July 11th, 2007 — Domaining
Maybe it’s just that I personally have been following the industry more, but it seems to me that domaining–and the accepted value of premium generic domains–is finally coming completely into the mainstream, as evidenced by several recent articles about domainers in MSM publications, the momentum of domainer conferences and auctions, and the maturation of the domainer blogosphere. I think this happened with SEO sometime last year, but 2007 is the Year of the Domainer. (Of course, you still see some idiotic MSM articles about both domaining and SEO, but don’t hold your breath for that to change anytime soon.)
I myself will have a big announcement concerning my involvement in this space in a few weeks, so stay tuned. 
Meanwhile, some interesting links I’ve come across lately, in case you don’t have your domaining white belt yet:
And in case you want to tune in more to this space, here’s a handy list of domainer blogs that I subscribe to:
June 21st, 2007 — Domaining
I find these sorts of posts to be mind-boggling. I think we’re in an odd time where premium domain names have shot up in value so much in such a short period of time, that even some domainers are saying “Can they possibly go any higher?”
Scotland.com $1,000,000 - Nope, Wow, nice name. But I have a gut feeling, crickets will chirp. I think it is worth it but this is the wrong place to auction it off.
Seniors.com $1,000,000 - Nope, Do old people use computers? I think this one is too high.
ComicBooks.com $500,000 - Nope, Where is Marvel? Someone should broker this sale.
Premium, 1st-tier vertical domains are like Manhattan real estate. They aren’t going to lose value year-over-year. God ain’t making Manhattan any bigger and He sure ain’t making a second Scotland.com. In 2009 these prices will seem laughably cheap, just like NYC real estate prices in the ’80s now seem.
Considering domainers as of yet haven’t grokked the synergy between SEO and keyword.com, it’s not surprising that much of the perceived value remains hidden. Now who wants to give me 12M in funding to start a hedge fund? 
June 21st, 2007 — Foo
I am trying to help Mr. Provost by writing this terrible post in an effort to get readers to unsubscribe. At this point, my Bloglines subscriber lead is so huge that pretty much nothing short of posting daily links to scat pr0n and my own poetry is going to give him a chance, but at least this way I’m trying to make our bet interesting.
- Did you know the word “handsome” can be used to describe a woman? I think it was used widely in the olden days, like the 30s or 60s or whatnot. As in, “Wow look at that hot chick, she is really handsome.” I am trying to bring it back, so please do what you can to insert it into your daily conversations and blog posts.
- Do me a little favor and join my Facebook Cause: Resolve Uganda. (It’s free. Resolve Uganda is pressuring our leaders to take action to end the two-decade war and humanitarian crisis in northern Uganda.)
- I am moving to Houston, Texas next week, in an effort to get myself a little bit more Tropical than Iowa City. So posting will be light for a while; After I get my stuff moved I’ll have to go shopping and buy boots, a hat, a horse, and a gun, and then get my car inspected, what a pain. Seriously, do I have a personal assistant yet?
June 19th, 2007 — Competitive Webmastering, Foo
#1. Always make sure to follow Google’s Guidelines for Webmasters completely. HAHAHAHA J/K I wouldn’t do that to Tropical readers Uh-huh,
I been in this game for years, it made me a animal. It’s rules to this sh*t, I wrote me a manual. A step by step booklet for you to get your game on track, not your wig pushed back.
Rule nombre uno: never let no one know how much dough you hold, cause you know, the cheddar breed jealousy. ‘Specially if that man f*cked up, get your *ss stuck up.
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 three: never trust no-bo-dy. Your moms’ll set that *ss up, properly gassed up. Hoodie to mask up, sh*t, for that fast buck, she be layin in the bushes to light that *ss up.
Number four: know you heard this before, Never get high on your own supply.
Number five: never sell no crack where you rest at, I don’t care if they want a ounce, tell em bounce.
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.
Number eight: never keep no weight on you, them cats that squeeze your guns can hold jobs too.
