Internet Babel

Recent figures show that the 2008 online advertising spend in the US showed an increase of over 10% on 2007, despite the Financial Crisis that was beginning to take hold in the latter part of the year.

2008 US revenue (MOT Worldwide, just the US) came to a record $23.4 billion, surpassing 2007′s record of $21.2 billion by 10.6 percent.

The figures indicate a continuing shift from traditional to online modes of advertising, and a realisation that online provides a more targeted and measurable approach, which can be important when every advertsing dollar needs to be accounted for.

Search related advertising kept its position as the main player, accounting for almost half of the total spend, with an almost 20% increase over 2007. ‘Direct’ advertsing is also growing.

The largest vertical markets were, as in 2007, retail, financial services, computing and automotive.

The full article can be read  here:
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/03/30/online-ad-revenue-up-106
Some points that arise from this article:

• Given that Search showed such a healthy increase in spend, this didn’t seem to be reflected in Adsense publisher’s incomes. This is anecdotal evidence of course, and there are always some publishers/sites who can show good growth but from looking around on the forums it certainly seems that the increase didn’t generally make it through to Adsense publishers’s wallets.
• It could well be that the increased spend was spread more thinly over the ever increasing amount of Web Real Estate, or inventory. More sites, more advertsing spots, more spend but distributed across an ever increasing pool of publishers.
• If that is the case, then will there be a ‘saturation point’ where the amount of available Web Inventory becomes just too big? Will the growth in advertising outstrip the growth in available traffic, and returns start to flatten out naturally?
• If the online spend is being spread ever thinner, that only goes to highlight the importance of providing something different, regular site reviews, updates & changes (unlike this site recently – haha) and effective SEO to make a site stand out.
• Is it going to be better to run loads of sites to try and catch some of that thinly spread advertsing spend, or concentrate on a few key names that you can really push – and sell off the rest of your stable?
• Publishers should look more and more into ‘direct’ advertising (something that IM/MMO Bloggers in particular do anyway). Advertisers like PR and content, and the knowledge that traffic will be targetted, so activley pursue direct advertsing/sponsorship opportunities for all your sites.
• Only park domains when you have to. Parking can be good as a holding option, but you’re getting an even smaller slice of that spend when you do it. Review your parked domains, pick the best potential ones (through keyword analysis, seacrh temrs, parking stats etc) and stick a minsite on them, with a combination of static and RSS/Video type feeds. Throw Adsense, Adbrite or whatever floats your boat on there – you’ll see an increase over parking revenue, the chance of gaining some PR and backlinks, a growth in organic/search traffic – and open up the potential for adding direct advertising or selling the developed site on at a profit.

Just some thoughts.

Nice to be back

A few months back, Google announced that they would be releasing a product that would allow easy integration of Social Networking features within websites and Blogs.

As of 4th December the Beta release of FriendConnect has been unveiled – and Google are accepting signups (to go on a wait-List i believe) for a phased roll out of the product.

What is FriendConnect?

Using OpenID, FriendConnect will allow you to add a range of social interactivity tools onto your website, in just the same way that you ad Adsense or analytics code. This will allow people to sign-up as Members of your site, post messages, reviews and ratings plus expected features such as sharing of apps, videos and pictures. 

Benefits and How-To:

Members wil also be able to invite others to join, so the potential for spreading the word about your site is obvious. There may also be tools to allow easy communication between Friend Connect and other social apps such as Facebook and Hi5.

As with other Google tools, you will need to sign up under your Google account and apply to join the program, but after that it seems that adding the Social features to your site really will be just the same as adsense – i.e. generating and pasting the required code into your site/template.

FriendConnect will of course be competing against a number of established players, but I’d be very surprised if they don’t grab a large chunk of the market with this – and they will almost certainly be adding a host of media and application type features into it.

It certainly opens up new possiblilities for smaller sites and new developers who would like to integrate social/membership type features into their sites.

Here’s a handy little video about Google Friend Connect (from CampFire one):

Of course, Facebook have also launched a Friend Connect tool so let battle commence

See more at: http://www.google.com/friendconnect

Here’s a nice little idea for maybe getting a different audience to come to your Blog or Website.

