I’ve also found that personally, it’s easy to spot someone who’s just in the business for the money vs. those who really care and want something great for the industry. It might be the optimism speaking, but I feel that the latter group usually produces the brightest innovations (and eventually, profit, too).
The urge to make a snarky reply is unbearable… Tropical… must… resist… impulse to… scratch itch… hippy jokes… overloading…
Not every CEO needs this, but I’ve found that in a web-based market, having watched dozens of people navigate (or try to navigate) websites has given me an extra edge in empathizing with the user and trying to understand what they need.
I’m great at telling people when they’ve done a good job, but awful at criticizing any effort. In order to overcome, I’ve started hiring only those folks who have a deep, internal need for perfectionism. If you are your own harshest critic, it helps me to work around this pervasive flaw.
My nickname around the office is “H8er”. I call it “my critical eye”. Rand, where do you find these people with a deep need for perfectionism? I, ahem, haven’t found this trait much in our generation.
It’s a dictatorship. When tough decisions come up, they’re my responsibility. I’ve noticed that even with little things, when we take a company vote, dissent and discomfort abound. If you want to run a company with a pseudo-democracy, take everyone’s opinion and input, then make the decision. You need to be able to take the blame when something goes awry, and bowing to internal pressure is no excuse.
I’m impressed. Is the “team building” and “consensus” fad over yet? Good. You’re CEO for a reason: you have a higher batting average at decision-making.
I can remember dozens of times when I felt like the world was crashing down around me - that I could barely hold up another day. I think all CEOs probably need to have those experiences a few times before they start to recognize that nothing is as bad as it seems, the sun’s coming up tomorrow and time heals more than you think it could. That employee who’s struggled the last few months may indeed turn things around. The client who hasn’t paid might just need a little extra contact. The product that’s not taking off yet could, with a few tiny fixes, soar.
If you’re living in a dumpster, working on a stolen laptop online with stolen wireless, you’ve been indicted for embezzlement, and you’re trying to get a new social networking site off the ground, then, I’m sorry to tell you, things are indeed as bad as they seem. Also: employees don’t generally “turn around”. Underperformers have no place in a company that’s not publically traded, so ditch them as soon as you know.
I’m hereby naming 2008 the year of premium content. Yes, I’m aware that The New York Times is moving away from the premium content model, as are several other traditional general media outlets. But I’m actually seeing things move in the other direction. I think premium (paid) content is making a huge comeback, and will be part of the Web for many years to come.
While ESPN still barely even offers free content covering the UFC, Sherdog’s paid membership program is ticking along.
I just renewed my premium Scout.com subscription. I just have to have every single piece of info about the Cleveland Browns as soon as it comes out. We just signed a new #3 punter to the practice squad? Yes, I need to know that. OK, this bullet point was completely subjective. But it passes my gut check–if I have ever paid for premium content, and there are other people in the world like me, then…
Of course, the paid content model isn’t right for everyone, and for every success story above there’s another story about a site cancelling their premium content section. But when paid content works it really works. Here’s a handy, no-BS quiz to help you find out if the paid content model could possibly work for you:
Have you built a free readership of at least 10,000 subscribers or daily readers? My napkin calculation says that you can reasonably expect (best case) 1% of readers to pay for a premium membership. Unless you can successfully charge a thousand bucks a month for membership, I’d guess you need a base of at least 100 members to break even on content production costs.
Are you a recognized authority in your field? This is a huge selling point in being able to convince people they should actually pay for your information when other less formal or less expert informational channels are free. e.g., Scout.com isn’t just a bunch of bloggers–they have real reporters and NFL insiders whose journalistic integrity I actually trust.
Do you have serve a regular dosage of exclusive content? This could be videos, in-depth guides, research, tools, or whatever, but if you don’t have exclusives, why wouldn’t a reader go to your free competitor? e.g, Scout.com gets plenty of (usually true) rumor stories not carried by ESPN, and also has an exclusive “Ask the Insiders” forum, etc.
