Some Internet Triva For Ya

• In 2008 there were 28 million new domain names registered.
  
• At the end of 2008 there were a total of 177 million Top Level Domains in existence
• In order the 5 largest domain extensions were .com, .cn, .de, .net and .org
• 2008 represented a 16% growth in new domains.  The largest ever.

 177 Million didn't seem like a lot to me, given the number of people on the planet.  I guess I assumed that everyone had a couple of domains.  What IS big however is that 28 million new domains were registered last year.  I don't think that the fellas at Rand, MIT and UCLA could have possibly envisioned the colossal entity that was in it's infancy.

Today, I think that it's pretty safe to say that the internet has changed the way we live our lives.  Research,  shopping, entertainment, work and so on.  If you own a business, the real question is whether or not you are using the internet to maximize your business potential.  It's not just for eBay anymore.

If you are still with me here on The Big Bald Blog, thanks for hanging around during this time of inactivity. 

Be back soon.

Pops

 

Strange Phone Calls

I was sitting here feverishly working away (not really) and my extension rang. A gentleman on the other end of the line was inquiring about building a website. He had a concept and wanted me to give him a quote over the phone. He lives in the area so I tried to set up an appointment with him to outline what it was that he needed and that way we could have an accurate idea of what he was looking for. Turns out he wanted a website like Ebay or Amazon. Sweet!

Still wanting me to give him a quote off the cuff, I tried to explain that this was a seriously HUGE project and we would definitely need to meet. After a few more questions, we started talking about budget. He had a budget of $900 to $1000. Silence ensued. I didn't know how to respond. I kindly explained to him that you could not build an Ebay for $1000. He hung up.

Here's the funny part. Instead of working feverishly like I had previously indicated, I was actually on a website called Tech Support Comedy listening to recorded customer service calls. I have never had someone that irate call me before, but I thought that it was rather ironic that I was wasting time on a website like that and I got a call that could be a part of that site.

What have you received in the way of strange calls?

 

Market Your Website

If you don't think that your business needs a website or if you think that Internet marketing of your site isn't necessary, you are missing the boat.

Even today, in this world of technology on demand, I have talked with several business owners that don't think they need a website. They typically say, "I have all the business I want." Believe it or not there are even multi-million dollar corporations that still refuse to take their business to the web. I even know of a company that, by my estimation, continues to spend $300,000 a year in the printed yellow pages. Yeah, you know who you are.

The bottom line is that any company - ANY COMPANY- can benefit from a professionally constructed and properly written site. BUT, you need to dedicate the time and resources to maximize the ROI and make your website work for you.

Remember, having a website for the sake of having a website isn't enough. You need to demand results from your online presence.

Do people want to come back to your site? Do you have a function that will allow visitors to "sign up" for something? Do you have properly formatted landing pages for your banner advertising? Are you using your website to track the effectiveness of a direct mail campaign? If you can not answer yes to all of these questions, I may know of someone that can help. Drop me a line.

 

SiteHoppin Toolbar Baby!!!

Here it is. Finally! Max from Sitehoppin has it all tweaked ready for beta testing. I was very fortunate to be one of 20 lucky bloggers that he released it to. I was also given an extra perk. You, the readers of The Big Bald Blog, will be able to beta test it too with my special code.

All you need to do is go to the Sitehoppin tool bar download area and enter the code: bigpappa

This will allow you to download and test out the new Sitehoppin Firefox tool bar. If you are wondering what it does, you need to check out this video on Josh Whitford's site. It's more-or-less like Stumbleupon except you rate the sites with beer. Instead of a simple thumbs up or down you have a rating system of 1 through 5. AND if the site doesn't have a rating of at least 3 beers or more it won't show up in the hops. There's even a bonus. It the site is complete garbage or is total spam, you can hit the "puke it" button and it kills the site. Head on over and give it a try.

Thanks again Max for including The Big Bald Blog and it's readers in the beta!

 

Keywords That Led To You

Just for fun, every month when I look at my stats I take a look at the complete list of key words/phrases that I have been found with and sometimes the strangest keywords show up in the report. These are not keywords that appear on my blog with any frequency or have a whole lot of relevance to anything.

