Off Targeted Ads as an Opportunity

If you create a site about information retrieval and see medical ads on it that might be a good sign there is a bunch of money in that market.

  • Google's internal AdSense optimization is based on earnings potential. If they give an ad excessive exposure, even on off topic sites, it probably means that the ads stand a good chance of being expensive.

  • If advertisers are buying expensive clicks from off topic sites then they got plenty of budget to blow through.

I am not saying that off topic ads are a great thing long-term, but they might make for an easy way to follow the money trail. If you have any interest in the ad topic then create a few pages about it and test the earnings potential. You might also consider joining a related affiliate program and buying cheap traffic through other ad networks, such as AdBrite.

In case you think this off targeted advertising is a short term condition, consider the following data points...

Recent market size:

The most startling fact about 2002 is that the combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33.7 billion). - Marcia Angell

Future growth prospects:

If medical spending rises to 25% of gross domestic product by 2030, as many economists expect, health care's share of jobs could grow to 15% or 16% of the labor market from today's 12%, based on historical patterns.

Such a shift in employment would require health care to be the single biggest creator of jobs in the economy for the foreseeable future. And while the U.S. could in theory afford to spend 25% of GDP on health care, it's hard to imagine a world in which our children have to choose between working for the local hospital or the local health insurer. - Business Week

Drug companies are off manufacturing diseases to make up for our poor rushed choices and hollow lifestyles:

75 million Americans may have something called metabolic syndrome. How Big Pharma turned obesity into a disease – then invented the drugs to cure it. - Wired

Drug companies sponsor research

The Center for Science in the Public Interest found that 96 percent of the industry-funded efficacy studies of drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil in children were positive. That compares to just 63 percent of independently funded studies published in medical journals.
...
If one looks at just published clinical trials that contained a placebo-controlled arm, industry-funded clinicians reported the drugs were effective in 9 out of 10 cases. But among researchers not funded by industry, only 5 out of 9 reported positive results, which is surprisingly low given that other studies have shown that medical journals are biased toward publishing positive reports. By comparison, just 3 of 15 FDA reviews of pediatric antidepressant trials, many of which have not been published, were positive. - Center for Science in the Public Interest

Drug companies market directly to consumers via shady prescribe yourself websites.

And if all the above wasn't scary enough, consider the fraud baked right into the system:

The Justice Department has charged a former chief of the Food and Drug Administration with lying about his ownership of stock in companies regulated by the agency, according to media reports on Monday. The government accused Lester Crawford with falsely reporting that he had sold stock in companies while he continued holding shares in firms governed by FDA rules, the Associated Press reported. - MarketWatch

Marketing Via Free Samples

Seth Godin recently posted the difference between monopolistic businesses and those which actually appreciate their customers.

If you think about buying more marketing but have holes in the conversion process eventually you are going to get priced out of the market. Sure free samples may be a cost, but it is probably some of the cheapest marketing available, because free samples help you build trust and increase conversion rates by associating your brand with the product your customers want while they are actively looking for it - in a sense it is like an enhanced feature rich version of search. If giving away a sample costs $20 and samples lead to a 10% conversion rate, how does that compare to buying clicks at $2 each and ending up with a 1% conversion rate? If you do the math both of those will lead to a $200 cost per action, but one of them requires you to deal with far fewer people, and will be far more scalable, because any market is limited in size.

Popular bloggers that use their blogs to sell a book (maybe like me) sell many books or ebooks because their blogs keep the attention of potential clients and posts act as free samples. The beautiful thing about selling or giving away information is that there is an unlimited number of new things you can do or say, and an even larger number of ways to restate old thoughts or repackage old ideas. I still have at least a half dozen projects I really want to do soon, and rather than waiting on what to do there is always something I could be doing.

Getting people to pay attention is a cost. People not only convert better when given free samples, but free samples give people something to talk about and link at. If you are trying to build a brand from scratch and sell information then making piracy easy might be the difference between a successful business model and a failed brand that never got much exposure.

