Question: I recently purchased a website at mydomain.somecompany.com as a store to sell somecompany.com's products and was wondering if the site had any value, and how I could do SEO on the site if I couldn't change the content?

Answer: Many companies sell the right to resell their products online, but most of them that require you to use their domain or subdomain for your stores are probably selling junk. Truth be told, I have got similar questions from other people who told me that customer support at some of these firms charged for site customization, and even started off many question sequences with how much room is left on your credit card.

The idea of paying for the ability to sell someone else's stuff online is a bit absurd. Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo! and thousands of other sites all have affiliate programs. Some of the better opportunities with product catalogs also have fairly open API programs that make it easy to integrate their data into your site.

There are many problems with trying to market a site that you can not touch

• if you can't change a site then it is hard to create something remarkable that people would want to link at or share with friends

• if someone's marketing is so closed off that they don't even allow you to change anything then their marketing is probably missing out on many other great feedback points as well
• if you can't change a site then it is hard to get past duplicate content filters (good search engines will only want to rank 1 of these subdomains for any query which means that the rest of the affiliates are out of luck)
• It is important to build up your own doman name if you are serious about building something of value. If you are stuck on someone else's subdomain, then if they ever dislike you or if their business fails so does yours.

Ideas and pieces of software are recycled all the time. This site uses Apache, MySQL, and MovableType on the back end, but the front end design is unique and these words are things I typed. There is nothing wrong with using pieces, but if someone wants you to use their entire system then they are probably going to hold you back from your full potential.

People buy packaged solutions for the same reason they buy diet pills and exercise programs that work while they sleep:

Why do you think there are so many diet pill, fitness equipment, workout 10 minutes a day, crap commercials selling billions of dollars worth of solutions that don't work? The reason is people want to believe they work, they are unwilling to do the things actually required to successfully loose weight and be in shape (diet AND excersize regularly at least 30mins a day)

So instead, they buy the marketing because they'd rather lie to themselves and believe a pill / fancy ab equipment and 10 minutes will work.

Instead of starting from some boxed in, closed off opportunity someone else offers you, I think you would be better off to start with something you are interested in and go from there. It costs under $200 a year to register a domain name, host it, install Wordpress and start writing. And if $200 is more than you have then Blogger.com allows you to custom map a Blogger blog to a URL of your choice for only $10.

Martinibuster started a great thread titled Anatomy of an EPC Collapse. One of the points mentioned in it was too much inventory.

Social Sites as Budget Eaters:

AdSense ads have been appearing on many MySpace pages, even on pages when there is not much content to target against. Google also recently signed up Friendster as an AdSense publishing partner.

These social networks are hard to monetize. Valleywag recently highlighted Facebook as one of the worst sites to advertise on.

If you bid on anything remotely related to the various large social networks with a dime a click max CPC you are going to get a lot of exposure. Here are some of my logs from my affiliate software. Out of a 20 minute period I likely got at least 9 clicks from MySpace.

Save Your Ad Budget:

If being one of the default backfill advertisers costs you only $12 a day that is going to cost you about $4,000 a year in worthless advertising costs.

If you are an advertiser and bid on keywords that trigger ads on these sites, and that leads to many impressions and ad clicks without any conversions it is best to filter those sites at the campaign level using site exclusion. Use facebook.com and mspace.com to ensure you filter out all subdomains.

Publishers: Earn More:

If you are a publisher, and people filter out these low value networks by name (ie: facebook, myspace, etc.) rather than URL, then you are filtering out a lot of advertisers if you mention those sites sitewide. You need to make sure you do not place sitewide links to profile pages on these sites using their official names in the anchor text if you do not want -myspace to filter out your ads.

Other terms that kill your ad targeting are worth avoiding. If a word has a glut of low value advertisers and is associated with low value content may also make sense to filter it out, like blog.

Think of words associated with large untargeted traffic streams as being the new poison words, especially if you use contextual advertising.

If you are growing a site organically it might be worth it to sacrifice the short term earnings for long-term growth, but what happens when it comes time to sell a site? If you site has a strong brand or other intangible brand type assets worth far more than current earnings consider those before making any changes, and do not tarnish the site's image. If you site does not have those, and will likely sell at an auction it will probably sell for some multiple of current earnings, based on a number of factors including

• how much work it is to keep the site earning what it is (fixed costs, in time and money)

• general category growth (upside potential)
• site position in the category (upside potential)
• how aggressively it is monetized (upside potential)

Almost everything that has the word potential in it is going to be heavily discounted. Some people will not see the potential, while others will feel that they don't want to bid based on potential (because they feel that is their value add after they buy the site). Before you sell a site, make sure you spend a few months tweaking the monetization to max out your current revenue numbers. That is the base which most buy offers will be built from.

I just ordered a cup of tea from Starbucks, which is running a series called "The Way I See It", which is a bunch of idealistic quotes from various sources.
The Way I See It #193 was from a musician named Dan Zanes. The quote was

Let's imagine a 21st century America where families, friends and neighbors gather together at the end of each day in parks and town squares and on street corners and porches, to tell stories and jokes, to sing and dance with wild abandon! I can see and hear it now...

Then the cup has
- Dan Zanes
written under that.

At the bottom of the cup it has printed in small text

This is the author's opinion, not necessarily that of Starbucks. To read more or respond, go to www.starbucks.com/wayiseeit.

If they don't believe in a message, why waste my time showing it to me? Using words without meaning or disclaiming the value of your marketing undervalues consumer trust.

Similarly, when you lack an about page and don't have a human feel to your website it is far easier to appear as a slimy corporation that cares about nothing more than short term profit. Not mentioning much about us makes a site nameless and faceless. Some companies can pull it off because their marketing is so strong on other fronts, but if you are small then acting small may be one of your biggest advantages.

I just used Parallels to install Windows Vista on my MacBook Pro, and I noticed that by default the Windows software had gadgets on the desktop. Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! are all pushing gadgets.

In order to to make it easy to navigate the sea of gadgets, and with the hope of becoming the default provider, many of these companies are showing popularity or distribution statistics of gadgets and videos, while also making it easy to syndicate them and easy to consume them (via personalized home pages, desktop widgets, site inclusion, and sidebar widgets).

This means 2 things for publishers: a cheap way to get huge distribution and brand loyalty, and easy access to human filtered interesting content.

Today Freebase launched, which is attempting to create a useful semantic web of human knowledge, similar to Google Base. As upstarts and established companies fight for distribution and trust more information will be publicly available from third party sites. Marketers can use toolbars, statistics, APIs, custom topical search engines, Yahoo! Pipes, widgets, and other mashups to create and package useful niche content and tools by aggregating data from these sources.

Some people are using the APIs to provide a more useful version of the original, like Alexaholic, while others are focused on creating profitable ad networks such as Auction Ads. One of my affiliates recently created this mashup. You can keep up with mashups and widgets at Mashable and Sexy Widget.

ebay
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