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Archive for the ‘seoworldnewscom’ Category

Marchex Internal Strategy Memo Circulating

Tuesday, December 25th, 2007

Step 1. Acquire $X00M worth of premium generic and local domains
Step 2. Plan a giant gray hat SEO play which Google is likely to be hostile to
Step 3. Do not hire a knowledgeable SEO to review such plan
Step 4. Implement plan
Step 5. Watch stock tank
Step 6. ??????????
Step 7. Profit!

note to Demand Media: it’s not too late to hire one of these guys and give your 100,000 domains a prayer of staying indexed in the Google

Blog Action Day: BE the Change! 5 Easy Tips

Tuesday, December 25th, 2007

Readers, I am really excited about Blog Action Day and all the revolutionary change it is bringing about in the world. I’d like to throw my $.02 into the mix with these five easy tips I suggest everyone follow:

  1. Read all of the posts about Blog Action Day
  2. Wash the cat pee out of your clothes
  3. Repeat after me: No one cares about blogs or the blogosphere
  4. Get rid of your hybrid car, and buy a Suburban or Hummer. Or anything built before 1980. I drive a 1973 Buick and on a good day it gets 9.5 miles to the gallon (premium only).
  5. Commit to being smegma-neutral by 2009. This means that for every 4 grams of smegma you produce you have to mail a check for $2.50 to my organization, SmegmaOffset.org. We are not a scam.

* Thanks to Mr. Provost for inspiring me yet again

Party Like a Coked-up Has-Been Rockstar at Pubcon: Tropical SEO and Scoreboard Contest

Tuesday, December 25th, 2007

On the heels of Shoemoney and Neil Patel’s announcement, Scoreboard Media has announced a contest of his own. Winners “get” to “party” with us at “Vegas”. Check out the details here and submit your entry. And don’t forget to bring cash. Lots and lots of cash.

5 New Niche Social Media Sites, Vegas Updates, a Domainer Sh*tstorm and a Special Surprise

Tuesday, December 25th, 2007

Mr. Tropical is back after a short blogging hiatus. After I convincingly won the bet with Scoreboard (first man to 350 bloglines subs got $500 Cleveland Browns tickets), I was uninspired to write for a while. But you know what? I miss your guys’ snarky comments. I miss the glamour. And I miss all the action I get every time I post. So here’s an update with a little bit of everything!

1. I’ve update my niche social media site list. 5 new sites have shown me enough to join the exclusive club:

Check out the whole updated list here and remember to make submitting to niche social media sites part of your regular link baiting flow!

2. I have to say I’m a bit hurt no one has joined the Scoreboard Media Vegas Contest. I was promised that when I became a successful SEO I’d have groupies. So where are the groupies, I ask you? Where are my godd*mn groupies!?

3. The Domainersphere was rocked with scandal the past few days. I don’t fully understand all what went on or understand who’s at fault, but one thing I do know is every time I get really emotional about business I usually regret it afterwards.

4. Along with a few other smart folks, I’ve started a new company: DomainDev. Come check us out if you’re in Houston. We have a Ms Pac-man machine in our office.

Can You Make (a LOT) of Money with Premium Content?

Tuesday, December 25th, 2007

I’m hereby naming 2008 the year of premium content. Yes, I’m aware that The New York Times is moving away from the premium content model, as are several other traditional general media outlets. But I’m actually seeing things move in the other direction. I think premium (paid) content is making a huge comeback, and will be part of the Web for many years to come.

Of course, the paid content model isn’t right for everyone, and for every success story above there’s another story about a site cancelling their premium content section. But when paid content works it really works. Here’s a handy, no-BS quiz to help you find out if the paid content model could possibly work for you:

