Feb 07

Explore. Explained.

Cardinal Sin, Doodling, Techniques, Virtual War 4 Comments »

I mentioned the four X’es. Why do they matter so much? Because they are how you win a strategy game. Strategy games are simulations of war. Business is a civilized war.

So, lets talk about the first step, Explore.

Exploring means pushing back the fog of war. Means knowing, means learning, means hearing. On war, to explore would mean to send scouts, to know the lay of the land, to know any potential resources, fortified locations, camps of the enemy, quantity of troops etc etc. Whenever the enemy moves, you need to know about it. Whatever upgrades or special troops he has, you need to know about them. Whatever access to resources he gets, you need to know about it.

On big corporations, this step is taken very seriously. Yes, it is called industrial espionage. Now, on your small one man business, you cannot afford to hire professional spies. It would be silly, and an overkill. But the concept remains.

You need to know.

Knowing, means you need to read any news in your niche. You need to personally get familiar with some key people, in order to learn stuff before they hit the news. You need to know about the new tools, the new services, and the new competitors.

Of course, you also need to know everything about your current competitors.

And by everything, I mean everything. Become an e-stalker. What domains does he own, what kind of education does he have? How much money does he have available to throw into his business? Is he backed up by venture capitals, or is he alone? What other assets can he utilize to respond to your moves?

This is a very important step, because through the information you get now, you will weigh the importance of the competitor. You will assign a rank at him, and judge whether or not he is a threat.

Next come historical data. Those, you either collect by another source, or you create them yourself. The historical data instantly (at least in me) show a pattern (if you can’t make use of them, show them to an analyst). You can see whether that particular competitor is smart, stupid, following a long term strategy, or acting on a whim. How did he react to that problem a year ago? How did it work out for him? Was his reaction fast? What is too late? Did he simply pour money into the problem and solved it?

Of course, all of the above are a full time job by themselves. That means, you need to cut down on the crap info. You need to focus on your strong competitors, and in order to point them out, you need to know some stuff about them first. Yes, this step is inevitable.

And now, in order to get out of the theoretical stuff, lets talk about realistic solutions to this. What can you really do to explore?

  • You can reverse lookup your competitor. I will not get into details, it is an art by itself. If you cannot do it, hire someone who can. It is basically private investigation online. Online assets, online profiles, online accounts, emails, whatever he does. This step, if done right, will give a ton of data to dig.
  • Next comes the way back engine. It is an amazing tool to see the progress of some sites. Check out his sites over time. See the changes, the updates, the improvements, the growth.
  • If you run ppc, use a keyword spy tool, like keyword spy (!) or ppc bully. Those are a non stop, automatic spy on your competition. Cross referencing the data with the ones obtained through other means will give you a very good picture of the “battlefield”.
  • Use seobook’s rank checker, seoquake and spydermate to study his sites. Is he a good SEO? Does he have a weakness to exploit? Does he practice SEO full-time? (If your reply is, “how the fuck should I know?” then go read a comic book, kiddo.)
  • Follow his affiliate links, and find out which offers he promotes heavily. Join the networks, some of them have a public table of the progress each affiliate has. 
  • Social engineering. You can learn practically anything you want.
Why is the Explore step so important? 
Because it opens up the way for the next steps.
If you don’t know where the resources are, how can you take them? If you don’t look for opportunities, how can you grab them? If you don’t know where the problems are, how do you expect to handle them?
But, you might ask, can knowing avoid problems for me? 
Honestly, no. Problems will arise no matter what you do. But, by knowing, you will expect those problems beforehand. You will be prepared for them.
I used the word “step”, for Explore. Is it a one time thing? Do I do it once, and then focus on something else?
No. Does the battlefield stay the same? Of course it does not. It changes every day. Exploring is an ongoing process, an important one, and all those who ignore it are running blind to their slaughter.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: ,

Feb 06

Explore. Expand. Exploit. Exterminate.

Doodling, Heavy construction, Mind over Pixels 4 Comments »

It seems the less I write, the more readers I get. Strange huh?

Anyway, lets talk about a serious issue in any business venture. Optimization.

Optimizing something, means to bring it at its optimal state, at its best capacity. Some things can be optimized, others cannot.

Optimizing is a good thing, an essential thing. But I see many people getting caught in it too early.

For example, lets take a ppc campaign. You can optimize every aspect of it, every keyword, every color on the landing page, every little thing. Should you do it though?

No, basically. At least not until you have some serious volume.

What people do not understand, is that optimizing means a percentage increase, not a quantity one.

If I earn 100$ from a ppc campaign, is it worth it spending hours split testing landing pages and ad copies to squeeze out e.g. 4% improvement?

Of course not, the 4$ are not worth the time spent.

