Top search engine - Drupal Sessions Login Issue
A couple hours ago the sessions table for Drupal needed repaired or emptied because it was not allowing SEO Book users to login. I just emptied it, so you need to login again to comment, but it should work well again. Sorry about that.
No it's “goddag” here. G'day is another part of …
Google Local Becomes a Destination
As mentioned on SearchEngineLand, the Google Local onebox may now include up to 10 links in it. The increase from 3 to 10 results was allegedly due to usability testing, but them using text smaller than the rest of the text on the search results doesn’t really conform to good usability standards either.
Start your search on Google
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Clickthrough to the top review site there - still get Google maps
limit usage. In a few years Yahoo! will be wishing they begged people to spread that data far and wide to build a leadership position in the market, which is what Google will do via syndication.
If Google can drive a lot of traffic to their local listings and start encouraging user reviews that gives them another way to keep users on the Google network and monetize the search results.
Freemium Publishing & Sustainable Business Models
Here is a great speech by Chris Anderson about how reputation and attention are becoming the new economies upon which much of the internet (and potentially offline) world may be based upon.
Freemium consists of giving away value (and possibly wrapping it in ads), as a lead generator to sell premium products and services. The model minimizes consumer risk by allowing them to become familiar with and reliant on the service before paying for it.
- Fred Wilson, the VC, describes it as his favorite business model.
- Some of the biggest challenges with freemium based business models are deciding how much to give away free and how much support to give away for free.
- Typically freemium offers have ~ a 3% conversion rate, which is typically packaged as a recurring revenue stream.
A Startup Nation article explains why the model is so powerful:
David Beisel, principal at Masthead Venture Partners in Cambridge, Mass., says the freemium model is attractive to VCs for the same reason it’s attractive to entrepreneurs. “Giving away a free version of the service allows consumers to not just learn about it through collateral or a free trial,” he explains, “but it presents them the opportunity to fully adopt the service and incorporate it into their lives.
“Those types of customers are ones who begin to evangelize the product to others. Entrepreneurs then greatly benefit, as powerful and inexpensive word-of-mouth marketing kicks in.”
One of the things I believe is that just like services that move toward free, all forms of content (even specialized high value niche content) will follow the same path. Information that is sold as a product (not a service) will keep seeing its margins decline as self satisfying hollow chucking and local substitution (ie: wikipedia editors rewriting your content, or someone uploads it to a torrent site) drive the value of most information to nothing.
People buy the reputation, experience, story, and relationship. It is more emotional than logical, and so publishers will become interactive media artists.
Video link via Seth.
Find Top Paying Keywords for Google AdSense
High Value Keyword List Data for YOUR Business
This video is about more than just generating keywords for AdSense sites, it is about finding the most valuable keywords for any business. But most the people searching for top paying keyword lists are looking for AdSense keyword lists. I wanted to welcome those searchers to this site by making it easy for them to find this post when they search for related keywords on Google (hence the use of AdSense in the page title).
Discover Your Top Keywords
In this video I explain…
- Why most top paying AdSense keyword lists are worthless. (It’s not just because AdSense cannibalizes publishing business models and AdSense earnings are dropping).
- how to quickly create a keyword list using data from search engines, public keyword suggestion tools, and competitive research tools. (you could also use data from your analytics tools too)
- how to filter a keyword list to find out which keywords are the most profitable using Microsoft’s Ad Intelligence tool and the Google Traffic Estimator
Alternative Energy, Alternative Media, & Asset Bubbles
If you have ever wondered how the mainstream media works, watching Manufacturing Consent does a great job of displaying its sordid underbelly. The bias is not always this obvious, but it is always there:
The most recent issue of Harper’s has an article by Eric Janszen about financial bubbles throughout US history named The next bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow’s big crash. A couple key quotes:
We have learned that the industry in any given bubble must support hundreds or thousands of separate firms financed by not billions but trillions of dollars in new securities that Wall Street will create and sell. Like housing in the late 1990s, this sector of the economy must already be formed and growing even as the previous bubble deflates. For those investing in that sector, legislation guaranteeing favorable tax treatment, along with other protections and advantages for investors, should already be in place or under review. Finally, the industry must be popular, its name on the libs of government policymakers and journalists. It should be familiar to those who watch television news or read newspapers.
The media rides the story up and rides it back down. We always need something to talk about. It happens to the media offline just like it does to niche publishers online. But the memory and analysis are short and shallow, quickly pointing a finger at a false cause, fixing symptoms like antidepressant drugs do:
The U.S. mortgage crisis has been labeled a “subprime mortgage crisis,” but subprime mortgages were only a sideshow that appeared late, as the housing-bubble credit machine ran out of creditworthy borrowers. The main event was the hyperinflation of home prices. Risks are embedded in the price and lurk as defaults. Even after the faith that supported a bubble recedes, false beliefs continue to obscure cause and effect as the crisis unfolds.
It puts the formation of the alternative energy market in a fascinating perspective, especially as I finished reading about the demise of ACA and hung up the phone from an automated call from a sleazy telemarketer company calling me at 8pm, stating their partnerships with non-profits to help consolidate the debt that I don’t have due to the country’s current credit crisis.
When economic fraying appears at the weak edges of the market it hints that more is to come. Long time bulls are turning bearish and the stock markets are hurting worldwide. And so history repeats itself for the people, yes.
