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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.
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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This blog is becoming a bit of a joke for certain aspects, a war casualty for others.
It wasn’t my intention to have a blog explode on me but The Acer Guy really has taken me by surprise. In the space of one month, the average number of unique daily visitors has risen from an average of 50 to over 400 and this trend doesn’t look like it’s going to ease up any time soon.
All this with the “paid” job becoming more and more, emm, involving.
It’s been a fascinating trip, even more so as it’s a one-man public show. I’m having so much fun staying up with the conversations that it’s very hard to make any real progress with user tracking, Adsense CTR and all that jazz.
The one thing I have noticed, as this is as big a surprise as the growth in visitor numbers, is the fact that the biggest Adsense earner is in fact off-site. That’s right, the Swicki generates at least 3 times the Adsense revenue of the other income streams.
I have a theory for this: The Swicki is a way for users to fine tune their searches once they arrive on a site. But the Swicki results page is a mess, so users click on the fastest way out… Adsense. It’s not quite what I had in mind when I created it so I’ll have to look into a way to clean it up a little.
This is more like me ringing home to touch base than me saying anything shocking but that’s the way things go online I guess.
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Moving on from my last post, it’s becoming harder and harder for me to concentrate on some of the things I’d like to in this blog as many of the wheels I’ve set in motion are beginning to turn very rapidly indeed.
These wheels are teaching me the lesson of a lifetime but while I’m busy absorbing, it’s becoming very difficult to produce. Or at least share…
Time has become an issue lately with me. Let me put that differently: Time has an issue with me.
I just can’t get around to organizing my day in such a way as to have a start and a finish. It’s just a continual blur, just like one of my son’s frantic scribbles, whizzing back and forth with amazing power and authority only to produce what can best be described as a colourful mess.
I don’t know about you but I’ve now settled into following a few blogs directly on NetVibes rather than slavishly scouring my aggregator for keywords. That at least allows me to keep in touch without taking too much time away from my 9-to-5 (that’s pm to am ;-))
I think some of the best blogs right now are Jack Humphrey’s and Jane May’s, if only because the first talks straight, no-holds-barred authority tactics that go down like a glass of Glenfiddich with no ice. The second is far more gentle and surprisingly encouraging. Their styles are so different yet so equal in their appeal. Maybe it’s just because they know their stuff and write damned well.
Speaking of Jack Humphrey, he’s just launched a new Web 2.0 marketing tool that I like so much I bought it the moment it came out. It’s called Web2Submitter and it’s so clever you wonder why nobody thought about it earlier.
If you’re not clear about the principles of Social Powerlinking and are scared by sites like Go2Web20.net, I thoroughly recommend you hop over to Jack’s site and read this.
Anyway, the beauty of Web2Submitter is that it automatically submits submits your blog posts to Web 2.0 sites like Digg, Netscape, Reddit, Shoutwire, Plime, Newsvine and Stumble Upon , creating countless backlinks, traffic and a whole lot of authority in just a few clicks.
Like I said, brilliant.
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I made an important discovery yesterday. One of those blinding flashes that sneak up on you when you least expect them, yet are so bright they burn colourful imprints onto your retina so that you can still see them even if you close your eyes.
It seems I have more in common with Hugh McLeod than I imagined.
Many years ago I dropped out of university before I even had the chance to start. I went to a very good private school in
Until I went to hospital.
The school organized a works-experience week and I and two others (who made it to the other side) were shuffled into an operating theatre to see what surgeons do first hand. It also gave me the opportunity to see who the surgeons were.
That day I learnt the most important lesson of my life. Who you are and what you do aren’t necessarily the same thing.
The English education system makes it almost impossible to back out of your chosen career path at the last minute which is why at the tender age of 19, I found myself on a plane heading to Italy, where I’ve lived ever since.
That day returned to me recently during one of those “what am I doing with my life??” moments when I was blinded by that flash I mentioned earlier.
It seems that the cutting edge of the blogosphere is social networking. It’s like a massive, uncontrollable Hollywood-style scandal rag reporting round the clock on who’s sleeping where, who said what and how my judgment is invariably wiser than yours.
Getting on this train is easy: Read, write and link. Read, write and link. Hugh calls it “people talking” and people talk perpetually.
Like mainstream chat show ghosts, the stars of the blogosphere are beyond reproach. They’re sneezers, opinion makers, forces to be reckoned with. The rest of us drop like flies.
There is a holier-than-thow element to this. Apparently, to be successful, you’ve got to have your ear (aggregator) to the ground, know the movers and shakers and hang out at the right blog expos. Even better, vlog about them. Corporations in particular can’t miss a beat.
Now I’m the first to admit that, expos aside, I do this myself, I’m doing it on this blog and in this post. It’s also how I met my friend, colleague and rival Richard and it’s how I plan on meeting many others in future.
