Anything worth investing into is usually worth taking big risks with, especially if you are beyond self sustaining from other revenue streams and investing in a project is taking time away from your other business ventures. So a friend and I were working on a project that started off slow. He was a bit of a mule off the start, but now he is doing great. Since I was funding it, off the start he was worried about spending too much, because he worried that it would take longer to break even and that earnings would have to climb much higher to break even.

After losing about $20,000 so far this year, last month was the first month the site more than broke even, but rather than allowing it to keep moving slowly toward profitability I decided to dump about another $20,000 into it so that the site would either sink or swim quickly. As more and more people invest into slowly growing their business market saturation will make it harder and harder to be profitable going slow and steady. But when you take big risks you are remarkable and have the potential to see big returns.

Slow and steady growth is nice, but if you are investing you can't be risk adverse. The site I just invested into recently doubled it's daily income, and I have to think that all of the latent effects of marketing still have not yet kicked in. If you are sitting on shaky ground it is ok to hide what you are doing or invest slowly, but if you believe in what you are doing, it is worth more than twice as much to fail or succeed quickly. If you are quick even if you fail at least you saved time in the process. If you succeed you should have more to reinvest sooner.

For the first year or two of owning a site you should be able to double its income every 3 months until you reach market saturation as long as you are an aggressive marketer and the category is in good health (and of course there is little to no reason to invest lots of effort into a dying category).

What markets and companies does that bode well for? Which ones will do worse? What media companies will swing their bias to the party in power? Which ones will stay the same?

In other unrelated news, Rumsfeld is out. If he still supports the war in Iraq it would be nice to see his ass in uniform on the front line. Rumor has it the reserves are looking for a few fine men.

Rand recently posted a comparison of traffic volumes and competitive research data for various SEO Blogs.

Here is a brief overview of a few of the other free competitive anaysis tools on the market. All I ever have to do to realize how Alexa is inaccurately skewed toward marketing and webmaster resources is look at my own graph. There is no chance in ___ that this is one of the top 1,000 sites on the web.

Recently there have been a couple launches of services which compete with Alexa, and appear to have quite a bit less webmaster skew to them.

Compete.com gives a snapshot of your site which includes average pageviews per visitor and average time on site.

Quantcast.com gives a snapshot of your site which includes demographic information (they think 90% of the readers here are guys), and breaks your site visitors and traffic volumes down into passers-by, regulars, and addicts. Sites which have highly engaged visitors are typically going to be much harder to compete against than sites which are entirely reliant on search.

There are also a number of tools which show you what keywords competitors rank for,

Spyfoo shows top ranking keywords, competing advertisers and organic competitors.

URL Trends shows historical link trends and some of the keywords a website ranks for.

I honestly do not use any of these tools much yet, but find them interesting. Do you find any of them or any similar tools useful for search marketing category analysis?

Recently I interviewed Scott Smith (aka: Caveman) and said to look out for an announcement sometime soon. Well now is sometime soon, and I am proud to announce that I have partnered with Scott to create Clientside Search Engine Marketing.

The focus of Clientside SEM will be in help mid size and larger size companies improve their organic search exposure.

About 2 months ago Oilman posted about how Digg was wasting some of their authority by splitting their brand and link equity across at least 3 domains. Given the following conditions

• there is a virtually unlimited number of ways to build links

• some link sources can be authoritative, parasitic, and long term
• Google's general goal is to be hard to manipulate and list information over commercial results
• most old authorities react slowly to market changes and don't sell their authority in a manner that is relevant to the current market

It makes sense that Google would want to promote a site with 10 quality links much more than they would want to promote 2 sites with 5 quality links each. Consolidating and controlling your link authority is exceptionally important.

Many websites still make errors when doing authoritative things by not providing a focused linkpoint on their own site for an idea. A couple examples:

Many book authors write a book and then never create a page on their own site which is the defining resource for their own book, and thus allow one of the larger bookstores or ecommerce platforms to take the default rankings for their brand.
• Many people use SurveyMonkey or some other source for surveys. If their survey / contest gets popular then they throw away a bunch of their link equity by having it all point at an external source.
• Many people blow their marketing by announcing too many things at once, instead of double or triple dipping on the plublicity.