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Article: Penguins, Pandas, and Panic at the Zoo | SEOmoz

By on May 4, 2012 in News

In light of the recent rumblings with Google it pays to understand how to handle your websites and your business.  I have seen many people hit hard by the recent penguin changes, and while the reality of the situation is fairly simple – but that doesn’t make it any easier if your site traffic just tanked 80% (though to be honest, you shouldn’t have more than 30% of your traffic from google if you have an established business).

The most important thing is to keep your cool, don’t make drastic changes without a well thought out plan.  Check out this article at SEOmoz to make sure you are up to date on the reality of Google SEO.

Penguins, Pandas, and Panic at the Zoo | SEOmoz
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo

While every major algorithm update causes some protest, post-Penguin panic seems to be at near record levels, worsened by weeks of speculation about an “over-optimization” penalty. Webmasters and SEOs are understandably worried, and many have legitimately lost traffic and revenue.

 

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Selling Websites with Low Value

By on May 3, 2012 in News

Building and selling websites requires the establishment of consistent value.  During the process, we will always find that a portion of our sites are not going to turn out the way we want exactly – that is, you may be building up a website to a certain goal, but after a time you might find you haven’t been able to achieve the traffic you want to prove the value level that you are looking for.

In short, only the minority of sites will I keep and build to a higher level of value, the rest I will sell when I determine they don’t make the cut – this doesn’t mean though that they have no value to someone else, but proving that value can be tricky.  After all, if you only receive 20 visitors a day you can’t really prove monetary income potential with something like Adsense – quite the quandary.

The article below presents a service called Social Spark, which provides a way to monetize your blog via being paid to present content.  The rates are not determined by traffic, so it’s a good solution for lower traffic blogs – and while this won’t prove huge income capabilities of the site, having some demonstrated income helps increase the value over none when it comes to selling websites.

Most Profitable Way for Small Blogs To Make Money Online
http://www.johnchow.com/most-profitable-way-for-small-blogs-to-make-money-online/

I get many emails from new bloggers asking what’s the best way to make money online and my answer hasn’t changed – build traffic with quality content and then monetize that content in the most profitable way possible. Unfortunately, most bloggers go with the easiest way instead of the most profitable way. They end up setting up their blog with Google ads and nothing else.

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Article: 10 Factors That Can Skyrocket (or Tank) The Value of a Website

By on April 20, 2012 in News

Interestingly enough the secret to determining, or building value in a website is right in front of us.  This article from Flippa goes to demonstrate 10 elements that you can focus on to build real value in a website by looking at common traits among website auctions that sold for more than $100k.

Really there are two lessons here.  First off, learning the common traits among these high value sites is just pure gold.  Some of it may be obvious, but seeing it in front of your eyes can be powerful – establish a list, solid traffic, and earnings history are a given.

What I found really instructive was the bit about listing your site as “low maintenance” and having less than 50% of your traffic from google.

Aside from the information in this article, this excersize helps me realize the value in regular analysis of other site sales, and the value in regularly visiting flippa.  Perhaps I should add for myself a weekly task of evaluating a set type of site…

In either case, check out this article and see where your site stands – maybe you can find a way to build it to a 100k valuation.

10 Factors That Can Skyrocket (or Tank) The Value of a Website
http://flippa.com/blog/10-factors-that-can-skyrocket-or-tank-the-value-of-a-website/?oauth_token=5cf2f69774258eecc02de34e1f92cb30&oauth_verifier=&flogin=1

Have you ever considered what it would be like to buy or sell a site valued over $100,000? Several times a year sites sell on Flippa in the six figure range. What exactly makes these sites command a valuation over $100,000? That’s the question I set out to answer before writing this post. First, I’ll explain the methodology I used to answer this question, then, I’ll summarize my findings into 10 factors that affect the value of a website.

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Outsourcing to Insulate From The Long Winter

By on April 6, 2012 in News, Outsourcing, Selling Websites, SEO

3229890844 d668766e8d b 300x200 Outsourcing to Insulate From The Long WinterEd Dale has declared that a Long Winter is coming for SEO (be sure to check out his article, it’s a cracker as they say).  It’s time to bundle up – and the coziest comforter for your business is going to be found in outsourcing.

In light of Google’s recent changes, and the general feeling of doomsday around the marketing community, it’s prudent to ask yourself what the best practice is moving forward.

So how do you handle the long winter?

 

Market Leadership – The Internet’s Best Parka

As Ed says, Market Leadership – which is simply content times consistency (simple yet involved).  Again, you must build a team (ideally via outsourcing). There is no way around it – no ifs ands or buts. Your entire time needs to be spent becoming a market leader, because that is the only way to insulate yourself from the cold.

Despite the recent callings of the end of SEO, you can’t ignore this aspect of the business – just stick with the basics (done by your team). Most importantly, you should only be spending your time doing things that only you can do – like being yourself. If your market leadership requires your voice and your action, then that is what you should be doing.

This doesn’t mean you can’t have someone else do certain aspects of your market leadership. I recommend you check out this video at SEO Braintrust with Pete Williams, where – instead of simply outsourcing – he explains his process of insourcing and outtasking, and demonstrates that he assigns the ongoing components of his business that don’t really need his touch – thus using his team for part of his market leadership activities, but in a streamlined process that maximizes the time he spends.

 

Selling Websites – Outsourcing Will Help Keep You Warm

There are different schools of thought when it comes to selling websites – and I am perhaps taking a different route. I recently brainstormed an audio posting about building business value as opposed focusing on increasing certain site stats that you think will increase the amount of money you get from a sold site.

I believe in looking at this process more in terms of building and selling businesses – which happen to be websites. This means I prefer to build a little slower, perhaps have more unique and engaging content, and I definitely put some focus in establishing (beginning the processes in any case) a market presence.

