Monetize Lab

Building Links and Traffic with Google Alerts

March 28, 2008 – 3:51 pm

This method that I’m about to disclosure is one facet of my marketing plan and it should be used in conjunction with link building, trackbacks and other SEO tools that we will learn in the future.

The goal of using Google Alerts to build links and increase traffic is to know where the Google bot has been, and follow behind it tracking your keywords.

I assume you have a Google account. If you use Adsense, AdWords, Gmail or any other Google service, you have a Google account. So head to the Google Alerts page.Google Alerts

Set up an alert for each of your keywords, but set the “type” to blogs. Once a day is plenty. Now, set up keyword alerts for other keywords you use. If you’re selling widgets, you could use “buy widgets”, “widgets for sale”, etc.

You can use parenthesis for keywords like you do with Google search.

Every day you will get an email from every site that Google has spidered that has your keywords. Click the links, post a comment and move on. You should have, every morning a bunch of new posts in your niche on blogs that you’ve never seen before. So, you can read them and comment and get some links.

While it may not revolutionize the way you build links, it certainly helps to know where the blog action is!

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Drilling down into Analytics data

March 26, 2008 – 3:46 pm

This article was written by Steve Jackson, he is a a recognized thought leader specializing with web analytics working for Satama the largest web analytics consultancy in Europe.

I was in a client workshop last week in Chicago and I really had to get back to basics. Being a consultant in the web analytics field gives me the opportunity to work with some of the brightest minds in the space as well as with clients who are very advanced with their analytics. However it’s always a great feeling being able to help folks that are early in their adoption of web analytics tools and processes and still get the wow effect with some of the simplest insights you can glean from the tools.

“Context is king baby! Go get your own” (Thiago’s comment: You must read it!!) reminded me exactly of what I was doing last week in Chicago and hostgator“>hosting workshops talking about the simple stuff that Avinash discusses brings you right back down to earth. I’ve been looking to the future of web analytics, debating the finer points of engagement and talking shop with some real industry stars but it’s easy to get caught up in all that and forget that most folks simply want to know how to use the tools to get some payback. So I thought I’d share the insights from my Chicago workshop and hope you can learn from it.

The company were using Google Analytics (GA) - the free system you can add to your site which is pretty good to get some decent insights.

Benchmarking

The first thing I showed the company was an opportunity that they weren’t taking advantage of, benchmarking themselves against their competition. While it will never be an apples for apples comparison benchmarking at least gives you some idea of how you’re doing. In GA you can switch on a benchmarking service by agreeing to allow Google to aggregate your visitor data - something you should carefully consider if you don’t want Google to have your information. However the trade off is very good. Some data from a website I work with is below and shows that I am doing slightly better than average in the industry that the site is in in terms of visits.

You can do the benchmarking by clicking on Visitors > Benchmarking.

There are other ways to benchmark yourself like Alexa which will give you direct comparisons to other specific sites (competition for instance) however the panels are quite small and US centric.

Looking for trends

The second thing I tried to show was how to look for trends. It’s sometimes quite difficult to spot the good stuff. One thing I do is work with standard deviations to allow me to notice which trends to look for - it goes back to my days as a quality analyst back in the early 1990’s but it works very well. I’ll discuss how to apply standard deviations to your KPIs in another article as it requires a full explanation, however the basic idea is that you look at all your numbers over time and work out the upper limit and the lower limit of your average numbers. In this way you can determine whether the trends are “out of the ordinary”. Using standard deviations I determined that the following trend had a peak in early Feb that was “out of the ordinary” limits.

The red circled area was above normal levels so like any good analyst I asked why and looked a little bit further. The first thing you need to do in this situation is put the trend into context. Which traffic source is causing the lift?

I had a look in GA at the Referring sites (Traffic Sources > Referring Sites) to see if there were any other trends I could spot. In other words I drilled down and I started looking specifically over the date period I was interested in.

As you can see from this trend there is a much clearer trend in the referring sites list. This meant that one or more of the sites in question had affected the numbers over the time period in question. Drilling down further into the top referring sites list which appears below the graphs in Google showed that one site in particular (and I hide the name so that the numbers can’t be linked to any companies) drove much more traffic over the given time period than anything else.

