Archive by Author

Six days. Twenty Dollars. One New Business.

Posted on December 2, 2007 by in Uncategorized

A gentleman by the name of Ezell apparently told his friend that I had made a successful business in a ridiculously short amount of time, so it must be possible.  The friend disagreed.  Ezell said “I’ll prove it!”, and has decided to one-up me in the process, by shaving a few days and dollars off my schedule.  I personally think he will be able to do it, and am rooting for him.

The program is going to be called BabyAid, running in a niche roughly similar to TrixieTracker.  I previously commented on the Business of Software message board that I believe this is a very underserved niche which one could really do a lot of good in with the right offering. 

Incidentally, the friend was disagreeing as a result of his experience as a independent game developer.  I agree, for a game developer to produce a game worth paying money for, 8 days and no budget for art or music assets will probably not cut it.  Personally, I think that developing videogames is an excellent hobby if you like it (I have contributed to OSS ones in the past) but it makes a very poor choice for someone wanting to start a business.  Maybe I’ll go into why on another post.

Fantastic Article on SEO For Bloggers

Posted on November 28, 2007 by in marketing, SEO

This article on SEO for bloggers is just amazing.  I highly recommend anyone with a blog who doesn’t already consider them past the intermediate stage on SEO read it.  I recommend absolutely everyone read the followup on how the original article was designed and marketed as a stunningly effective piece of linkbait.  (Some might say that this makes the original article cynical.  I disagree — it was and is very useful to many people, and there is no reason you shouldn’t promote things which are useful to your audience for your mutual benefit.  Rails is another project which has proven that just because you’re professionally marketed and designed to go viral doesn’t mean you have to suck.)

If you’re interested in SEO for bloggers, the author of that piece and I will both be contributing chapters to Steph’s book on blogging.  You might find them of interest.  If Steph lets me I’ll post an early excerpt from my chapter as an early Christmas present to you all.

P.S. Speaking of Christmas, I know you want to play Christmas bingo with your family, right? 

Because You Can't Quite Get Enough Transparency…

Posted on November 26, 2007 by in Rails, stats

I really wanted to post how Daily Bingo Cards was doing statswise today, but probably will not have the time.  (The short version: the snowflake queries are loving me and owning a top 10 spot on every possible variation of “thanksgiving bingo cards” is worth 1.5X owning the 11th spot on [thanksgiving bingo cards] itself.  Don’t ask me how you can rank for a phrase that competitive in less than 2 months of work.)  While I know the analysis is the really interesting bit, for the stats geeks in the audience I decided to make my website stats public in real time.  Enter a Rails plugin named Sitealizer, about five minutes of work, and powie, stats for anyone.

Want to take a gander?  Daily Bingo Cards stats.  At the moment it should be showing search queries, referrers, and the like for about the last 24 hours.  You’ll note that it is hardly as tricked out as Google Analytics (one nice feature Analytics lacks: it tells you what crawlers are hitting your site and at what rates), but it is good enough to keep me more or less honest when discussing traffic numbers.

Exploiting New Niches

Posted on November 24, 2007 by in AdWords, blogging, SEO

I’m currently the #1 result on Google for the [conversion optimizer] search which is not actually controlled by Google, as a result of a pair of posts on the subject.

That is largely the result of a combination of a niche which was new, my early adoption of it, and radical transparency.  There are, approximately, a billion Internet marketing and search engine watching blogs out there.  Many of them are much, much higher profile than this blog.  Many of these covered the launch of Conversion Optimizer, but I was (to my knowledge) the only person who backed up the first impressions with numbers, and as a result I attracted just a few more links than the next guy and, wham, the search engines think I’m the expert on the topic.

I mention this for two reasons: One, it is quite useful to know how to convince the search engines you are the expert on a particular topic.  For niches which are brand spanking new (say, hmm, Blackberry spam filters after the introduction of the Blackberry), the combination of there being zero pre-existing links, less than a full Internet of competition, and massive first-mover’s advantage means that you can snag the top spots quite easily if you move reasonably quickly with something compelling.  It’s not just enough to be there first, you have to be there “firstest with the mostest” — I think my first post on Conversion Optimizer was weeks after launch but the “real numbers” hook is extraordinarily more compelling than the “news you already read from Google’s blog” hook.

After you’re already on top, you’ll probably stay on top, because the guy on top becomes the canonical result to refer to the subject when anyone else just needs to introduce it.  (This phenomenon is described in Filthy Linking Rich, probably the most worthwhile article from 2004 for a business owner in 2008.)

