Fumbles and Features (Web site optimization) for Search and Social Network Firms
Fumbles and Features for Search and Social Network Firms
It feels like Thanksgiving was just yesterday but of course that didn t slow down some of our favorite search engines and social networks well except in one case. Here s a quick round up of some of the good bad and ugly news currently breaking about Yahoo Facebook and Google….
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How to Save Over $1,000 on Next April’s Tax Bill
The year is almost out, and tax time is just around the corner. Here are some tips for SEOs and web marketers on how to lower your income by increasing your expenses.
- Donate to Charity - want to do some good? Why not donate some cash to a good charity?
- Domain registration - make sure your domains are registered for at least 5 years.
- Buy a better name - does your domain name suck? Now is the perfect time to buy a better one.
- Hosting - have hosting bills coming up soon? Pay them early.
- Directory registration - if any of your good sites are not yet listed in BOTW, Business.com, JoeAnt, or the Yahoo! Directory then submit before the year is out
- Yahoo! Search Marketing - if you are a big user of Yahoo Search Marketing you can pay a few thousand extra in advance
- Affiliates (& other Marketing Costs) - do you have payments that are typically done on the first of the month? Consider paying them early.
- Website design & custom programming - need new features or a fresh look to take your website to the next level? Make that down payment made in the next couple days.
- Software & tools - thinking about trying out a piece of software? Now is a great time to buy.
- Sell loser stocks - did you buy CountryWide at $45 earlier this year? Get the writedown you deserve.
What are your best tax tips?
Introduction Thread - Who Are You? What do You do?
With about 4,000 members signed up so far I figured it would be good to have an SEO Book introductions thread. Please use this thread to introduce yourself, and give feedback on how we can make this site better for you.
Yahoo! releases Slurp Yahoo has said that some slight changes might occur with page shuffling, and ranking changes. Yahoo does have a feedback form for any conerns that you might have with the new search crawler.
Yahoo has released a new search crawler. Meet Slurp, a more efficient website visiting engine. Yahoo has estimated that website owners will see a 25% reduction in the number of requests coming from Yahoo servers, thus decreasing bandwidth.
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Google Not Best for All Searches
When you re looking for information do you go to an encyclopedia or a specialized book If you answered Neither I check the Internet don t click away. The question has more relevance for the major search engines particularly Google than you might think….
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Contextual Web Ads Exploit Weak, Poor, Desperate, and Stupid People
As an advertiser and a publisher I have ad CTR data spanning hundreds of millions of impressions and about a million ad clicks across a wide array of verticals. One of my early opinions on contextual ads and search ads was that people are far more likely to click ads if they are desperate, stupid, or ignorant. While I was flamed for my opinion, this opinion has only been confirmed from talking to friends who have much more data than I do, and Dave Morgan from AOL also confirmed it.
Seth pointed to this post by Danah Boyd, which offers a hypothesis on who is clicking ads:
Based on what I’ve seen qualitatively, my hypothesis would be that heavy ad clickers are:
- More representative of lower income households than the average user.
- Less educated than the average user (or from less-educated environments in the case of minors).
- More likely to live outside of the major metro regions.
- More likely to be using [social networks] to meet new people than the average user (who is more likely to be using SNSs to maintain connections).
The problem with catering to the lowest common denominator is that the people who are clicking the ads
- have less of an ability to buy premium products
- are less likely to do follow on marketing for you to promote your products to other
- are a small minority of your visitors
- are driven away from your site when they click
- each day many ignorant users learn more about the web and click less ads
- the new users coming on the web replacing those who are learning about it are even poorer and less socially connected than those already on the network
In the next couple years there is going to be a major shift in online ad based business models where many publishers push themselves up the value chain. The trend for profitable publishing, is going to include the following aspects
- fewer ads
- ads with more information
- ads that look more like information
- ads tighter integrated into the content
- having a semi-porous brand which allows your free content to do your marketing for your paid content
- in many case selling ads that include personal endorsement, and ads for white label products or house products (often via subscription)
As more premium publishers shift from ad based models to selling white labeled and house products it is going to get harder to buy ads affordably on the clean parts of the web. And the trend has already started. If you look at some of the most popular investment sites you will see that many of them provide free offers for products that lead you into buying a subscription service.
If you are going to monetize your site from a small minority of your visitors it makes sense to build relationships with them and charge recurring if you can. If your only monetize 5% of your audience would rather have $50 a month from them or 50 cents?
