Internet Babel

Doug Scott is a very well-known name in Affiliate and Web Marketing circles – and a great subject for an interview, cos he tells it like it is without any bullshit or ‘black art’ stuff. He’s the man behind ASAP Ventures and a host of high-profile domains particularly in the travel and car-hire sectors.

This post would have appeared under the ‘Interviews’ section, except that someone got to Doug before me. However, this interview is so good you’ll want to hear it, believe me.  Fraser, from AffiliateBlog.co.uk did the interview with Doug and they have both agreed to me posting about it and producing a transcript.

The full interview comes in at 40 minutes plus but it’s a great lesson in how things really work.

On Domains:

Fraser: Fly.co.uk that’s a kind of high profile purchase you made recently wasn’t it?

Doug: Yeah, that was GBP 87,500 (approx. $175,000). 

Fraser: That’s quite a big investment.

Doug: Personally, I thought it was a bargain – I thought they gave it away.

Fraser: You think so, that’s good.  So I take it you’re a real believer in a good generic domain name then.

Doug: If you’re going to sell something it’s much easier to sell fly.co.uk rather than dougscheapflights.co.uk.  As a company, what we do is we get traffic to websites. You know, carrentals.co.uk – is a very good generic. It probably does - over the past 5 years, it’s probably done between 50 and 100 million GBP worth of sales.  If we wanted to sell that domain it’s much easier to sell that domain having it as a nice name.  It’s much easier for a corporate to understand what they’re buying.
 
If you look at carrentals alone, that domain has probably had in the region of 5 million GBP spent on it. Therefore, you might as well spend that much money on a nice domain name.

If you look at Fly.co.uk, that was 87.5k GBP, Recycle was 152k GBP - and I just look and I think, it’s so easy.  The traffic part has never been a problem to us. I always say to people you put content on websites and give them some links – that’s all you have to do.

Traffic & Link-Building:

Fraser: So why would people find the traffic part difficult then?  I know there’d be a lot of people out trying to desperately get traffic to their websites.

Doug: I think that most people don’t believe it.  They do it for 3 months and then stop.

You know, they don’t see the results they expect. I did an explanation yesterday to a couple of people, and they had a website and my first question was how many visitors does it get? And they said 5 a day.  I said, you’ve got 5 now, whatever you did last time do it again ‘cause then you’ll have 10 and then do it again and you’ll have 20 and once you get to a certain point theyre will be a logical point where what you should actually do is turn this into a process and have other people do it or have machines do it.

There’s no point you as an individual sitting in a bedroom trying to manually do everything.

Fraser: So processes for things like getting the content written, doing the link building, those kind of jobs?

Doug: We do processes for everything.  I say we do factory SEO. We have probably about 300 writers now around the world who write content for us.  We used to write it ourself but then it became cheaper to give to someone else in bulk. 

If we do link building, we have machines that do requests, we have people who do requests.  Basically we’ll trial something, trial something, work out how it works and then we will try to make it an automated process or a manual process.

Fraser: That you can then outsource, so you’re not stuck having to doing it yourselves?

Doug: You can outsource or you can build a machine.
 
Fraser: So how do you mean, can I explore that a little bit “build a machine” – you just mean an application that does it for you or what?

Doug: If I’m very simple about it, if you’re looking for links in a sector, what most people will do is, they will go to Google.  They will search for terms relating to their sector, they will try to find the contact forms and the email addresses of those people and then they will manually contact all of them. 

Now, aside from saying the legalities of how you contact them, the collecting of that data, well a machine can do all of that much, much faster than an individual will ever do it.  Now you may put a sanity check in – where we’ve now got all the data, we now get people involved, who then basically before we touch someone will look at the data to make sure it’s what it’s meant to be.

Fraser: Right yeah, so you’re emailing the right people and not asking the wrong sites for links and that kind of stuff?

Doug: Yes, in most cases it’s very limited in what we do about asking people for links anymore.  We have processes now – we’ve just learnt as time goes on that the efficiency of asking people is not the best way of doing it. 

If I went back 4 years ago we would have been doing very much more traditional asking for the link.
 
Now what we would do is we will try and create something and then tell the relevant people who really want to link to it because if you can kick that snowball down the hill the effect is dramatic.  It’s one of the discussions, you know going back to the domain name purchases  – you look at the 2 big ones which people know that we bought was Fly and Recycle.  Now have a look at the back links at any time you want of Fly and Recycle and you’ll see there’s a lot of them and there’s a lot of them based because of how much we paid for it.

Fraser: Right, that’s almost kind of self fulfilling, yeah you spent that money on an instant success because people talk about it because of how much you spent on it.

Doug: Anytime I mention it, anywhere, like here, other people will link to it. It’s the same on my blog, my blog has taught me a huge amount of how to create controversy.

Link-Bait

Fraser: Do you think that’s a good method? I know that some people have frowned at that link bait at money.co.uk saying that if the story’s not true it’s misleading and unethical, I mean  what’s your stance on it?

Doug: Depends on where you going with it.  Ethically wise, I would say I agree, it’s not ethical. Lyndon’s view is, commercially it’s hugely viable. Now if you’re Google what do you do with that I don’t know. What we’ve done in the past is we prefer to create a story – we play – rather than rifle shooting we play a lot more of a random game, a shotgun, where what we will do is we will create a 100 stories and some will get picked up – we don’t know which ones will but once one is picked up we will then exploit it.

So we let the world decide what the story is that wants to be told.

Paid Search:

Doug: Paid search to me now is pure arbitrage business. You know, it’s exactly what happens in money markets and share trading markets.  What you’re looking for is a hole in the market. And there’s enough data out there, if you’ve got access to the data – that’s what it very simply is – at one point we were running one paid search campaign with 4.5 million key words in it.  An individual can not do the analysis on that data – it’s just not physically possible. So you need to have a machine.

You’re changing your bid prices, time of days and things like that but you need to be able to take the data you’ve got and react to it.  It should be possible with enough data to take the click through value, the click through rates, the amount of money you paid on a position in Google – you should be able to forward forecast and reverse forecast what any price should be at any time of the day for any keyword in any month.

From our experience, if you’re in a very targeted niche, say if you’re doing car insurance, an individual will win every time because an individual will physically look at the ads and see how good they are, bad they are, in comparison to what other people are doing, and be able to make gut instinct changes – a machine can’t do that. 

But as soon as you go past the 100 key words – we proved it most of last year, ‘cause we ran 2 parallel campaigns on 2 different sites, and that’s exactly what we found.  The machines just won every time. 

Hear the full Podcast at: http://www.affiliateblog.co.uk/doug-scott-asap-ventures-interview.html

Download the full transcript here

I hope you find it entertaining and educational.

Dave