Aside from it being a useful business skill to learn how to position yourself as the expert on an emerging topic (and, for what it’s worth, I’m hardly the expert on this subject, just expert in the eyes of the computer algorithm that people trust to identify experts these days), this opened up a nice opportunity for my business.  I hate to be coy, but it will be another week or so before I can say exactly what it was.  For now, I just wanted to get this post timestamped so that I can refer to it for a before-after comparison in the wake of the announcement I expect to be making.

What the Duplicate Content Penalty Looks Like

Posted on November 22, 2007 by in blogging, SEO

Someone on the BoS board asked a question today about how to execute linkbait well.  I have an article on this blog about that, and wanted to paste a link, so I used my usual link repository — Google.  I have a photographic memory for titles and can’t remember URLs to save my life, for some reason.  Anyhow, the exact query was [developing linkbait for a non-technical audience], which as an exact match for the title Developing Linkbait for a Non-Technical Audience should be a cinch for Google.

And, indeed, it was.  Every one of the first ten results was about the article.  The problem?  Well, take a look: (photo slightly edited — I moved the query over from the right side to the left side so it would fit in my wordpress theme)

 Duplicate Content Penalty 

Yep, that is right — all ten results on the first page are about the article, but the article itself doesn’t appear at all.  Welcome to the Duplicate Content penalty — Google thinks I am plagiarizing one of those results and, as a result, assumes my blog is not a relevant result for the query.  Oofdah.

What can I do about it?  Not much.  This post may well cause that query to rerank.  Luckily, it isn’t a commercially significant query for me.  I’m mostly pointing it out to demonstrate what it looks like to get your site penalized by Google — any time you can punch in a title verbatim and have folks who linked to it appear before the article itself, you can be positive you’ve been penalized.  Luckily, the penalty does not appear to be applied to my site at large, as I still rank for the title of my blog, and obvious strings for which I’m the canonical result that don’t appear on the page itself.  (Patrick McKenzie blog, Bingo Card Creator blog, etc)  Those are the tests you’d want to perform if you suddenly see yourself de-rank for something you should rank for, by the way.

What caused this?  Well, if I’d have to guess, it was either the Sphinn (a social network for SEOs) post (a decent bet, since that is the #1 result) or perhaps one of the verbatim copy/paste jobs from those .info spamblogs.  Really freaking irksome, either way.  Since you can’t control people scraping or linking to you, I recommend not worrying about it, but should this happen to you on a page you care about, an inbound link or three from a trusted site will generally cure it.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody. 

Rails SEO Tips 90% Completed

Posted on November 19, 2007 by in Rails, SEO

Too many projects, too little time.  I got most of my Rails SEO hints page completed tonight, after finally implementing more of the suggestions I was making in Daily Bingo Cards itself.

The Table of Contents

The page is still a bit of a work in progress, of course.  I intend to keep it updated and continue gradually expanding the content.  Plus it is 2 AM and I really have no effort to do make the code samples more pretty (what can you expect — I built them by hand in notepad — lots and lots of ampersands, let me tell you). 

If you have any comments about the article, feel free to leave them here.  If you know any Rails developers who might be interested in the resource, please feel free to pass it on to them.

A Side-Project You May Be Interested In

Posted on November 19, 2007 by in Uncategorized

Steph Granger, of LandLordMax fame, is editing a book about how to succeed in blogging.  It will be composed of essays and interviews contributed by guest authors.  There are a bunch of big names participating (Seth Godin, John Chow), quite a few folks from our little uISV community (Andy Brice, Ian Landsman, etc), and for some strange reason I was asked to contribute a chapter.

If you’ve got anything you’d like to see me cover, feel free to drop me a line in the comments.  Given that there are marketing folks aplenty on the author list I was thinking of covering some of the technical nuts&bolts of blogging, probably from an SEO angle, but that is hopefully not the only thing I know how to talk about.

Putting the Green in Evergreen

Posted on November 18, 2007 by in blogging, marketing, SEO

If you have a post which ranks very highly for a particular query of high value to you, you can use it to springboard additional products in conceptually related spaces. 

Most blogs which add value are eventually going to have a few evergreen posts.  An “evergreen” puts the lie to blogs being a medium which only covers breaking news and the controversies of the day — they keep producing value forever, typically by ranking highly for search terms of consequence.  However, as evergreens age you can find that, while they still provide value to your business, they tend to gradually fall in the search engine rankings and become less and less useful at achieving your business objectives.