Is your content niche enough? If you’re reporting on world news, you are competing with approximately 1000000 other free sites. If you’re reporting on the Cleveland Browns, you’re competing with approximately five other sites. If you’re SEOmoz, you’re competing with approximately 5 or 10 really good, regularly updated SEO information channels (along with about a thousand crappy or quasi-crappy blogs like this one). The point is, if you’re not niche enough, you’re going run into some heavy problems–a large number of free competitors, a larger hurdle to brand yourself as an “expert”, a harder time getting true exclusives, etc.
I’m sure I’m missing other bullet points that ought to be here. Comment and let me know
Now, all this being said, I can’t say I’m currently experimenting with the premium content / subscription model–I’m too busy with my big project right now. But damn, I wish I was. Godspeed, SEOmoz. You hippies in Seattle may get the last laugh after all.
SEOmoz inspired me today. It’s not just traffic. It’s what you do with it.Yes, we’ve heard it all before… traffic development is just one piece of the puzzle. Can you convert that traffic into sales? newsletter signups? blog subscribers? Can you convert it into ca$h money?
If you’re anything like me, you don’t completely ignore monetization. You spend maybe 5 days a year on it. (The other 360 are spent on building traffic via social media, SEO, etc.) In reality, this split should be more like 80/20. Or even–gasp–50/50!
The trouble is, the SEO’s skillset doesn’t really lend itself to a monetization mindset. As a traffic developer, I look at building an authority site like it’s an Epyptian pyramid where every good link is a single brick… slow and steady wins the race, and focus on the links, links, links.
But this sort of focus has its downside. To maximize revenues, you have to think of your Web site as a business… a business which is a constantly shifting experiment (thanks Squirrel).
“But my site has 1,000 variables. I don’t have the time, software or expertise to revise, test and optimize them all!”
Relax, friend. That’s fine. The good news is, chances are your site monetization has a ton of ‘low hanging fruit’… you can probably work on this for six weeks, and triple your conversion rate, before you run out of ‘easy’ stuff to do.
So if you’re a lazy, monetization-challenged SEO like me, please act on the following five steps, and find out what your real conversion rate is:
Conduct a basic conversion rate audit. Conversion Rate Experts have 101 “quick n dirty” points on their conversion checklist. A lot of these points take 20 minutes to implement (for instance: add a testimonial; add a hacker-safe logo; use bullet points near the end of the copy; etc.). If you can find even 10 or 15 points to improve from their checklist, your conversions will improve–maybe double–right of the bat.
Conduct a basic usability audit. A lot of usability issues won’t be covered in a “conversions guide” like the one above, but they will still certainly affect conversions. You can fix a lot of easy issues yourself by going through a basic usability checklist. Then, have anexpertconsultant go through and catch more subtle issues (make sure to fix the basic issues yourself first, so the expert doesn’t waste their time on stuff you could have figured out anyway). You can get a thorough, conversion-oriented usability audit for as little as $1,000. Following this, your newly usable site will yield even more conversions… I promise.
Now comes the fun part: rewrite some key pages and calls to action. Many times the usability audit will uncover some themes which will help you rewrite your homepage/landing page copy and/or other key calls to action. I tend to write copy from a “me perspective”, rather than a “user perspective”, and the usability report will usually tell me where do I this. With this knowledge, I can come up with more user-oriented headlines and copy (benefits over features, overcoming common objections, etc.). If you feel your copywriting skills aren’t up to snuff–or even if they are, and you just want a second opinion–hire some experthelp. Again watch your conversions increase, and spend the extra money on cokeApple gadgets self improvement.
Test a few design variations of your new and improved copy. Now, if we wanted to get really slick, we could test multiple versions of the copy, each with multiple design variations, etc. But I promised you this was low hanging fruit–and I don’t have much patience–so f*ck that. Take your shiny, polished copy (maybe a short and long version) and have ShoeMoney’s guy whip up 3 variations @ $75 apiece. Feed them into Google Optimizer, gear up your volume for a few days, and bam. Either the best performing version has tripled your original (before-step-1) conversion rate, or I’ll refund you all the money you spent on this blog post!