Here is my top 10 list of strange keywords that I have been found for.

"140 pound condom"
" is Elton John bald" (I figured this one out)
"can you show me pictures of bald girls"
"4794279" (among many other 7 digit numbers)
"big pooty"
"mini clapping bald eagle"
"mark eating cactus"
"is chuck norris bald"
"delay carpet cleaning and worry about downtime"
"lobster boy server blog"

But the one that I am most shocked about is, "big bald men." I mean seriously, what does that have to do with me?

Here's what I want to know. What are some keywords that have brought people to your site, and I am talking unintentional. I am not talking about you setting out to capture the "poop deck pappy" or "the dingle droppers" traffic by optimizing for those words.

Let me know what you have found. I will collect them all and may even give the winner a text link to your site, not that its worth a whole lot but it's something right?

 

My Posts on Someone Else's Site

For those of you more experienced in the blogosphere than myself, I need a question answered. I ran across a site called "www.making-me-money.com." Basically it has a pant-load of Google AdSense on there with MY rss feed and one other blog's feed acting as the posts. There is however a link to The Big Bald Blog in the blogroll.

From what I have read, I am assuming that this is "feed scraping" site. I do have my FeedBurner feed set to "partial" content so it's not looking the best.

My question: Is this something I should be concerned about? I don't think so, but then again, I am only the 5th smartest person on the planet.

Your thoughts?

 

Twitter?

I went ahead and set up a Twitter account just for the heck of it. I was seeing "follow me on Twitter" on a couple of blogs and I read some posts about it so I decided to sign up. I figured you can't do enough marketing right?

I AM a little confused about it though. I guess I don't get it. Am I missing something?

This is the function of Twitter as I see it. Periodically you write up to 140 characters of whatever in this little box. People can opt to follow you on Twitter and you can follow them. When you reply to their short posts and that shows up on your "main page." You also have the ability to do a little customizing to your page. The way I look at it, it's basically like a mini-blog. People can subscribe to you (follow you), leave comments (reply to you), and read your posts.

So is there something that I am not seeing? I have never claimed to be the smartest person on the planet...just the 5th smartest.

 

The Good Web Design Enigma - Craigslist

I've done it, you have probably done it and other people do it to the tune of 24 million unique visitors per month. I am talking about visiting/using Craigslist. According to Alexa, it is one of the top 100 sites on the internet (66 as of today)

Everything that modern web design accepts as best practices can now be thrown out the window. OK, not really but you have to admit there are some talking points here.

If you have ever been to Craigslist, you know what I am referring to. Plain with simple blue text on white space. No design, no borders, no gradients, no graphics, NOTHING. It looks kind of like a word document. BUT wait a second there Captain, it works and it works good!

Why does it work? Content. Although it isn't pretty, it gets the job done, just like my rusty old lawnmower. The content is real, the site is relatively easy to use, and it gets results. What more can you ask for right? Well maybe SOME design.

I am more if a aesthetics person when it comes to web design and I think it does make a difference to the consuming public. That is why so many "consumers" love 100% Flash websites. They look great and they are fun to play around on. BUT in the end, developers know that they are not the best for SEO. Did you ever wonder why all the sites that sell flash templates, build their sites in html, asp, php or xhtml? Probably the same reason that most of the listings on a SERP for the search term "flash developers" are built in the same way.

One of the coolest websites that I have seen is the 2AdvancedStudios website. The current version and the past 2 or 3 versions have been simply AWESOME. These guys are definitely the masters of Flash but I was unable to find their site if I was searching for flash designers or flash developers. Don't get me wrong, I am not bashing here! The people at 2Advanced do unbelievable work. They just have to market their site differently.

Here is an excerpt from a design critique written by Kate Bronstad: "When Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, was asked why the site was 'visually boring', he explained that "we all consume too much media, and we just want to get to the point sometimes" (Weidaw). In addition to valuing clarity, Newmark and his colleagues probably want to impress upon their users that Craigslist isn't some untrustworthy corporation, and, in fact, Craigslist is a community. Based on the site's success, this impression might be getting across to a lot of people. If Craigslist is so popular, should it be messed with? Maybe not -but there could be a way to retain the values of the Craig and company (user loyalty, minimal design, content heavy) while making the Craigslist experience a little more pleasant for its legions of users, some of whom might not have grown to love the dizzying blue and purple bricks of text."

