SEO WORLD NEWS

Maybe it’s just the crazy pills I take every morning, but lately it seems that eBizMBA.com appears on Delicious/Popular or another big social media site at least twice a week. I hadn’t even heard of them a month ago, and now they’ve thoroughly branded themselves in my mind (and they’ve gotten a crapload of traffic and links recently too). Now today I’m seeing 20 Most Popular Sites for Bargain Hunters referenced everywhere, and that’s the last straw, I have to post about their genius now. Here are four lessons you can take from the recent success of eBizMBA:

1. Make your content pretty. Check out any page there: the content is generally in a bulleted list format, with clean thumbnail images next to each bullet point. People like pretty pictures. People like to scan. People vote for, and link to, what they like.

2. People love rankings. The eBizMBA posts I see reaching Delicious/Popular are usually of the Top 30 Social Bookmarking Sites or 25 Largest Web 2.0 Sites variety. The beautiful part about stats and rankings is that you can take a stale-as-hell niche and come out with a baity, useful, and successful hook simply be remixing existing public stats and ranking the recognizable players. (The players that rank at the top will probably even help you spread the meme. )

3. If you’re an industrial strength link baiter, make sure you have a good Web host. Right now the site is loading slowly, and I think I had this problem last time I visited. (Granted, I usually visit them when I see them via the frontpage of a social media site.) Likely the spike of traffic from social media, combined with the fact that they use a lot of image files, contributes to this problem. But it’s pretty self-defeating to be slow or down when the spike happens. If you’re link baiting regularly, spend a little bit more money to get a better hosting solution. (Sorry, guys, I didn’t say all the lessons would be positive!)

4. Once you find a hook, milk it for all it’s worth. When you realize the Top-25-Ranking-with-thumbnails format is a winner, you can a) pat yourself on the back, and try to find some other hooks, or b) take the successful hook and apply it to every other niche–or even sub-niche, if your site is narrow–that you can think of. I believe it was DaveN who said, “SEO is knowing what the search engines want and giving it to them… so hard they f*cking bleed.” Well, you can quote me: successful blogging is figuring out what your readers want, and giving it to them so often they *izz their pants!

Today, let’s skip past SEO tactics and get right to the green. As I’ve blabbered about before, many SEOs lack common business sense. In no particular order, here are some tips I think are important for any SEO who is trying to be a better CEO.

1. Decide to make more money.

OK I don’t mean to sound like a speaker at a pyramid scheme “success seminar”, but goals are very important. As soon as your goal becomes “make $XX,000 per month”–as opposed to a goal of say, ranking #1 for a certain keyword, or getting 350 bloglines subscribers to your blog–you’re on a more focused track, and likely to make more money. Smart people tend to achieve their goals, the issue is picking the right goals in the first place.

2. Get a damn accountant.

Having an accountant do your taxes can be surprisingly cheap ($500?), but it is also surprising that a really good accountant can be hired for only a marginally more expensive price. Spend $1000 on a smart accountant who handles a lot of other entrepreneurs, and chances are he’s going to save you a multiple of the $1000 you spend. And a penny saved is a penny earned right? (Did I really just write that? Am I getting old or something?)

3. Depreciate asset purchases as aggressively as you legally can.

A lot of accountants don’t know how to handle depreciation on online assets such as premium domain names, and tend to be over-conservative when depreciating them. So if you’re investing in a lot of online assets, you may want to get an accountant who specializes in Internet business. But even if you have a “regular” accountant, find out how they’re treating depreciation of Web sites and premium domains that you purchase. According to this article, you may be able to depreciate over a 5 year schedule. One single premium domain could wipe out nearly all of your tax liability for the year. (Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or accountant, do not take this as legal advice, consult your own accountant and lawyer before depreciating anything.) Just be aware of this issue, and use tax law–legally–to your advantage.

4. Raise your prices aggressively and periodically.

OK you may raise your eyebrows at this one, but the truth is a lot of people get “used” to earning a certain amount and then more or less live with that indefinitely. The reality is, online you can go from novice to expert in a specialty pretty quickly (i.e., you can go from novice SEO to pro in 12 months, and you can go from n00b affiliate to super affiliate in 12 months). So make sure to take stock of yourself periodically and try to figure out if you provide more value than you did before (and if so, how much).

Last month I had my business partner call all of the merchants we’re an affiliate for, and ask them if they can pay us a better rate. Guess what? Every single one said yes. Our largest merchant partner gave us a 10% across the board increase. (We’re doing good volume, so they want to keep us happy.) It was probably the most profitable 5 minutes in our company’s history, a short, painless phone call made us an extra five figures this year.