I had now found the reason for my peak in traffic. The next thing I had to do was monetize this, otherwise the data is simply nice to know.

Monetizing the referring source

I checked how many actions came as a direct result of the individual referrer which is quite easy to do in GA. I found out that 11 actions had come as a direct result of the traffic lift which resulted in a value of $1650. This is not a lot of money but tracing back what happened over that time period was very interesting.

A branding campaign had happened in which one particular site had basically allowed my clients to put free advertising on the referrers site. The free advertising wasn’t designed with any sale in mind and yet 11 actions had taken place resulting in revenue. This was very interesting for everyone concerned and really opened their eyes.

To wrap this article up I would say that I did go into a lot more depth and would happily share more of such examples if you feel this is useful. I’ve really only covered looking at Reach. Engage, Activate and nurture haven’t been covered here. However what I’d suggest first is that you try this out yourself. Happy drilling!

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Chapter 1: Getting Started with Search Engine Optimization

March 25, 2008 – 11:51 pm

What sites like John Doe, XPoint or Car Deals have in common?
Well, those websites and many others like yours and mine have at least one thing in common: Every single website want to be visited and found by people just like you and me.

What about website visitor? How they find what they are looking for? Word of mouth, website mention on billboards, books, TV, magazines, e-mails but for the most part they are finding everything with Serach Engines just like Yahoo, AOL, Google, MSN and many others.

When a user is searching for something like a convertible car he is presented with a mind blowing amount of information just like the screenshot below.

This huuuge amount of information is displayed in the form of Search Engine Result Pages that we like to call SERPs. Is right in this page that a company or some person website will be seen. Is right on the first page displayed by the Search Engine, which is called the Organic Natural Listings, where 80% of the users will click, they don’t go to the second page. They just look in the first one and if they don’t find what they are looking for they usually try another search with different keywords. If they still don’t find it they are most likely to abandon this search and go to another Search Engine than to go to the next page.

Again, the Organic Natural Listings area is the area of most of the online users trust. They believe that area to be not contaminated with ads in any way and that is why we say that it is the domain of the Search Engine Optimization or simply SEO.

Make no mistake: this incredibly competitive page is very valuable. Statistics and studies show that if your site is not listed on number one page of a search query, the chances of people visiting it through a search query is about zero.

So, that is what SEO is all about: Getting your page listed in the Organic Natural Listings area.

With this powerful training I’m starting today, I will conduct any person through the secrets of Search Engine Optimization.
Be tuned right here so you don’t miss the next chapter!

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I’m a jack of all trades

March 24, 2008 – 10:45 am

For those of you who know me you will be aware that I am still fairly young, just turned 24 few months ago, yet I have a surprising amount of experience for my age.

I have been a founder of 3 different companies, graphic designer, retail salesman, assistant manager, regional sales manager, market intelligence supervisor, strategic procurement specialist, hotel manager, i’ve also done a little bit of programming in Perl, PHP and Ruby and worked as a online affiliate marketer.

Sounds awesome, right? Well, don’t get me wrong but sometimes it really bothers me. It feels like that I’m good at a lot of thing, but, I’m an expert at nothing. Jacks of all trades are a lot of fun and good to talk about but people actually look for experts.

I’m not saying that I’m not capable, I am a fast learner, and my knowledge in most of the above areas is very high and I still fell that I can work in a bunch of different areas and be successful, but am I an expert? No.

So why is this a problem?

It is very useful to be a “Jack of all trades” kind of guy, but if you want to be paid really good money for something then you need to be an expert otherwise you will always need to go for your own enterprises.

To make serious money from anything, you need to be in the top 1% of your field, and even then it helps to be connected. I am good/very good at many things, especially when it comes to managing teams and seeing the big picture. But if you are looking for an expert then you are probably better looking elsewhere.

My questions are as follows:

Is it possible to make a good living without being an expert in one specific area?

Given the choice, would you prefer to be good at most things or an expert at just one thing?

