an unglamorous launch but maybe, thanks to the power of social media, a bright future.
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Blogs in the “real” world
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 12th, 2007
Tagged as: Long Tail
I read an interesting article over on Shel Israel’s blog about how Tom Shelley of the Economist had started mailing him asking for ideas on the direction the Economist should take while developing its own blog.
The post immediately after was one from Shel asking the public how his new book was shaping up.
This product/public interaction got me thinking about how one could or should adopt social media to create and market a new product and whether the need to satisfy public demand stifles brand identity by outsourcing it to the world at large.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m already a self-declared fan of Dell’s IdeaStorm and firmly believe that direct public interaction in shaping a company’s products and strategies is a fascinating development of this new medium.
If blogs are the doyen of long tail social dialogue, then why is it their creators feel they need to satisfy short-tail philosophies to make sure they are accepted?
I think there is a danger of getting wires crossed here.
Blogs, however, live in an entirely different medium. Sure, Technorati has its own Top 10, but this is principally about frequency, not authority. So asking the public how a blog should be isn’t so much helping a blog’s rankings as an attempt to make it an instant, popular hit rather than building it and shaping its inherent values over time.
I think companies should do everything in their power to ensure that their soul is the driving force behind projects as niche-rich as blogs, and champion this above anything else from the outset, no matter what happens.
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Conversation Search Optimization
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 12th, 2007
Tagged as: Search Engine Marketing
What a fascinating post over on Backbone Media.
I had never really given much though to SEO on blogs - or should that read “how to stay on the front page of Technorati“.
It seems obvious, to those in the game, that there is a clear difference between relevancy search engines and RSS-based conversation search engines.
Yet this difference is perhaps just as invisible to the normal client as the reason why Search Engine Optimization is so important to any online presence.
In John’s post, he points out that in order to stay on the front page in your particular field, all you have to do is post more often than the time the last article on the page was listed.
In his example, the last post under “Business blogging” was posted 2 days ago, meaning that to maintain a ranking on the first page a blogger would have to write at least every 2 days. For subjects way, way down the long tail, like “synthetic transparency”, that frequency diminished considerably, allowing bloggers to stay on the top page writing just one article per year.
In the IT world, this becomes a little more difficult as the frequency for internationally-known brand is much higher. In Acer’s case, at time of writing, the last article on the first page was published under an hour ago making it almost impossible to stay on the first page for conversations alone. Dell has a much harder time with posts required every 16 minutes…
I am, like many others, still climbing the steep learning curve of blog effectiveness but conversation search optimization is certainly a concept I’ll be keeping an eye on.
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