Branding and search relevancy are both largely about building mindshare. If you have no free samples, and expect people to take the plunge buying from an unknown source, you are going to need a rather compelling offer or a lot of hype to make many sales. Or you can take the desperate act of trying to win out on pricing, but in most cases that does not make for a sustainable long-term business model. Plus if you build significant trust you not only lower your marketing costs, but you can also increase your prices and expand your margins.

The Role of Passion in Marketing

I recently posted that I thought almost any successful marketer could be defined as a spammer at some point in time. The main point was that to be successful, you have to be willing to live outside of other's boundaries, and be willing to accept arbitrary labels people will throw at you for doing so. But that is not to say that everyone will succeed ONLY by spamming. I got an email today from a guy who was down and out. I got a call yesterday from another guy who seemed to be in a similar market position. The biggest commonality I notice amongst people who seem like they want to do well but are not is that they either lack focus or passion. If you are passionate about a topic it is much easier to stay focused and avoid burnout.

WebmasterWorld recently had a thread about authority which has a number of great quotes in it.

whitenight:

So for most people, an authority site is built as a labor of love on the subject.
It's that "This is the site I wanted to find on the subject when I was looking for info, but couldn't" mindset.

MikeNoLastName, being a contrarian with the thread theme, stated:

So NO I do not agree that the internet is anymore (if it ever truly was) the great playing field leveler that many still believe it is. Perhaps, for a while you'll out-fox your bigger competitors by knowing more about SEO, at least until they wise up to the potential and hire a whole staff of SEOs, but in the end it will still be who is a better business organizer and who can afford to throw more marketing money in the ad buying pot, which is greatly encouraged by the likes of G & Y.

In some cases Mike is right, but Google just bought YouTube for $1.65 billion, which shows that the underdog can beat the giant. In most cases they probably do, as long as they are truly passionate about the topic. If a person lacks passion then they are typically far easier to steamroll over though. Why?

There are people spending $5K to $100K+ a day on arbitrage or spamming. If you try to compete just on numbers and are starting with a smaller chip stack you are fighting an uphill battle.

That same WMW thread linked back to an old Googleguy comment:

Of course, folks never know when we're going to adjust our scoring. It's pretty easy to spot domains that are hoarding PageRank; that can be just another factor in scoring. If you work really hard to boost your authority-like score while trying to minimize your hub-like score, that sets your site apart from most domains. Just something to bear in mind.
...
Let me clarify that last post a smidge. You can try all sorts of stuff to "conserve PageRank," but that's no guarantee that something will work, or that it will work in the future.

If you lack passion then you may feel you have to get something before you give anything out. If you are passionate about a topic it is much easier to become a platform.

Not only is it easier for passionate people to become topical platforms, but if you are passionate

  • you are more likely to want to understand what ideas are important (and why)

  • you are more likely to see what ideas are spreading
  • you are more likely to see why ideas are spreading

And as a net result of those you are more likely to be able to create ideas that will spread. When you start seeing things like unrequested quality links, mentions on high quality sites, or other people saying I wish I would have thought of that it means you are on the right path.

Once you learn how ideas spread in one market it is easy to apply that line of thinking to quickly analyze another market.

So how does the passion bit relate to the spamming stuff I mentioned at the top of the post?

  • The more passionate you are the easier it is to create signs of quality and the more people will trust you.

  • People trusting you means you will do well even if you temporarily fall out of graces with the search engines.
  • The less effort you have to put in to build your backlink profile the more likely your site is to look like a natural part of the web.
  • Many authority sites started out as hubs.
  • Sites with more signs of quality can get away with doing a lot more shady things (or accidentally screwing up lots of things) while still being in the realm of normalcy.

Directory Archives Update

I have sorta let the Directory Archives site go to crap (ie: be poorly maintained) for a number of reasons. I still like many of the better directories (like Yahoo!, DMOZ, Business.com, MSN Small Business Directory, BOTW, Gimpsy, JoeAnt), but outside of the top few general directories and a few high quality niche specific directories most directories probably do not pack much of a punch at manipulating Google's search results or delivering direct traffic. Given the flood of low quality directories, and their lesser value in manipulating search, I have not put as much emphasis on my directory of directories. All the following reasons play part in its reduced priority status:

  • Most directories are of limited quality. Building a high quality one is an expensive and time consuming process, and most of the people who have been creating directories over the last few years have not been concerned with quality. Most of them have been selling hollow PageRank to naive webmasters.