That’s what I do. But is it who I am?
Didn’t blogging start out as a “web log”? A diary of me, my thoughts and a way of sharing my chunk of life?
I guess at some point some big-boy bloggers’ personal conversations dried up and they sought out other conversations, building traffic for no other reason than because they channelled their thoughts into the comments of others (link love), fueling a never-ending conversation that systematically leads them towards a conversational anti-climax they knew was coming anyway.
Boy does this system get you noticed (and ranked).
But what exactly is the point?
In my book, the only things that ignite and build genuine interest either have a start and a finish or, at the very least, a sense of purpose. Anything else is just a scratched record, with clicks replaced by links that, sooner or later, take you back to where you started.
For my job, the Edelman/Vista fiasco had a start and a finish and it was an amazing experience to be in the middle. Following and countering the adverse PR for my client was an education in syndication management. The bickering about who got the damned Ferrari notebooks and who didn’t frankly didn’t light my pipe at all.
So where’s the link with Hugh? Hugh writes passionately about purpose in the epic “How to be Creative” article.
“One evening, after one false start too many, I just gave up. Sitting at a bar, feeling a bit burned out by work and life in general, I just started drawing on the back of business cards for no reason. I didn’t really need a reason. I just did it because it was there, because it amused me in a kind of random, arbitrary way.
Of course it was stupid. Of course it was uncommercial. Of course it wasn’t going to go anywhere. Of course it was a complete and utter waste of time. But in retrospect, it was this built-in futility that gave it its edge. Because it was the exact opposite of all the “Big Plans” my peers and I were used to making.
It was so liberating not to have to be thinking about all that, for a change.
It was so liberating to be doing something that didn’t have to impress anybody, for a change.
It was so liberating to have something that belonged just to me and no one else, for a change.
It was so liberating to feel complete sovereignty, for a change. To feel complete freedom, for a change.
And of course, it was then, and only then, that the outside world started paying attention.”
I just walked that same path with my wife and our Runaway Parents and Genitori in Fuga projects. The fact is, it’s got nothing at all to do with what we do, but everything about who we really are.
There’s a different flavour to projects you have, to use Hugh’s words, “complete sovereignty over”.
“The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will. How your own sovereignty inspires other people to find their own sovereignty, their own sense of freedom and possibility, will change the world far more than the work’s objective merits ever will.
Your idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours alone. The more the idea is yours alone, the more freedom you have to do something really amazing.”
Writing about who you are also puts what you do into perspective, draining some of its ultimate value perhaps, but forcing you to put your long-term strategy into perspective.
Even if you still can’t resist that one last link to someone further up the tree who absolutely, without question has something interesting to say about the state of the
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As you can probably tell from my silence, May has so far proven to have been one hell of a month.
I’m not sure what’s more worrying, the fact that I’m still in one piece, or that May’s no where near over yet.
It’s had some interesting twists, a few hiccups and more than the odd surprise, but the result was/is breathtaking. It all started back in mid- April, when we were handed the Gemstone concept to work on. It was quite big move for Acer but, and I stand by this, a very astute one.
In essence, Acer has decided to take its “solutions provider” reputation to the next level by bringing in a subsidiary of BMW AG called BMW DesignworksUSA to review the industrial design of its notebooks. Have a look at the Wikipedia definition and you’ll see why this was a good thing.
With Santarosa not due until the 10th (today) and the products expected at the end of May we had some margin, but not much. Then, HQ brought the launch forward to the 3rd and all hell broke loose.
In little more than 2 weeks I produced an Acer signature design blueprint that would be used to anchor the concepts, wrote “design” brochures for both product lines, got the websites prepared, wrote a 15-page Acer News special design edition, a 30 minute presentation speech for senior management covering all design, product and commercial aspects and support material, press releases, invites, and a host of marketing collateral while the graphics department went to work on the show itself.
If that wasn’t enough, the day after the presentation we set to work on the Santarosa material. This time all that was needed were two generic product brochure body texts and two headlines that were to be used as a basis for the mini-site. Oh, and two press releases. Those were all published today.
Santarosa’s here, so now we’re working on the products themselves. This is endless.
The best part about working with this client is trying to satisfy the demanding needs of the OEMs. Intel, Microsoft, AMD and Ferrari are all very wary about what you can and can’t say about products they’re associated with, and learning how they think is key to getting things approved and published so fast.
Today I got a real kick. When Merom came out, I suggested we link the “Dual” core concept to a message of “more than twice the fun”. Wow! Everyone liked it. Except Intel who rejected it on the grounds that “dual” did not mean “double”.
I insisted (I got the mails to prove it). I lost. Oh well. Tomorrow’s another day.
Then on Monday I opened the Intel Santarosa messaging guidelines for consumer products and what was the first message that leaped out at me? “More than twice the fun”.
Funny that eh?
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