Livin’ the dream

Readers, I am really excited about Blog Action Day and all the revolutionary change it is bringing about in the world. I’d like to throw my $.02 into the mix with these five easy tips I suggest everyone follow:

1. Read all of the posts about Blog Action Day
2. Wash the cat pee out of your clothes
3. Repeat after me: No one cares about blogs or the blogosphere
4. Get rid of your hybrid car, and buy a Suburban or Hummer. Or anything built before 1980. I drive a 1973 Buick and on a good day it gets 9.5 miles to the gallon (premium only).
5. Commit to being smegma-neutral by 2009. This means that for every 4 grams of smegma you produce you have to mail a check for $2.50 to my organization, SmegmaOffset.org. We are not a scam.

* Thanks to Mr. Provost for inspiring me yet again

Step 1. Acquire $X00M worth of premium generic and local domains
Step 2. Plan a giant gray hat SEO play which Google is likely to be hostile to
Step 3. Do not hire a knowledgeable SEO to review such plan
Step 4. Implement plan
Step 5. Watch stock tank
Step 6. ??????????
Step 7. Profit!

note to Demand Media: it’s not too late to hire one of these guys and give your 100,000 domains a prayer of staying indexed in the Google

I’m 10 weeks in here in Houston, and I’ve found myself referring to CitySearch again and again. I check there first for everything: from delicious Thai restaurants, to reputable Thai massage parlors (Side note: who knew come to this place for “a good time”!!! was a common euphemism?). The point is, I’m not checking any local business’ official Web site, but instead, I’m checking other platforms for third party information. Any business that’s been around for a while will have several reviews.

As users embrace local search in droves, having this “distributed presence” is becoming increasingly important for any local business. The distributed presence is important for national and global businesses, too, but even more so for a firm that gets half its online customer referrals from Google Maps.

Which brings me to the fake reviews. I first began to notice these on hotel reviews at Travelocity:

“I don’t know what the other reviewers are talking about!!! My room was spotless and the decor was beautiful. The management was extremely helpful and gave me everything I could have possibly needed. The nice owner, Lisa, even gave me tips on sightseeing. I can’t believe how cheap their rates are!! Stay here and you won’t regret it!!!!”

*gag*

The fake self-reviews are here, whether you like it or not, and they’re surprisingly pervasive. It’s gotten to the point where half the businesses I check have at least one obviously fake self-review. Generally the only ones I can trust are:

• Negative reviews (these are extremely helpful)
• Mixed reviews (here’s something positive, here’s something negative)
• Tons of reviews (generally the managers only do two or three fake self-reviews, so if I see 47 reviews for a business, I allow myself to trust the “aggregate opinion”)

So, local business owners, if you’re going to do fake reviews (and, let’s be honest, if you own a local business, you probably will), please keep the following tips in mind:

• Don’t end sentences with multiple exclamation points.
• Don’t begin with “I don’t know what those other reviewers were talking about!”
• Don’t refer to the owner or manager by name. I don’t think I’ve EVER seen this happen when it wasn’t a fake review.
• Include a negative or two. They can even be “gentle negatives”. The following does NOT count as a negative: “The only negative I found was the price: it was too cheap!”
• Don’t rate yourself 5 out of 5, or 9-or-10 out of 10. Instead, stick with 4 out of 5 or 8 out of 10.

Instead of:

Mai Thai is my favorite Thai restaurant in Houston! Everything from the chicken pad thai, to the hot and sour soup, to the chef’s specialty “Chicken Curry No Hurry” is absolutely delicious! The decor is wonderful, there are authentic Thai paintings on the wall. I go there at least twice a week, and the owner, Lewis, always says Hi to me and we chat pleasantly for a while. It is a great place to go for a business lunch or even a Friday night date!! Oh, and don’t forget to try the green tea ice cream!!!!! 10/10

Try:

Mai Thai is a pretty decent Thai resaurant for the price. I’ve tried the Pad Thai (good) and the hot and sour soup (average). The lunch crowd is busy but they get you seated fairly quickly. 8/10

The second review will get me in there. The first, not so much. Oh, and for the record, I’m not actually trying to coin FRO as an acronym. I think we have enough silly acronyms, don’t you?

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:

1. 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.
2. 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 an expert consultant 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.
3. 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 expert help. Again watch your conversions increase, and spend the extra money on coke Apple gadgets self improvement.
4. 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!
5. 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.

“Top 2 Windows Applications
#1. MS Office
#2. Internet Explorer”

“Charlie Weis Nip-Slip [PICS]”

“Top 11 Reasons Digg, Reddit and Delicious Users Are a Bunch of Stupid Wankers with No Social Lives”

“The Ultimate Guide to Smegma: 101 Fun Facts, Tutorials, and Pics”

“33 Reasons Why Blockbuster Is Better than Netflix”

“10 Reasons Why George Bush Is Smarter Than You”

“Top 0 Digg Power Users Who Aren’t Virgins“

My list of “niche social media sites that actually send traffic” is one of the most popular pages on this blog. I know I visit it at least twice a week (whenever I do a link bait launch), so no surprises there.