You can get a lot of value out of a nice, aged evergreen post.  My best example of this is Free Bingo Cards, which ranks extraordinarily highly for, uh, [free bingo cards].  It is #2 on Yahoo and in the top 10 on Google, and gets about 2.5k hits a month.  Not shabby.  That is about 1/4 of the hits my Bingo Card Creator site gets, and I promote that relentlessly whereas the hits just roll on in for that post.  (This is largely thanks to several of my blogging buddies who, without me asking for it, linked it when it came out.  It collects links on an ongoing basis too from my users — in the Internet and in most economic activity, winners win.)

Left alone, Free Bingo Cards would gradually slip from 2.5k hits a month to 1.5k hits a month or so, and while that would still be a hundred dollars or so in marginal revenue there are higher and better uses.  For example, I recently launched Daily Bingo Cards and have been desperately seeking a method to get it a core group of early users to spread the word for me.  Hard to get visitors without ranking, hard to get ranking without links, hard to get links without visitors — it’s a vicious cycle. 

I learned around Halloween that if I edited Free Bingo Cards to include both topical information in addition to the material that has been on it forever, it would both be refreshed in the SERPs (extending shelf-life — new info must mean relevance, right?) and give me a stream of traffic to strategically redirect to my new project, to get it off of the ground.  I did this for Halloween and got several hundred visitors, including about five folks who most be as hardcore about bingo as any raider is about WoW, to judge by their usage patterns.  (Now if only more of them blogged about it, too.)  I’m doing it for Thanksgiving as well, and it has been working out well so far.

Here is a hint which I’ve learned through CrazyEgg’ing every page I have access to: the first link in any long bit of content gets the lion’s share of the clicks.  The search engines are biased towards content earlier on the page, too, but not nearly as much as searchers.  Thus, if you want to deck out an evergreen without worrying about losing its wonderful aroma, I’d suggest adding a simple paragraph at the top with a link in it.  Presto-changeo, you now have a steady stream of traffic for any related project you currently have on your plate.

Obviously, you will not want to use this to send traffic to an unrelated page.  Non-motivated traffic is worthless to you, and you’re not developing the sort of repeat users that you want for your site(s).

Free Thanksgiving Bingo Cards

Posted on November 16, 2007 by in Uncategorized

I run a business which sells software that makes custom printable bingo cards and every time a holiday comes around people come out of the woodwork looking for them.  Seeing as how Thanksgiving is about a week away I thought I would put up some cards I had made to make everyone’s life a bit easier.  You can either download a free copy of Bingo Card Creator from the above link and make your own custom boards, or you can mosey on over to Daily Bingo Cards and download 8 premade Thanksgiving bingo cards .  Yep, they are indeed totally free.  Feel free to use them, print them out, pass that link on to your friends, blog about it, whatever you like.  If you need more than eight, download a free trial of Bingo Card Creator and you can print up to 15, or purchase the full version and print as many as you like.

The cards have only words on them.  I suggest if you have little kids letting them decorate their cards with markers — drawing turkeys is always fun, but watch out for that darn brown ink, it has a bad tendency to seep through paper straight onto tables/hands/clothes.  (Between working at an office supply store and then being a teacher of young students I have learned far, far too much about the personality of various types of markers.  Brown is a royal nuisance, but black, black is the killer.)

The instructions for playing Thanksgiving bingo are on that site as well, but given that it is a holiday you might be wondering how you can spruce things up a little bit.  Personally I’m a fan of giving everyone their cards before the big cooking marathon and letting them get a free space on the card for any dish that they help prepare.  (You might to stick a little thumb on the scale for the little ones — it is unlikely they can make cranberry sauce but they can certainly help you wash cranberries, so give them credit for it by marking off the cranberry sauce section.)   Then you can play bingo after dinner or, if you’re not exhausted from cooking, do it before dinner and let the winner carve the first slice off the turkey.  (Especially popular with little ones, although I’d imagine you’d want to assist them with the carving.) 

I hope you all have an enjoyable holiday with your families.

Conversion Optimizer: AdWords, Done Right

Posted on November 10, 2007 by in advertising, AdWords, bingo

I have been using Google Conversion Optimizer since late September.  The program has been extraordinarily successful for me, enabling me to double revenues (and profit margin) in a month.  This post recounts my experiences.

Who I Am: I sell software which creates bingo cards to teachers.  The goal of my advertising campaign is to get them to download a free trial.  Some portion of those who download a free trial purchase the full product, making me money.

What Content Network Is: Conversion Optimizer (hereafter CO) is a way of bidding on the AdWords Content Network, which is all those little ads you see plastered on non-Google websites.  Typically, on the Content Network you write up a list of keywords, write up a maximum bid per click on each keyword, write some ads, and then get charged as the ads get clicked on on any site Google thinks matches your keywords. 