Plenty of News and Newspaper Websites have areas where you can comment on news, but there are a few that actually let you have your own Blog as well.

For example, the Telegraph and the Independent (both are respected and big readership UK Newspapers) have Blog areas where you can sign up and create your own Blog area.

Of course, you can’t carry adverts on there, but you can put your URL in your Profile.

More importantly, you can Post (and comment on other readers’ Blogs) about a massively wide range of subjects – and that means that you can incorporate links back to your desired Website/Post as part of that content.

Off the top of my head I can see a number of good things about this:

• It’s another avenue for you to post content and to drive people to your site
• It exposes you to a new and diverse readership – a large proportion of whom are interested in current affairs, technology, politics, finance etc but perhaps wouldn’t normally fall in your ‘target’ audience
• You get some neat backlinks, most likely from a site with some good authority
• With the telegraph, you get a neat little ‘my.telegraph.co.uk/yourname’ URL for your Blog The independent service is offered via LiveJournal 
• It is of course free
• You can post about your selected subject matter, outside of the strict confines of your own Blog, and direct any links back to specific landing pages/posts
• As Newspapers have a fairly loyal readership, I would guess that by signing up for Blogs at a number of Newspaper sites, you would not be getting too much overlap in your audience 

I haven’t really seen anyone talk about this much before, although the Blogs themselves are very popular with the Newspaper online readership. I seriously think these Blogs have some potential to open your material up to a new audience and to drive some trafic your way. 

The Telegraph Blog area can be found here:
http://www.my.telegraph.co.uk/

The Independent Blog area is here:
http://www.livejournal.com/integration/independent/learnmore.bml

There are almost certainly others out there, but these are the two I wanted to highlight for the purposes of this post. I think it’s worth a try.

Thanks
Dave

In one of my first posts after taking ownership of this Blog, I described how the relative search popularity trends for ‘SEO’ vs ‘PPC’ as shown by Google Trends reflected the current economic climate.

I laid it on a bit thick to make the point but the link seemed pretty clear. Jim, from the NetFool, thought I was reading too much into it and that search trends didn’t reflect the economy.

Well they do - to an extent.

If you only look to see what’s Hot in Google Trends at any one time then of course that just reflects the relative popularity of current cultural/social/news topics – but if you narrow your search down to two competing ‘generic’ terms like this and refine your search to look at specific geographic areas then they do give some indication of the current economic state. 

Look again now at Google Trends, compare seo & ppc and look at the 12 month trend for USA, UK, Australia as opposed to say, China (India seems a different case, as SEO has always led PPC there and the pattern seems stable).

The trend I pointed out in my original post is continuing (and in the case of the UK and Australia the gap looks to be growing). SEO is gaining ground over PPC in the main English-speaking ‘Western’ (and European) markets and that’s not reflected (yet) in China. 

OK, I’m not being 100% deadly serious about this - PPC will always be here of course. It’s great for kickstarting campaigns and getting traffic boosts – and the guys with the massive generic domains (Fly.com is for sale at SEDO by the way – be prepared for a 6-7 figure price though) will always be secure anyway. For the rest of us it just reminds us that organic is best.

By the way – Wednesday seems to be the most popular day of the week for ‘SEO’ searches in the US

While you’re here – have a click on that nifty little ‘pencil’ in the sidebar – yes, that’s the one, it says ‘Random Post’ on it. Guess what it does? Well – if you click on it, it’ll take you to a mystery Internet Babel Post – it could be one from yesterday or a year ago and it could be about anything – you might find something you missed before. go on…Click it.

Most people coming to this Blog (and many other Blogs in the same field) are looking for an edge – something that will help them stand out. For the most part we cover broad topics relating to SEO, Blogging techniques and Affiliate matters because the standard thinking is that we want to appeal to as wide an audience as possible.

Think Local

Even when we do focus on a niche, its almost always a market niche, so we’re getting (or trying to get) visitors who are interested in a certain subject matter, wherever they are geographically located.

What about we turn that on its head, and aim for a purely geo-based market? and where better to try that than in your own town?

What I’m talking about is making a Local Blog – and not just a Blog, but a Forum and a Directory, a News site or local reviews even.