Come to PubCon and get sloshed with me. Now if this list was like every other conversion checklist, step 5 would be “continue to make variations, test and retest.” We have already established however that both of us are lazy SEO’s and have limited patience for this kind of stuff. So, pat yourself on the back, take comfort in the fact that you’ve tripled your conversion rate (and each unique is worth 3x what it was before!), book your ticket to Vegas, and let’s get drunk at PubCon. If you don’t get sick by the end of the night, you didn’t give it your all.
p.s. extra props to myself, for linking actual recommended people for each service I mention… it’s so hard to find good people these days.
Number two: never let em know your next move. Don’t you know Bad Boys move in silence or violence. Take it from your highness (uh-huh). I done squeezed mad clips at these cats for they bricks and chips.
Number six: that godd*mn credit, get it. You think a crackhead payin you back, sh*t forget it!
Seven: this rule is so underrated, keep your family and business completely separated.Money and blood don’t mix like two [web 2.0 sites] and no [userbase], find yourself in serious sh*t.
Follow these rules you’ll have mad bread to break up. If not, twenty-four years, on the wake up, slug hit your temple, watch your frame shake up, caretaker did your makeup, when you pass, your girl [ranked] my man Jake up, heard in three weeks, she sniffed a whole half a cake up. Heard she [linked promiscuously], and can hook a [Web site] up.
Gotta go gotta go, more pies to bake up, word up… RIP
Side note: I once myself disagreed with one of Mike Grehan’s controversial columns, and made rather an ass out of myself when I called him out. I learned the lesson to not get emotional about business [unless it’s a good emotion], and thankfully, Mike was gracious enough to forgive my stupid antics, and we’re on good terms now.
Anyway, trying to intimidate someone anonymously, via e-mail, is cowardly. So, whoever you are, do us a favor and go join another industry… go to law school or something.
Now, leaving this little sh*t aside… A lot of smart people in our industry took offense to Mike’s column and wrote rebuttals. (I have no problem with rebuttals.) SEO isn’t dead, they said. (True.) Traditional SEO isn’t easy, they said. (True again. Maybe 90% of it is easy, but the other 10% can be really, really hard.) And SEO isn’t boring, they said. (Well, that depends on your perspective. It sure as hell still gets me up in the morning.)
Now, if Mike is guilty of anything in his columns, it’s hyperbole. I remember when I had my immature outburst against him, it was because he basically said that the Sandbox didn’t exist. Which, of course, was false. But he was making a very true point. “The Sandbox” had become a boogieman which many incompetent SEOs were blaming for any problem under the sun. And if his clients, and some other sites, were getting past the Sandbox, maybe it was time we reconsidered our way of thinking, stopped complaining, and got creative. So I guess, in my opinion, Mike was (arguably) wrong, but he was also very right. (Did I just write that cheesey line? I think I just heard a sound, as if a million voices were crying out in unison to unsubscribe from my RSS.)
You see, Mike was pointing his readers in the right direction, but the problem was, the direction was painful, and we didn’t want to go there. It’s almost like he’s our best friend, the only one who loves us enough to tell us our wife is cheating on us. Well someone had to tell us the truth but we sure weren’t happy to hear the news, nor were we thankful to the friend who told us what we didn’t want to hear. (Amazingly, my metaphors continue to get worse from paragraph to paragraph. Stick with this train wreck of an article, it gets better towards the end.)
So this “Other SEO” that Mike discusses is a silent revolution that sort of snuck up on us. We whine and complain about quality score updates, paid link FUD, etc. but this Universal Search has us really scared. Because the skillset, resources, and way of thinking that got us here–wherever here is–is going to have to evolve pretty heavily. Or, yep, we’re “dead”.
I mean for crying out loud, I do a search for my main keyword and there’s a godd*mn video ranking above me?!? How the f*ck am I supposed to beat that? Who the hell even knows how to make a video? Let alone one about mortgages that real people would actually want to watch! Just when I thought I had this stuff finally figured out… SON OF A…
When a competitive landscape changes, and you realize you’re at a disadvantage, the first reaction is to be in denial–but the better managers come around to the facts–and get scared.