  • Search engines (especially Google) have limited the effectiveness of many low quality links, in some cases not only deweighting the value of low quality links, but if you have too high of a junk to quality link ration they may throw ranking penalties on your site or reduce your crawl depth or crawl priority. The reduced crawl depth and crawl priority (based on low quality inlinks and outlinks and duplicate content issues) also hit many of the directories themselves, causing many of their pages to be deindexed.
  • Social sites and consumer generated media add much more context to links than most directories do.
  • Social bookmarking sites have limited editorial costs and a huge number of editors, thus they are more comprehensive than most directories are, while having much higher profit margins.
  • So many people are blogging that if you can create something legitimately useful and get it a bit of exposure via your own blog or via the social sites then it is bound to pick up many high quality links.
  • Improving search relevancy coupled with this additional content makes directories less necessary. Various niche blogs, the Wikipedia, and other authoritative social sites have largely replaced most directories in the search results, thus reducing the direct traffic most directories send to listed websites.
  • Using the social sites is often a cheaper and more effective way of building a natural and diverse high quality backlink profile than by trying to build links from some of the lower quality directories. The social sites often lead to many secondary citations.

Rather than just killing off Directory Archives I added a social news and bookmarking section to it, such that it can still be used to help webmasters acquire good links and market their websites. In addition to listing social bookmarking and news sites it also has categories for sites like Squidoo and Work.com.

Dave Taylor's Great Blogging Video

Dave Taylor recently spoke about blogging at Affiliate Summit. Dave posted the video online here. It is a nice introduction to blogging for those who want to understand the benefits of blogging and how it can help improve their businesses.

Google Outdistancing Yahoo! in Monetizing Branded SERPs

Yahoo! tends to be a bit more cautious than Google when it comes to allowing trademark related ads. That significantly suppresses their earnings because brand related search queries are often some of the most targeted, most commercial, highest converting, and most expensive keywords. Here is a snapshot of the current search results for SEO Book. Notice that the top 8 organic results link to SEO Book.com. By loosening up on subdomains (displaying them more frequently) and providing a mini site map (called Sitelinks) in the SERPs it makes it much harder for affiliates or merchants reselling a brand to get exposure through the organic search results for the core brand name.

There are two pieces to that, as well.

  1. If the top 5 or 6 search results point at the official site searchers have to scroll down quite a bit to find commercial search results outside of the core brand. Rather than scrolling they may be more likely to click an ad.

  2. If the search results look highly informational in nature (by being harder to manipulate via commercial bias, and Google over-representing the official site) then merchants are more likely to buy ads.

The brutal part with buying the ads is that sometimes Google shows 0, 1, 2, or 3 AdWords ads above the organic search results. If the organic search results are somewhat irrelevant to the commercial intent of a searcher, those few ads at the top of the search results are going to get a high clickthrough rate. If you are a merchant who is not featured at the top of the results the right rail ads will bring you relatively little exposure. Thus a bidding war occurs for those top couple ad spots, and Google can control how many ads to show above the results to maximize earnings.

If you sell an ebook like I do, it is no big deal if one day your sales are high and the next day they are garbage, but if you run a business with fixed costs, a fixed marketing budget, and many employees then you may be stuck paying whatever it takes to be at the top of the results for brands you carry. The more dependant your business is on search the more they can bleed you dry!

While I used my brand as an example in this post, this brand factor recently played a big roll for a client, who even outranks his manufacturer for their official name in some major search engines, but is forced to pay much higher AdWords rates to get any exposure on Google. If he falls out of the top couple ad slots the right rail sends us like 10% the traffic that the top ad positions do. And I am probably going to have to bid bleed about $5 a click for a while to work that client back into the rotation of the ads at the top of the search results. And then if we knock a competing site out of position that may spur on a budget bleeding bidding war. Companies with a fixed marketing budget (my client has a variable budget based on market conditions) will suffer even worse by having to overpay for traffic until they kill their budget, and then not show up the rest of the time.