If you perform a service, I think this tip is even more important. Are your prices the same as they were last year? Do you have more clients this year? If so, demand has increased and you should raise your prices. Are you better known this year? If so, your reputation has increased, and you should raise your prices. When a client knows you and likes you they won’t be angry that you’re asking them for more money. They will simply look at the new price and ask themselves if the value is still there, and if it is, they will pay you the new amount. Trust me, they would rather pay you marginally more than go to the bother of finding another provider, who may or may not be a scam/idiot. Another interesting thing is that increased pricing generally leads to increased value perception; you may find that you actually attract more–and better–clients with higher pricing.

If you’re an employee, you should also be aggressively (but politely, and intelligently) asking for a large raise periodically. The difference in the value created between a first year SEO and a second year SEO is huge–as should be your pay raise. If the value you create has doubled (and your boss is smart enough to recognize that), you’ll be able to negotiate for a lot more pay. So do it. Disclaimer: a lot of bosses are stupid, and won’t recognize value. In my experience, most employees also fall into two camps–those who wildly underestimate their value, and those who wildly overestimate their value. Make sure you fall into the third camp.

5. Get a personal assistant.

If you’re creating a lot of value, at some point you have to do what you can to remove low-value activities from your daily work. The best way to do this is to a) outsource what you can (design, programming, etc.), and b) get a personal assistant for other sorts of tasks (research, pick up dry cleaning, etc.) Bonus points if the assistant is hot and wears skimpy clothing. I actually have a “virtual assistant” who lives in another country and would pretty much hate my life if I didn’t have him (and I would get less done and make less money).

Anyone with other good business tips for SEOs, feel free to comment!

From the SEW Blog:

Ask.com has developed AskEraser a tool that will allow you to wipe your search history and will be launching it in the near future, according to their press release.

“Searchers will have easy access to AskEraser and can change their privacy preference at any time. Once selected, searchers’ privacy settings will be clearly indicated on search results pages so they always know the privacy status of their searches,” the press release stated.

“As search and other online services progress, it’s important for our customers to be able to trust that their information is being used appropriately and in a way that provides value to them,” said Peter Cullen, chief privacy strategist at Microsoft. “We hope others in the industry will join us in developing and supporting principles that address these important issues.”

Anonymize logs in 18 months and reduce your 500 year cookie length? That’s a joke, G. Or what, do I look like a giant sucker to you?

p.s. did I call that one or what? Who knew Ask.com and MSN search executives read TropicalSEO? Of course, before we start calling Yahoo or MSN The Privacy Engine, let’s remember this little incident. Still–progress. Congrats, MSN and Ask, you officially just beat Google in one aspect with real innovation!

(OK, first off, Mr. Buffet didn’t recommend you invest in domain names. But I think if he spent time researching the domaining business, he would recommend you invest in domain names. Read on.)

This post at Domain Name News reinforced a lot of my ideas about domain name investing. The article makes a lot of parallels between stocks and domain names, what would be a “growth vs. value” play, sale multiples, etc. Great primer, go read it if you haven’t yet.

I would like to take the parallel a bit further though. There are good stocks and bad stocks; there are short term plays and long term plays. In my opinion, premium generic domain names are superb businesses that will deliver superior returns over the long term. What do I mean by the term ’superb business’? Think of the type of business Warren Buffet would buy (Coca-Cola, Gillette), and compare that, to say, a random premium generic domain name: SavingsAccount.com (I have no idea what’s there or who owns it, it just popped to my mind as an example of a premium generic).

• Excellent brand equity: Mr. Buffet understands that a brand name built up over many years has an intrinsic value that will drive sales for years to come. (People know Coca-Cola because of 50 years of advertising. People will buy Coca-Cola for another 50 years.) Now, SavingsAccount.com hasn’t spent billions of dollars on branding BUT the .com extension itself has been branded by thousands of other people, media channels, and companies–and that branding is built in to SavingsAccount.com regardless of whether the owner spends a dime on advertising. Intrinsic, strong branding? Yummy.
• High profit margins: Mr. Buffet invests in companies that generate a lot of cash, rather than companies with unrealized “potential”. A parked premium generic domain name is going to have negligible expenses (yearly registration), and if it’s truly premium, will yield revenue from type-in traffic which dwarfs that expense. If your yearly registration expense is $6.95 and CPC revenues for the year total $700, that’s a 99% profit margin. Pretty sick. Now, if you’re paying for the domain on the retail end (after 4-5 domain wholesalers have bought/sold it), you probably have a lot of money tied up into that asset. But that’s a one time capitalization (which can probably be depreciated), and the cash flow is recurring. Morover, if you’re on the retail end, you’re probably developing the domain name–and in that case, affiliate sites, e-commerce outfits or arbitrage plays will likely yield high margins as well.
• A competitive “moat” which protects the business: Mr. Buffet likes to find businesses that are not only profitable, but which have a “moat” around this profitability. (Otherwise, he wouldn’t feel comfortable holding onto the business for 10 years as industry conditions change.) For instance, take Coca-Cola: the worldwide distribution network they’ve built would probably take decades, not years, to profitably replicate. Also, consider this scenario: RC Cola tweaks their recipe so that a majority of consumers prefer its taste to that of Coke. Do you think that scenario would cripple Coca-Cola? I’d be surprised if that would even make a small dent in Coke’s market share. That’s a moat. With premium generic domain names, their very nature gives them a moat. There is only one SavingsAccount.com, and chances are, in 10 years the .Net registry won’t be branded to the level where SavingsAccount.net would get anywhere near the type-in traffic that the .com gets. I suppose the plural version (SavingsAccounts.com) could pee in the “moat” a little bit–but that’s the worst-case scenario–one other guy to compete against.