That’s OK. Unless you’re a creative multimedia genius, or you own a highly trusted media outlet that’s included in Google News, you should be scared by Universal Search. So go to law school if you don’t think you can cut it going forward. (Wuss.)
Not ready to quit yet? Cool. The next step is playing with Universal Search for a while, and then making an action plan. Your first video is going to suck, but that’s alright; the sooner you suck, the sooner you’ll rock.
Thanks for telling us what we needed to hear, Mike. Nill illigitimi carborundum!
p.s. speaking of being scared and surviving revolutions, check out this post by The Sugar Mama about evolving in a hostile search environment. Don’t worry, she doesn’t cuss as much as I do.
The great thing about the Web is that there are countless different ways to be successful. Each man’s own talents, connections and personality gives him a unique path to success.
But I do think it pays to observe what other successful people have done and take some pointers. You won’t be able to copy them exactly and equal their level of success, but, on the other hand, every successful playbook steals a ton of pages from other successful playbooks. All art is derivative. Or something like that.
I’m not going to recount what Aaron writes about–you can read over 1,000 posts for free on his blog or purchase the SEO Book to hear what he has to say in his own words. Instead, let’s look at some of his actions–what he actually did to get where he is today.
First things first, he built his home on a good domain. SEOBook.com: it describes exactly what the product is. And quit whining “but… but… branding!!” Aaron got the best of both worlds: he took a great keyword domain and branded it. Even though otherprominentdudes sell SEO books, Aaron Wall is now The SEO Book.
He went into a crowded niche and excelled by having a unique voice. I believe Aaron started blogging on SEOBook.com in late 2003, and even then there were over a hundred SEO blogs (there are probably over a thousand active SEO blogs now, but even then, it was competitive). When you go into a crowded niche like this you have to be unique and stand out to gain any mindshare. Readers tend to go to old, familiar, trusted sources so you’ll need to be remarkable to draw them in. Aaron differentiated himself by a) being brutally honest, even at the cost of short-term profits; b) blogging about higher-level topics (e.g. capitalism, marketing), but relating them to SEO; c) giving useful, specific and timely tactical advice. A lot of other bloggers at that time were saying “get more links”. Aaron would say “Here are 13 specific places to get links”. That’s how you get bookmarks and subscribers.
When he attained moderate success, he reinvested more time and money. I don’t know the exact timeline but I think within 6 months Aaron was selling a low–but decent–volume of eBooks. Enough to live off of. So he kept up his blogging pace, and within another year he was selling enough eBooks to live really well off of it. At that point, he could have cut down his level of posting and just sort of coasted and probably maintained his (nice) income and mindshare, more or less–but again, he kept up his furious blogging pace. The result was he had enough plenty of capital to invest in other (more profitable) projects. Another side effect was that his mindshare had grown to the point where he became a minor celebrity at SEO conferences. (If you’re into the whole “fame” and “SEO groupie girls” thing.) Anyway, the law of increasing returns holds true in competitive webmastering.
He sold an e-product rather than selling leads or tangible goods. OK I am the first guy to stick up for affiliate marketing. I am also the first guy to say that almost all e-products are “shit-tastic crapola in a box”. However I think that a very well done e-product is one of the best possible assets to own and sell online. The margins are extremely fat. The costs are fixed, but the sales ceiling is very high. You have a monopoly on the product, and you don’t have the risk of merchants screwing you somehow (affiliate marketing), or inventory risk (tangible goods). And the instant downloadability lends itself to impulse buying, which is the easiest type of online sale to make. Bottom line: most people selling e-products really suck at doing it, but the few at the top who really excel are reaping the rewards.