I think I tend to agree with this assessment. There can be a happy medium between minimalism and an over the top visual orgasm. But who am I? Since I don't have a site that's getting 24 million unique visitors per month, you really don't have to listen to me. :) However, I do have over 80,000 uniques so far this month, thanks to my stumbling friends. <--shameless self plug so you will buy an ad.>

So what's the point here? It's all about the content and functionality. You can have the best looking website in the world but if users don't find it useful or it serves no purpose, they won't be coming back. Design your site so people will want to come back. The ultimate compliment for any website is a RSS subscription or an add to the user's favorites. For this very reason I am going to take another opportunity to thank the readers of The Big Bald Blog, after all it's all about you, and without you I wouldn't be doing this. Thanks!

Let me know what you like to see in a website. Oh, and if I had a typo you would tell me wouldn't you?

 

SiteHoppin BABY!!

There are a few sites on the internet that I try and stop by every day. Gorilla Sushi, A Strange Life and Blogsters Guild just to name a few. Mostly because I want to see what they are going to say next. If you have ever seen the movie about Howard Stern called "Private Parts", according to the NBC executive in the movie, the reason for his ratings being so high was that "people wanted to see what he would say next."

This is exactly why I stop by the SiteHoppin blog. When I first ran across this blog, I thought to myself, good grief, this is the most annoying thing I have ever laid my eyes on. But you see, in the beginning, I simply didn't get it.

Well, I get it now and I have to tell you, it IS hilarious. At first I thought that it was going to be like the train wreck Anna Nicole Smith Show. Seriously, I HATED that show, but for some reason I couldn't keep my eyes off of it. If I was flipping the channels and it was on, some unknown force would compel me to stop and stare at the screen. I would get so mad at that show. How could someone so stupid have their own show? Why are people watching this? Are people like me or do they find this entertaining? I would complain how Hollywood will exploit anything. After about 15 minutes of ranting my wife would usually come in and say in calm voice, "why do you watch it?" or "just turn the channel." Yeah right, she didn't know anything.

So here I am on the SiteHoppin Blog. There's this crazy cat named Max who makes videos of himself in his kitchen drinking SOJU and Mickey's. Mostly he rambles about SiteHoppin, getting drunk, site stats, cooking, drinking, and what ever comes to mind. Oh did I mention getting drunk?

As of this post, the most recent episode informs us of his quest for knowledge in the Java and Ajax world. He also lets it slip that he is broke because of recent server upgrades. I kind of feel bad for Max, given his recent bout in the hospital. I may send him some cash, but I don't know, we will have to see. I am still trying to figure out if he really is broke or this whole thing is a well orchestrated production. Nonetheless, it is entertaining AND I am compelled to check back every day. I may even go out and locate some SOJU to make my own video and send it to max.

Actually there's more to SiteHoppin than just the crazy blog. It is a new kind of social bookmarking site. It is reminiscent of StumbleUpon in the sense that you can "hop" to a random website and if you like it you can vote on it. However it is more than a simple thumbs up or down. You get to vote on the page in the form of beers. Yes, beers! You can rank the page from 1 to 5 beers, tag it, comment on it and then move on. Here are a couple of my pages that I have submitted, if you feel so inclined head on over and rank me. But more importantly, try out SiteHoppin and let me know what think. Granted, this site is in it's infancy and I think that Max has some tweaks to perform that will make it better but I think it is a good start.

 

What Did You Just Say?

I got a call today from a magazine trying to sell me a "no obligation, cancel at any time" subscription. According to the sales rep, the magazine focused on specialized SEO, SEM and web marketing.

I said, "Sure, I will take a look at it, but I want to take a look at your website first."

She said, "Oh, uhhh... well, we don't have a website."

My Response - "So let me get this straight, you have a publication about website marketing, search engine marketing and SEO and you DON'T have a website?"