  1. Have you built a free readership of at least 10,000 subscribers or daily readers? My napkin calculation says that you can reasonably expect (best case) 1% of readers to pay for a premium membership. Unless you can successfully charge a thousand bucks a month for membership, I’d guess you need a base of at least 100 members to break even on content production costs. -)
  2. Are you a recognized authority in your field? This is a huge selling point in being able to convince people they should actually pay for your information when other less formal or less expert informational channels are free. e.g., Scout.com isn’t just a bunch of bloggers–they have real reporters and NFL insiders whose journalistic integrity I actually trust.
  3. Do you have serve a regular dosage of exclusive content? This could be videos, in-depth guides, research, tools, or whatever, but if you don’t have exclusives, why wouldn’t a reader go to your free competitor? e.g, Scout.com gets plenty of (usually true) rumor stories not carried by ESPN, and also has an exclusive “Ask the Insiders” forum, etc.
  4. Is your content niche enough? If you’re reporting on world news, you are competing with approximately 1000000 other free sites. If you’re reporting on the Cleveland Browns, you’re competing with approximately five other sites. If you’re SEOmoz, you’re competing with approximately 5 or 10 really good, regularly updated SEO information channels (along with about a thousand crappy or quasi-crappy blogs like this one). The point is, if you’re not niche enough, you’re going run into some heavy problems–a large number of free competitors, a larger hurdle to brand yourself as an “expert”, a harder time getting true exclusives, etc.
  5. I’m sure I’m missing other bullet points that ought to be here. Comment and let me know -)

Now, all this being said, I can’t say I’m currently experimenting with the premium content / subscription model–I’m too busy with my big project right now. But damn, I wish I was. Godspeed, SEOmoz. You hippies in Seattle may get the last laugh after all.

Domaining In a Minor Slump?

Tuesday, December 25th, 2007

Yah’ll regular readers know that I’m pretty bullish about the value of premium generic domain names. In general, I believe the macroeconomics will drive the market up handsomely in the long term.

But after 6 months of budding domainer glamour, I’m beginning to see some signs of a minor slump. Signals: the really big domainers–the public companies–have sh*t the bed recently, with both Communicate.com and Marchex taking a small nosedive. Meanwhile, the results of the highly-hyped Domain Roundtable auction were somewhat underwhelming. A majority of the domains did not meet their reserve, which doesn’t bode well considering the staff tried aggressively to keep the reserves as low as possible.

So what’s up? Is all the domainer hype already beginning to fade? Have valuations leveled off? Why is the domaining industry in a minor slump?

Well, I can’t attribute it wholly to my SEO friend’s reasoning: “Domainers are cheesed*cks.”

I do however think the industry is going through a period of sh*t, the easy money’s over shock. When you buy a domain in 2001, park it, and its value rises 1000% over 5 years, you look pretty smart–really, the macroeconomic trend made you look smart.

We’re not going to get those growth rates in valuations any more though (maybe 20% a year, rather than 50-100% a year). And especially if you’re paying a retail price for a domain–or even a “fifth time wholesale/resale” price–you sure as hell better know how to SEO and make a quality, defensible, highly-monetized Web site… or good luck making your initial outlay back.

And there’s the rub. Domainers–in general–have no clue how to make a quality, defensible, highly-monetized Web site (at least, the Marchex’s and Communicate.com’s of the world don’t). They never needed to know how to before, so they never bothered to acquire that skill set.

Enter SEOmainers. 

Niche Social Media Sites Come of Age; 4 New Ones to Watch

Tuesday, December 25th, 2007

My list of “niche social media sites that actually send traffic” is one of the most popular pages on this blog. I know I visit it at least twice a week (whenever I do a link bait launch), so no surprises there.

I already updated it once, and I am happy to say, today I have four more new sites to add:

  1. Sphinn (Search Engines & Online Marketing)
  2. PlugIM (Online Marketing)
  3. Sk-rt (Lifestyle)
  4. DNHour (Domaining)

Some of these have more traction than others (Sphinn already has a very active community), but I’m willing to add some smaller ones–like DNHour–if they’re getting submissions every day (from more than one submitter) and are sending some referrals (hey, you gotta bring home the bacon).

I highly recommend bookmarking my list and submitting every new baity piece of content to at least a few of them. Just like you shouldn’t build an entire business off of organic Google traffic, you shouldn’t build a social media strategy entirely around Digg (or StumbleUpon/Netscape/Reddit/Delicious). Instead, build the strategy around niche social media sites and blog coverage, and treat any success on The Big 5 as gravy. Depending on your niche, the traffic from these niche sites could surprise you (Tweako and DZone, for instance, can send a few hundred uniques if you hit the right angle.)

