Why I Don't Monetize This Blog

Posted on February 11, 2008 by in blogging

Does this blog earn money?  Why doesn’t it have ads on it?*  Why don’t I put affiliate links on all my mentions of products I’ve used successfully?  I get these questions on a fairly regular basis, and thought I’d put up a post to answer them.

Most recently, Sunil Tanna (a pretty smart guy when it comes to Internet marketing, and direct competitor of mine**) asked the following on the Business of Software forums, after I had mentioned that I personally don’t see value in putting affiliate links on my blog.  (An affiliate link is one where, if you the visitor make a purchase after clicking on that link, I am paid money by the person selling the product to you.  They’re also called Cost Per Action, or CPA, advertising.)

Unless the only things that you’re ever going to write about is your own product  – and your own product completely and finally caters to every single visitor’s potential needs, you’re missing easy incremental revenue [by not including affiliate links].

For example, all those, or at least some of those mentions on your blog of Adwords, PayPal, payment processors, SEO tools, domain registrars, hosting, etc., could be earning you extra money in addition to whatever you get from selling your particular niche software product. Since you’ve written the content anyway, why wouldn’t you want to get paid for it?

Now, Sunil (who, I reiterate, is a pretty smart guy) has a very different take on doing business on the Internet than I do.  I don’t aggressively monetize this blog both because I don’t think it would be effective at making me money and it wouldn’t mesh well with my general business philosophy.

What I Get Out Of Blogging

I don’t see blogging as an income generating activity.  I think of it more as an investment — do the work now, reap the benefits later.  All of the benefits flow directly from you.  That’s right, you.  Whether you’re reading this blog for the first time today (rather unlikely, given my typical traffic), have had me in your feed reader for a few months, or are part of the uISV blogging community and we have been reading and commenting on each other’s blog for years (scary thought!), this blog is written for you because, without you, it would be a pretty lonely place around here.

Now, quick show of hands, how many of you would be interested in reading the Make Patrick Five Bucks By Acting On This Post blog?  Yeah, that’s right.  There is no reason for you to read that blog, whatsoever.  If you stumbled upon it the first time, you wouldn’t be coming back.  If you had been reading me for months, I’d be out of your feedreader in a week.  If you were linking to me on a regular basis, you’d be asking yourself “Is there anything for me in this?  Is there anything for my readers in this?  No?  Why am I linking?” 

Intrinsic Value — Writing for writing’s sake.  Despite being an engineer, a field which has a distressing tendency to not talk with people, I consider myself a professional communicator.  I love talking and I love writing, and I like to consider myself fairly decent at both, and above many things in life I crave praise for the two of them.  As fun as it is to write in a paper diary (I have tried — never found the patience) and speak to an empty room, having an audience makes it a much, much more pleasant experience.  Chris Rock’s riff about women needing food, water, and compliments pretty much applies to me as well — when I write something which I know is good that is a happy day for me, but when someone tells me that I have written something good, that is happiness squared.

Opened Doors — They apparently teach you three words in business school — networking, networking, and networking.  Blogging is a great supplement to the professional networking that happens in the ordinary course of my day job.  (For one thing, it is very hard to network with Americans from a rice field in central Japan unless you use the Internet.)  It brings me all sorts of opportunities, both the ones useful in my continuing quest to improve Bingo Card Creator and ones which will be useful in my future endeavors.  For example, having a blog has helped me integrate myself in the uISV community (who are constant source of advice, moral support, and — in distant third place — backlinks for me).  I am extraordinarily fortunate to count other successful businessmen, such as Andy Brice, Nick Hebb, and others too numerous to name as professional colleagues.

Establishing Myself As An Expert — It is sort of scary to contemplate, but at some point in the last year I transitioned from “mediocre programmer with a tiny business” to “mediocre programmer with a tiny business who generally knows what he is talking about”.  That is a sort of useful thing for me, as I contemplate the overall arch of my career.  I suppose I could, theoretically, grind my way up the Japanese corporate ladder, but I don’t see myself doing it for the rest of my life.  (If I did, that would be a short, short life — the hours would grind me to bits.)  When I start the Next Hurrah, I don’t exactly want to be Mediocre Programmer++. 