I already updated it once, and I am happy to say, today I have four more new sites to add:

1. Sphinn (Search Engines & Online Marketing)
2. PlugIM (Online Marketing)
3. Sk-rt (Lifestyle)
4. DNHour (Domaining)

Some of these have more traction than others (Sphinn already has a very active community), but I’m willing to add some smaller ones–like DNHour–if they’re getting submissions every day (from more than one submitter) and are sending some referrals (hey, you gotta bring home the bacon).

I highly recommend bookmarking my list and submitting every new baity piece of content to at least a few of them. Just like you shouldn’t build an entire business off of organic Google traffic, you shouldn’t build a social media strategy entirely around Digg (or StumbleUpon/Netscape/Reddit/Delicious). Instead, build the strategy around niche social media sites and blog coverage, and treat any success on The Big 5 as gravy. Depending on your niche, the traffic from these niche sites could surprise you (Tweako and DZone, for instance, can send a few hundred uniques if you hit the right angle.)

As always, if you know of any successful niche social media sites I’m not listing, leave a comment. Don’t bother telling me about a new one that lacks a decent-sized core community and doesn’t send any referrers… for each of the 29 sites in my list, there are a hundred abandoned or soon-to-be-abandoned attempts.

Yah’ll regular readers know that I’m pretty bullish about the value of premium generic domain names. In general, I believe the macroeconomics will drive the market up handsomely in the long term.

But after 6 months of budding domainer glamour, I’m beginning to see some signs of a minor slump. Signals: the really big domainers–the public companies–have sh*t the bed recently, with both Communicate.com and Marchex taking a small nosedive. Meanwhile, the results of the highly-hyped Domain Roundtable auction were somewhat underwhelming. A majority of the domains did not meet their reserve, which doesn’t bode well considering the staff tried aggressively to keep the reserves as low as possible.

So what’s up? Is all the domainer hype already beginning to fade? Have valuations leveled off? Why is the domaining industry in a minor slump?

Well, I can’t attribute it wholly to my SEO friend’s reasoning: “Domainers are cheesed*cks.”

I do however think the industry is going through a period of sh*t, the easy money’s over shock. When you buy a domain in 2001, park it, and its value rises 1000% over 5 years, you look pretty smart–really, the macroeconomic trend made you look smart.

We’re not going to get those growth rates in valuations any more though (maybe 20% a year, rather than 50-100% a year). And especially if you’re paying a retail price for a domain–or even a “fifth time wholesale/resale” price–you sure as hell better know how to SEO and make a quality, defensible, highly-monetized Web site… or good luck making your initial outlay back.

And there’s the rub. Domainers–in general–have no clue how to make a quality, defensible, highly-monetized Web site (at least, the Marchex’s and Communicate.com’s of the world don’t). They never needed to know how to before, so they never bothered to acquire that skill set.

Enter SEOmainers.Â

Maybe it’s just the crazy pills I take every morning, but lately it seems that eBizMBA.com appears on Delicious/Popular or another big social media site at least twice a week. I hadn’t even heard of them a month ago, and now they’ve thoroughly branded themselves in my mind (and they’ve gotten a crapload of traffic and links recently too). Now today I’m seeing 20 Most Popular Sites for Bargain Hunters referenced everywhere, and that’s the last straw, I have to post about their genius now. Here are four lessons you can take from the recent success of eBizMBA:

1. Make your content pretty. Check out any page there: the content is generally in a bulleted list format, with clean thumbnail images next to each bullet point. People like pretty pictures. People like to scan. People vote for, and link to, what they like.

2. People love rankings. The eBizMBA posts I see reaching Delicious/Popular are usually of the Top 30 Social Bookmarking Sites or 25 Largest Web 2.0 Sites variety. The beautiful part about stats and rankings is that you can take a stale-as-hell niche and come out with a baity, useful, and successful hook simply be remixing existing public stats and ranking the recognizable players. (The players that rank at the top will probably even help you spread the meme. )

3. If you’re an industrial strength link baiter, make sure you have a good Web host. Right now the site is loading slowly, and I think I had this problem last time I visited. (Granted, I usually visit them when I see them via the frontpage of a social media site.) Likely the spike of traffic from social media, combined with the fact that they use a lot of image files, contributes to this problem. But it’s pretty self-defeating to be slow or down when the spike happens. If you’re link baiting regularly, spend a little bit more money to get a better hosting solution. (Sorry, guys, I didn’t say all the lessons would be positive!)

4. Once you find a hook, milk it for all it’s worth. When you realize the Top-25-Ranking-with-thumbnails format is a winner, you can a) pat yourself on the back, and try to find some other hooks, or b) take the successful hook and apply it to every other niche–or even sub-niche, if your site is narrow–that you can think of. I believe it was DaveN who said, “SEO is knowing what the search engines want and giving it to them… so hard they f*cking bleed.” Well, you can quote me: successful blogging is figuring out what your readers want, and giving it to them so often they *izz their pants!

