Niche Marketing: One-Page Wonders and Microsites

Brief coverage of the webmasterworld conference niche marketing panel.
Ted Ulle:
The power of long copy...people either leave with a back button or a buy button. Direct mail showed longer copy works better.

split test your niche sites
80% to your historical best
20% to your test version

  • The people who are actually going to put the effort into reading long copy are the most qualified prospects.

  • You should write to your BEST prospect, not necissarily to the largest audience. (My sales letter is lacking, and out of guilt I will make it much better soon.)
  • As you widen your targets you lose your best prospects.
  • Talks about The Tipping Point, and the effects of viral marketing by targeting your most targeted leads
  • Talks abut how targeted the copywriting on the MailLoop salesletter is.
  • Telling a story in first person is a strong sales technique. You want prospects to visualize the happiness and enjoyment your product will bring them.
  • Typeset is important (For example I know I should change the font type on my testimonials to something like Courier New or a newspaper looking )
  • create a rhythem of small agreements, and then the final agreement or purchase is much easier to make.

recommended books & authors:

Chris Raimondi:
Where to get ideas for niches:
don't throw away junk mail
look at one of the search sites that shows searches as they happen

for small niches sometimes the best way to test is just to put a page up and see what happens

control your visitors before they see your site

asx (I need to find a link) is free software which lets you check your site visitors in real time. customize your content to match their setup focusing on the selling points that work well for them

after people visit an adult site he gives them a popunder, using how would your boss feel about you looking at adult sites during the day and how would your family feel about you looking at adult sites during the night

Usability.gov is a good resource

Talks about eye tracking. Usually people ignore things that look like a banner or the top banner area. back when Chris ran banner farms the second banner position would bet more clicks than the top one.

Jeff Libert:
buys many long targeted domain names for type in traffic. may put sites on them down the road. buys various versions of a URL. they are cheap, and in expensive categories a few clicks a year pays for the cost of it.

pay attention to related areas and emerging technologies to make your business model futre proof

do inventory of things you enjoy.

don't register trademark domains.

recommeds Moniker

type in traffic also shields you from algorithm shifts

FAQ's:
ChrisR gave the example of hearing a person on TV say something like bring back the porn and registered the domain. it pays for itself daily.

lawsuits can be in other areas. the privacy of a hidden domain registration does not protect you against laws. it also might be held against you to make you look even more suspicious or troubling if you are sued for the site.

for search engine love register domains for at least 3 years. use real information on your domains. even if it is not your own details make sure that the phone number and related data work.

Webmaster World New Orleans Pubcon - John Battelle Keynote

History:
John helped found Wired. In 1994 the first comercial banner ad was placed on Wired. He also founded The Industry Standard. Went back to Berkley after the Industry Standard business model stopped working in 2001. While the market was doing bad he noticed Google and Overture was doing well and started SearchBlog. He started Web 2.0 conference. About a year and a half ago became the ban manager of Boing Boing. Publishing Costs at Blogs vs Magazines:
Boing Boing most linked to blog. 600,000 monthly unique visitors. Only cost about $1,200 in marketing to get to that level. The Industry Standard cost about $25 million to get to 500,000.

Web 2.0 vs Web 1.0:
More potential now than in the past with a Web OS.

Great Web 2.0 companies...

  • are build on the architecture of participation &

  • leverage work of other people and run lightweight business

Search & Web 2.0

  • Talked about the power of the tail.

  • Search drives most of the action in Web 2.0.
  • Search has large cultural impact which most of us do not yet appreciate.
  • Cited Piper Jaffrey data on growth of search and how the cost per lead was less than half of any other channel.
  • 59% of money in search comes from other marketing budgets
  • CTR on paid search ads increases on longer search terms.
  • New media models were not that new. Get subscribers and attach ads to it.
  • Where search is different than most web publishing is that audience places intent before content with search, instead of buying a proxy of intent with normal ad purchases.
  • Talks about the Point to economy. If people point at you, your site ranks better and people find your site.
  • Publishers thought search was bad because they viewed search as stealing their content.
  • a while ago on his blog he posted From Pull to Point: How to Save The Economist and The Journal from Irrelevance
  • Defamer has much more linkage data than Variety.com since it is easier to link to, and thus is growing faster.
  • Business models that do not accept the new point to economy will continue to fall behind.

Old vs New:
He compared old media to new media, saying newer media has lower customer acqisition costs, healthy profits, and minimal lockin. The lack of lockin makes people have to keep working hard to keep their visitors.