The Benefits

If you get yourself a good, locally relevant domain name and content that is aimed smack-bang at a local audience – you are going to have a great chance of grabbing visitors and retaining visitor loyalty, because people feel a natural preference for a ’local’ site over a generic one. They have a sense of attachment and that is something you can build on.

What’s more, once you are able to establish a ‘brand’ locally, it will be relatively easy to build on that by expanding the scope of your site/network – and even reproduce it for neighbouring Cities/Towns.

Say, for example, I pick up a domain “BirminghamBuzz.com”, “HotInPerth.com”, “CapeTownReviews.com” etc. (I just plucked those names out of thin air – I don’t know if they have been taken, I’m just using them as an example). I can use names like these to build a very focussed, very targeted niche site.

Aren’t I restricting my potential Visitor Numbers?

Sure, I know that straight away I’ll be ignoring the vast majority of people in the world who don’t actually live in those Cities, but in this case i don’t care, because I know that the people visiting the site will be considerably more likely to be interested in what’s on there.

More to the point, I can sell that ‘exclusivity’ to advertisers – because they will also know that the vast majority of people visiting the site will be those most likely to be interested in their services. That means that they will be guaranteed a better success rate when compared to taking pot luck on some generic term web site.

It’s the Web equivalent of local newspaper advertising – you don’t get so broad a reach but you get a better hit rate.

Getting Advertisers

What it means to you, as the Site owner, is that the normal advertising ‘model’ doesn’t apply. You will have to do more legwork to attract advertisers, as generally speaking you won’t be able to use the usual mainstream advertising/affiliate methods.

The upside (and it’s a big one) is that you will be able to negotiate deals direct with local businesses – you’ll cut out middle-men and, of course,  you will be WAY cheaper than traditional print advertising, which means you could pick up business from people who have previously avoided advertising.

You will probably have to offer ‘loss leader’ or ‘opening discount’ type deals to get people interested to start with but the freedom of being able to work out your own arrangements with local businesses can bring great benefits. Plus, the ‘personal’ touch means that these guys will be more willing to give you a chance -particularly when you can literally drop round and discuss deals face to face.

User Involvement

As with any other niche, you want to generate and maintain user involvement. And that means you need to do more than just set up a Directory site and hope it takes off. This is where Blogs and Forums in particular can pay off – people tend to feel involved in their community and are often passionate about subjects of local interest. Once you provide a means for them to air their views you will be able to develop a thriving online community, which will spread by word-of-mouth as well as by SEO.

Once a user base is established (with the help of some good ‘start up’ advertising deals and special offers), you can leverage that involvement with Reviews and increased advertising.

What to Do?

So – if you live in a town with a population of say, 100,000 or more, give it a try:

• Register a locally meaningful Domain name
• Start by Blogging about local topics and news
• Identify local businesses (even just start with 2-3) and approach them on the basis that locally targeted online advertising will be beneficial to them (and also much cheaper than traditional methods)
• Be prepared to offer cheap or free advertising to begin with, or to work on a commission-only basis, perhaps using a basic ‘voucher code’ approach
• Approach local newspapers to see if you can get an editorial plug, local radio stations to get an on-air mention (offer some free advertising in return).
• Encourage Comments and set up a Forum  – exploit the fact that many people feel passionately about their town. Publish and encourage Reviews and Feedback. 
• Get some advertiser testimonials – even if you have to pay for them Put them on the site
• Get your advertisers to offer Website specials/discounts
• Maintain Visitor and Click stats if you can – use them to generate repeat business – don’t  be afraid to approach businesses in the same field as your advertisers – let them know just how well your advertisers are doing
• Don’t neglect your usual SEO tasks 

What we’re looking at here is generating maximum benefit from a relatively small user base – we’re not competing on Keywords with a million other sites and we’re maximising the chances of a visitor actually making a commitment to your site/advertisers.

Give it a go…

Cheers
Dave

Coupon Codes, vouchers, discount codes – whatever you want to call them, they’re still a hot thing, highly searched and can generate a lot of traffic and loyalty/return visitors.

So it’s understandable that you’d want a piece of the action. Trouble is, there are a million people out there setting up new coupon sites at the same time, so you’re working in a very competetive marketplace. But there’s a way to get ahead of the pack, and that’s by NOT setting up a Coupon site.