How Converison Optimizer is different: With CO, you don’t specify how much a keyword is worth to you.  You specify how much a conversion is worth to you.  Google then guesses, based on your previous history, what CPC (cost per click) price will achieve your CPA (cost per action) goal at any particular website, and bids accordingly on your behalf.  I like to think of this as pseudo-CPA bidding, since its really just a wrapper around CPC bidding.  Google has a beta CPA product that I haven’t tried yet, and probably never will, because CPA bidding has some severe issues for publishers which will make it perpetually less popular than CPC bidding.  There aren’t enough publishers in my market interested in CPA bidding to make it worth my while to start a campaign.

My Experience With The Content Network Prior to Conversion Optimizer:

Endless frustration pretty much sums it up.  When I started advertising on Google last September the content network was on by default.  At the time it was filled with Made for AdSense (MFA) sites, which scrapped content and existed only to get clicks.  They got clicks, but the traffic I got was extremely low quality, and they drained my AdWords budget dry.  I was advised by knowledgeable folks at the Business of Software boardsthat the Content Network was a hive of scum and villany.  I turned off the Content Network, advised everyone else to turn off the Content Network, and went on building my business for the better part of a year.

Why I Came Back to the Content Network: A professional peer who produces language learning software told me he had had excellent success with the Content Network.  I am skeptical about most people opining on the Internet but I have a good deal of trust for him and, moreover, I trust data.  Google had in the interim cleaned up some of their click fraud problems and shared Placement Reports with advertisers, which let you see which sites were running your ads and what their individual conversion rates, CPC prices, click through rates (CTR), and whatnot were.  With that data, I thought I could make something of the Content Network.

So things went well?  No, actually, they sucked for quite a while.  I got trapped in an endless cycle of checking my Placement Report every day, banning whatever flavor-of-the-moment site was abusing their own visitors to misdirect folks into clicking on the ad by disguising it as content (n.b. the site owner featured there says it was an accident, and I believe him, but I was getting a new site using a similar technique two to three times a day),  and losing the money I had allocated.  I have a day job at a Japanese company, with a 3 hour commute.  When I get home at 11 PM at night, I don’t want to sit down and have to immediate check AdWords to see if my pocket is getting picked yet.  I was right about to turn off the Content Network again when CO debuted.  I jumped at the chance, and became one of their earlier advertisers.

Anatomy of a bad site to advertise on:

Let me pull you an anonymized entry out of my Placement Report, and compare it to my averages.  These images are digitally edited composites of my AdWords status screens — I haven’t changed any numbers, but I have removed some to make the narrative clear.  If you are reading this on WordPress.com and not on a feed reader, the image is truncated — click it to see the full size.

Content Network (Scam Site)

As you can see, the bad site has a CTR much, much higher than my average CTR.  This is because their site is designed to funnel their own visitors onto the ad, which is disguised as content.  Notice the conversion ratio is terrible.  This is exactly what we would expect — since they were tricked to click on the ad, they have no real interest in downloading a free trial of my software, and click the back button to try to find what they were looking for on the dishonest site.  This drives my Cost Per Conversion through the roof (incidentally, my goal is 30 cents, and break even is about 60 cents).

Multiply that one dishonest site by about 20 or so, with more showing up every day, and you’ll understand my frustration with the Content Network.

Anatomy of a Good Site on the Content Network:

Content Network (good)

Here, on the other hand, we have a good site on the Content Network.  They wrote a page with unique, original content which is useful to folks in my niche and which got them in the right mood to need Bingo Card Creator.  Then, in a perfectly honest fashion, they had ads after their content that folks could click on if they were interested.  You’ll note that while 3.62% is a very good CTR it isn’t outlandishly, unbelievably good like 20%.  You’ll also note that their conversion rate is high (18%, a bit above my average for content network, which underperforms organic and paid search), and that I am actually profiting from this site.  Substantially.

Heck, I’ll out the good site: it is About.com’s page on Halloween bingo.  Thank you, About.com, you made me about $250 in October.  I salute you.

Where Conversion Optimizer Comes In:

You’ll note that the major observable difference in the numbers between Bad Sites and Good Sites is that Cost Per Conversion value.  Heck, from my point of view, that is the major reason why they are bad: if I pay $3 for a trial download, which converts at approximately 2.5% to a $25 purchase, I am spending $120 to make $25.  Not a good idea, and I’m supporting the pollution of the Internet in the bargain.  If I pay 30 cents, I am spending $12.50 to make $25, and supporting good content creation.  Good idea! 