He made himself accessible. “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” OK we’ve all heard that a thousand times. That’s because it’s been proven time and time again. Aaron posted regularly on every major SEO forum (under his brand name ’seobook’), attended every major conference, and answered almost every e-mail (and I assure you, a lot of annoying wankers e-mail him every day). The net effect is that almost everyone who participates in the SEO community feels like they “know” him. That leads to a lot more links, word-of-mouth recommendations, goodwill, and karma. F*ck karma, you say? Sure. But not when that karma turns into ca$h money!
He focused on providing value for his visitors. It took me a long time to come around to Aaron’s point of view that you should always focus on providing value for your users. Firstly, I am too lazy to do this, and secondly, I am obsessed with shortcuts. But in the end, search engines want to rank those sites that provide value, and other webmasters want to link to and recommend sites that provide value. If you’re not providing value you’re swimming against the tide and playing a short term game: sooner or later you’ll drown. Ironically, creating something that people actually want is easier, more profitable, and more compatible with laziness in the long run.
He hustled. A lot of Aaron’s success is due to the above wise decisions that he made. But remember that he also worked his ass off. Many competing SEO blogs and e-products had advantages over his (longevity, liquidity), but one thing they couldn’t do was out-work him. And remember it’s a marathon, not a sprint. 4 years later SEOBook.com ranks in the top 10 for [seo] and Aaron has as much mindshare as anyone in the industry.
Problem:You have an affiliate site in the tried-and-true “ads as content” (product comparison directory) format, but it’s either not indexed, or not ranking.
Solution:Make your thin site thicker. Google respects thickness.
Ways to make a thin site appear thicker:
Remix content. The beautiful thing about datafeeds is you can take free content from the merchant (that other affiliates, unfortunately, also have access to) but rearrange it in a unique way so that the page “as a whole” is unique.
Find and replace. Go through the datafeed. Take some common words or acronyms and replace them with words that have the same meaning to a reader but look different to a bot. Find and replace PMI with ‘private mortgage insurance’. Find and replace the word ‘mortgage’ with ‘home loan’.
Combine unique content with the dupe content. A page will still appear unique “as a whole” if you have, say, 200 words of unique introductory text above 800 words of dupe (or nearly-dupe) content.
Tack some original, remarkable content onto the site and get it well-linked. If your site has 100 pages which are “somewhat thin” and another 20 pages which are “very thick”, the site as a whole is thicker than if you just had 100 “somewhat thin” pages. If you can get these thicker pages links and traffic from social media, the site is also going to be more defensible, period. Even if you only have one page that’s best-of-breed (a true authority/resource), Google’s results are going to be less relevant if they disinclude your domain. That’s the position you want to be in.
So, in summation, here’s my recipe to make a thin site thick: Take all those thin/dupe pages. Remix/rearrange the content a bit. Find/replace some common words. Take some new unique content and sprinkle it throughout. Finally, add a few 100% unique and remarkable pages and get them some quality links. Bam!
When I first started in the game I ignored most forms of internet marketing aside from SEO. Firstly, I was good at SEO, so why go outside my circle of competence, and secondly, I (partially correctly) assumed other channels couldn’t touch the ROI of targeted, free search traffic. I don’t have any regrets that I followed that path: sharp SEO is still my most powerful competitive webmastering weapon, but these days I take a more holistic view.
You see, I don’t want a healthy stream of free targeted search traffic. I want a Borg.
A Borg is a large and multi-platform–but centrally managed–web presence. You can kill one part of the Borg but as long as the brain lives on it is going to survive and regenerate. A Borg’s different parts and weapons systems work together to create synergy where the total machine is much more deadly than the sum of its parts. The Borg is driven by the nerve center (you) but leverages others to do its dirty work in a dastardly Web 2.0 manner. The most powerful Borgs, Super-Borgs, have huge repositories of valuable data which they have assimilated and will use to exterminate their rivals.
The problem with your potential client base is that its made up of different species. You have your social-networking-whores and your watch-video-timewasters and your forum-dwellers and your barely-use-the-Internets. A normal Web site won’t be able to hit some of these, but a Borg can envelop and digest several different species and then have them working together, each species doing what it does best. That’s how efficient the Borg is.