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment »

I See the Future of Online Ads

March 22, 2008 – 1:53 pm

I wish it was true. Every time I look to the future of online advertisement all I see is a foggy horizon. I know that big changes are once more about to happen but is hard to tell which way we are going to take.

Yesterday, I read a article on New York Times about a assemblyman trying to pass a bill that tries to limit the tracking of web surfers’ clicks. That would make it a crime, punishable by a fine, for certain Web companies to use personal information about consumers for advertising without their consent. If it passed, surfers will have the option to ask to not be followed around.

According to DMNews, Microsoft, Google and AOL are already getting ready to meet with New York assembly­man Richard Brodsky to discuss the bill and I think this will be unlikely to pass without major changes. For me, the bill is a big confused worry about privacy, just something to bring our attention to the subject.

Now we have something to think about: In one hand we have users more and more concerned about privacy and on the other hand we have companies thinking that personal information is the new tool of the century to market their product. Companies never had so much personal information available.

With twitter and Facebook status and others, companies are almost capable of knowing what we think, what we desire. And it is not only in the consumer relations, with the way the web works now we can develop powerful tools to help us in business relations. Think about that: You are a procurement manager for a big company and you are negotiating a contract of $100M with your supplier. What would you help to negotiate with him? I’ve been a procurement specialist and I tell you I would love to know if anyone in my company were friends with my suppliers, even if it was my doorman. I don’t care, I would put them on the table, right next to me, and suddenly I would have a better bond and that would give me a better contract. With the power of social network I would know what to talk about with them, where to take them. I would increase by at least 80% my chances to please the people with who I negotiate with.

The way I see it, this is a big thing and I decided to do a little search and yes, the new york times created a big buzz about it.

ReadWriteWeb on this subject remembered us about Feacebook Beacon. The first time anyone said NO to a company abusing privacy to sell stuff. Actually, beacon could be a great thing if they didn’t screw it big time like they did.

Bernard also states in his post that Behavioral Targeting is currently the best game in town for big budget consumer branding. It is mature, works and all the big Ad Networks have a variant.

I have to disagree with him. Behavioral Targeting is far from being mature and yes all the networks are using it but they are far from using the full potential of it. Worst, advertisers are not pleased with the results they are getting. That is why we don’t know what the future of online ads holds, we can not even predict it, only wild guesses can be taken. We know that advertisement is more than ever heading into costumers’ personal life and that will raise big privacy issues. What behold the future is the way we are going to handle each one of them and a bill is definitively not the answer.

The future is foggy but we are the agents; big opportunities in front of us. The demand is right there screaming for help. Bring in your ideas and develop your tools.

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Bloggers Union/Guild - Would you go for it?

March 20, 2008 – 10:19 am

Yesterday Michael Arrington posted a very interesting article about how much money bloggers are making and some things that are involved with this. After his post, Josh Catone came and raised another question which I would like to discuss.

According to Josh, the majority of bloggers aren’t being paid what their outlet could afford to pay them. Some, like those who write at the Huffington Post or DailyKos, might not be paid at all. He observed that a bloggers union is an idea that was most recently advanced last month in an issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.

People are starting to envision a professional guild for bloggers, not unlike the Writers Guild of America, that would rep professional bloggers. Their task number would be weed “professional bloggers” from the hobbyists . Unionizing bloggers is something the National Writers Union is also talking about. Organizing bloggers is a subject that is slowly popping out everywhere.

This kind of organization is something that I fear the most and I tell you why. As far as I see it, blogging is too dynamic to be controlled/represented by a guild or a union. The tradeoff would be too expensive: bloggers would lose freedom and speed. Almost everything the web conquered was due to freedom and speed. If it was up to me I wouldn’t trade it to have someone negotiating how much I will make and how many benefits i will get.

I truly believe that on the web the power is on my hands and if I think I’m not earning as much as I should I have all I need to negotiate it or to go for new ventures.

People tend to like power more than they should; they fear the most when they feel that the power is being distributed. They may try to shade this but the truth is that bloggers don’t need a guild is the guild founders that need bloggers and the power that comer with them.

I think we are fine the way we are and thank you very much!