Happily, the blog is sort of a portfolio of all the things I can do that your average Mediocre Programmer can’t.  This leads to people throwing all sorts of opportunities my way, which I’m always humbled and happy to receive.  I have gotten, at last count, eight job offers from readers (but for the day job and my own business, I would probably have accepted several of them).  My collaborations with Google on the Conversion Optimizer case study and with Steph on his blogging book both flowed pretty much directly from the trust I had built up here.  Neither of those pays money, either, but they enhance my status as an expert and will make it easier to convince the next decisionmaker that I am the right guy for the job/opportunity/investment/whatever.  (The bosses at my day job were also extraordinarily pleased with the Google thing, believing that having an “in” with Google is in their best interests.  They have given me explicit permission to continue my uISV adventure since it keeps increasing my value to them, and that in itself is worth every hour I have spent on this blog and then some.)

What I Would Have To Do To Monetize This Blog

To monetize this blog, I would have to burn my hard-won trust with my readership and contacts to convince them to clicky-clicky on the little blue thingees and then hand over money to whoever was on the other end of the link.  Sunil thinks that is an option I could just tack onto my blog as it exists right now.  I think it would end up replacing a lot of the value that this blogs brings to you, and end up eroding your trust in me.

Let’s look at what I would have to do.  First, the affiliate model is very sensitive to the type of content the links are embedded.  Big theory pieces, which are consistently my best work (you’re reading one of them), cannot be effectively monetized because they are not product-focused.  Tactical suggestions, such as writing SEO tips or why guarantees are successful, are extraordinarily popular with my readers but also don’t bring home the bacon.  Updates on how Bingo Card Creator is doing or what is new in the business, which are some of my favorite ones to write (who doesn’t like bragging?), also don’t include easy opportunities for affiliate links.  I suppose I could put an affiliate link to e-junkie in the “e-junkie: $5″ line item in expense reports, but would you click that?  No, of course not, no reason to.  You’d need to be convinced to, and to do that I would need to pollute my blog with…

Product Reviews

Now, I do occasionally plug products or services that I have found worthwhile or that I think you would find worthwhile.  I almost never review something just to review it — heck, it has been jokingly suggested that I am the local e-junkie sales rep and I am having difficulty remembering whether I ever did a full post about e-junkie as a totality, as opposed to the limited intersection of e-junkie with Bingo Card Creator.  But what if that weren’t a joke?  What if I were the local e-junkie sales rep?

First, I’d have to heavily editing the content of my reviews.  I would have to start consolidating the reviews into single posts (need enough information to make the sale all in one place to maximize conversion rates), start optimizing the link placement (believe me, that isn’t a consideration I want in my mind as I’m writing), and I would have perverse incentives to review the most rewarding products instead of the ones I find most useful.  For example, e-junkie pays $1 a month per referred customer, is useful to only a fraction of my readership, and is the best thing since sliced bread, Random Marketing E-book pays $15 per customer, is theoretically useful to most of my readership, and is likely a great steaming pile of hucksterism.  Higher conversions times higher payouts equals more money, but at what cost to your trust in me, and for that matter my ability to sleep at night?  I don’t want this blog to become one of the Make Money Online blogs, which is… 

… largely a bunch of guys talking about how wealthy they are, leading inexperienced newbies on, pretending like someday they’ll reveal their “big money” secrets, and you’ll be wealthy too. In reality, they just use their blogs as newbie traffic channelers, selling it off to the highest bidder. The newbies take forever to realize that they ARE the “big money” secret the author has.

(Quote from SlightlyShadySEO, whose blog is worth reading for ideas even if the black hat tricks are antithetical to everything I believe in.)

Even if I weren’t to slide all the way down the totem pole to the cesspool that is multi-level ebook marketing, would you really like it if this blog’s priorities were set by affiliate payouts among tools I actually like?  Let’s see, e-junkie is $1, Slicehost is $20, AdSense is potentially a lot — write more AdSense posts!  (If I ever tell you to start using AdSense as a uISV to sell advertising, as opposed to buying advertising using AdWords, I’d be doing you a tremendous disservice.  More on that some other day!)

