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Archive for the ‘Copywriting’ Category

No going back now

Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 23rd, 2007
Tagged as: Apple, Asides, B5Media, Copywriting, Gab Gab Gab, Internet Marketing, Jeremy Wright, Problems, SEM, SEO, Search Engine Marketing

It’s a fascinating moment for me.

On the one hand I’ve got a great job. Copywriting - and in particular freelance copywriting - has given me both the insight and education that lets me put my thoughts and feelings into words as well as the time, freedom and inclination to explore the outer reaches of web life.

At ‘work’ I have been busy drafting the story behind a few upcoming product launches with various success. I have been studying various ways of approaching the thorny subject of internal communication and recruitment. On top of all this, I have also been looking into creating the master content of a series of web strategies so that the text is both easy to translate and effective across 7 key European markets.

Not a dull moment then.

But just like anyone with time management problems, I have also been distracted by what has in the past been called “blind ambition” but now goes by the name of a “challenge”.

You see ever since I stumbled across the letters, S, E and O, I have been drawn to their power - the fact that words, chosen carefully, could actually change the geography and relevancy of search engine results.

Then there was what you could actually do once you had uncovered this secret. White Hat is my natural colour of choice, of course, but nevertheless these three letters have unquestionably permitted some fortunate few to exploit a system to the detriment of the many.

These letters also have a more sinister side: they alienate you from the “real” world around you. I recently brought to my multi-billion dollar client’s attention that there was precious little activity on their site from any of the search engines. I even went as far as to recommend reformulating their web strategies not only to generate new traffic streams from natural search engine results but also to build enough reputation throughout the entire site to change the formula used by my client when linking to its resellers.

I got a big bunch of nods, a number of smiles and quite a few “wow we had no idea”s but never heard from them again about it. Meanwhile my client continues to pour truckloads of money into individual projects which, because they are disjointed from the overall core principles and are void of any shared values, detract from the performance of the site as a whole.

Ugh!

Either SEO (and SEM for that matter) is still in its infancy outside the US or I’m starting to be earn a reputation as a lunatic.

Best thing is to start my own business and boy do I have a few ideas knocking around. Thing is even then when I talk to friends and neighbours about them, even some who have offered to invest, the “big picture”always remains a few feet out of reach, as if what I see happening across the world in blogs, media companies and other online industries is merely a figment of my imagination, or just part of a game I’m playing all by myself.

‘Slow world’ meets the ‘fast world’, as an Italian web specialist once said, is when those living in a world fed by mainstream media have to deal with the lightning fast reactions of those of us who have chosen a more democratic, if slightly more volatile, path online. It’s never a pretty site and we (fasties) always come out worse off.

The question of whether to continue or go back is a rhetorical one. However the answer opens up a whole new debate: Then what?

I have ordered the near future into challenges I have to face:

1. I want and need to master the art of RSS as I believe RSS technology is what’s needed to create the world’s most advanced e-learning platform.
2. I believe that niche communities and experience aggregators are the key to entrepreneurial success in a Web 2.0 world. Jeremy’s “No Money in Web Advertising” articles have been instrumental in this decision.
3. I believe strongly in a healthy relationship between paid content and free services. E-learning, for example, is an ideal platform to experiment with both.

Each of the above is a open project I’d like to see up and running by the end of the year and if there are any talented writers, teachers or programmers reading this, I could probably bring that forward quite some way.

Want to know why I got buzzed today. Because I read this, then watched it here.

Oh and Jeremy, if you’re reading, I’ll be in touch soon - or you will…

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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 21^st Century Ponzi scheme on a mass scale, Internet Marketing fuels the promise of easy money by creating 2^nd and even 3^rd 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 “work”.

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?

OK $50 million a year sounds like an awful lot of cash, but only if you’re alone. If you’re a serious business, that’s probably where you’d aim.

So anyway, the results. According to the author of the report, Jeremy Liew, a venture capitalist at Lightspeed Venture Partners, the numbers are like a cold shower.

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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Can you copyright Web 2.0?

Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on October 22nd, 2006
Tagged as: Copyright, You Tube

This is a good one.

There was a lot of speculation over copyright infringement at YouTube before Google took over the reins. Now it’s gaining momentum and all the copyright lawyers have started dusting their suits off.

As it turns out, YouTube doesn’t carry a direct responsibility for the content that appears on its site. They even say so on their guidlines page. I read a post by Mark Cuban over at CNet.

Basically, while it was starting up, no-body cared. Now it’s a suit-wearing mega-site with the keys to millions of amateur/pro videos, it’s washing its hands of all and any responsibility to the people that made it what it is.

Napster took us there a few years back and they were shut down with aggression. I don’t see how YouTube can “host” copyright material and not be hung, drawn and quartered as Shawn Fanning was.

The safe alternative is Revver. But until I read Mark’s mail this morning, I will admit this site had passed beneath the radar, which gives you some idea to its viral limitations over YouTube’s.