Posted in Articles | 2 Comments »

Unlimited access to music: Are we heading to a new era?

March 19, 2008 – 10:18 am

Yesterday the Financial Times reported that Apple is in discussions with the big music companies about a radical new business model that would give customers free access to its entire iTunes music library in exchange for paying a premium for its iPod and iPhone devices. This started a storm of posts everywhere.

You probably already read about it but is it really true or is just another rumor taking shape of news? If this really happens it would change the music industry upside down once more. The problem is that I’ve seen Steve Jobs say no to this idea many, many time in the past. Did he really changed his mind?

According to the Financial Times, research has shown that consumers would pay a premium of up to $100 for unlimited access to music for the lifetime of the device or a monthly fee of $7 to $8 for a subscription model.

As I see it the method that would work is to give customers the option to buy or not the premium and than when this user register to the iTunes Store he would see all the musics with the price tag of $0.00

I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see something like this happen but it is going to be a hell of a fight with the labels and they also should work as hard as possible to maintain the simplicity appeal intact.

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Ebay new affiliate program

March 18, 2008 – 11:32 am

eBay has stopped taking new submissions for their affiliate program at Commission Junction and is starting their own affiliate program from 1st April 2008. You can register for the new program at http://affiliates.ebay.com from 1st April onwards.

As of today, new signups for eBay affiliate program at CJ are stopped. So currently there is no way you can become their affiliates till the new program is launched.

eBay official launched can be read here.

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Beauty Isn’t Worth Money, Honey

March 18, 2008 – 9:32 am

First of all, this post is not related to the main subject of Monetize Lab but I think every one is going to enjoy this.

I was reading my emails today and I saw this one that was quoting a craigslist ad where a “spectacularly beautiful” girl is looking for “guys who make 500k or more…for marriage only.” She is straightforward and very well articulated. The truly gem here is the reply she got from a “prospect”.

Here is how the conversation proceeded. I hope you Enjoy!

Girl’s Ad

What am I doing wrong?

Okay, I’m tired of beating around the bush. I’m a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25 year old girl. I’m articulate and classy. I’m not from New York. I’m looking to get married to a guy who makes at least half a million a year. I know how that sounds, but keep in mind that a million a year is middle class in New York City, so I don’t think I’m overreaching at all.

Are there any guys who make 500K or more on this board? Any wives? Could you send me some tips? I dated a business man who makes average around 200 - 250. But that’s where I seem to hit a roadblock. 250,000 won’t get me to central park west. I know a woman in my yoga class who was married to an investment banker and lives in Tribeca, and she’s not as pretty as I am, nor is she a great genius. So what is she doing right? How do I get to her level?

Here are my questions specifically:

* Where do you single rich men hang out? Give me specifics- bars, restaurants, gyms.
* What are you looking for in a mate? Be honest guys, you won’t hurt my feelings
* Is there an age range I should be targeting (I’m 25)?
* Why are some of the women living lavish lifestyles on the upper east side so plain? I’ve seen really ‘plain jane’ boring types who have nothing to offer married to incredibly wealthy guys. I’ve seen drop dead gorgeous girls in singles bars in the east village. What’s the story there?
* Jobs I should look out for? Everyone knows - lawyer, investment banker, doctor. How much do those guys really make? And where do they hang out? Where do the hedge fund guys hang out?
* How you decide marriage vs. just a girlfriend? I am looking for MARRIAGE ONLY

Please hold your insults - I’m putting myself out there in an honest way. Most beautiful women are superficial; at least I’m being up front about it. I wouldn’t be searching for these kind of guys if I wasn’t able to match them - in looks, culture, sophistication, and keeping a nice home and hearth.

The reply:

Absolutely hilarious but true

I read your posting with great interest and have thought meaningfully about your dilemma. I offer the following analysis of your predicament. Firstly, I’m not wasting your time, I qualify as a guy who fits your bill; that is I make more than $500K per year. That said here’s how I see it.