((click)) The line goes dead.

Yes that's right, I got a circa 1988 telemarketing call peddling a subscription to a magazine and they hung up on me when I questioned them. Nice. I wonder what kind of scam they were running?

This reminds me of a of the girl who tried to scam money out of me in front of Target right before Christmas. A young and inexperienced panhandler came up to me and said that she was collecting money for a mission trip for her church.

Me - "Oh really, what church?"
Her - "The baptist one."
Me - "Which one."
Again she said, "The baptist one."
Me - "Yeah, I heard you, but which one"
Her - "The Kingdom Hall over on um...uhhh..."
Me - "The Kingdom Hall is a Jehovah Witness church"
Her - "Uhhh...well...uhhh...I wish my sister was here she knows more than I do."
Me - "No thank you, I have to go now"

As she walked away I got in my truck and watched her try and hit up someone else coming out of the store.

The moral of the story. If you are going to try and scam someone, at least have your story straight or make sure you have a website. :)

I can already hear it, some of you are going to say, "But Big Pops, your website has been down/under construction a LOOONG time." To you I say, HA. No longer will The Big Bald Blog be alone on Impactmt.com.

It is a glorious day here in Big Pappa Land. We are in the final stages of getting it ready to go live, FINALLY. I think that it should be live here in the next week or so. So again I say, HA.

Have you ever been scammed or has anyone attempted to scam you? Let's hear the story.

Have a great weekend everyone!

 

Why I Don't Like Your Website

I have seen a LOT of these posts floating around lately. Most of them are talking about the typical things on a website that provide some level of soothing irritation. Things like music playing on the load, resizing of the window, slow load times or a bunch of multi-colored fonts like comic sans.

Here are a couple of things that I can contribute to the lists going around. I have an extreme aversion to the mPire widgets that hold your browser hostage until they finish loading. The second thing that I want to add to the list is the annoying little voice that says, "Congratulation, you may have just won an iPhone."

Since you should always try to be positive, I think I will end this by saying something uplifting.

• I like your website because it has easy to see and use navigation.
  
• I like your site because because the text is broken up into easy to read segments.
• I like your site because it is extremely relevant to the keywords I was searching for.
• I like your site because it looks like someone took their time on the design and did the little "extras."
• I like it when you respond to me in a timely manner.

Take into consideration what you like and try to implement those qualities into YOUR site. You know, prior to writing this, I was informed that my site was causing an error in a visitor's browser. I immediately replied with questions about the error and determined that it was the JibJab video embedded in a post. I proptly got rid of it and ran over to WebSiteOptimization.com to see if I had any other issues. Yep, sure did. I fixed quite a few issues with image sizes and The Big Bald Blog appears to be loading faster now.

In summary, I LIKE it when you give me feedback about MY site to help me improve it. Thanks!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

 

Late News For The Week. It's Official - Digg Is For Sale

I know that this is pretty old news but I just read that Digg is for sale for $300 million dollars.

"A reliable source just confirmed the company’s plans, noting the company has hired Allen & Company, a tiny but influential private investment firm, to help broker a deal. The asking price is still $300 million, the source said." Wow, $300 million. I wonder if they'll take a check?

"When asked about a potential sale, Digg founder Kevin Rose said that “we never comment on things related to acquisitions.”

Awww shucks, can't he give us a little something?

All I know is that I have way better luck with traffic from Stumbleupon. Digg has never really generated anything substantial. With any social media, the big challenge is converting that traffic into RSS subscribers or ad clickers, what ever your goal is. I have had moderate luck getting RSS conversions from SU traffic. However this month I have increased my RSS subs by about 70 so far but that was due primarily to the contest which ends on the 4th. And because it is going so well I am going to give an un-announced bonus when the winner is drawn.

I am curious, what social media is your biggest generator of traffic?

 

Entrecard Revisited

This is kind of cool. I made it to the second row in the "Most Popular" category on Entrecard.
That's me at the very end of row 2. I don't know what this means but being in the top 12 seems pretty great. It looks like I only have about 9 more more points to make up in order to pass up our good buddy John Cow (who I think is really John Chow).



