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Today is the day many football games have been looking forward to since the Old Trafford brawl. We’ve been dreaming of new rookies, new animations, new moves, and end zone celebrations. I’m talking about Madden 08.
Like a child eagerly heading downstairs on Christmas morning we’ll all be heading to the stores (or the mailbox) today in search of gaming greatness. This Maddenolidy though, it seems as if we’ll be opening up a big pink bunny suit instead of our red rider B.B. guns. (sorta like how you’re reading tired cliches here instead of insightful commentary.)
This year’s version of the game offers little else other than improved rosters, and new animations – except for the increased product placement. Now, things like the coin toss are actually sponsored. Just what I needed!
I’ve never understood why EA doesn’t approach video games from a “software as a service” model. The main reason I buy new versions of the sports games every year is for the updated rosters. My Wii is online, so why not offer me a continually updated roster service? I’d gladly pay a yearly fee to be able to have it automatically update with the newest version of the game and rosters (or just the rosters for my old version.)
I’ll still buy this year’s version, (it should already be waiting at home in my mailbox) and I’ll still play it for hours – not because it’s so much better than last year, but because it’s the only one out there to feed my football fix.
August 14th, 2007
It’s not often you hear the word MySpace thrown around when talking about the over 50 crowd, but that’s exactly where we’re seeing growth with one of our clients.
If you’re an online marketer you’re probably familiar with all the benefits of having a MySpace account. If you aren’t, you need to start reading.
Seeing how well that MySpace advertising worked for my text messaging website, I decided it needed a MySpace account. I was amazed at how many people signed up for it and how easy it was to alert my loyal users about new features through bulletins and such.
Internally, we tried the concept on one of our T-shirt websites. By offering special coupons strictly to our MySpace friends we were able to actually grow sales.
Having some spare time on a Friday, I decided to make one for our client who sells red hat society merchandise. If you’re not familiar with the red hat society, it’s basically a social organization for ladies over 50. I didn’t expect to get any return out of it, but I was shocked just 2 days later when we had over 100 friends to our RedHatsAndMore MySpace Account.
If you’d asked me just 2 weeks ago I would have told you that there can’t be over 100 old ladies on MySpace – and I’d have been wrong. It seems that not only are teens flocking to the social site, but their parents (and in some cases, their parents) are using it as well.
As a society we seem to think of anybody over 30 with a MySpace account as a creepy old pedophile, but that clearly isn’t the case. Grown ups have friends too, and they like to stay in touch with them. Keep that in mind when planning your marketing campaigns: There’s really no age limit on social media.
August 13th, 2007
You might have missed the announcement last week, but Google has gone live with their search session ads. Now, instead of just showing you ads based on the keywords you search for, Google will remember what your last search was and show ads relevant to your searching “session.”
The example given by Google is this: If a user searches for “Italy”, ads for Italy will be shown. If their next search is for “weather”, ads related to weather in Italy will be shown alongside the regular weather ads.
Here’s an example that just came up for me. I had just searched for the term “gothic arbor” to see if one of my clients was listed, when somebody else came running up to say “hey, we’re #1 for plastic grips! Those homepage changes you made worked!” Naturally, I typed “plastic grips” into the search box. Check out the ads that it showed:
As you can see here, the first ad is still for arbors. Google remembered what I last searched for, and showed me ads relevant to my overall searching session.
I’ll be interested to see how well these changes work; not for Google but for overall conversions from the advertiser side. As somebody who’s bidding on some arbor related keywords, I’m not entirely sure I want to be showing up for other searches. It’s possible that it’s going to do nothing but lower my click through rate.
Privacy advocates should take note that these “sessions” are not stored after you leave Google. This feature only works during the same visit to the website, and does not persist over time. For instance, when I come back to Google after typing this post and search for “blog writer” Google won’t show me ads related to arbors or grips.
August 9th, 2007
As many of you know, I’ve given up programming to become the head of SEO at my new company. We’re growing nicely and possibly adding 2-3 more clients. Thinking of that, how many clients is ideal for one person to manage? I’m currently doing all of the SEO and PPC for about 8 different websites. I’m fearful that by adding 3 more clients I won’t be able to give my best effort towards all of them.
Is it time for me to hire? Or do I just need to stop blogging and get back to work?
What’s your workload like? How many clients is each person responsible for? What’s the ideal number?
Any and all feedback is appreciated.
August 9th, 2007
Dear Netflix. Please have somebody watch your DVDs before you send them to me.