Your offer, from the prospective of a guy like me, is plain and simple a crappy business deal. Here’s why. Cutting through all the B.S., what you suggest is a simple trade: you bring your looks to the party and I bring my money. Fine, simple. But here’s the rub, your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity…in fact, it is very likely that my income increases but it is an absolute certainty that you won’t be getting any more beautiful!

So, in economic terms you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset. Not only are you a depreciating asset, your depreciation accelerates! Let me explain, you’re 25 now and will likely stay pretty hot for the next 5 years, but less so each year. Then the fade begins in earnest. By 35 stick a fork in you!

So in Wall Street terms, we would call you a trading position, not a buy and hold…hence the rub…marriage. It doesn’t make good business sense to “buy you” (which is what you’re asking) so I’d rather lease. In case you think I’m being cruel, I would say the following. If my money were to go away, so would you, so when your beauty fades I need an out. It’s as simple as that. So a deal that makes sense is dating, not marriage.

Separately, I was taught early in my career about efficient markets. So, I wonder why a girl as “articulate, classy and spectacularly beautiful” as you has been unable to find your sugar daddy. I find it hard to believe that if you are as gorgeous as you say you are that the $500K hasn’t found you, if not only for a tryout.

By the way, you could always find a way to make your own money and then we wouldn’t need to have this difficult conversation.

With all that said, I must say you’re going about it the right way. Classic “pump and dump.” I hope this is helpful, and if you want to enter into some sort of lease, let me know.

Conclusion

Why smart and successful men marry plain janes, you ask?

A woman’s power (over men) is not her beauty, not her sexuality, not even her brains. It’s her confidence and trustworthiness. How many of the top 10 self-made billionaires actually have babes or geniuses for wives? Look at Melinda Gates, Susan Buffett, Astrid Menks. None of them are particularly hot, particularly smart or particularly sexy. But they do have something that you don’t:

They got their husbands’ backs when it counts.

With their confidence and trustworthiness, these women become the pillars of support when a man breaks down. Every A-grade intelligent men would recognize this. It is this reason that plain janes, and not beautiful gold diggers become their wives. Only B/C-grade men like the producer of The Apprentice goes for your type. And you know what? His wealth is also B/C-grade in comparison to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. So what does that make you? A B/C grade wife.

You, lady, are like a fancy sports car. Your beauty shocks and awes. Yet your price will depreciate the moment you have been sold. Within 5 years, a newer, sexier, smarter car will replace you. Such is the fate of superficial beauty.

Those women, Melinda and Astrid, are like a vast piece of land. On the surface, they are nothing but grass and dirt. But their strength and their passion will one day become the foundation of a beautiful mansion to house a family through rain and through shine. And on that day, their worth would far exceed what money can buy.

This, my friends, is the power of an A-grade wife.

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Review: HostGator - Try it or try it not?

March 17, 2008 – 1:02 pm

HostGator is a hosting company created by Brent Oxley and is currently one of the most popular and trusted providers on the internet, being featured as one of the world’s 10 largest hosting companies. The company was founded in 2002 and currently provides services to over 700,000 domains for more than 90,000 customers. Despite his company size, Brent still takes personal involvement in customer satisfaction and will often handle concerns personally.

Their sites are hosted on top-of-the-line Dual Xeon servers in their data centers at Dallas. The data centers are well equipped and connects to 10 backbone providers. They offer 99.9% uptime Guarantee which is the industry standard. They support PHP4 & 5, SSH, Cron jobs, Python, Ruby On Rails etc. Also, all the packages include enough POP3 accounts(20 for Hatchling and unlimited for others).

HostGator is very popular among the new generation of bloggers that have taken to the web in the search of a reliable and affordable hosting solution to power their privately hosted blogs. The Hatchling plan is available for as little as $4.95 per month and was an instant success for anyone desiring to take the first steps into the world of professional blogging. If a more robust solution is needed, there are two more complete shared hosting plans priced $7.95 and $12.95 respectively.