For those of you who are a little confused about my Entrecard design for The Big Bald Blog, let me explain. I also have another site that I mess around with called Big Pappa World Wide. It too is an experiment in fun. Just in case you were wondering, there you have it.

As a matter of follow up on Entrecard. It is still working great by delivering traffic, comments and quality people. Another completely random side note, my card is the only circle style card on Entrecard. How is that important you ask. It's not.

Also, I haven't been very good about this but here goes my pitch. Make sure you subscribe to The Big Bald Blog either with the RSS or sign up and have posts delivered to you by email.

Thanks again for stopping by.

UPDATE:

A few hours after writing this I went back in and this is what I saw. Now, I am 100% positive this fluke will change rather rapidly but at least I will always have this post to remember the day.

 

New Websites Launched!

In the interest of disclosure, this is something that we do just because we love our customers. This isn't a paid service or something that we agree to. We simply do it from time to time to show a little customer love!

Capitol Realty

Capitol Realty, the real estate specialists in Waverly, Iowa have just undergone a complete brand makeover which included their website. Now you are able to browse the entire MLS right from the Capitol Realty site. If you are looking to buy or sell a home in the Waverly area, give one of the Realtors at Capitol Realty a call.


CVRM

Cedar Valley Records Management has also launched their new site. CVRM Inc. is an off site document storage and retrieval company that services the Cedar Valley. You are able to request documents for delivery or for pickup via their online system. CVRM is an excellent resource for compliant document storage, recovery and destruction.

If you are looking to give YOUR web presence a face lift, don't hesitate to give us a call.

 

Web Hosting Downtime.

How often is your hosting company up? We do pretty good around here, especially since we switched our server over to a local data center several years ago. We used to use Alabanza and decided to quit using them after we were down for the better part of a day and a half. They said it was due to some big fire in Baltimore and it melted a bunch of fiber somewhere.

I get emailed this article from a friend yesterday. It seems that our old hosting vendor Alabanza had decided to move it's servers from Baltimor to Andover. No big deal right. A virtual migration would be in order and it should go off without a hitch. In this case, that would be too easy. Here's the sad part. After 110 Hours of downtime only 60% of the server are up and running. That translates into more that 80,000 websites are still not up after almost 5 days. No website AND if their email was tied to their hosting account, which most are, they have been without email for almost 5 days as well.

BUT WAIT it gets better. It seems that they "...thought the virtual move was taking far too long so (they) yanked the servers out of the Baltimore facilities, tossed them into trucks and headed to Andover...where nobody was prepared for an actual physical migration. Because the original plan was for a virtual migration. No plans. No strategy. Just toss the things into a truck and drive and hope that someone would figure out what to do once the servers arrived in Andover."

WOW, I don't know what to say. I wonder how many customers they are going to loose after this debacle. If you have excellent uptime on your website, be thankful that you have a good hosting provider.

Have a good weekend everyone.

 

Sponsored Ads or SEO?

Do you spend the time or the money? I have been doing a lot of reading lately on the different approaches to site traffic generation. The big debate lately is organic SEO or PPC type advertising.

Most of the experts agree that it really depends on the type of site you have as well as the people that you are marketing to. However, many feel that anyone can benefit from some combination of the two. With a PPC campaign the results are mostly immediate but will cost you some cash. With organic SEO it will cost you less in green but cost you more in human capitol or time, AND it will take more time to build traffic through the natural link building process. Having a combination of the 2 will obviously yield better results.

Just the other day I was speaking with a business owner about his website. They have a 100% flash site that doesn't index at all on it's own for anything that they do. For the first 6 months, post launch, they relied heavily on PPC traffic. Everything was going well until they got to a certain point where they no longer had the time or the desire to continue the management of their PPC campaign. Once that fell by the wayside, so did their traffic.

So what do you do? I think every website can benefit from traditional organic SEO, especially if you have a unique product or a very narrow niche. It's easier to optimize a site for narrower niche than it would be to optimize a site for something like web hosting or web design. If you have a really broad category it is going to take longer to achieve the desired results due to the competition. This is when you may want to take a look at a PPC campaign and look at the how much competition there is for your main keywords.

