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?

 

Thanks To All Our Readers

As The Big Bald Blog continues to almost double every month, traffic in August was at an all time high. Even though I mistakenly had the comment posting option set to "registered users only", our RSS subscribers have continued to climb. Admittedly this was an amateur blogging mistake and I have corrected the settings, so feel free to comment away. Thanks for bringing this oversight to my attention.

Ranked in order of traffic, here is a recap of the top 10 visited posts from August.

1. 3 Billion Songs on iTunes
2. Digital DNA on your Photos
3. 20 Million Visitors
4. MySpace Cleans Up Sex Offenders
5. Social Media and How You Market
6. The Impact of the Internet on Newspapers
7. The 3000 Mile Oil Change Myth Revisited
8. What Has George Bush Done Wrong
9. Bad Logos and the Mistakes that Made Them
10. Viral Marketing Part 1

Thanks again for visiting The Big Big Bald Blog!

 

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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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.

 

Google Vs. Ebay

Just in case you haven't been following the Google/eBay tussle, here is a little background. eBay pulled all of their ads off Google when they tried to hold a private party competing with eBay's annual celebration. Dirty pool for sure and when the cry of foul was heard they cancelled the party. Most think it was due to the ad pulling frenzy that preceded. Most of the bad blood started when eBay disallowed the use of Google Checkout in favor of PayPal; which by the way eBay owns.

eBay execs are now insisting that the their pulling of the ads was a planned event to experiment and evaluate traffic without the help of Google. YEAH RIGHT. They kept their ads on Ask, MSN and Yahoo. This was an obvious retaliatory action in an attempt to give the sultan of search a bloody nose (something few companies are capable of).

Based on their "experiment", eBay says that a disproportionate amount of traffic in relation to spending was discovered and they plan on a "significant" scale back of spending in the US.

 

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.

 

Holy Wiki Batman

Ever notice that just about everything you search for, a result on Wikipedia shows up.

Some amazing stats were published on leuksman's blog earlier this month. These kind of stats aren't for the weak of heart.

How's this for traffic... Are you ready? 7 billion page views per month. Yep you read it right, I said SEVEN BILLION. AND the chart says that 24% of the traffic is contributed to Google. This means that Google results in almost 56 million clicks per day. Given that there is 1440 minutes in a day, that is 38,888.88 clicks per minute just from Google. Staggering isn't it?

Good grief, just think if they had some AdSense ads on there. How much money do you think they would make per minute?