Instead, use your existing Web presence to kick-start your Coupons.

How?

Assume that you already have a site (or sites) out there (Blogs or Content sites or whatever) which means you’re already indexed with your existing content. Your site has some history, it has some visitors, it has backlinks and it maybe has some PR or other ranking.    

So why not make the most of that advantage by adding Coupon codes and Vouchers to your existing sites?

You can do this by adding new pages or sections to the site, or by adding a content block or sidebar to certain pages, listing latest or rotating offers.

Why?

• You’ll have a population of existing site visitors who’ll see these offers immediately, and of course you’ll be able to utilise any existing subscriber/mailing lists you might have.
• Your Coupons will be being presented to an audience who are more likely to ‘trust’ you as opposed to the million other straight-up coupon sites out there.
• You’ll be able to contextually target your coupons to the specific site or even page audience, so your coupons and vouchers will be being shown to a demographic that’s going to be more likely to show interest in them. 
• People are searching more and more for specific types of discount codes (products, brands etc) and you’ll likely attract a proportion of these people to your site as well.

Sure, there will be some effort to target and monitor your coupons/vouchers and so on, but you’re going to have a head start on all the ‘generic’ coupon code sites out there.

It doesn’t have to degrade from your site appearance or aesthetics, and it’s easy to trial it on selected pages or for a period of time – so give it a go. Leverage the advantage your existing site will give you.    

Based on an original idea from “Gorgeous” Doug Scott

Quicker & better search engine functionality and more savvy users continue to drive the trend of using longer keyword search phrases. A growing proportion of search phrases contain 5, 6 or more words. 

What this means is that that people are increasingly searching with more specific service, goods or information related phrases rather than simpler generic terms. For the ‘smaller’ site owner offering a product, service or comparison tool (who isn’t already operating in a very tightly defined ‘niche’) this presents an opportunity to focus on these less competetive key phrases.

It is highly probable that people who type in more specific keywords are more likely to know what they are after – i.e. chances are they are looking for a specific item/service and are more likely to be a prospective buyer/customer rather than someone who is just browsing on generic terms.

Trying to compete with the big players on generic terms is going to see you languishing in the back-end of search results. Let them fight it out over the big phrases, and let the casual browsers go to those sites. Focus some effort on more specific and longer key phrases – the people finding you will be a lot more likely to convert.

A few simple steps to implement this approach:

1) Decide on a candidate list of potential multiple-word search terms that people may use for your site, based on the product/service you sell and the target audience.

2) Use any historical stats you have (e.g. from Analytics, stats or any Affiliate tracking tools you may have access to) to see the kind of search terms that have brought the kind of traffic you want to your site in the past (i.e. conversions).

3) Use the SEOBook Keyword search tool or similar (Google, WordTracker etc) to see search volumes for the phrases you have identified (and potentially throw up more candidates) from past search data.

4) Trim down and customise your list to suit. Keywords/phrases with results in the hundreds/thousands are  likely to be pretty much covered already. Longer phrases at the lower end of the results are potential candidates for your ‘long key phrase’ experiment (as long as they are still relevant to your site and audience). Always bear in mind that even if a phrase yields just a handful of searches, hits on your site using those terms are likely to show a good conversion ratio, so low-volume phrases shouldn’t be ignored.

5) Finalise your list, based on the results from the steps above, and SEO tweak your site/landing page/content accordingly. Where appropriate, use brand & model names and features.

6) Monitor, assess, review and repeat as required….this is important as the exact pattern of longer search phrases will change more frequently than straight generic terms and will be influenced by trends, current events etc. Using highly focussed key phrases to draw traffic to your site requires regular monitoring and tweaking to ensure that you stay relevant to the popular search terms of the moment. Use your agility to stay ahead of the game.

 
You should still SEO for your generic terms and phrases of course – treat these longer phrase tactics as an additional weapon in your SEO/traffic arsenal. Any existing generic type traffic you get will still be there, and although the volume of extra traffic actually driven to your site by the longer terms may seem small these extra visitors are much more likely to be of a high-quality.