The core hub of the Borg is still a domain name, Web site, and SEO. But a powerful Borg has a left arm that’s an offline conference and a right arm that is an email newsletter. The left and right arms reinforce the core hub of the Borg and also reinforce each other. They also make the core hub much more defensible from other Super-Borgs like the GoogleBorg.
The Borg realizes that many species will never accept its old platform so it assimilates these species on their own terms. The left leg of the Borg is social networking (Facebook and MySpace); entire demographics spend most of their online time on these sites so the Borg sets up a presence there and uses it to reinforce other parts of the Borg. The right leg of the Borg is multimedia, a large percentage of people dislike reading and hang out at YouTube instead. This multimedia part of the Borg became much more critical with the introduction of Universal Search.
If all you have is a nerve center and the basic hub of the Borg (site + domain + SEO skillz), building an advanced Borg can seem rather daunting. The lowest hanging fruit is probably the email newsletter, every single Web site you own should be collecting email addresses (even if it’s just a form for a fake newsletter that doesn’t exist yet, I pretty much patented that tactic), so hop over to Savicom or Constant Contact and get that rolling ASAP. Some of the other platforms might be a better fit for your business than others, but don’t take the lazy route out because each of them has something to offer if you’re smart about it; Build the obvious (and easiest) parts of the Borg first.
Here is another thing about building a Borg, you can’t spread the nerve center too thin. If you’re going to start a Facebook group you need to be active there and spend time maintaining it: send out bulletins, friend people, facilitate discussion etc. Otherwise this will just be an abandoned or even hostile part of the Borg and you won’t reap any potential synergy benefits. So add parts of the Borg once you have the necessary time and resources, but I don’t say that to give you an excuse not to act, because your competitors are going to beat you to the punch if you don’t get started ASAP.
And now I will let you in on the super secret Borg plan to take over the world. The center of the Borg’s long term strategy is the assimilation of data. Even if you’re like me–not smart enough to know how to profitably leverage all of your data–you need to at least start collecting it. You never know how you’ll be able to use it in the future but start collecting it now. I didn’t know when or for what purpose I’d ever send a newsletter for my VoIP site, but then when I did want to start leveraging email marketing, boy was I glad I’d already collected 10,000 email addresses. Email addresses are a good start, email + name + phone number + zip code is even better, offer a freebie downloadable whatever but of course the price they pay on the download page is giving over their data to your Borg.
If you don’t want to build a multi-platform Borg, fine. Just know for every dollar you make you are leaving 99 on the table. Also know that very soon my Borg will be coming into your local galaxy and will either assimilate or destroy you.
By the way thanks to Brian Provost for teaching me a lot of things which went into this post. Your knowledge has been assimilated and soon I will be the Queen of Summertime!
A business mentor told me once, if you provide a service or product, you can deliver any two out of the following three: good, fast and cheap. So you can be cheap and fast, but then you won’t be good; or you can be fast and good, but then not cheap.
Very few contractors (designers, developers, SEOs) are good, fast and cheap. (In fact, many have trouble even being two out of those three!) When I find someone who is good, fast and cheap, I generally am a bad friend, and I don’t recommend them to others. Yes, it is a bastard move, but hey this is business and a good relationship with a good contractor is a profitable resource and a competitive edge. I have had it happen before where I recommend a contractor I like to a ton of people, and then that contractor gets so busy they can’t take my work anymore! So I take the selfish route and hoard them.
Well my friend Bapin (who I’ve met in person) of eBizzSol (in Bangladesh) was a huge help the other day and helped me fix several problems which resulted from being hacked. eBizzSol has also designed several sites and logos for me in the past month, and I’m always amazed at how good, fast and cheap they are. And to top it off, they can build pretty much anything you need in PHP (if you send them detailed specs it will help, of course).
So there you go, for once I’m paying it forward. If you need a good, fast and cheap web designer or developer for pretty much any type of web project, and you don’t want to play “eLance roulette”, check out eBizzSol (ask for Bapin). And no this was not a paid post. Just don’t send him so many projects he doesn’t have time for mine anymore!
Uh-huh,