Quick Mercenary Math

OK, here’s the point where Sunil might actually agree with me: assume, for the sake of argument, that my blog readership does not decline due to monetization initiatives.  The merchant pays out a portion of the sale — how much depends on a lot of factors, but 30% is a decent baseline for many products.  When I typically suggest folks try out a particular product or service, that link gets about 15% click through.  Let’s assume you trust me slightly more than the average bear, so you’d convert at about 5% based on my say-so and the relative utility of the product in question.  These factors are multiplicative, so one view of the post gets about .225% of the purchase price of the item.  For a $50 product, that means the eCPM (revenue earned for 1000 views) is about $112.50.  (In actual fact, I’d probably get $40 to $50 if the post was about as successful as my average posts here, given my readership.)

 $50 is two sales of Bingo Card Creator.  Instead of keeping 30% of the sale price and dealing with unknown conversion rates, I keep about 96% and have a very, very good idea of what will send folks who actually would benefit from using the software.  Rather than spending the time optimizing one of my posts so that Vendor X can make 70% of the results of my labor, I should spend the same amount of time, anywhere in my business, to increase my effectiveness at doing anything by a half a percentage point.  Heck, I could do that by writing a single bingo card — about Valentine’s Day, for example.

So This Blog Doesn’t Make Any Money?

Now, in point of fact, there are a couple of posts on this blog that consistently make me money.  One is Free Bingo Cards, which is the most popular post on this blog by a factor of “lots”, and which probably generates about $100 to $200 in sales a month.  It is written to provide something of substantial interest to my target customer, and does it admirably.  That isn’t the only reason it was successful — many of my uISV friends took it upon themselves to link to it (after Ian Landsman did likewise).  This is goes right back to what I was saying earlier about trust — if most of my big successes are because my readers or my customers trust me, why should I sell them down the river for short-term financial advantage?

A Word Of Thanks

As I mentioned earlier, one of the primary reasons I continue to stay up to, hmm, 1:50 AM writing updates to this thing is by the Non-Financial Support of People Like You.  (Note to non-American readers: you are more fortunate for not getting the joke than the folks who got it.  They had to sit through some really excruciating television.)  Thanks for your emails, comments, words of praise, and criticisms over the last year and change.  And thanks, most of all, for reading.  It means more to me than the money ever could.

* WordPress does, occasionally, put Google AdSense ads on this site.  I really wish they wouldn’t, but wasn’t too careful when reading the contract I clicked through when I signed up.  The main consumer of that advertising spot is… me.  One more reason for you to host your own blog when you are starting out!

** Some folks might be suprised with me linking to a direct competitor. If you intuitively understand why this prospect does not worry for me, I have a funny feeling we’re going to get along great together. If you don’t, explaining would take more space than the rest of this post together, but it boils down to that I wouldn’t have a business worth competing with if I was routinely small-minded about such things. The trust and authenticity this philosophy engenders are much harder to duplicate than my program.

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Moving Off Of GoDaddy hosting

Posted on February 10, 2008 by in Uncategorized

My year of GoDaddy hosting, which cost me about $93 if I recall correctly, expires on February 23rd.  I will be transitioning Bingo Card Creator from GoDaddy hosting to one of my Slicehost VPSes slightly before that happens.

This is not a rejection of GoDaddy so much as it is just a natural growth in where the site is going.  I am integrating the Bingo Card Creator and Daily Bingo Card sites, and am planning on doing some serious Rails-based work on the main site itself, starting with some backend improvements (conversion tracking the way Google should be doing it, for starters — “first click wins” not “last click wins”) and a few automated marketing experiments.  As a result, I have no further need for shared hosting, and want my $7 a month back.  ;)

One thing that gave me pause about doing this was an email disruption.  Happily, I was able to transfer email providing from GoDaddy to Google Apps for Domains without much hassle.  It took about 20 minutes to set up, all told.  Now I get to use the Gmail interface I know and (mostly) love with my @bingocardcreator.com addresses.  Hopefully Google will also end improve the deliverability of the emails, although since setting up an SPF record for my site and e-junkie I have had much, much less of a problem with that. 

Another thing which I’ll have to think about is whether my $20 a month Slicehost slice can take an increase in traffic by a factor of about 10 (immediately) and then some fairly rapid growth after Google gives Bingo Card Creator’s link juice and domain trust to the Daily Bingo Card cards.  I’m pretty sure it can, but will be serving key pages as static HTML until I know that traffic spikes won’t bring the whole business to its knees.