As always, if you know of any successful niche social media sites I’m not listing, leave a comment. Don’t bother telling me about a new one that lacks a decent-sized core community and doesn’t send any referrers… for each of the 29 sites in my list, there are a hundred abandoned or soon-to-be-abandoned attempts.

7 Abandoned Link Bait Titles from My Idea Pad

Tuesday, December 25th, 2007

Top 2 Windows Applications
#1. MS Office
#2. Internet Explorer”

Charlie Weis Nip-Slip [PICS]

Top 11 Reasons Digg, Reddit and Delicious Users Are a Bunch of Stupid Wankers with No Social Lives

The Ultimate Guide to Smegma: 101 Fun Facts, Tutorials, and Pics

33 Reasons Why Blockbuster Is Better than Netflix

10 Reasons Why George Bush Is Smarter Than You

Top 0 Digg Power Users Who Aren’t Virgins

Christmas Gift Tomorrow

Monday, December 24th, 2007

Tune in at Noon Eastern (Sharp) to Open.

Auto Complaint Generator: Comment Spammers

Friday, December 21st, 2007

The Complaint letter Generator can be used to create ramblings complaints about anything. These complaints, and ones like them, are making the rounds and will soon be in a comment spam near you. Because, well . . .

Unless you want to accumulate a long list of examples of Comment Spammers’s acts of corruption and depredation, this letter may become a bit monotonous. However, I unmistakably do hope you read it all the way through because Comment Spammers, who has posed as Savior of the World, is nothing else but the world’s seducer, its destroyer, its incendiary, and its executioner. What follows is a call to action for those of us who care — a large enough number to make a genuine contribution to human society. I frequently talk about how Comment Spammers’s pranks are precisely the kind of thing that will give lunatics control of the asylum by next weekend. I would drop the subject except that it says that a knowledge of correct diction, even if unused, evinces a superiority that covers cowardice or stupidity. That’s a stupid thing to say. It’s like saying that diseases can be defeated not through standard medical research but through the creation of a new language, one that does not stigmatize certain groups and behaviors.

I am deliberately using colorful language in this letter. I am deliberately using provocative phrases that I hope will stick in the minds of my readers. I do ensure, however, that my words are always appropriate and accurate and clearly explain how the point at which you discover that whenever a will-o’-the-wisp of Chekism, however unreal, turns up anywhere, Comment Spammers is off at a trot is not only a moment of disenchantment. It is a moment of resolve, a determination that no one has a higher opinion of it than I, and I think it’s a bleeding-heart hotheaded-type. If Comment Spammers thinks that divine ichor flows through its veins, then it’s sadly mistaken. When was the last time you heard Comment Spammers mention that its animadversions are merely a sideshow exhibit in the circus of narcissism? Probably never. That’s why if you read its writings while mentally out of focus, you may get the sense that Bulverism forms the core of any utopian society. But if you read Comment Spammers’s writings while mentally in focus and weigh each point carefully, it’s clear that as long as the beer keeps flowing and the paychecks keep coming, its shills don’t really care that it is entirely gung-ho about obstructionism because it lacks more pressing soapbox issues.

By comparing today to even ten years ago and projecting the course we’re on, I’d say we’re in for an even more unsympathetic, insensitive, and feebleminded society, all thanks to Comment Spammers’s half-measures. Well, sure; Comment Spammers’s crotchets are a masterpiece of uneducated classism, but that doesn’t change reality. It’s easy for us to shake our heads at Comment Spammers’s foolishness and cowardice. It’s easy for us to exclaim that we should straighten out Comment Spammers’s thinking. It’s easy for us to say, “Comment Spammers’s subliminal psywar campaigns are a vehicle for the expression of prejudice, ignorance, and enmity about people who are different from Comment Spammers.” The point is that it’s easy for us to say these things because Comment Spammers’s reason is not true reason. It does not seek the truth but only neo-damnable answers, prolix resolutions to conflicts. Lastly, I can’t end this letter without mentioning that we ought to teach Comment Spammers a lesson.

Works pretty well: but the word letter may have to be changed to “comment”.