If I were to spend my time and ingenuity on coming up with ten times the traffic volume for that campaign, would then be worth optimizing it? Assuming the campaign earns 1000$, then 4% becomes a much less ignored 40$ profit. Still, 40$ are peanuts to some. What “a nice chunk of cash” literally means is certainly open to discussion. But still, there is a line for everyone. Make sure you point out that line, it will make your decisions much easier.

Please note that in the above example, the time that the optimization takes, is exactly the same! Yes, it costs the same amount of effort to gain 4$ and 40$.

Is it worth to you wasting 2-3 days working to earn 40$? If it is not, then instead of optimizing your campaign, focus on growing it.

Why am I babbling about this? Well, I recently went to a total overhaul of my web assets, and optimized a ton of pages. I am the sort of webbuilder, that builds something crude, and lets it rank and ripe before spending more resources on it. I also work on numerous projects simultaneously, and ruthlessly shut down whatever does not work.

Due to the strategy described above, there were huge margins for optimization on those assets.

First came my domain portfolio. I checked the stats, and simply removed the automatic registration from the non profitable ones. They were around 200.

Next, I saw that I was getting paid from my parking service by paypal, losing a 4% every single month. I was surprised to discover that my dear parking service offered free wires! Silly me, switch payment to wire, 28$ more every month, 336$ per year. Add in the domain renewal costs at around 2000$, and that is a nice sum to save.

Following issue on my list was my SEO. A quick look at google webmaster tools top search queries showed me dozens of keywords that needed a slight push to get me to the 1st page. But what do you know, we just saved 2300$! Pour that into linkbuilding then. The ranks were up in no time, followed by traffic, subscribers, buyers, links, more traffic etc etc that I am too bored to measure.

Next came my campaigns. I threw some brainstormed new ad copies to the mix, and tracked conversions. What do you know, another winner ad with an amazing CTR!

Last, I took the time to actually socialize, and call my affiliate manager on an offer that I have running for months. I said “Hello, I am the affiliate with the username Glowleaf. Can I get a payout increase on this offer?”

He checked my stats, and replied “Of course.”

The payout increase results in 110$ more profit. Daily.

Did I get the payout bump because of my big balls? No. I got it because I have VOLUME. The AM would be a retard to even consider rejecting my request.

Where am I going with this?

You need to focus on getting the volume first. Once again, optimization is a percentage increase, not a quantity one. It takes the same amount of time to optimize a 100$ campaign and a 10.000$ one.

So:

  • Don’t play around with your Adsense placements. Leave the fuckers where they are.
  • Don’t spend hours moving buttons on your landing pages. Instead, spread the campaign on other traffic avenues.
  • Don’t bother getting your 12 readers to engage and comment. Focus on more traffic.
  • Don’t bother writing SEO perfect articles. Just write more articles, that bring in more links and traffic.
  • Don’t squeeze your parked domain for 2 more cents. Spend the time to dig up a new gem.

I like to play real time strategy computer games. There is a rule on them, one that I follow religiously, the so called four Xs:

Explore. Expand. Exploit. Exterminate.

  • Explore.

Know the ground. Have scouts. Keep an eye on people, on the market, on everything. If it happens, you need to know it first.

  • Expand. 

Spread your claws on everything, whatever lies in your reach. Make sure you reach far. If you want to specialize in your niche, own as much area of that niche as possible.

  • Exploit. 

There are always systems functioning in everything. All systems do not touch each other perfectly, leaving holes between them. Some people call them “opportunities”, I like to call them “glory holes“.

  • Exterminate.

Use your knowledge, your foothold, your assets and everything else you got to leave no one in your niche alive. Metaphorically speaking of course…

More on the four X’es soon.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags:

Feb 01

Reverse engineering a bought link

Cardinal Sin, Feed the Spiders, Google, Mind over Pixels No Comments »

I have been thinking whether or not to write this post for about two months. Today, lucky for you, I was in a “what the hell” mood so I wrote it.

Why? Because the issue discussed here is a diamond. A real, valuable gem among the sea of trash. Seriously. Let me explain.

As I have posted before, I like selling links, it is a an easy/automatic way to monetize your sites with a very stable income. Also, it doesn’t clutter up your site. I use TLA on many of my sites. A few months ago, as I was checking out my network and stats, I saw something very interesting. It is not every day, that you see a well known domain in the “link buyers” section. Yes, a well known site, had bought a link from my site through TLA. As a paranoid affiliate marketer that I am, I couldn’t just feel good about my minute of fame and move on. I had to investigate.

Please do understand that I will not say the known site’s name, or the page that the link is located. I may be an asshole, but I am not a fool, and I don’t want to expose them (don’t bother looking for the link, you will not find it). I shine the light on this issue because it is valuable information for the right kind of man, not to harm a well known site. The site discussed is really, really well known. We are talking about an Alexa rank of ~3000. It is one of the blogs almost everyone knows about.

Ok, so, bigasssite.com bought a link from me, through TLA, with the anchor text widgets (the real keyword is a hot, high traffic and competitive one). The link has been live for 3 months I think, and it keeps going.

