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Why I’ll never be a great online marketer…

Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on June 29th, 2007
Tagged as: Asides, Internet Marketing

It all started with a video from the late, great Ken Giddens. It was amazing how this man played the system. And buy system I mean the way people searched for information.

He showed in the clearest way possible, that the way to make money through pay-per-click systems like Adsense was to collect traffic looking for something particular, give them a little more information than they already knew and then point them in the direction you want them to go.

The (obvious) secret to making money with AdSense is getting visitors to click on the ads you want them to. Put differently, what you’ve got to avoid is giving them a reason not to.

This sounds dumb but I’ve recently learned some interesting lessons about this on one of my blogs.

To start with I believe in putting up AdSense ads only where they serve a purpose. Take a look round this site and you’ll see no ads. Lots of widgets and things but no ads. For the simple reason that in my view, anyone “lonely” enough to visit this blog isn’t looking to buy anything so what purpose do they serve here? They don’t actually add to the experience so, for now at least, they’re not welcome.

No, the idea is to put ads where they add value to the page. An example is the AdSense block on the right margin over at www.genitoriinfuga.com. Yes there’s an English version but we’re working on this one at the moment.

What this site does is tells of our travels “without the kids”. If anyone else feels the urge to follow in our footsteps, Google is kind enough to provide some pretty good ideas. It’s complimentary and makes the site look a whole lot more professional in the process. Now all we’ve got to do is work on our traffic…

A blog that isn’t lacking traffic is www.theacerguy.com and this one in particular has taught me more lessons than I’ve had hot dinners (and I’m a big guy). There’s steady growth, interest and participation from all involved.

This site has AdSense blocks both on it and off (Swicki). I’ve noticed that if people get onto the Swicki, they’re ten times more likely to try and get away from it by clicking on the AdSense ads. Ken was right.

So what was the lesson?

Recently The Acer Guy had a lot of traffic from people with a support issue. At first I wasn’t able to resolve the issue completely so visitors passed through, often clicking on the Ads when they didn’t find what they were looking for.

Then last week-end I posted a solution to the problem. Almost overnight my AdSense revenue went through the floor and is struggling to show a heart beat.

So at what cost authority? I guess there’s a fine line between giving people what they want in return for building long-term reputation and giving them what you need in return for a quick buck.

I’ll take the former any day.

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The unstoppable power of online communities

Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 26th, 2007
Tagged as: Gab Gab Gab, Internet Marketing, Long Tail, Social Media

My last post spoke about not going back.

I wrote it very late at night (for me anyway) and it was a groggy description of where my world was heading.

Two days and as many nights have passed and if anything the weight of change described in that post is even heavier today. An old saying goes: When the student is ready, the teacher will come. I like to think of it as the moment your mind is open, clarity comes.

I am beginning to see the power of long tail communities.

I’m not speaking of empty forums set up to discuss the pro’s and con’s of a single idea but communities where the collective knowledge, emotions and feelings of millions of users is shared. In his book “The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand“, Chris Anderson described it as probabilistic statistics - a matter of likelihood rather than certainty - but there is something about using the combined knowledge of an open community as the lowest common denominator in the definition of a particular principle that defies the imagination.

Wikipedia is of course the flag bearer for this medium, but there is an increasing amount of interest in this means. Take Imagine, a site that infuses the mechanism for people to self-organize get togethers such as the one’s introduced by Meetup.com with the passion of idealistic activists around the world.

Imagine’s vision is deceptively simple:

We want to live in a world where all people can live free and dignified lives, where any person who wants to help another can do so, and where no opportunities for action and collaboration are missed or wasted.

The strength of purpose of this kind of initiative is phenominal, with thousands of people worldwide dreaming, planning, doing what they want for their own communities, shifting power from institutions to people at the edges.

Or even the Personal Democracy Forum 2007 coming soon to New York, starring some of the online world’s biggest movers and shakers that aims to address:

• How is voter-generated content changing election campaigns?
• Why should advocacy groups adapt to the connected age?
• What new technology tools and practices are on the horizon?
• How are new technologies democratizing the political process?
• Which political leaders “get it”?

OK, political motivations aside, what do communities like this offer for business and marketers in particular. The possibilities are endless, once the insights and mindsets of your target audience has been fully understood. Once you accept that the many can be smarter than the few (The Wisdom of Crowds), developing a campaign becomes a process of striking the right chord in the right places.

Look at what happened over on Dell’s Ideastorm site, which uses a combination of blog user interaction with a Digg-style voting mechanism to give public weight to the unthinkable.

Going back to Wikipedia, and to one of my projects in particular, what would happen if you focused the probabilistic systems used to build an unstoppable collection of online reference material on a “massive-scale” towards instruction? Could the web be left in charge of its own education? Could its millions of users teach themselves?