I am wondering if the same applies to blog content. If you host a site which uses and/or refers to material written by others, and you give credits, links and all the rest, are you promoting them, or ripping them off?

In social networks, we are all footholds for each other. If I’m not allowed to use yours, do we both slip?

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Common Sense - Everything Never Changes

Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on October 8th, 2006
Tagged as: Copywriter, Copywriting, Long Tail, Naked Conversations, Shel Israel, Thomas Paine

Right on the second page of the introduction, the raison d’être of governments is laid out clearly and succinctly, confirming the point I made in my last post:

SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him, out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others. (source: ushistory.org)

This pre-dates the Declaration of Independence… I find the contrast between the goals of man to better his own standing and the controls imposed by necessity simply astounding, even more so as these same contrasts exist today.

Modern-day conspiracy theories aside, I still think that blogs are the voice of a new population, the one that has been promised yet never realized ever since the arrival of the Internet.

It is a new ground, populated by pioneers and formed through an overwhelming desire to speak out, declare our individal worth and be heard by others.

Paine continues:

In order to gain a clear and just idea of the design and end of government, let us suppose a small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth, unconnected with the rest; they will then represent the first peopling of any country, or of the world. In this state of natural liberty, society will be their first thought. A thousand motives will excite them thereto; the strength of one man is so unequal to his wants, and his mind so unfitted for perpetual solitude, that he is soon obliged to seek assistance and relief of another, who in his turn requires the same. Four or five united would be able to raise a tolerable dwelling in the midst of a wilderness, but one man might labour out the common period of life without accomplishing any thing; when he had felled his timber he could not remove it, nor erect it after it was removed; hunger in the mean time would urge him to quit his work, and every different want would call him a different way. Disease, nay even misfortune, would be death; for, though neither might be mortal, yet either would disable him from living, and reduce him to a state in which he might rather be said to perish than to die.

Thus necessity, like a gravitating power, would soon form our newly arrived emigrants into society, the reciprocal blessings of which would supercede, and render the obligations of law and government unnecessary while they remained perfectly just to each other; but as nothing but Heaven is impregnable to vice, it will unavoidably happen that in proportion as they surmount the first difficulties of emigration, which bound them together in a common cause, they will begin to relax in their duty and attachment to each other: and this remissness will point out the necessity of establishing some form of government to supply the defect of moral virtue. (source: ushistory.org)

In Naked Conversations, Shel Israel tells of how he shared drinks with John Naisbitt who hit him with the declaration “Everything Never Changes”. As I’m inclined to agree with this concept, it seems to me only a matter of time before the blogosphere evolves to such a degree that colonies will form controlled by regulating bodies.

Some convenient tree will afford them a State House, under the branches of which the whole Colony may assemble to deliberate on public matters. It is more than probable that their first laws will have the title only of Regulations and be enforced by no other penalty than public disesteem. In this first parliament every man by natural right will have a seat.

But as the Colony encreases, the public concerns will encrease likewise, and the distance at which the members may be separated, will render it too inconvenient for all of them to meet on every occasion as at first, when their number was small, their habitations near, and the public concerns few and trifling. This will point out the convenience of their consenting to leave the legislative part to be managed by a select number chosen from the whole body, who are supposed to have the same concerns at stake which those have who appointed them, and who will act in the same manner as the whole body would act were they present. If the colony continue encreasing, it will become necessary to augment the number of representatives, and that the interest of every part of the colony may be attended to, it will be found best to divide the whole into convenient parts, each part sending its proper number: and that the ELECTED might never form to themselves an interest separate from the ELECTORS, prudence will point out the propriety of having elections often: because as the ELECTED might by that means return and mix again with the general body of the ELECTORS in a few months, their fidelity to the public will be secured by the prudent reflection of not making a rod for themselves. And as this frequent interchange will establish a common interest with every part of the community, they will mutually and naturally support each other, and on this, (not on the unmeaning name of king,) depends the STRENGTH OF GOVERNMENT, AND THE HAPPINESS OF THE GOVERNED. (source: ushistory.org)

Witness b5media. Is this the future of blogging already in the making? Large communities of bloggers all regulated under one “colonized” roof? I can’t wait to see how b5media develops and whether it spearheads

a “controlled revolution” of a “revolutionary media”.

If nothing else I can’t wait to see what’s left for us outsiders once the new powers have signed their own constitution.

Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. Freedom and security. And however our eyes may be dazzled with show, or our ears deceived by sound; however prejudice may warp our wills, or interest darken our understanding, the simple voice of nature and reason will say, ’tis right. (source: ushistory.org)

Perhaps, though, when the dust settles, there will indeed be a long tail left over for the rest of us. After all if powerful colonoies of self-regulated organizations form, they will more than likely be listed enterprises with a responsability to their shareholders and financial backers to produce profit. That alone must surely limit their scope.

Everything never changes, you say? That won’t stop some people from trying.

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