Learn to take advantage of all the tools available on the internet and identify who is searching for your product. Always remember that nothing can replace quality content with appropriate keyword density. Like Eric Ward says, "It's about the veracity of the content. I'd rather have links from ugly sites created by business school professors using Netscape composer than a million from gorgeous sites about nothing, or directories with PageRank 4 that nobody has ever heard of." This excerpt is from his article, "Five Ways Link Builders Hurt Themselves."

I am curious on how you search. For me, I normally look at the organic results first and then I go to the sponsored listings on the page. How often do you click on the sponsored listings?

 

I Am Jack's Raging Sense Of Design

As I was making my daily blog rounds, a headline on Seth's blog caught my eye. How to create a great website is what lured me over. I took particular interest in #8, #7 and #1.

"If you hire a professional: hire a great one. The best one. Let her do her job. 10 mediocre website consultants working in perfect harmony can’t do the work of one rock star." How hard are these rock stars to find? This is one area that is particularly difficult right now. But, once you get this person make sure you hang on to them.

"Fire the committee. No great website in history has been conceived of by more than three people. Not one. This is a deal breaker." Design by committee has never worked. One person needs to make the decisions and live with them. Just like when you are designing a logo - there is only one person that needs to be making a decision. If you have 15 people on a design committee, you are going to have 15 different opinions and nothing will ever get accomplished.

Insight is good, clever is bad. Many websites say, “look at me.” Your goal ought to be to say, “here’s what you were looking for.” I couldn't have said it better. After all, isn't this the goal of any website. Properly constructing a site to give searchers the answers to their questions and the information that they are looking for is the key to success. So often this gets overlooked in the rush to make a site look good.

Great Post Seth!

 

Eye Tracking - What A User Is Looking At.

What are people looking at when they are on your website? I just read a new study on eye tracking in relationship to websites. This has always been an area of interest for me. Years ago they did this same type of study with drivers. They would track where a driver was looking as they were going down the road in order to improve sign placement. Today, similar technology is used to track where a person's eyes are focused when they are viewing a website.

So what are people looking at when they are on your site? "Using statistical analysis and eye tracking data across a broad-spectrum demographic provides the researcher with numerical sums based on number of observations and length of observations of different elements on any site page." Yeah, OK, so what did they find out?

"Single-variant testing is the simplest to initiate and track. However it's time-consuming and may lead to unsubstantiated conclusions. Multi-variant testing is a more efficient means of determining which site appearances and features deliver optimum results, i.e. the highest conversion rate." Uhhhhh OK, so what did they find out?

"However, multi-variant testing is more complex than changing a single variable and waiting to gather the A/B test results. It could take months to optimize a site for conversion. Further, single-variant testing often requires the tester to make certain assumptions that may or may not be true." YAwnnnnn - OK, this is getting pretty tiresome. Can't I just read the last page to see the results? NO I can't because the report concluded nothing about what people are looking at. In fact it went on and on just like the excerpts above do. All it did was go on about the proper methods of measuring and how to establish baselines. What a total waste of my time. They owe me money or something! Talk about link bait.

Anyway here's what other researchers have found and can pretty much be summed up in a few bullet points.

• Top left 1/4 of the screen is prime real estate
• If you want people to read and not scan, use smaller fonts
• Headlines make or break articles as well as click trough rates
  
• Users overwhelmingly look at a website is an "F" pattern

Here's a great video from YouTube showing a typical eye tracking test. Seth Godin also has a video of an eye tracking session on his website.

Looking at these videos, it gives you a better understanding on how people browse. Like Seth says, "...websurfing is a hunting activity." You need to make sure that what you have to offer is readily available to the hunters.

 

Iowa's Busiest Pattern Shop Releases Their New Site!