Publishing Synergy:
Publications have three main things:

  • publishers

  • marketer
  • audience

A good marketer adds to the conversation. The synergy of the conversation between the three are what drive the success of a publishing business.

A Market Opportunity:
The authors of well known blogs are industry leaders because people decide to give them their attention. A good blogger is an editor / filter. The biggest difference between blogs and most media is a more direct connection with the audience. Technorati tracks over 10,000,000 blogs.

Many of the best blogs are not the best publishers. Many are created around interest, and not necissarily profit driven.

He talked about Google site targeted branding AdSense ads. Mine are showing on SearchBlog when I just checked :)

AdBrite allows publishers to chose to accept ads prior to listing them. He feels that is important and something the AdSense model missed out on.

John's new Federated Media publishing funded last week.

He wants his new FM Publishing idea to help be an independant fourth item between marketers, authors, and audience. Their goal is to get 10 to 20 high quality publishing partners in each industry.

A while ago I remember writing a few posts about why I did not think something like About.com scaled well, which is the same way John thinks. By not owning the content, it can scale, since FM are partners with the channels, and make the channels easy to buy without needing to worry about the editorial scaling inhouse. To me this is the exact reason why being independant is a better SEO business model than getting wrapped up in a large company, and resonates well with Seth Godin's recent small is the new big.

The Plane Takes Off in Less than an Hour... Need to Pack, Quick

I am going to WMW New Orleans conference. So is Yahoo! Search. They just issued a weather report saying there will be a major Yahoo! Search index change tonight and that it is going to be humid in New Orleans.

I may do some review stuff or I may not. Depends on the motivation factor and how much time I spend in the speech areas. I want to maybe set aside a bit of time to interview a few people if I can while I am down there.

I think one thing my ebook is lacking is that it is all wrote from my opinion or perspective, this is a good thing in that it means it is not huckster upsell upsell lock-in upsell upsell, but it is also bad because others have experiences I could / should be sharing. My experience is somewhat diverse, but I have only been in the game for a few years. Interviewing a few key SEO players could make the voice of my ebook much more diverse. And so I will. More on that later. :)

Link Hounds: New Blog Launched Just for You

Are you a Link Hound? I thought you were.

My buddies Andy Hagans and Patrick Gavin have decided to launch a link building blog, by the name of... Link Building Blog. It's in my feedreader on my daily must visits list.

Nowhere to Click: Google AdWords Ads Without an Ad Title

Somebody got creative over the weekend. Not sure how they got it past the automated ad tester, but I searched Google for Asian to compare their ads to Ask Jeeves ads and found the top AdWords ad did not have a link and title associated with it (and I tested on two browsers on two computers).
Google AdWords ad without an ad title.
Wonder how you get the ad to #1 with a 0% CTR? You could make the ads funny too, like:

I can only afford
two lines.

or

AdWords Ads
half off sale.

I think they know what they are doing. hehehe (they not being Google)
Google AdWords ads image.

Cleaning Out Domain Junk & Renewing Domain Names

I recently chatted with a friend about domain names. I ended up deleting about a dozen of my domains. I could probably delete another 50 to 80 more and still be fine. It is almost like an addiction buying those things, and they are so hard to let go.

I also renewed some of my domains for many years, which I think is probably a good call, especially since search engines may look at a longer domain registration as a greater commitment and reward it with a greater level of trust. Ever so slightly higher rankings can land a few more customers, and just one good one pays for a decade of domain registration.

Have you renewed your registrations on your best sites and do you find it hard to let go of a domain name?

Search Engines Trashed for Paid Links, Paper Trashed for Bias

The East Bay Business Times published an article named Jeeves, others trashed for sponsored links, about how search engines do not label their ads properly:

Indeed, the quality of search results has steadily increased. That's due to better search technology and to reforms resulting from pressure from the Federal Trade Commission and groups such as Consumer Reports.

Wow, talk about a pat on the back article. Search quality evolved because of these groups? Search evolved because Overture proved it could provide strong revenues and Google proved it could be done cheaply & highly profitably on the back of those evil ads.

The competition for the ad dollars, userbase, and purest data set have been what has driven it from there.

Dan Thies got a plug in the article:

"Speaking as an advertiser, I would prefer that my ad is known as an ad because it is more likely to reach the right audience," said Dan Thies, a search engine advertising consultant. "I wouldn't want my ad snuck in."