Sidenote: for those starting uISVs looking for hosting, I think GoDaddy is an excellent choice.  I think in 18 months there I’ve had one serious problem (unexplained corruption of the trial executable EXE, on and off, for two weeks) and one additional minor outage, which happened in the middle of the night and lasted for a few minutes.

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Bingo Card Creator 2.0 is done! (Finally!)

Posted on February 9, 2008 by in Uncategorized

… but not quite released yet.  I finally figured out what was giving Java problems with reading the 200 new bingo card files (stupid Windows Notepad inserting a byte order mark into UTF8 text, stupid Java not reading BOMs in UTF8 despite them being in the standard, stupid me for letting this delay a release by almost a month…)

I’ll be releasing it into the wild as soon as the site redesign is complete — ideally, sometime this weekend.  In the meanwhile, I’ve already put it on Daily Bingo Cards as sort of an early-warning-system for issues.  For once, I rather doubt there will be any.  If there were, my new and improved automated test suite would have croaked when doing the output run for all the DBC cards.

New in 2.0

  • ~200 new bingo card Wizards
  • better support for foreign character sets
  • much, much better printing for many large words and phrases
  • assorted bugsquashing
  • eased some trial restrictions that were only causing problems as opposed to sales

In the crazy busyness of January I forgot about pre-announcing the price increase, so I’m going to put that off for another month.

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Blogging As Personal Marketing

Posted on February 6, 2008 by in Uncategorized

I will post more about this topic in the future, but one of the reasons to have a blog is that it allows you to establish a reputation as an expert in your field. Having that reputation leads to all sorts of doors opening up for you — for example, if I weren’t blogging and otherwise creating useful content, it would be fairly unlikely that the CEO of Dzone (a social networking startup for programmers) would drop me an email and ask to please repost my linkbait to his site.

(Which is, incidentally, about as nice a success as you could ask for linkbait. Some people might be disinclined to go that route, preferring to keep control. I am more inclined to pick ability to spread over control — after all, you will still get credit as the original source, and you can think of it as investing in the success of your next project.)

The linkbait in question was my SEO on Rails post, which recently got a bit of new life breathed into it months after its original production by some light promotion on the social networking services. (If I can pound the same old drum one more time, if you’re going to invest time in creating content you might as well make the content evergreen — that post will still be good in 3 years, assuming Rails doesn’t decide to fall off the radar screen.) There is little reason to read it again if you’ve already read it, but they convinced me to put a photo up, which some folks might find interesting.

I have resisted putting up a photo on my blog for the last two years for one reason: I have had a (somewhat irrational) fear of getting judged by my age. I’m 25, incidentally.

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What Do You Want To See Covered Here?

Posted on February 2, 2008 by in Uncategorized

I am going to try to write one of my longer, meatier pieces in the next week (it is SEO/information architecture related, and should be of interest to those uISVs who have hundreds of pages rather than the typical 5 page brochure site), and after that I don’t have a strong idea for a topic to cover yet.  I thought I would ask you guys: what do you want to see covered here?  I’m in principle open to writing about almost anything within my capabilities, and quite a bit of the stuff outside of them, too. ;)

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Redesign of Bingo Card Creator main site — interested?

Posted on February 2, 2008 by in Uncategorized

I’m hiring again, on a project unrelated to the last two.

Details are on eLance — I needed a bit more robust response to this offer than I got the last time I advertised a web design job here, but that is likely because my timing was poor and my blog has been dead for a while.  It took me forever and a day to figure out how to get a simple permalink out of them, but eventually I abused their “mail description to a friend feature” to do so.  Here are the details.

In a nutshell:

I’m going to need someone to make a 1 page template to cover a merge of Bingo Card Creator and Daily Bingo Cards.  DBC has been fairly successful and I want to fold its pages into Bingo Card Creator, which will provide Bingo Card Creator with some badly needed updated content on a daily basis and will allow me to use the much, much higher link juice pointing at BCC to rank DBC’s cards.  None of this specifically requires me to have a new design, naturally, but I figured as long as I was going to have to edit every page on a website might as well use the opporunity to make it look pretty.  And I’ve got some revenues around from January to do it with.