I know you can report DVDs as damaged, but I don’t think many people are doing that. The last 3 DVD’s I’ve rented from you have skipped, froze, or just not played.
Normally I’d think that my DVD player is the problem, but I tried it in 3 different players AND my computer.
If I get another DVD that doesn’t play, I’ll be switching over to the blockbuster plan. At least that way, I’ll be able to go back to the store and get a different copy that actually works.
August 5th, 2007
Some of you may have noticed that dotcult.com, noslang.com and feedbutton.com have been down or acting very slowly for the last few days. I thought it was because of the amount of bandwith feedbutton was using (see post below this one) but it wasn’t. I kept running the numbers in my head and thought “wow, a dedicated server should be able to handle these 3 websites with no problems.” It turns out, I was right.
When my sites weren’t responding I went through the usual checklist. Here’s what I did and my thought process:
- Is it my internet connection? A quick visit to some proxy sites show that the site isn’t responding for them either.
- Is the server down? ping…pong it’s responding to that.. A quick look at the apache logs confirm 150 current requests being processed… it’s not down
- Is there a rogue process? su root; ps x …. Nope, everything looks normal here.
- Restart apache anyway. That didn’t seem to work.
- Restart the server for the hell of it… that didn’t work either
- Must be a network issue. tracrt www.dotcult.com … hop hop hop.. interesting….
After it reaches a GoDaddy IP address (ip.secureserver.net) the final 5 hops take 778ms. This tells me that the problem is somewhere within GoDaddy’s network. It also tells me that there’s nothing http://circleplastics.co.uk/featured/ I can do to fix this problem. I’m stuck calling GoDaddy.
After about 30 seconds of hold time (impressive!) I’m met by a guy on the other end. Before I can tell him what the issue is, he explains to me that I have an unassisted server plan, and thus he can’t help me. He also told me that he can access my sites fine. I tried to explain to him that by accessing them locally from his network, he won’t experience it… to try a proxy site or external internet connection. He refuses.
30 minutes later, I finally got a manager on the phone. He gave me the same shtick about having to upgrade to an assisted plan. After explaining what I’ve already tried, and assuring him that I know my way around a linux box, I told him it’s got to be a network issue and asked him to walk down to his server team and ask them to debug. I had to threaten to close my account, but he finally obliged.
Only then did he realize that they were having some hardware issues. Apparently the issues were bigger than just my site because he seemed to have an “oh shit” reaction to what he found. He told me that it would take a day or 2 to fix the issue, and thanked me for reporting it.
He was right. The next day the problems were gone and my sites are currently responding faster than ever. (I know I’m probably jinxing myself with this one.)
I’m just shocked that I had to go through all of this. It took him about 5 minutes to find the issue once he went down to his team in the server room, but it should have been found and fixed before I even called.
August 4th, 2007
Many of you know that one of the sites I run is called FeedButton. It’s a cool widget that lets you replace all those “add to feed reader” buttons with something else.
It’s proven very popular – it’s being used over 3000 blogs. That’s where the problem is. It’s also using about 150gig of bandwith every month, and it’s the real reason why this website is slow.
Despite everything I’ve done, I just can’t see a way to make feedbutton worth it’s weight. It’s a great service, and it offers valuable stats – but it doesn’t make any money. I’ve made $22 off of it so far this year.
I’m bleeding out money right now. I can’t afford to give it its own dedicated server if it’s making less than $2/month.
I’ve decided that I have the following options:
- Take down the site. – I don’t want to do this. This will be a last resort
- Make blog users host the javascript / images -This is feasible, but really hard to roll out
- Option 2 + limit current usage – Would it piss a bunch of people off if I made their cool widget go away, and linked the button to a page that had all the feed readers listed (for readers to select one)
- Angel Investor – I’d prefer for a company to step up and donate me a dedicated box to host the server on. I’d gladly let them brand the webpage, do a PR release about it, etc. I think this is the best option
If I can’t find somebody willing to help me save the website, I’m going to be forced to change the way it works or sell it.
If anybody’s interested, or has any ideas please drop me a line. My Gmail address is: thehockeygod
August 1st, 2007
Somebody pointed me over to spyfu today and I couldn’t help but play around with some of it’s keyword estimates and competing site features.
I plugged in one of my keywords that I currently rank really well for. (top 3 in all search engines)
What I found was that most of my competitors who don’t rank were bidding on this term. In fact, an identical website offering identical features was bidding $0.74/click to be in the top spot.