If the core brand term is priced out of reach it is important to

My client dominates the long tail, but for that particular brand he carries, most of the queries are for the official brand name. As a Google share owner and owner of a strong brand, I think they are brilliant. As a marketer who has a client getting screwed by their setup, I think a bit less of them. ;)

Also worth noting that Yahoo!'s search results are moving toward a more authority based algorithm, and they are starting to double list many brand sites, so this issue will likely rise again soon enough.

Should I do SEO for Niche Market Clients?

SEO Question: Where would you begin with a client that markets exceptionally niche products? Or would you simply pass on the opportunity and just work with clients with more mainstream products/services?

SEO Answer: Certain markets, like insurance, are brutal to jump into, no matter how much you are willing to spend. Other markets are easy to dominate with little effort. Traditionally niche markets are less competitive than established competitive markets, and thus it is easier for a small amount of SEO to go a long way.

There are a few major considerations when deciding if it is worth it to do SEO on a niche site:

  • Is there market demand? Is their trending demand? It is hard to get people to change the way they use language or create demand where none exists unless the marketing goes beyond SEO. If the customer ranks #1 for their core keywords, but there is no traffic then SEO is a moot point. Do keyword research before considering SEO. You may also want to search to see if people are talking about similar ideas. Don't forget to use something like Google Trends if the market is seasonal. If possible set up an AdWords campaign. If they are in a deep niche there probably is not going to be much competition for their core target keywords, and they may even do well by spending $100 a month on AdWords.

  • Is there an overshadowing important market? Another thing to consider is how established and authoritative are the sites currently ranking for your target keywords. In some cases they may be prohibitively authoritative and not worth the expenses required to outrank.
  • How relevant are the organic search results? If the organic search results are irrelevant and AdWords has no competition then it might be hard to justify an expensive SEO campaign if AdWords, Overture, and AdCenter are working well enough.
  • Does the site have any trust? If the site has no trust at all it may be easier to rank pages on other sites. For example, you could put up a Squidoo lense (or similar), point a link or two at that, and try to rank it.
  • Are people talking about the site? If the site has been mentioned in the past by people without much of a push marketing campaign then odds are it is remarkable enough to really citation worthy, especially if you are working with a Purple Cow. If the site is interesting or you can relate it to something of great interest then viral marketing as SEO is great stuff.
  • Budget & Fun: The other things to consider are how fun would the client be to work with, how bad do you need work, and are they willing to give you enough budget to adequately value your time and provide long-term value. In some niches there might be huge upside potential. If they are starting from scratch (or nearly from scratch) it might make sense to gain an equity position in the website. You also have to evaluate how scalible your model is. Ongoing quality SEO services require a low client to service provider ratio since each client has exceptionally unique needs and SEO service business models are hard to scale.

History - a Cool Marketing Idea

Not sure if this idea exists already, but it would be a cool project idea for anyone ambitious enough to do it. What about creating a social network site that leverages famous poems, speeches, and quotations, and integrated them into the web by allowing submitters to add links to famous text that existed before the web. The links could show

  • how the meanings of words changed over time

  • how static human nature is
  • how politicians lie and lied
  • how religious material changes over time
  • how bogus and misguided most forms of patriotism are
  • whether cultural norms should change
  • or anything else you are interested in

There is a lot of marketing potential in history. Google realizes it, and is already exploiting it, but not to its full potential. Invariably traditional publishers are losing control due to network efficiency. Warner is already threatening to sue Google over YouTube, but YouTube just sold for 1.65 billion. I think historical text (and maybe personalized versions of it) is another vertical which is low hanging fruit like video once was.

Part of Google's move toward trying to be the default hard drive for different types of information is such that they can add context to whatever you are doing. Some of that context will be relevant ads, but the other piece of it will be useful related ideas based on other's usage data.

I think the best way to make the wisdom of the past appealing to a wide audience would be by making it interactive and showing how it is relevant to today. Some amount of that can be automated, but given how many people are trying to interpret the meaning of lyrics and how layered great writing is you would think there is a market for adding personalized or opinionated context to historical text.