Details:

  • The market is overwhelmingly female, 30-40s, and non-technical.  The design needs to be bright, clean, and inviting to this audience.  I like Web 2.0 aesthetics, such as you’d find at CrazyEgg, BlinkSale, or the like.
  • The basic layout of the page isn’t changing much: header, horizontal navigational categories, sidebar moves to left, main content area.  The main content area is divided up into sections (similar to the current Bingo Card Creator home page).
  • The main content area should take up most of the space on the page, similar to how it does currently. 
  • Target for 1024×768 resolution. 
  • The design will have to showcase black and white bingo cards, of substantially similar appearance (including size) to the ones currently on Daily Bingo Cards.
  • New buttons for the free trial and purchasing links, as well as any others you feel are appropriate.
  • You’ve got a free hand to use or ignore any previous icons/banners/etc.  I am paying for your visual and design expertise, so do what you think is best.  It is my personal opinion that the current banner is too large.
  • I really, really hate stock photos of random people.  No visual element can suggest that Bingo Card Creator is related to gambling in any way — bingo balls, etc, are out.

You can send a bid and portfolio to (my first name)@bingocardcreator.com or you can respond through eLance, whichever you are comfortable with.  I’m thinking in the general vicinity of $300 – $500 and completion in under two weeks from project acceptance.  (I am fairly responsive with change requests, and don’t imagine there will be that many.)  As usual, I don’t particularly care who you are, where you live, etc — if you can follow instructions well enough to get the job done that is good enough for me.

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Major Update To Google Analytics — Action Required

Posted on January 30, 2008 by in Uncategorized

Saw this on Carsonified a minute ago:

Google released a new version of Analytics which requires you to update your script and, in return, gives you a lot of goodies.  (You can keep the old one if you don’t want the goodies.  It will continue working for at least another year, but will receive no new updates, aside from (presumably) security fixes.)

New features of particular note to the ISV:

  • Track downloads and, with a little work, download completions and download times (free link to whoever figures out the best way to do this first, it is 2 AM and I am not doing Javascript at this hour)
  • Tracking access to dynamic content — Flash objects, Javascript/AJAXy elements/etc, embedded videos
  • Track e-commerce conversions better (here’s hoping it works this time)
  • New reports are getting rolled out which won’t be compatible with the old way.

Fair warning: a quick perusal of the PDF integration guide suggests that this is slightly more pain than Analytics used to be.  Nothing to be worried about if you’re a programmer, but I will be handling this project myself for my brother’s superhero novel blog.  This doesn’t require Peter Parker levels of scientific accumen but it isn’t a Hulk Smash Puny Variable project, either.

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Why You Shouldn't Pay Any SEO You Can Afford

Posted on January 28, 2008 by in SEO

Recently, there was a question on the Business of Software forums, asking whether someone could recommend a good SEO firm which was not booked solid.  Someone jokingly suggested that the best SEO firms are so busy no one hires them anymore.  That answer, which might have been intended as the equivalent of a Slashdot +5 Funny, gets really close to fingering the actual problem.

The problem is: if you can afford to hire a particular SEO firm, they probably aren’t competent enough for your needs.  This is pretty much a result of how the incentives line up for being a really good SEO who works for clients versus being a really good SEO who also happens to run a business themselves.  (Shoemoney, a noted and successful Internet marketer, recently had a bit of a tizzy with the SEO community, suggesting that 95% of it is worthless for a variety of reasons.  I think he is more right than wrong, but could have used some dispassionate analysis to make the case better.)

This should be obvious to most people reading this already, but SEO is a flowing river of cash if you’re good at it.  Both parts of this equation are important.  I have an unhealthy fascination with bingo cards, seeing as I run a small business focused on them, so let us look at that exact query.  First, observe:

  • it isn’t awash in cash  (not mortgages, pills, adult, etc)
  • it doesn’t have an obvious monetization strategy (4+ different takes in the top 10 results)
  • it isn’t hyper-competitive (at least 2 sites up there have been up less than 2 years)
  • it doesn’t get hundreds of thousands of searches every month

Every day, while you’re eating your breakfast or putting the baby to bed, that query doles out money to about 6 small businesses.