I personally like people not thinking of my ad as an ad. There is so much nasty advertising that many people would be turned off if they knew what the ads were.

Our phone number is on the no call list and my roommate gets about 2 or 3 telemarketers a day. They almost always refuse to give there name and want to know who I am, so I curse them out and hang up the phone. My goal is to help give them a bad day, make them want to quit their job or be less productive, and make that marketing channel more expensive for wasting my time.

Paid ads are different than telemarketers though because people are requesting information on the topic. It is the same exact reason that most legitimate SEO services are not nasty. Quality SEO work focuses on being relevant.

Whether people click more ads or more regular results there is approximately the same value in the search market as a whole, and I am willing to pay for the targeted leads that might still be a bit earlier in the sales cycle. Is that somewhat wasteful of me? Yes, but since the medium is so new and the market is inefficiently tracked it is undersold.

A person interested in a topic who does not buy right now may also be a person conducting research and buying later, or they might link to or reference my site in some way.

Even if search engines noted that the ads were ads that still would not stop people from manipulating the regular search results, so I don't really see how it helps them to brightly label many of the ads for what they are and ignore labeling the rest of them. Doing that would make the regular results seem more pure than they are, and if that was the case my bank account would be empty and I would not be typing this particular post right now. You can't take human bias out of search.

The article continues their multi page focused attack on Ask Jeeves:

take the search term "Asian." In past years, such a search would have been guaranteed to result in many adult and pornographic sites. That has been mostly cleaned up by the search engines, though traces still remain: search for "Asian" at Ask Jeeves and the paid listings come up with three dating sites.

Dating ads = porn? What sort of comparison is THAT? Of course they don't tell you that those nasty dating ads on Ask Jeeves come from Google's AdWords program.

Usually search articles good and bad focus on Google. This is about the first industry wide article that I have seen which places much more emphasis on Ask than on Yahoo! and Google. Lets not forget that this article is about wanting engines to label advertisements and it only gave Yahoo! paid inclusion a brief mention. Was this focus on Ask because they are small and easy to attack, or did someone not want to lose an inside contact with Yahoo! or Google?

Piss Poor Usability in SEM Services: Overture & MSN Small Business Directory

Overture:
I am sure I am the guy in the glass house throwing stones here, but why is it that after you get to the bottom of your Overture add listings page the button right there is the opposite of what you just did.

Like if you make 50 different listings the button there would be for the create one ad for all keywords, and the regular continue link would be a little lower over on the other side of the page. Click the more conveniently located button and erase your work. Yippie!

There are many other factors that make using Overture a purely frustrating experience, but that was just one example.

MSN Small Business Directory:
I can't log into my damn account because my one stupid proprietary MicroSoft account does not match up with the other stupid proprietary MicroSoft account. They give me some bullshit options to create security keys and other security garbage.

  • Why the hell did they give me one account if they already knew they wanted to migrate me over to their other dubious services?
  • Why is the migration wizard such a hunk of crap?

  • Why is the original SBD login stuff hidden away until after I tried my non matching Passport email account?
  • Why do I have to fill out a ton of forms to send an email for a personalized response when they really ought to know that their migration wizard is a hunk of crap from the feedback many people have surely already gave them?

Passport.net = hunk of shit. As a bonus I like how it disables the back button.

Here is an example of the login experience:

  • click the sign in button: nope. that's NOT your correct Passport details. Don't have a Passport account? try our supper cool migration wizard (and don't ask us why we wasted your time creating that other account. don't ask us why this process isn't seemless or automated).

  • thrown off by the Passport stuff you can forget your login details, so you click the I can't remember my bCentral password button.
  • that launches a help pop up with a couple options, namely:

    If you've lost or forgotten your bCentral password, go to the Password Retrieval Form, type your e-mail address, and then click the Submit button.

  • click that link and you wind up here, where they say "Type your registered e-mail address and click SUBMIT once."
  • they know they are migrating the account service over. at this point you have indicated that you do not know your password three times, so you enter your email information and think nothing of it. click submit.
  • the next page gives me drop down form options, where I have to specify account type, product, and problem, and then give them my email and information AGAIN.

I just sent them this feedback:

Complete hunk of shit usability IMHO. Bad enough to write a blog post about. I hate your migration wizard and am unsure what account I signed up with. If most business had this type of usability and customer interaction they would go bankrupt.

White Hat VS Black Hat: What Color is Your SEO?