655,108 - The Value of Precise Numbers in Marketing

We tend to believe that authenticity is typically more associated with the information source rather than numbers or how we evaluate them, but precise numbers typically sound

  • more factual

  • well researched
  • authentic

even if they are not.
When you want to play down something, you

  • don''t focus on it

  • gather weak data
  • using research methods with favorable slippage
  • round in your favor
  • use rough estimates
  • IF you talk about it, use loose language

But since 2003, Johns Hopkins researchers estimate 655,000 Iraqis have died. Bush thinks it is closer to 30,000, but even that is a large number considering how our reason for invasion was fraudulently associating Saddam Hussein with September 11th events.

As Bush would say:

"One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror." – President Bush's interview with CBS News' Katie Couric, Sept. 6, 2006

Even math is dependant upon marketing [PDF]. I am always perplexed when people say you shouldn't talk about politics on a marketing site. Politics is nothing but marketing. It is an ideological system of fraud and measures to bilk the world of its wealth and beauty for the profit of select power sources - at any expense necessary, and often without any connection to reality, or concern for the future.

From Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes

I pledge my allegiance,
say the munitions makers and the international bankers,
I pledge my allegiance to this flag, that flag,
any flag at all, of any country anywhere
paying its bills and meeting interest on loans,
one and indivisible,
coming through with cash in payment as stipulated
with liberty and justice for all,
say the munitions makers and the international bankers

"War is a racket always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
...
The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes even twelve per cent. But wartime profits-ah! that is another matter-twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent-the sky is the limit. All that the traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let's get it."

If Death Tax is such a big deal, then why don't politicians care about death itself?

Announcing ReviewMe!

In April I mentioned that I wanted to create some sort of a social network. I left that description intentionally broad such as to not tip my hand too much. But the idea was a social ad network.

I had a good idea, but hate the idea of having employees and running a company. I want to be able to travel and explore the world, so the idea required a partner. ;) I brought my idea to Andy Hagans, and he was up for running the show. The idea is to create a blog advertising platform that allows advertisers to contact related bloggers to ask if they would review their products or services. Our network is called ReviewMe, and will be launching soon!

While I got into the web as an SEO, I tend to think of myself more as a blogger and viral marketer than an SEO. Viral marketing was the idea behind ReviewMe. It took us a while to get the model and infrastructure down. Since we started working on the projects other blog ad networks launched and one even got VC funding, but I believe our model is going to be somewhat unique and offer a high value when compared to other businesses in the same space.

I think writing a lot and reading a lot about marketing put me in a unique position. After acquiring Threadwatch, while still building this site and others, I started getting pitched more and more frequently. It made me think that there could be a formal marketplace which made it more efficient to ask bloggers for reviews, and also removed some of the potential risks associated with pitching to bloggers. The last thing you want is a popular blogger calling you a spammer, because that stuff tends to rank well.

Four elements which will work nice in our network to filter out bad products and bad offers are

  • bloggers will disclose their relationship with the advertiser

  • bloggers only review things that are interested in
  • we encourage brutal honesty
  • the comment sections on popular blogs will help keep advertisers and bloggers honest

Fraudsters and advertisers with junk offers will not want to risk paying people to write reviews that may expose their business flaws. But, if you have a good product honest feedback and conversation about your business should only help you. Getting great feedback early on in a product's life-cycle can save millions of dollars in the long haul.

I also think this is a more efficient way of selling cost per influence than some of the other networks. Buy a sitewide ad in the right rail of a popular blog. Compare how much traffic that sends to the amount of traffic sent to links in the content area of the blog, and you will see that the influence is in the content area of the site, not near it.

In addition, I think the real value of blogs is the unique feedback you can get from the blogger. Do they like your idea or hate it? And why? What advice can they offer you on how to improve your business?

We are not going to try to create the largest and most efficient ad network in the world. That's Google's job. Rather than trying to squeeze a few more cents out of an ad space, our idea is to extend the value of advertising by coupling it with reviews and conversation on popular sites. Brand building is much more about conversation and community involvement than it is about targeting keywords and displaying ads.

ReviewMe hasn't even launched yet, and I am more excited about it than any site I have ever worked on. You can read Andy's official announcement here, and read up on the latest developments on the ReviewMe blog.

Pages

« first‹ previous154155156157158159next ›last »