SEO: Winner Take Most

For your reference, the #5 spot on the query is worth about 6k unique visitors a month.  (I bounced around between 5 and 10 on it, so I have a fairly decent idea of what each position is worth.)  We have a rough approximation at what multiple the #1 spot gets of that, thanks to the leaked AOL search data: it is in the ballpark of a factor of 8.5.  We can thus approximate the traffic from the #1 spot as about 50k uniques per month, giving a little bit of a fudge factor.  Now, my effective profit per 1k search visitors is on the order of $40, so if I were in the #1 spot, I would presumably be making something on the order of $20,000 a month.  (I’d probably discount that by 50%, for reasons that go beyond the scope of this post, but $10,000 isn’t much to sneeze at, either.)

So here we have a baseline, using real numbers, for what topping off a search engines result page is worth.  In a wee, little niche, in a wee little section of the Internet, one single, insignificant query can quite handsomely support a small businessman and his family.

Now, pretend you’re the head consultant at Magic Fairies SEO, and you are so good at your job that you have but to flick your SEO wand and Bingo Card Creator will sail to its rightful position at the head of the Internet.  How much should you charge me for the use of your wand? 

Option #1: Charge me $X an hour

No sane person will charge me $X an hour when I stand to gain $20,000 a month from your services.  This is, however, the prevailing billing model for SEO firms.  They take a generous billing rate, oh, call it $100 an hour, spend 10 hours on the project… and then I become crazily profitable in under 48 hours.  Oh, crikey, how silly that is.  (I also think you’re silly to charge on a per-hour basis as a contract engineer if you’re writing things that are going to scale stupidly for the client.  It is a quirky world where you get paid less as you get better at doing your job, but that is what hourly billing amounts to.)

Option #2: Charge me $X0,000 up front

Very few sane clients will accept this arrangement from most unproven SEO firms, because the Internet doesn’t believe in fairies.  Even if I were largely not sensitive to risk ($10,000 a month!!! has a certain intoxicating flavor to it), there is the capitalization problem.  Put simply, I am not in the financial position to pay $5,000 or $10,000 in a lump sum (my business only profited $6,500 last year).  Most small businesses are similarly undercapitalized.

Option #3: Equity Participation

Let’s say the SEO Fairies and I strike up a deal — they get me to #1, I pay them a portion of the money I make from being #1.  This puts a gratuitous amount of risk on the poor fairies — I could fail to monetize #1 successfully, I could conveniently forget about our contractual relationship, I could skim sales off the top, I could screw them in any of a hundred ways.  To the extent that I’m honest about my dealings with them, it is a terrible deal for me, too: after the work is done, I rationally want to terminate their participation in my business as fast as possible.  I’d be constantly on the lookout for ways to terminate our relationship and save me what would surely be my largest business expense.  For example, I’d study what techniques they were using, and show them the door as soon as I was reasonably certain I could copy them.  Thus, the Fairies would be constantly worried that they were going to get their big fat bingo check from me every month.

#4 Cut me out of the picture

We all know what the Fairies contribute to the business: a #1 search rating.  What do I contribute?  Well, a program that can be written in a week, some support, and my own marketing efforts — which are demonstrably worth, oh, about $6,500 a year on the open market.  Being a crafy profit-maximizing Fairy, if you know your wand is going to get you to the top of [bingo cards]… what did you need me for, again?  You can either write your own website/program or outsource somebody to do it for you, rank that, and then start printing money hats.  And then you aren’t dependent on me in the slightest.  You get all of the gain and none of the risk relative to the other options.

Most of the best SEOs in the world have long since done this math for themselves.  Keep in mind that [bingo cards] is sort of the blue collar of the Internet search space.  If you move to the upper middle class sections, like (picking an example at random) student credit cards, and you were good enough to prosper in a Winner Take Most environment, you would laugh in the general direction of $10,000 a month.  And this is, fundamentally, why you can’t find many good SEO consultants for hire: if they’re as good as you need, they don’t need you.

What can you find?

Well, just like in any labor market, there is a wide spectrum of ability.  You can’t afford to hire somebody who can rank for [student credit cards], or even conceive of ever ranking for that term, but maybe you can fall down the curve a little bit.  Maybe the B student in the class is good enough.  The B student probably has designs of being a B+ student, since Winner Takes Most means skill and effort superscale: if you are 1% better than the next guy you get many times the revenues.  Thus, again, why is the B student wasting his time with you, when he could be working on his own projects.

