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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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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Conversation Search Optimization
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 12th, 2007
Tagged as: SEM, 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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Alexa turns up the geek-value of its charts
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on February 20th, 2007
Tagged as: Alexa
Am I the only one to be a little confused over Alexa’s recent changes in the way they present their site view results?
At face value there’s no real difference.
Old
New
What has changed is the y axis.
No longer does is say “Daily Page Views (per million)” but “Daily Page Views (percent)”.
This confused the hell out of me at first but I think I understand why they did it. Isn’t it easy to assume, looking at the first, that this graph shows an average of 12 million page views per day?
You certainly couldn’t make that mistake with the new parameter. The problem is, this number, while extremely accurate, makes any kind of presentation particularly taxing on client attention.
“Michael, Just what is this number a percent of and why…?”
Looking at them now you can’t go wrong (and I know I have in the past). It’s just that when showing a client relative values, it helps to have a competitor (or five) to compare them against.
Otherwise you might as well save yourself the trouble.
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Easier done than said
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on February 1st, 2007
Tagged as: Page Rank
Now that I’ve managed to reinstall everything after McAfee took down my registry, it’s all systems go with the page rank remapping project.
It’s a pretty complex issue mapping out page rank over hundreds of links and regional sites but it’s certainly worth the challenge. The problem I think is more to do with the PowerPoint presentation I’m trying to prepare to explain all this. What’s the rule? Maximum 5 slides..? Yeah right.
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Page rank madness
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on January 31st, 2007
Tagged as: Leslie Rohde, Page Rank
We got page rank.
No not me, my client. They got a PR8 home page, and PR0 product pages.
Thank God people like Leslie Rohde exist, that make this all insanely easy to figure out. And no, that’s not an affiliate link.
We got problems with session IDs. I’m a bit thin on programming knowledge but have enough to figure out that if you’re a $11+bn company, you need page rank on your product page.
So it’s back to the drawing board for a really massive overhaul. Two weeks to get a presentation ready..
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