Now, by the way, some the preceding attributes would only be characteristics of premium generic domain names–remember that typos, .Info’s, etc. wouldn’t necessarily be great long-term investments. (Yes, some people have made a ton of cash off these other extensions–I respect that there is more than one way to successfully invest. But it isn’t the Warren Buffet style.)

And don’t just take my word for what Mr. Buffet would recommend: check out this list of famous quotes from the Oracle of Omaha and tell me they don’t apply to investing.

“Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.”
If you’re new to domaining, but want to get started, I’d recommend you read all you can for a few months before dropping a few large on your first names. (But don’t wait too long to get your feet wet–in another year prices will have risen 30% )

“Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.”
Some people think that premium domain prices are so high they can’t possibly go any higher. People in the know–like Frank Schilling–are still buying. Why invest in the S&P when you can get a 30%–or 200%–return on your domains?

“A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.”
See preceding quote.

“It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.”
Better to buy a fairly priced premium .com than to buy the equivalent .Net (even if it’s really cheap). In the long run, the .com will appreciate soooo much more.

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
Don’t lie, cheat or steal. And if you have a “crazy idea” run it by some smart friends and then sleep on it before acting. (OK, this applies to most any business.)

“Our favourite holding period is forever.”
If premium generics are increasing in value 30% a year, why would you sell for what seems like a good price today (double the value?) when you could hold onto it for 10 years and quintuple the value?

“I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.”
No need to take risks on odd extensions like .mobi’s, or odd-sounding names that might or might not flop. Stick to premium .com’s that you know will appreciate.

“We believe that according the name “investors” to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a “romantic”.”
If you’re constantly having to buy/sell/trade your domain name portfolio, you’re either not buying the right names, or you’re simply selling too often. Transactions have built in costs (time, escrow fees, etc.) and most of your time should be spent researching, not dealmaking.

“We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.”
See the wave of hopeful (desperate-seeming?) investing in .mobi? Be fearful.

And now for the application: Yes, the underlying economics are in your favor, so you can make mistakes and still be successful. We work in a great business, such that even if you overpay for a name by 50%, you can just hold onto it for 3-4 years and still double your money. But there’s no reason to be stupid–you’re going against pro’s who’ve been in the space for 10 years, and meanwhile there are new wannabe-domainers (who read a Business 2.0 article or something) coming into the fold all the time. More sharks in the pool, and slightly less room for mistakes. Be smart in how you conduct your domain investing, the Buffet way:

• Buy wonderful domains at fair (or cheap) prices. For long term appreciation, it is probably better to buy a truly premium name at a fair price, then to buy a non-premium (but decent) name at a cheap price.
• Buy and hold. Then hold some more. A premium generic domain’s value grows in the double digits annually. Say you bought in for 100k and now someone wants it for 250k: it would feel good to bank it, right? On the other hand if they’re offering 250k now, in three years someone else will probably offer 500k or 1M.
• Remember that the most powerful word in your vocabulary is “no”. Do fewer deals–but better deals. Sell a wonderful name only if the multiple someone is willing to pay is ridiculous. If it’s only a mildly attractive offer, why bother? Conversely, if 50% of your target domain acquistions end up saying “yes” to your offers, you are probably offering too much. Most of your time should be spent in the research phase (or getting yelled at for your lowball offers).

p.s. After all this, you’re probably thinking that I have a gigantic man-crush on Warren Buffet. Guilty as charged, I love this guy.

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:

• Best Practices For Corporate Domain Name Management - SEL
• Highbrow Arbitrage Pages - Frank Schilling
• 10 US Laws Every Domainer Needs to Know - Rich McIver at Aviva
• How To Estimate Universal Search Volume *Without* Using Yahoo or Wordtracker - Domainer’s Gazette
• Firefox 3 To Make Domains Stand Out - The Conceptualist

And in case you want to tune in more to this space, here’s a handy list of domainer blogs that I subscribe to:

• DomainEditorial.com
• Daily Domainer
• Names @ Work
• Domain Name Wire
• dnvw.com
• Domain Name News (update–somehow I missed it)
• DomainTools Blog (although this post was annoying)
• Seven Mile (anyone else find that URL to be both ironic and hilarious?)
• The Conceptualist
• Rick Schwartz
• Whizzbang’s Blog
• The Key
• The Domainer’s Gazette

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?

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?

#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

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.

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.