Gray Hat News - Monty Pythonish SEO blog.

Black Hat vs. White Hat Search Spam Debate - Rand debates white hat vs black hat with a successful search spammer. To me the most interesting parts of the interview are that the spammer says what he does, and he also shows the visitor log of a recently launched spam site which made a couple thousand dollars in it's first few weeks.

I do not agree with the example of a New York legal healthcare business as an example of the type of site that would be worth doing aggressive spam for. Heavy spam sites are usually affiliate marketing or generic travel type sites. They also did not mention that if your site has a strong enough brand you can get away with just about anything.

With all the talk of [insert color here] hat seo there is starting to be some decent search volume and type in traffic for the related terms. Black hat is beating white hat by a large margin.

Almost tempting to redesign black hat seo, linking through affiliate links to many decent black hat tools ;)

I think a good name idea for a small SEO company might be something like Orange Hat SEO. Some tagline ideas:

  • While others debate SEO... we are getting your site ranked. (and as you built a brand you could just shorten it to "Busy getting your site ranked", which of course implies that other people don't do that)

  • We're different. We actually rank your site.
  • No hype. Just results.
  • And in the page copy I would also use "If people are SEO experts then why are they wasting so much time debating ethics?"

If your inbound links are completely unrelated, but who links to you is completely outside of your control because you made a contest where people are paid to try to [insert random idea which includes linking to your site] is that a legit SEO technique?

If so, why aren't more companies doing it?

The Perfect Shopping Mall: Inside Google

I may have been drinking a bit too much Kool Aid recently, but this post reviews why I think Google has a better business model than eBay... Although I want to, I have yet to read the book called The Perfect Store: Inside eBay. eBay has seen slowing growth, has limited feedback mechanisms, and the announcement of Google's payment processing service is a shot across the bow at eBay.

Buying Cycle:
Sure people buy a large amount of stuff on eBay, but many people only go there AFTER they are in the buying mood. Many people use the web to research, and eBay clearly misses out on that opportunity. Recently they bought Shopping.com, but that brand and service is still targeted at the later ends of the buying cycle.

Google's business model allows them to profit many times along the entire buying cycle, and their new payment processing will allow them to collect a percentage of the sale when people finally buy.

An Ad Everywhere:
Want to search for something? Here are some ads. Reading something interesting? Here are some ads. Checking your email? Here are some ads. Want to buy something? Buy it through Google Wallet.

Trackable, Precise & Easiest Ads to Buy:
There are a few oolies, but generally those ads from Google are the most precise and some of the easiest ads in the world to buy. They also allow people to buy using different mechanisms. You can create search only ads, also place those ads on content, target them to a region, and target them to a language.

Google also offers free tracking so they can collect more market research data.

If you are worried about click fraud on content sites you can buy site targeted ads on a CPM basis. Eventually they will probably add features which allow you to limit the number of times any one person sees your content ads.

Could I afford to run branding ads on About.com? Not until Google site targeting came about. By making the ads available in quantities small and large they get more participants in their ad auction, higher ad prices, and more ad revenue.

Limited Value of eBay Feedback:
The numbers and text eBay feedback comments are limited in value. In the hotel lounge at SES London one of my friends was looking at an item and said the guy selling it had a 97% possitive feedback. Immediately the guy sitting next to him started explaining how that is not a good number. Is it? I don't know, but a 3% return rate is not uncommon for many products sold over the web. eBay has a ton of community feedback, but most of the members still remain faceless.

Trust, Value, & Price:
We tend to be willing to pay more to people we trust. Trust is much more of an emotional issue than a mathematical one. Over the weekend MasterCard announced a breech of 40 million credit card accounts, which happened through what consumers likely feel is a nameless faceless middleman. Until I read articles about it I did not know it happened or who CardSystems Solutions was, and now all I know is that they suck. If people trust you at the other end of the purchase they are more inclined to trust the steps in between.

When items come from a faceless vendor, with mostly textual sales copy, and a one off relationship, it is hard to build a brand and tell a story. That is the flaw of eBay, currently it is limiting how well it can allow it's members to tell stories. There will always be some disconnect between true value and price. Why not host merchant blogs or value added story building tools like that on eBay?

Saving Money & Paying for Certainty:
There is nothing on eBay which deeply motivates me to build a relationship with a merchant instead of bidding a few dollars cheaper to buy the same item off someone else.