There is also the problem that SEO is a high-skill occupation and you, as the customer, have to worry about the high floor every bit as much as the limitless ceiling.  Any SEO worth his salt is probably employable as a generic web programmer, for example.  $55,000 salary straight out of college, very little risk, relatively unstressful.  Similarly, the more creative ends of the field can be used in classical marketing or copyrighting for, again, not insignificant amounts of money.  You have to be able to beat the SEO’s next best offer, and their worst, risk-free, in-case-of-financial-emergency-break-glass offer, is pretty expensive from the point of view of a cash-strapped small businessman.

So you’re left with the dregs

This shouldn’t be a fairly controversial claim: most people who are interested in making money online, using whatever method (running a software company, being an SEO, filling out surveys), have no particular skill at what they do.  The overwhelming majority will not be financial successes, relative to a very conservative definition of financial success such as “Makes as much online per hour as they would flipping hamburgers or cleaning toilets”. 

(It is entirely possible that they’re externally motivated and wouldn’t mind continuing what they’re doing because, after all, the Internet is more fun than cleaning toilets.  I’m very sympathetic to this and yet, as a fellow businessman, I would want my partners to be successful first and emotionally fulfilled second, because success transfers fairly easily but emotional fulfillment probably does not.)

You can see this same dynamic in the software business, where the overwhelming majority of proprietors make close to nothing.

If you look at any random collection of folks who sell SEO services for money, the overwhelming majority are going to be in the dregs.  It is sort of like a perverse anti-Darwin evolution: successful specimens are the first to die  (i.e. move to greener pastures, in every sense of the word green).  The more successful they are, the quicker they die.  What you’re left with is a mix of both newbies, and folks who just do not have the chops you need.  I suppose theoretically you could hope to scoop up a newbie who is both a) skilled and b) doesn’t know the value of their own skill yet.  However, most newbies are too busy being scammed out of $49.95 so that they can buy e-books to learn how to make $200,000 a month!!! selling e-books and if you act now get our copy of Magic Long Copy Letters, a $79.95 value, for absolutely free… to work for you.  And the ones who aren’t busy are probably, well, untrained and terrible at what they do.  So you’re buying lottery tickets and, as we all know, lottery tickets are just a tax on people who can’t do math.

So is there a way out?

All of the above is specific to SEO services.  SEO products could very well have a different incentive structure — they are also a Winner Take Most economy, so if you can be SEOMoz or Aaron Wall you might actually stand a decent change of making money, and thus it almost makes sense for you to be offering your expertise as a product.  I have my doubts in the generic case, though.

I sometimes shake my head in wonder at both of them, actually.  I won’t tell anyone else how to run their life or business interests — if they’re happy, I’m happy for them.  Nonetheless, Rand Fishkin and the team are clearly near the top of their field, with skillsets that are worth conservatively millions, and yet they do client work for peanuts, relatively speaking.  Rand Fishkin, after years of having a deserved reputation for being insanely good at what he does, makes far under the SEO floor salary.  (Or at least he did before the VC injection — maybe one of the board members will have a facts of life talk with him.)  They could just as easily have sewn up a niche, or a half dozen of them, hire folks to keep it sewn up for them, and do SEO education as a hobby to pass the time between celebratory cash bonfires.  Or, heck, they could find one guy who could open doors to the world of big business and say “Hiya, Bank of America.  Give us a 10 man team and a year, and we’ll increase revenue driven by your website by 3%.  You know that is worth millions, and believe me, you will pay millions for it, or Citibank will.”  (I am reminded of the classic sieve to separate rich lawyers from poor lawyers: look for the ones who work for rich clients.  There is a lot to be said for that maxim.)

I incidentally haven’t purchased either of the above services, but I’m making an educated judgement about their quality on the basis of the information they write for free in their blogs.  Both are likely excellent resources for folks getting past the newbie hump in a hurry.  However, because you can’t really teach what gets folks from a solid foundation in the basics to the B+ region where they are making decently large sums of money, I wouldn’t expect these resources to get you there.  After all, if they could, why would you sell them for $80?  They’d be worth more in future income than a college education at my alma mater, and would be priced to match.  But if you are feeling totally clueless about SEO, and think your time is valuable, I’d suggest buying one or both of the above and, more importantly, start learning by doing.  (As usual, I have no financial relationship with either of the above two products.) 