American Pattern and CNC Works has launched their new website. American Pattern is a full service pattern shop and short run foundry. Located in Cedar Falls, Iowa American Pattern specializes in:

• Renboard and Wood Pattern Making
• Prototype Tooling
• Production Tooling
• Prototype Castings
• Gray Iron, Ductile Iron, Aluminum, Austempered Ductile Iron, Steel and Steel Alloy Castings
• CNC Machining
  

Since 1994, American Pattern and CNC Works has been serving top manufacturers and delivering the only finest quality products to the agricultural, industrial, consumer, transportation and plastic industries.

 

Yahoo Releases YSlow

Yahoo has just released their new web performance tool called YSlow.

YSlow measures individual web page performance based on the best practices outline.

"YSlow has three main views: Performance, Stats, and Components. Performance view scores the page against each performance rule, generates an overall YSlow grade for the page, and lists specific recommendations for making the page faster. Stats view summarizes the total page weight, cookie size, and HTTP request count. Components view lists each component (image, stylesheet, script, Flash object, etc.) in the page along with HTTP information relevant to page load times. It also contains several tools including JSLint."

I installed this yesterday and it provides great information about your sites. Specifically I was interested in the rating that it gave me for ETags, CDN and expiring headers. All the other things listed in the report are excellent little tools that can help you increase the speed at which your sites load.

Give it a try and let me know your comments.

 

John Chow and the Great Google Debacle

I have been reading John Chow's blog for several weeks now as a matter of interest in the posts. I love his blog and read it every day. After a while, I realize that John is a pretty big noise in the world of blogging. Admittedly, when I first started reading the blog, I had no idea who he was. After a couple of weeks of reading deeper into his blog and looking elsewhere online, I realized that he is kind of a rogue in the blog community and some of his actions may have gotten him in trouble with someone you don't want to be in trouble with; Google.

John is making thousands and thousands of dollars per month by monetizing his blog with the support of "advertisers" and other revenue generating avenues like Google Ads and selling links. Matt Cutts, Google's Search Engineer, had warned people about subscribing to paid link advertising in his 2005 blog post. Apparently this is where pro blogger got into a bit of trouble when he began to push the threshold of what Google saw as acceptable conduct.

For a period of time, John Chow's blog was ranked #1 for the search terms "make money online." Right now if you Google John Chow, his actual site shows up at #54 in the results where it used to be at #1. Even though he has broken into the top 50 on Technorati, he is still being punished by the biggest boy on the block. John explains how his fallout with Google all went down in this June 2007 post. The best quote is from the last line of the post, "Let’s see, I’ve been banned from Digg, banned from Technorati and now bitch slapped by Google. I’m doing pretty good!"

Understand that this #54 ranking is an improvement over where he ranked a couple of months ago but he still has quite a ways to go before he will gain back what he lost this year. Granted, if you search John Chow, you can get to his site from the vast amount of posts on other blogs, but it is always nice to be #1.

Now this is pretty old news to most of you and I am coming on the tail end of it all. I just thought that is was a pretty interesting story about the power of Google and how they can shut you off if they are so inclined. As I was putting this post together, I started wondering what happens when a search engine gains too much power. Is there a potential for information to be controlled? Can a corrupt individual eliminate someone from the rankings with enough money? I don't know, I just thought that I would throw that out there.


So what's the moral of the story? Build your site on organic search results with quality links from relevant sites. Don't get banned by Google by buying links, simply buy AdWords. Don't sell links, display AdSense on your site. Don't try and take short cuts, write quality content, provide substance to your site's visitors, and understand that it takes time to build a successful site that's valuable to your visitors.

 

20 Million Visitors

Digg and Facebook hit an incredible 20 million visitors this last month. Some industry insiders believe that this will open them up for a buyout. Just days after Jay Meattle wrote on his blog about YouTube crossing the 20 million mark, Google came in and bought it for $1.65B in Google stock.

Just for comparison sake, according to Jay's blog MySpace has over 75 billion page views per month and over 67 million in monthly unique visitors. I guess that gives us all something to shoot for.

These sites and many other social media type sites continue to give us trend indications and how to market proactively in the new mass media. I am going to make a prediction right now. I think in the next 10 years there will be a significant number of homes that no longer have cable or satellite. There will be large amounts of programs available on the Internet and consumers will be subscribing to some kind of syndication service for their in-home entertainment. After all, who would have thought that NetFlix would have taken the country by storm and contributed to the decline of so many traditional movie rental companies.