The whole frame of mind at an auction is "let me save a few dollars". People pay a premium for the story that goes with something. They also pay a premium for certainty. For some reason I think the Fletch DVD is out of print in the US. I will probably end up paying $20 more for it to know I am getting a certain price instead of going through the auction process at eBay.

Hollow Shops Not Building Trust:
I searched for eBay shops and was brought to stores.ebay.co.uk. They have featured merchants on the home page. Look at how ugly these shops are:

  • Golf Madness - nothing sells golf like bright ugly red?

  • Candle City LTD - I am not sure why, but it FireFox there home page has huge flashing text. what is that?
  • Look Cool for Less - the name stresses save money. not pay extra because you are worth it.

Those were the first three shops I looked at. The individual product pages look so ugly and modularly built that they remind me of Geocities (or Todd's favorite site). The fact that those sites were the featured ones tells me that eBay, merchants, or consumers must not take that idea too seriously.

Brand Extention:
Recently Forbes did a piece on brand extension, stating that consumers believe many brands can be stretched. Some have suggested that Google might want to buy a merchant with a recommending service like Amazon.com (see Epic 2014), but Google has access to far more information, and could probably create a better recommending program.

Pure Data:
Google bought Urchin, and also offers free tracking with their AdWords product. They could afford to give away Urchin, but they charge for it to keep the data more pure. Essentially they are providing a poor tax to filter out anomalies and smaller poorer sites.

Urchin not only allows them to track their own search service, but it also allows them to see shifts in market share, as well as how well competitors monitize their traffic and merchant ROI from competing services.

While it is likely Google will profit from their payment system, they may also want to create that service to have access to more raw data.

Ad Recommending Engine:
When you buy site targeted ads Google asks you to enter a few sites and a few keywords to recommend where else you might want to advertise.

Adgooroo lets people see some of the best terms their competitors bid on which they are not yet bidding on. Based on competing site ad buying habbits and conversion details Google could know where you should be buying ads. Of course, there will be limits to what advertisers define as acceptable sharing of information, but after the information becomes widely available elsewhere it might be considered acceptible for Google to share more data.

Google could even recommend bid prices and use competing advertiser details and web browsing patterns to tell you what parts of your sales cycle they believe are weak and how you may be able to improve them.

Thought Recommending Engine:
Search personalization, semantic web applications, and social filtering help guide people to certain channels and new ideas, helping people find what they love, and helping the ideas spread (causing the ideas to be refined and creating more content to place ads on).

Owning the Stock Market:
Having the most pure data means you have better data than anyone else in the world. Company insiders have some data tha Google does not know, but Google does get a deep snapshot of many businesses, buying trends, and better data about your competitors than you do.

Google could also look at link and news citation data or query volume for business related issues, and perhaps even predict when buyouts or mergers will occur. Eventually Google will probably buy or create something similar to Technorati just for the market research data. Perhaps they could do that with Google Sitemaps (I am not sure, but I do not think Google Sitemaps has a ping feature yet).

Google roughly knows how much value there is in nearly any market at any time. More importantly they can spot market shifts and buy or sell shares in near real time.

Investors are somewhat attached to their money and trade with emotions. Google has access to a large investor userbase which they feed news to and recommend thoughts to. It is not uncommon for a small cap stock to gain 10% or more from being mentioned on certain sites.

Google could create self training genetic algorithms to make bets for or against companies based on internal data. The program could teach itself how to make snap judgements based on self training criteria. This data could be used as one data point, or entirely automated - without any human interaction.

So long as Google was right 51% of the time they would make a ton of money, and surely it would be easy to create something that was right more frequently than that with all the data they have.

Imagine how Google could leverage their reach, their data, and their market capitalization in the stock market. Even if Google did not directly use the data imagine how much money investors would pay to access it.

Employment & Scalability:
Google has made scaled computing cheap, can recruit the top talent in the world, pays millions of dollars to outside sources to create content for it's engine, and scaled their internal system to be able to employ cheap remote workers. Their search data will soon be accessible almost anywhere, especially as the cost of communication continues to drop.

The Perfect Product:
I don't think Google will end up selling physical inventory directly because:

Filtering data is what search is all about, but Google could end up collapsing under its own weight if their hunger for data causes them to lose focus on what originally made them successful & the space is constantly evolving. If Google doesn't screw that up and do not lose their trust factor by collecting more data than people want to give they are poised to be the most powerful and richest company in the world within a decade IMHO.

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