Conversion Optimizer makes me bid on Good sites, not on Bad sites.  And that is why it works phenomenally, phenomenally well.  If I advertise on Bad site, their CPA price is through the roof for a day, and Conversion Optimizer silently and automatically makes sure I never send them an impression ever again.  Conversely, if I bid on a Good site, Conversion Optimizer analyzes how profitable that site is and steadily ups my bid so I can capture as much traffic as possible while remaining profitable.  This is why all of my Good sites with any volume hover right around the $.30 cents CPA.  (My bid is 35 cents.)

How Conversion Optimizer Is My Own AdWords Manager:

My market is very seasonal, and ideally I would be writing a new ad, ad campaign, and landing page for every major holiday, the start and stop of the school term, and whatnot.  But who has the time?  I was working 60 hour weeks in late October and, while I made some effort to capture the coming Halloween traffic, I couldn’t spend many hours on optimizing the heck out of my pages.

But why write landing pages when the rest of the Internet has already done it?  There are many, many pages out there extolling the fun of Halloween bingo and lamenting how hard it is to actually make the cards for it.  About half of the ones in the Google top 10 for relevant queries run AdSense.  They saw major traffic as Halloween approached, and that traffic was highly, highly motivated to play Halloween bingo… and my ad was in front of all of them, NOT because I had had the brainstorm “Hey, I should get the Advertising Department working on a coordinated campaign to shove 80% of my advertising budget into Halloween bingo” but because a soulless algorithm decided “Hmm, Bingo Card Creator is having its best return on investment on these sites.  I’ll put most of his advertising there.”    Its like my own private campaign manager… who works for no salary.  Lets have a scary Halloweenish Mwahaha! for that.

The Before and After Picture:
CTR 2.23% vs   .5-1%  (up by a factor of four.  This makes it easier for me to get cheaper clicks, because AdSense prefers to show ads which generate income rather than just having high bids.) 

CR 18%    vs 20-25% (not a significant change)
CPC 6 cents vs 9 cents (costs down by about a third, nice enough, but wait for it…)

Profit $500 vs $10 (Note that since my business previously profited about $700 a month, that is sort of a nice boost)

Wait a second, how did it make that much?

By scaling.  Conversion Optimizer, unlike my hand-edits to AdWords, just kept scaling as I tossed more money at it.  I ended up with an AdWords bill in the hundreds, to be sure, but I ended up with a 100% ROI on the hundreds, instead of ending up with a 20% ROI on my previous tens. 

Is it continuing?

The Halloween spike has subsided, and the Optimizer isn’t spending all of my budget allocation every day anymore (sadly), but Thanksgiving is right around the corner…  And I don’t have to do anything to prepare for it this year — the clicks will come straight to me, from whatever the Optimizer decides are the most worthwhile Thanksgiving bingo sites on the Internet as measured by their actual success in making me money.

Bonus Points:

It is difficult to tell if this number is totally accurate, because Google’s conversion tracking is sometimes lackluster, but I believe my trial-to-purchaser conversion rate on Conversion Optimizer-generated trials was about 4% as compared to my typical 2-2.5% number.  I attribute this partially to Halloween seasonality and partially to Conversion Optimizer finding me only the most motivated prospects, instead of folks who in aggregate didn’t really need Bingo Card Creator.  Obviously, increasing that conversion rate by 60-100% has a corresponding direct impact on my ROI.

Any bad news?

You can’t use Conversion Optimizer if your Content Network campaign gets less than 300 conversions a month.  When I spoke with one of the product managers he told me that was unlikely to change, as there are statistical significance issues below that number and the engineering team doesn’t think they can push it any lower.  I feel for you guys with CPAs in the $10 range, as I wouldn’t want to have to risk $3,000 on an unproven and relatively new product either.

There is also some tin-foil-hattery about giving Google enough information to guess where your profitability is.  In the end, I think as long as I get trial downloads at 30 cents in quantity I could care less if I gave up all of my customer surplus (econ term) from a smaller number of trial downloads achieved at under 30 cents each.  As you can see, the absolute number of dollars the campaign puts in my pocket exploded with Conversion Optimizer.

In a Nutshell:

Conversion Optimizer just made me a whole lot of money.  I recommend you try it out if it sounds like a good thing for your business’ unique circumstances.

Like this post?  This blog contains nothing but real experiences with real numbers about advertising, SEO, customer service, and every other aspect of running an online business.  If that sounds interesting to you, sign up for the feed.  If you know someone in the market for software to make bingo cards, I’d greatly appreciate a mention.

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