Today, let’s skip past SEO tactics and get right to the green. As I’ve blabbered about before, many SEOs lack common business sense. In no particular order, here are some tips I think are important for any SEO who is trying to be a better CEO.

1. Decide to make more money.

OK I don’t mean to sound like a speaker at a pyramid scheme “success seminar”, but goals are very important. As soon as your goal becomes “make $XX,000 per month”–as opposed to a goal of say, ranking #1 for a certain keyword, or getting 350 bloglines subscribers to your blog–you’re on a more focused track, and likely to make more money. Smart people tend to achieve their goals, the issue is picking the right goals in the first place.

2. Get a damn accountant.

Having an accountant do your taxes can be surprisingly cheap ($500?), but it is also surprising that a really good accountant can be hired for only a marginally more expensive price. Spend $1000 on a smart accountant who handles a lot of other entrepreneurs, and chances are he’s going to save you a multiple of the $1000 you spend. And a penny saved is a penny earned right? (Did I really just write that? Am I getting old or something?)

3. Depreciate asset purchases as aggressively as you legally can.

A lot of accountants don’t know how to handle depreciation on online assets such as premium domain names, and tend to be over-conservative when depreciating them. So if you’re investing in a lot of online assets, you may want to get an accountant who specializes in Internet business. But even if you have a “regular” accountant, find out how they’re treating depreciation of Web sites and premium domains that you purchase. According to this article, you may be able to depreciate over a 5 year schedule. One single premium domain could wipe out nearly all of your tax liability for the year. (Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or accountant, do not take this as legal advice, consult your own accountant and lawyer before depreciating anything.) Just be aware of this issue, and use tax law–legally–to your advantage.

4. Raise your prices aggressively and periodically.

OK you may raise your eyebrows at this one, but the truth is a lot of people get “used” to earning a certain amount and then more or less live with that indefinitely. The reality is, online you can go from novice to expert in a specialty pretty quickly (i.e., you can go from novice SEO to pro in 12 months, and you can go from n00b affiliate to super affiliate in 12 months). So make sure to take stock of yourself periodically and try to figure out if you provide more value than you did before (and if so, how much).

Last month I had my business partner call all of the merchants we’re an affiliate for, and ask them if they can pay us a better rate. Guess what? Every single one said yes. Our largest merchant partner gave us a 10% across the board increase. (We’re doing good volume, so they want to keep us happy.) It was probably the most profitable 5 minutes in our company’s history, a short, painless phone call made us an extra five figures this year.

If you perform a service, I think this tip is even more important. Are your prices the same as they were last year? Do you have more clients this year? If so, demand has increased and you should raise your prices. Are you better known this year? If so, your reputation has increased, and you should raise your prices. When a client knows you and likes you they won’t be angry that you’re asking them for more money. They will simply look at the new price and ask themselves if the value is still there, and if it is, they will pay you the new amount. Trust me, they would rather pay you marginally more than go to the bother of finding another provider, who may or may not be a scam/idiot. Another interesting thing is that increased pricing generally leads to increased value perception; you may find that you actually attract more–and better–clients with higher pricing.

If you’re an employee, you should also be aggressively (but politely, and intelligently) asking for a large raise periodically. The difference in the value created between a first year SEO and a second year SEO is huge–as should be your pay raise. If the value you create has doubled (and your boss is smart enough to recognize that), you’ll be able to negotiate for a lot more pay. So do it. Disclaimer: a lot of bosses are stupid, and won’t recognize value. In my experience, most employees also fall into two camps–those who wildly underestimate their value, and those who wildly overestimate their value. Make sure you fall into the third camp.

5. Get a personal assistant.

If you’re creating a lot of value, at some point you have to do what you can to remove low-value activities from your daily work. The best way to do this is to a) outsource what you can (design, programming, etc.), and b) get a personal assistant for other sorts of tasks (research, pick up dry cleaning, etc.) Bonus points if the assistant is hot and wears skimpy clothing. I actually have a “virtual assistant” who lives in another country and would pretty much hate my life if I didn’t have him (and I would get less done and make less money).

Anyone with other good business tips for SEOs, feel free to comment!

From the SEW Blog:

Ask.com has developed AskEraser a tool that will allow you to wipe your search history and will be launching it in the near future, according to their press release.

“Searchers will have easy access to AskEraser and can change their privacy preference at any time. Once selected, searchers’ privacy settings will be clearly indicated on search results pages so they always know the privacy status of their searches,” the press release stated.

“As search and other online services progress, it’s important for our customers to be able to trust that their information is being used appropriately and in a way that provides value to them,” said Peter Cullen, chief privacy strategist at Microsoft. “We hope others in the industry will join us in developing and supporting principles that address these important issues.”

Anonymize logs in 18 months and reduce your 500 year cookie length? That’s a joke, G. Or what, do I look like a giant sucker to you?

p.s. did I call that one or what? Who knew Ask.com and MSN search executives read TropicalSEO? Of course, before we start calling Yahoo or MSN The Privacy Engine, let’s remember this little incident. Still–progress. Congrats, MSN and Ask, you officially just beat Google in one aspect with real innovation!