It’s true of course that being on Page 1 for something that no-one searches for is of little benefit in itself, but I’m not talking about getting traffic just for the sake of it - what we’re trying to do here is driving quality traffic to your site. Highly specific and targeted multi-word key phrases will allow you to get a higher ranking than in your generic terms AND attract the kind of visitors you want most.

A site that caught my eye a few days ago is TextAdMarket.com – they’ve got a nice angle on providing a hybrid CPD-PPC ad solution.

For those of you don’t know the term, CPD (Cost Per Day) is a type of paid-advertising where (strangely enough) the Publisher gets paid for each full day that they carry an Advertiser’s ad on their site. There aren’t too many CPD providers around but there has been more talk about them lately, as they have the potential to offer a regular and known income stream without having to tie-in to any long term deals.

Background

TextAdMarket started out as a CPD ‘marketplace’, where Publishers could showcase their sites/ad-slots and advertisers can bid for those slots for an agreed period of time. Publisher’s can join up for free, and advertising ‘credits’ can be purchased in amounts as low as $20. TextAdMarket provides the mechanism for bidding, the embed code to use and various monitoring facilities.

The site went live in May 2008 and to date (23rd July) just over 300 Publishers/Advertisers have signed up.

CPD/PPC

One of the potential drawbacks with such a system is that ‘unused’ ad-slots can remain empty on sites, so the guys at TextAdMarket came up with a novel twist by also allowing PPC ads to be run whenever a CPD slot is not being used. Obviously these PPC ads are just paid ‘per click’ but all revenue goes into the same account.

Publishers can opt to sell their ad slots at a fixed price, or have their ad prices rise and fall on a nightly basis, based on ad popularity and other factors.

TextAdMarket say that they work on a fixed commission of 20%, regardless of the type of advert being carried.

This all seems like a good approach to me – I’m certainly going to sign up and try it out on a few of my sites (from both a publisher and advertiser perspective).

Conclusion

It’s early days yet of course, and the site’s success will hinge on the take-up rates, and also on the quality and breadth of advertising available. However, I think it’s certainly worth a closer look and the guys deserve some encouragement and exposure for bringing a pretty novel idea to the market.

The site can be found at http://www.TextAdMarket.com

Ben at TextAdMarket has also kindly offered an ‘opening special’ coupon code – for an extra 10% ad credit on all purchases until September 30th. Code: “10-GRANDOPEN”

This has not been a paid or commissioned review – just a service I came across that might be worth a punt. I’m not endorsing or making any claims for the site, nor am I getting any fee for this. Just saying it’s probably worth checking out.

I’d really like to hear your thoughts on this type of service, and feedback from anyone who signs up either as an Advertiser or a Publisher.

Google trend figures show that the term ‘SEO’ is now becoming consistently more popular than ‘PPC’ in the major Western, English-speaking markets such as the United States, United Kingdom and Australia.

For the last few years of the ‘boom’ economy, ‘PPC’ has generally had the upper-hand over ‘SEO’ as a search term, but the last few month’s figures show a steady reversal in fortunes, with ‘SEO’ gaining ground, overtaking and recently building a lead over ‘PPC’. The actual proportions vary from market to market but the pattern seems to be there.

This could be a reflection of the tougher economic times in the ‘Western’ markets, and an associated tightening of wallets. ‘PPC’ is going to be the first to feel the pinch because it’s more of a luxury item than bread-and-butter SEO. Consequently, more businesses are having to adjust to the reality that the slow-burn and long-tail business of GOOD SEO is always going to be reap dividends in the long term, even if you don’t get the ‘bang’ of a PPC campaign.

PPC is a ‘target’ traffic booster that is good for individual campaigns but of course it’s effect is generally short-lived and in the current financial circumstances PPC can be the first thing to be put on the back burner.

I had a quick look around at different regions and the same trends didn’t seem to be reflected in markets such as China and India, which seems to confirm the ‘recession/cutback’ idea – but there is every chance that China in particular will follow suit if their economy starts to overheat.

Just another reminder (if one was needed) that PPC and campaigns have their value in the right time and place, but content and quality SEO still rules the roost.

Comments welcome.

quick post – I came across this recently updated bunch of ideas and hints – thought you might like to take a few minutes to look at it:

http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/articles/101-google-website-optimizer-tips/

cheers
Dave