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That Flash is Pretty Flashy

So I get an email from a guy wanting an evaluation on his flash site before it goes live. The site is a well put together design and very visually appealing. The one problem is that there is no content, visual, HTML or otherwise. It is basically one big flash movie broken up into little flash movies accessible by the "mystery meat" navigation.

He told me that he wanted to make sure that his site was "found" on the Internet and that was the primary goal. I referenced countless articles that spoke about SEM and how flash was best used as elements within the site, including a post on Google's Webmaster Central Blog that said "Try to use Flash only where it is needed..." Linking strategies aside, I told him that "content was king" and how compelling and properly written content with appropriate key word density would yield better results than a flashy looking website.

The next day I got an email from his web designer that said I was "horribly wrong" and if "the design sucks then content will not mean anything." He went on to say that flash has been the SEO standard since October of 2004. To which I retorted, "ohh yeah, I forgot about that" and left it at that.

According Johnathan Hochman there are ways to make flash sites "spiderable" but not may designers will do it. Johnatan Hochman also concedes that, "A site built entirely with Flash suffers a great disadvantage because it lacks page structure to organize the content, internal linking, and unique page titles. One remedy is to create distinct HTML pages to represent each Flash "page,"... Most SEO expert agree that flash should be used as elements in HTML pages where spiders can glean the information and return home with real content.

Your comments are welcome!

 

Conversions Are Taking Longer

What is a conversion anyway? It is the action of converting the user from a "clicker" to a customer.

According to MarketingSherpa a new study claims that customers are delaying their purchases 34+ hours from the time they initially come to a site. This is a huge increase over the 2005 findings that reported a 19 hour conversion time.

It seems that the consumers "are comparison shopping more, rather than buying at the first place they click to."

So how do site owners and marketers improve conversions?

• Increase your product reviews - Consumers love this information


• Offer more exclusive bonuses if they buy now


• Give your visitors more content than the competition


• Have a properly formatted and optimized landing page


• Display plenty of certifications and authoritative logos


• AND obviously, make sure everything in your site is working. Broken links and non functioning elements dramatically diminishes your conversion potential.

 

Nielsen Nixes Page View Measurement

Everyone has heard of the Nielson Ratings regarding TV viewership. However, not a lot of people know that they are also measuring website traffic. In a recent press release it was decided by the ratings company that they were no longer going to be using page views as a measure of a sites popularity. They will still be providing the numbers but won't be formally ranking them. Instead, they are placing the emphasis on the total minutes viewed.

IMHO, I would tend to agree. This gives a more accurate picture of what people are actually looking at and a better determination of viewing quality. However, some industry experts are claiming that time spent on AOL's instant messenger and other similar aps are now going to be counted and can skew the results. With that being said, the new form of measurement is going to have the opposite effect on sites like blogs where users spend much more time actually reading the content.

This decision was made and influenced by new technology like AJAX which allows users to spend more time interacting with a page and not having to re-load the page content from the server.

I just have one question. Since online advertising is gauged by impressions, won't the impressions go down under this this new rating system? Will this de-value the ads or will ad providers have to adjust their measuring to accommodate this new metric?

 

Do You YouTube?

Well apparently someone is. Jason Miller just reported on WebProNews that "YouTube Comprises 10% of all Internet traffic."

Social media like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and other similar sites are getting more and more traffic every day. As Generation Y moves up in years, they are continually turning to the Internet for entertainment. The transition from simple web browsing to viewing streaming media will continue.

I agree that this trend will continue and lead the way for new applications, transforming the way we use the Internet.

According to Jason Miller, this recent YouTube traffic trend has surpassed, the once leading, P2P traffic in bandwidth consumption.

 

How Many Computers?

Forrester Research has reported that there will be over 1 billion personal computers in use by the end of 2008. 186 Million of which will have high speed Internet. It is estimated that 2 billion PCs will be in use by 2015. Still say you don't need a website?

I wonder how yellow page and newspaper publishers are preparing themselves for the death of their traditional media?