Like the guys at TTeach, I believe they could and am working on a means to prove it.

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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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The way things work

Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 21st, 2007
Tagged as: B5Media, Gab Gab Gab, Internet Marketing, Jeremy Liew, Jeremy Wright, Problems

Jeremy Wright’s response to allegations that there’s no money in advertising is seriously worthy of note for anyone planning on setting up an online media company (like me).

If for nothing else, it was a real eye-opener for relative newcomers, again like me, on the mechanisms used to generate income from similar projects.

Remember I’m the creative one. I’ve got the idea in my head and am working on ways to implement it, yet people with hands-on knowledge of revenue streams are way ahead of me in this field.

What was particularly interesting for me was the part where Jeremy wrote:

They (Jeremy Liew’s figures) don’t hold true if:

1. You do more than 25M AdSense impressions per month (you get a better cut, exclusive deals, etc).
2. You work with a boutique ad network (like Federated Media).
3. Are able to get some remnant inventory providers (which can go from 0.50-2$/unit CPM, giving you an RPM of 1-4$ with just 2 units per page).
4. You do any non-performance/metric advertising (like sponsorships).
5. You do text links.
6. You have any internal sales team at all (which’ll sell those 1$ units for 2-5$, giving you an RPM of 4-10$ on even the most generic traffic).

He went even further:

1. For generic traffic, expect a 3-5RPM. To get to 50M$/year in revenue would thus require 800 million pages per month.
2. For demographically specific stuff, expect an RPM of 12-15. You’d need about 300M pages per month.
3. Huge in-demand areas like cars and sports can net you an RPM of 40-50. You’d thus need about 100 million pages per month.

Now that’s not to say these numbers are easy. But a media company that balances the above 3 properly, does sponsorships, syndication deals, content licensing, text links, feed ads, etc could potentially achieve 50M$/year in revenue on about 200 million pages per month.

The mechanisms at work here make fascinating reading. Sponsorships, syndication deals, content licensing, text links and feed ads are all relatively new business areas for me, but seeing as the project I’m toying with would be used extensively by universities and international business groups, it should be one of the first things I look at.

But it isn’t. I’m the creative one, remember? I just put two and two together and came up with over a million subscribers.

Maybe I should just give Jeremy a call…

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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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Stifling the Italian Start Up

Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on October 27th, 2006
Tagged as: Internet Marketing

I had a look round SecondLife this week - it’s extremely disorientating for a complete beginner so I’m holding judgement ’till I’ve had my guided tour.

I have just posted a similar article to this over on my Italian blog. The reason being that I am wondering just how far a newcomer can or even must travel down the long tail before his or her e-commerce site becomes financially sustainable.

I doubt very much that newcomers could take on short tail champions like Amazon or iTunes, but having said that, too far down the tail would see so little activity that any ROI would be neglibible at best.

I am fascinated by Internet Marketing at the moment. I honestly cannot see the point of having an Internet site for the sake of having one. In every situation, given a little thought, there is a whole lot more to be gained from Web 2.0

I see that blogs are taking over the role of static websites - once static information zones that do nothing more than identify who the person or company is. Blogs are changing all this. Through a blog you can get to know someone’s thoughts, their personality and also their reputation. A static website gives you a fraction of that.

Yet a working website can offer just so much more. Ever since Google Adsense arrived, there has been a definite switch towards optimizing websites in order to rank higher in the search engines. But why would you waste your time chasing a front-page result if your website offered no more than your phone number?

Working websites can advertise, promote and, even better, sell. They provide the perfect opportunity to capture new clients and keep them informed about the latest developments. The goal of the website is to turn as many of those customers into clients and it’s very easy to measure how effective they are at this.

Newsletters, blog posts and even video logs give such a strong message of customer commitment, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would consider doing it any differently.

Streamlining this process for maximum CTR is what fascinates me and here’s the rub. When you study, research and apply these SEO techniques, you do so in an ideal envoronment: America.

Here in Italy, there are no fulfillment agencies, back-end offices for rent and cheap web hosting businesses. What’s worse, when you decide to sell something physical over the web, you have to get special permission from the Chamber of Commerce before you print out your first receipt.

It’s a sign of just how sorry the Italian market is when the government has to stifle free market growth by filtering out all the irreputable sites that would otherwise spring up like mushrooms.

It’s also sad that before you can even think about entering the still-lucrative web business market, you have to go 5 rounds with the government.

It would also be nice if we competing businesses had similar taxation requirements but there again, all things are anything but equal.

The answer lies in meticulous research, shrewed determination and blind faith.

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