Why should we care? Well, I looked at the page linked, and I saw a post from 2006! Yes, 2006. Now that is interesting… 

I check the link price, its the standard TLA 8$. Nothing much, but someone bought the link! Someone on that site’s SEO team sat down and confirmed the sale. In order for that to happen, there must have been a reason. (Unless that site had a monkey as an SEO that did random things, there must have been some kind of logic behind this)

I check my page, the one the link resides on. It is a page that got a lot of traffic, a review that turned into a successful linkbait, getting diggs, links from other blogs, lots of social votes, and even linked from two high traffic forums. That means the page is a juicy one, making the bought link pretty valuable for SEO purposes (and a lot more valuable than 8$, but lets not get into that…)

Investigating the domain is pointless, it is one of the most trusted, old, ranking sites on the net. 20 million backlinks. Why does it need mine?

Ok, so, lets investigate the culprit page. It is a nice, PR3 page. Yahoo shows 200 links pointed at it, which is rather much for a single page, but not that weird. Its a fucking blog post, like the rest of the site…

There is a difference though. The site is separated in categories (technology and internet related). It is mostly a news site, and the culprit page is just another news story, almost like everything else in there. What was I missing?

I check the comments, a classic series of useless rants from nobodies on the net. The trackbacks on the other hand are something interesting!

There is a series of trackbacks, all from authority news sites, quoting the post. As it seems, badasssite.com managed to be first, or at least one of the first to announce the story. The other news sites in the niche had to link to the original article. Bear in mind, the story is classic industry news, nothing earth-shattering. The links are not many, but they surely are authoritative! (the widget keyword is included in the article title, so the incoming anchor is “blah blah widget”)

I closely inspect the page to find an affiliate link (the widget has a lot of paid services with nice affiliate programs to refer to). No aff links, no internal php files with redirects, nothing. Who would be crazy enough to not monetize a page and at the same time buy links to it? (The page has ads on it, the same ads all over the domain. I cannot say the exact keyword, but it is one that every SEO would monetize with an affiliate link without blinking)

To the SERPs then. I check the rankings for our widget keyword. To my surprise, or not that much because the keyword is competitive, I see a shitload of results. Top ranks are all from authority sites, and right there, on spot 19, I see our culprit page!

Now that is a ton of traffic. Even being on the second page is enough to bring in the visitors. I assume that the culprit page was ranking under #19, and it just needed a gentle push to get higher. The traffic is not converted right away, but since the badasssite.com is a, well, bad ass site, it gets more loyal readers by the minute.

The widget keyword is not one that the badasssite.com’s SEO team would normally strive to rank for, but it is certainly one that they would be happy to rank for. I would have done the same, if I saw my barely relevant site rank #22-23 for a keyword like that.

So, what do we learn from this experience?

  • Big sites buy links. Screw Google and their best practices.
  • Big sites can buy links and get away with it. Screw Google and their best practices.
  • Smart SEO means optimize even for the keyword that is not that relevant. Opportunities do not grow on trees.
  • If you see something being done by someone more experienced that you, that you don’t understand, study it better.
  • If there is a cheap, effective, easy way to optimize, by all means go for it.
  • Sometimes a slight push at the right direction is all that is needed.
  • If that slight push happens to come from a page with a lot of linkjuice, then you are set.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: ,

Jan 10

Quality content means shit

Doodling 4 Comments »

I had a revelation today. I read a post from some idiot who started a thread and said the same old crap, add value to the internet, inform your visitor and the same old stuff swearing at everyone and no one at the same time. And then it hit me: “How much does my quality content give me, and how much the crappy/spammy one?”

Well, guess what. The spammy brings in more cash. Yes, its true. Don’t get me wrong, I get all idealistic some times, I too want to add value to the internet, I too want to educate the visitor, to impose my worldview to someone else (this blog is proof of that). Yes, I want to be proud of having websites, the epeen value of owning/running something big. Yes, I want to be able to namedrop a huge site when someone asks me which ones I own.

But quality is not good for business. It’s not me who declares that, the facts do. And in the end, business comes first, hobbies come second. It never seizes to amaze me how crappy sites with broken themes get conversions. How people order yacht charters on my splog’s comments! On a spammy, crappy, shitty, illegible SPLOG!

My most profitable domains are the ones that are typosquatting and domainsquatting, not the keyword rich ones.

My most profitable ppc projects (adsense style) are from funny/shitty/weird pics + social bookmarking.

My most profitable ppc campaigns are the ones promoting the crappiest of all products, like ringtones/crush/submits etc.

It gets to me sometimes. I make real projects, with valuable content, with an amazing visitor experience. And they tank. Simple as that.

And I see every shitty, forgotten abandoned site I make become profitable.

Someone is laughing down at us.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: ,

Dec 23

Ballin

Doodling 4 Comments »

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