So that is the cynical economist’s take on the SEO market.  I fully acknowledge that I am, at best, a B or B- SEO, so it is entirely possible I don’t know what I’m talking about.  And I also know that, as a software developer/marketer/CEO/whatever, I’m also a little itty bitty fish in a huge ocean of the Internet.  Here’s the thing, though: being a minorly successful little bitty fish is worth somewhere in the $80+ range an hour.  If I’m absolutely clueless about this field, this implies that someone who has a clue will be dreadfully expensive.

If you have squared the circle and figured out why someone with SEO chops would choose to be a for-hire consultant instead of a business owner themselves, I’d love to hear your arguments in the comments.

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Google Features Bingo Card Creator

Posted on January 24, 2008 by in AdWords, marketing

I’m sorry, this post was due a week ago but I have been a combination of sick and busy.

Regular readers of this blog might remember that, around September, I started using Conversion Optimizer on my Content Network campaign and had a lot of successwith it.  My success came to the attention of the project manager for marketing Conversion Optimizer, and after a bit of discussion we agreed to cooperate in the production of a case study.  Google published that case study fairly recently — it doesn’t include much that you didn’t already read in the above posts and the followup, but it might be interesting to see how their take on it is subtly different than my take on it.  You’ll note, for one thing, that they don’t mention that the prevailing view of the the Content Network is that it is a “hive of scum and villainy”.  I can’t imagine why.

I don’t have definitive knowledge as to why Google chose to select me for the case study.  I have theories, though.  The first was that I took an early lead in staking out the topic area when it was released, and it made excellent sense for Google to talk to someone who was already ranking high for their own product name.  It couldn’t have hurt that I was largely positive and transparently willing to share the exact statistics, which is great for someone who doesn’t want to waste their time going through 15 levels of corporate officers and ultimately failing to get the go-ahead to release the numbers.

I also think that authenticity mattered.  On an Internet which is chock-full of scam artists and folks wanting to make a fast buck at others’ expense, you can stand out pretty easily just by bucking the trend.  If you have 15 competitors and you’re the only one who is radically transparent about your business, then for many opportunities you have no competitors.  You’re sailing in a Blue Ocean, and you’re the only ship there is, from one side of the horizon to the other. 

I think uISVs should make use of this, not necessarily by being radically transparent, but by running businesses which stick out because they are meant to stick out.  The software can be cloned, the keyword lists duplicated, the advertising imitated, but no one has come up with a copy machine which can Xerox the soul of an organization that has one.  If your differentiating factor is a sense of humor, fanatical devotion to customer support, personal expertise in your domain, an emotional connection to your niche, or just the bare fact of being the little guy, that helps you stand out in a sea of mediocrity. 

OK, that is enough of the theorizing.  So, further thoughts on Conversion Optimizer: it still rocks.  I pay about 24 cents for trial downloads from the Content Network these days and, after someone corrected my mistaken impression that you couldn’t use it for search, my search campaign has had a solid three months below 30 cents (which was my gold-standard for execution back when I was hand optimizing).  This has also freed up well in excess of four hours a month, which I have been using to convalesce (boo!) and plot my next improvements to my website (yay!).  I really can’t recommend it enough.

Full disclosure: Google gave me a laptop bag as a thank-you gift for participating in this case study.  Some folks might think that compromises my objectivity.  I don’t think it compromises it nearly as much as helping me make a few thousand bucks, because that buys me an awful lot of laptop bags.  (Although those wouldn’t get me stopped at customs — “Oh, you work for Google!?  ARE YOU FEELING LUCKY?!  Sorry, sorry, I tried to make a joke.  Was it funny?”  Frankly, we need more good bad jokes to pass the time at airport security.)

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Marketing Runs In The Family

Posted on January 18, 2008 by in Uncategorized

My little brother just had his first successful piece of linkbait hit it big: List of Superhero Powers.  It got farked and then so did the VPS I was hosting his blog on.  I have spent the last hour fighting with the configuration so that it can withstand a traffic graph that looks something like a standing wave.  It seems to be stable now, thankfully. 

Sidenote to anyone who thinks playing amateur server admin in crisis mode is a good idea: put your Apache config files in version control because if you bork your redirection code and don’t remember how you got it working the first time you will be sorry.

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