The reseller plans start at an affordable $24.95/month for the Aluminum plan and comes with 24gb disk space accompanied by 250gb of available bandwidth. Other plans on offer include the Copper $34.95, Silver $49.95, Gold 474.95 and the Diamond $99.95 which boasts an amazing 100gb of disk space together with 700gb of bandwidth. All the reseller plans permit unlimited add-on domains, sub domains, POP3 accounts, FTP accounts and MySQL databases.

hostgator-400.jpg” alt=”Screenshot”>

They also offer some of the best dedicated hosting solutions available on the internet. All plans include server management software and an intuitive control panel completely free of charge. Customers opting for Linux can also choose from a list of Operating System which includes Red Hat Linux 9.0, RHEL3, RHEL4, CentOS, or FreeBSD. The basic plan starts at $174.00, followed by the Standard $219.00, Elite $279.00 and Pro $374.00.

You will also other services such as web design, merchant services, domain registration, SSL certificates (which at $75 each, are overpriced), and script installation. They outline all of their upgrades quite clearly in the Addons section of the Support Center, which is always nice.

The actual HostGator control panel is cPanel. There is absolutely nothing that I can tell that is different than any other standard installation of cPanel. It has the standard mail and database features. Everything worked fine and installation of the scripts I tried worked just fine.

Speed Test

It doesn’t matter if they have a great price, good support and fair addons if the speed is not great. Since I’m a HostGator reseller I thought you guys could think that I’m just trying to sell it so I decided to look for some one that had ran speed tests of HostGator and that is not involved in any of their reseller or referral program. I found this guy that has hosting accounts with 1&1, A Small Orange, Dreamhost and HostGator and decided to run some tests.

Web and FTP tests were conducted using 1 HTML page that contained 6 very large JPG images. Total combined file size: 19.1 MB. All tests were conducted 3 times with each host. What you’re seeing in the charts below are the averages of each of the 3 tests with each host.

FTP Upload

Since the first thing you do when you open a new hosting account is upload your files, we see no better place to start than with the results of my FTP upload speed test. This is how long it took to upload our files to the server:

FTP Download

For bloggers needs, this category isn’t particularly important. We usually upload a lot of files, but very rarely download any through an FTP client. But we already had the files uploaded, so we figured we might as well download them to test that speed as well.

Dreamhost was the clear winner in the FTP download category, allowing us to download our files in a mere 24.57 seconds. Host Gator was a close second, while the other two trailed far behind.

Web Download

For the Average Joe Web hosting customer, our Web download test represents the most important speed element. The chart below represents how long it to each host to load our 19.1 MB Web page.

Dreamhost and HostGator clocked nearly identical times of just under 19 seconds. 1&1 was roughly 26% slower than the leaders, while A Small Orange’s performance was very poor.

MySQL Query

If you plan to run any scripts that require MySQL database connections (such as forums or blogs) you should probably pay attention to this section.

Note: We were unable to test 1&1’s MySQL speed side-by-side with the others. We ran these tests using Navicat (GUI MySQL client). 1&1Hosting does not allow remote access to their databases. We could have tested through their Web interface, but that would not have been an apples-to-apples comparison, so We didn’t bother.

For this test, We ran a semi-complex query on a data table that contained 15 columns and 21,571 rows. The numbers on the chart represent the number of seconds it took each host to execute the query.

Once again, Dreamhost and HostGator were nearly identical, while A Small Orange was significantly slower.

MySQL Import

The results of my MySQL import test will probably only interest you if you find yourself constantly updating your database from an off-line source (like an Excel, Access or ASCII text file). Here are the results of the time test we ran to import the same data file mentioned above.

All 3 were fairly close, with HostGator getting the nod.

On January 2007, HostGatorlaunched a new widget that enables Web site and blog owners to have visitors rate how fast their Web sites are loading. “This simple tool gives our hosting customers valuable insight into their Web site’s performance,” says Brent Oxley, president and founder of Host Gator. “We are always looking for ways to add value to each and every hosting account we sell and this is just another example of how we do that. This tool also enables our hosting customers to evaluate the performance of Host Gator. We are absolutely confident in our track record and welcome the chance for our customers to put us to the test.”

Conclusion

HostGator offers good support, easy to contact, competitive pricing, plenty of features with cPanel, straight forward and good speed. In my opinion is a great fit for our blogging needs.

Posted in Review | 1 Comment »