Number nine shoulda been number one to me, if you ain’t gettin bags stay the f*ck from police (uh-huh). If [dudes] think you snitchin ain’t tryin listen, they be sittin in your kitchen, waitin to start hittin.
Number ten: a strong word called consignment, strictly for live men, not for freshmen. If you ain’t got the clientele say h*ll no, ’cause they gon want they money, rain sleet hail snow.
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
June 18th, 2007 — Competitive Webmastering
Mike Grehan’s column last week, predictably, caused quite a ruckus. Disagreements and arguments are common in the SEO world–and that’s OK–but some anonymous *sshole crossed waaaay over the line in attacking him personally.
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.
June 17th, 2007 — Foo
Someone has a great sense of humor. I noticed a Google search for [mahalo] in my referrers, but couldn’t find it in the organic listings. Then I realized it was an Adwords ad! (Only one advertiser is bidding on the term.)
Mahalo
It’s seriously just About.com.
Only worse.
www.tropicalseo.com
Nope, that wasn’t me bidding. I sure as hell don’t pay for clicks to my “just for fun” blog! Refreshing the search, I also saw:
Mahalo
That’s Hawaiian for 8 visitors a
month.
www.scoreboard-media.com
Mahalo
12 reasons this is the worst idea
ever and won’t make money.
www.stuntdubl.com
Mahalo
When relevancy is this poor
why show any results at all?
www.threadwatch.org
So who’s the funny man? My money’s on The Wolf.
June 17th, 2007 — Competitive Webmastering
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.
Anyway, let’s take a look at Mr. Aaron Wall’s playbook. If you need an introduction to Aaron Wall, you should probably check out this shit-tastic Wikipedia page just Google him.
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 other prominent dudes 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.
FYI, Aaron is my friend, but he didn’t know I was writing this post. Hopefully he doesn’t sue me for giving away his trade secrets, but then, getting sued is just another page out of his playbook!
June 13th, 2007 — Affiliate Marketing, Competitive Webmastering
“It’s the girth that matters.” — GoogleBot
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’.
OK those things are just tiny bits and pieces and obviously Google is 10 steps ahead of me in large scale textual analysis, but I believe every little bit helps. In a “signal of quality” era, slight tweaks could mean the difference between being on the right edge of Supplemental, and being on the wrong edge. Of course, appearing thicker only gets a site so far.
Ways to make a thin site actually thicker:
- 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!
June 8th, 2007 — Link Baiting & SMM
I have noticed several signs in the past few months that Digg has jumped the shark. Any one of these signs alone might be an aberration, but taken together I think they signify that Digg has peaked, and is now beginning a slow, gradual decline.
- First we had a mass exodus of many of the best users when the ‘top users’ function was removed.
- A user revolt (on account of a hand job) brought the Digg administration to its knees. Their credibility could now be questioned from multiple angles.
- The ‘bury rate’ continues to rise (it now appears the majority of stories on upcoming/most get buried rather than making it to the homepage); I understand they want to prevent commercial content getting to the homepage but in the process they are also preventing anything remotely controversial from gaining traction, and what good is a social media site without controversial content?
- The Digg Effect isn’t what it used to be. Rand Fishkin noticed that Digg sends less traffic these days and I can confirm this from stats on my own sites.
- Aaron Wall notes that after training its user base to be highly hostile to commercial content, Digg now plans to extend its platform to restaurant and product reviews. Somehow I don’t see this being well-received.
Now let me repeat, I am not saying ‘Digg is dead’, only that after an initial highly accelerated growth path, it has peaked and will now slowly decline. The guys over there built a really killer app but then squandered much of is business potential because of bad decisions (and a lack of common business sense). As a marketer I believe this is a good thing, with social media we don’t want a situation like in search where one player controls 70% of the market. I would rather depend on getting my traffic from 25 niche social media sites instead!
p.s. Digg thanks for the memories (a few hundred homepage stories, a few million visitors and half a million inbound links to various sites when the going was good)
June 7th, 2007 — Competitive Webmastering
A lot of Google’s business strategy makes us angry, but I think as entrepreneurs the correct response isn’t anger, instead we should be learning from them.
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!