Modern Search Engine Optimization (WebProNews)
In the course of judging the SEMMYs, one of the great posts I read was The SEO Playbook - Welcome to the Rabbit Hole Alice by Stuntdubl (aka Todd Malicoat). It’s a great post because it helps outline how SEO is expanding in it’s scope. read more
How Links Can Build Value & Profits
This is a somewhat basic video about how links can drive value. Props to Stunty for his 12 Different Types of Links and How To Get Them.
The WSJ let the “our content will be free” story spread for months to generate public relations related coverage and to misdirect competitors before announcing that they are going to keep their subscription service:
Mr. Murdoch made his latest comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in answering a question. “We are going to greatly expand and improve the free part of The Wall Street Journal online, but there will still be a strong offering” for subscribers, he said. “The really special things will still be a subscription service, and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive.”
The Wall Street Journal has enough trust, connections, and signifigance to keep charging for their best stuff.
Many other websites do to, but as exclusive content rather than part of a package. Bundling packages of similar content channels (like blog feeds) will not work for the following reasons:
- there is already virtually an unlimited amount of competition that is free
- the free content plays an important role in making it easy to subscribe
- Easy subscriptions provies lots of subscribers, social proof of value, and limited risk to subscribers. From those, cumulative advantage kicks in.
- Free content cuts marketing costs to ~ $0.
- People hate micropayments.
- Taste is personal. Some people who like sites similar to this one absolutely despise me. And the other way around is true.
- The incremental cost of having more customers means that you need to charge more than $1 if you are going to establish a sustainable relationship with them.
10 Things Yahoo! Search Must do to Become Relevant
Yahoo!’s Downward Trend
Yahoo! killed off their brand universe project, and recently fired 30 people. Rumor has it that about 2,000 more layoffs might be coming soon. Yahoo! shares are nearing $20, trading at $20.78, and giving them a market capitalization of $27.8 billion.
This WSJ article highlights that about half of Yahoo!’s value is in cash and equity stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan. Over the last year Yahoo! lost significant momentum and marketshare in search. They need to outsource search and search ads, fire a bunch of employees, gain search marketshare, or there is going to be a buyout or merger before the year is out.
Pageviews Still do Not Have Much Value
Sidebar: to anyone hyping the value of pageviews and social media, think of how many pageviews Yahoo! has. If you pull out the value of Yahoo!’s large equity stakes in other companies and cash on hand, Amazon and eBay are each worth about 2 to 3 times Yahoo!, and Google is worth about 13x.
10 Key Ideas Yahoo! Needs to Implement Tomorrow (or Sooner)
After seeing the underwhelming launch of Wikia Search, I think Yahoo! should push further in human aided search. Relevancy is based on perception and marketing. Yahoo! needs to do the following if they want to compete in search:
- Increase the relevancy of their directory by actually featuring it (the directory looks like a sidebar to a blog that occupies most of dir.yahoo.com), and by becoming more selective with what sites they accept. You can appreciate their bad marketing of the Yahoo! Directory by the fact that the Google Directory (a DMOZ clone) has a higher PageRank.
- Yahoo! is testing integrating Del.icio.us data in their search results. Brand Yahoo! search as human edited safe search and find a way to pay end users for their contribution. Payment does not need to be monetary. Take a look at the success of Yahoo! Answers and Del.icio.us and apply those toward search. Google gives Checkout advertisers free ads and a higher ad CTR (which leads to a lower ad cost). Win search marketshare from your users by giving them rebates on your other products as well.
- Create a branding and awareness campaign around the new Yahoo! Search. Hire someone to do a fake study proving that Yahoo! Search is more relavant than any of the other players. Make sure Ask or Microsoft is ranked #2 ahead of Google.
- Let users comment on search results AND on listings in search results. Controversy surrounding this will lead to more people talking about and evaluating Yahoo! Search for quality.
- Launch a new toolbar with a meter like PageRank in it…call it YourRank (or something the emphasizes to the user) that it is their web and what they like. Heavily push that branding message to users locked into Yahoo! email, Yahoo! Stores, and other verticals they interact with.
- Create a well branded specialty search for bloggers with innovative features that make it easy to follow the conversation both ways. Also launch creative ideas to buy mindshare with other high authority communities (universities, open source projects, etc.).
- Easily allow advertisers to do keyword research on Yahoo! outside of while they are setting up search campaigns. Create a reliable publicly accessible keyword tool which actually markets the Yahoo! Search product.
- Give away a lot of useful search market data (like Microsoft recently did with their Ad Intelligence plug-in).
- Put the Yahoo! brand on the millions of syndicated domain landing pages they power each day.
- Increase the relevancy of their contextual ad product and increase payouts to 100% (buy marketshare) BEFORE Microsoft openly launches their network. Perform case studies with publishers who saw their Yahoo! monetization go up AFTER switching from AdSense (and other inferior networks) to the NEW Yahoo! Publisher Network contextual ads program. Perhaps pay key leading bloggers 150% just to get them using, talking about, and giving feedback on your ads. Buy marketshare…
How Could Yahoo! Become Relevant?
Do you still use Yahoo! Search? What could Yahoo! do to make you want to use them and talk about their search product?