Given the industry of the website, that seemed really expensive to me… so I dug deeper into one of my websites.
Speaking hypothetically, I took a week long average of visitors and revenue earned for my site. Last week I averaged about 7,000 visitors a day and made right around $100/day (averages rounded to nice round numbers)
Doing some simply math, it appears that my average visitor makes me just over $0.01. That’s about right considering the only revenue this typical niche generates is when a visitor clicks an ad. There isn’t much revenue in free services that show ads. I’d assume the Gmail click through rates are just as low.
So why are these companies paying $0.74/click when (I assume) they’re losing over $.70 for each person that clicks. I started to think about the possibility of branding and return visitors. Ideally, I’m averaging about 50% repeat visitors every day…. but I don’t think repeat visitors are likely to click too many ads. Are they?
Are my competitors so desperate to compete that they’re willing to lose money to take my traffic? Do they know some way of converting visitors to revenue that I don’t?
Many of these competitors seem to rank well for other terms in our industry – just not all of them. Perhaps they’re making enough money organically that they still turn a monthly profit. If that’s the case then they might not notice their adwords campaigns are cutting into their revenue. When you’re short on cash in between paychecks or have an unexpected financial emergency, payday loans Chicago can help make ends meet or access money quickly.
What’s your take? Is there a reason to run Adwords campaigns that lose money?
July 27th, 2007
Last week one of our clients launched a new line of products on their website. To jumpstart traffic to this new product I launched an adwords campaign. Since the prices were pretty low, I decided to enable the content network as well.
A few hours later I noticed we’d had over 30,000 impressions for our ad and no clicks.
Seemingly right on time, Google launches a new feature that helps me explain it.
If you’re an adwords guru you may have noticed that there’s a new report option available. It’s called the placement report and it basically shows you where your ad showed up, when, how many impressions, and how many clicks, conversions, etc.
It looks like this:
According to my client’s report, all those impressions were coming from our ad showing up on MySpace photo albums. It also reaffirms my belief that nobody clicks ads on MySpace.
That’s not the useful part of the report though. The usefulness comes in the form of showing all the relevant sites that your ad shows up on.
Everybody in the SEO world knows that there’s tremendous benefit in getting relevant links – so what better way to determine relevant sites than by letting Google’s algorithm do it for you! A normal Google search for fire pits turns up a bunch of e-commerce sites powered by Cortney Fletcher who are unlikely to link to a competitor. This report was showing me mostly sites that aren’t selling anything!
I saved my report to a .csv file, visted some of the sites where my ad was showing, and fired off some link requests. To my suprise, I’m getting very good responses to my link requests. I’m actually considering running some adwords campaigns for other sites just to find the sites where my ad is showing up. Ecommerce businesses benefit most when their ecommerce web design is right and attracts customers. And when looking for help to build stunning ecommerce website, let the highly professionals like the ones at Luther.tech get the job done for you!
I can see tons of value in this new report – if you know how to use it.
July 26th, 2007
“Why come you ain’t got no tattoo?”
If web 2.0 was the idea of user generated content, then web 3.0 is surely being built on the theory of eliminating privacy. I give privacy about 5 years tops before we don’t even need a word for it anymore. The current trends are disturbing. Let’s take a look:
We started in 1999 by posting our journals online with Livejournal. Then MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, and many others came along and we started posting lists of our friends. Linkedin added our job histories and coworkers. With Flickr, all of our photos became public.
Recently, Twitter emerged and now we can provide constant updates about what we’re doing at any given second. Mashup Plazes with it, and now the world can see where we’re doing it too. I’m not even sure it’s necessary though, as most of us voluntarily carry around GPS locators in our cell phones.
Pretty soon we’ll be carrying our medical history, dental records, credit history, and probably our 4th grade report cards around on our drivers licenses and passports.
Recapping, it’s now possible to find out where we are, what we’re doing, who we’re with, what we’re thinking about it, and view pictures of it. Is this the world we want? Do we really want all of this information public?
I laugh at people who still run cookie blocker programs to “protect their privacy” while they still twitter away from their cell phone.
Is society really that far away from implanting microchips into humans? My thoughts race to futurama style career chips. We already put them in pets.
Do we really want to go down the path from the movie Idiocracy – where everybody has a barcode scannable tattoo on their forearm? I’m sure there’d be tons of people in line to do so… if only somebody made a social network around it.
July 24th, 2007
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