Market Leadership is a very long process – and it’s perhaps not reasonable to try to get there on every site you build – but I think the process of building market presence brings a tremendous amount of value to the site – far more than spinning an article every week for 3 months, and doing some blog comments to raise effective traffic numbers. I would rather sell sites which are engaged in their market. I would rather sell sites that are already built to be insulated from the long freeze.

 

This comes full circle – if I need to spend time building market presence with sites, then I must must must have a team to do everything else.

 

The whole of it comes down to this – how are you spending your time? If you are spending half of your time doing seo (building backlinks, or setting up sites, etc), then that time is not spent in market leadership – and come winter, you will freeze.

 

Image by Jazonz

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Building Value – Thoughts

By on March 27, 2012 in News
listen to ‘Building Value – Thoughts’ on Audioboo

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Beginning Outsourcing – Breaking the Dragon

By on March 15, 2012 in Outsourcing

Outsourcing

I am starting a series on outsourcing. This is related more towards business than towards buying and selling websites. The reality of the situation however, is that if you want to be in business on the internet – be that affiliate marketing, selling products, or selling websites – you must have a team. You have to treat it like an actual business – which means as soon as humanly possible, you must hire people to do the tasks which you don’t actually need to do yourself.

1540997910 4cf751c352 o 300x200 Beginning Outsourcing Breaking the DragonOk – easier said then done right? Yes it is. I’m starting this series because I have been hemming and hawing about hiring outsourcing labor for months. The fact of the matter is that my time is maxed out, and I am only able to do so much. In order to make good money – or even just make a living – running this as a business online, I have to find other people to do the work which I do not need to be doing.

So I wanted to share my experience with the process. My views of outsourcing before starting this process are vastly different than they are even as I write this article (I have just hired my first full-time contractor).

 

The Realization

I found myself in a specific situation – I needed to spend a certain amount of money, so I was actually looking at buying a new laptop (my desktop and laptop are both 5 years old, and the laptop is virtually unusable), and possibly a new iPad. I had my eyes on all these new goodies and then it occurred to me that I have enough to hire someone…full time.

Even just that realization is not enough to put one in full gear swinging for the fences. There is an element of risk. By taking this step, I do indeed present the risk to myself that I might be throwing money out the window.

It came down to one thing though. When I started my adventure of learning internet marketing, I did so after reading 4 hour work week. Who doesn’t want to have their time to do with their life as they please? I was nearing the end of time spent with a company that at their best exploited my time and talents, returning very little respect. At the forefront of my intentions was to never work for anyone other than myself again.

Remembering this brought me back to the beginning of this article – if I never again want to work for anyone other than myself, then I need to establish a successful business online, and if the only way to establish a successful business online is to build a team, then I must build a team and there is no other option.

 

Simplistic thinking is often beneficial.

 

Fear

Fear is something I always try to not make decisions for me – that is, if I’m aware fear is affecting my decision-making, I will do my best to choose the thing which I fear. See Do The Work.

On the field of the self stands a Knight and a Dragon. You are the Knight. Resistance is the Dragon.

Beginning Outsourcing Breaking the DragonAs Stephen Pressfield says in Do The Work, whenever you find yourself coming up against resistance (or fear), you are most often heading in the right direction.

So now I was looking at the situation thinking, if I hire someone full-time, I will be able to at least double the amount I am accomplishing now, and will be on the track for my ultimate goal of only ever again working for myself and living the life that I want to.

And the only thing keeping me from doing this was a fear that it might not work out? Pft. Dragon be gone.

 

Replace Myself

It helped that I found the Replace Myself program with John Jonas, through Michelle Macphearson. John has an absolutely stellar program worked up for hiring full-time contractors via the Philippines – a place where social values are particularly suited for this sort of work. His program also includes a large amount of training materials for new employees, as well as training on hiring and how to manage your new employees – so you pretty much get set up with the perfect hand to begin with.

Once you break the back of resistance, it has far less effect on you. I have now hired someone to contract for me full-time, and they are just starting out. There is still of course the possibility that this person may not stay with me – I would like to think that isn’t the case, I would like to think I have made an excellent decision and found someone who will work with me for a long time, but I don’t know.

The curious thing is that the Dragon isn’t there anymore – at least, he’s back in his cave huffing like a grumpy old man, but he’s not in my face. If this first person I have hired decides to leave, yea that would suck – that would be a big bummer. And if what I have learned from John says anything, it will probably even be my fault. But I’ll immediately pick back up and go find someone else.

 

So as I said, this is a series – I want to share my ongoing experiences, and this beginning post is just about breaking down that initial barrier which prevents you from starting a team.

For me, it came down to the ultimatum – I have only one option for living life moving forward, and the only way to make that happen is to build a team, so my only option is to build a team. There is no question, or hesitation, or reservation, or fear in any of that.

 

picture borrowed from ToastyKen

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You Can’t Improve What You Don’t Measure

By on February 28, 2012 in News, SEO

This is a universal truth for anyone trying to succeed at, well, anything. You simply can’t improve what you do not measure. How else would you know what changes to make or what actions to take if you don’t have all the data necessary to make those decisions. This is an old bit of wisdom – but applies to any endeavor, including selling websites.

 

Fitness – an Example

3209939998 c0028232b0 b 200x300 You Cant Improve What You Dont Measure

Photo by D Sharon Pruitt

A prime example of this is in weight loss or fitness of any kind which has a goal. Let’s say that you want to lose 20 pounds. You start off with a diet plan and an exercise plan. You do this for 4 weeks. Now – since your goal is going to be to lose 20 pounds, I’m going to assume that you at least measured your weight at the beginning and the end of this time. So after your first 4 weeks, you might see you have lost some pounds. But you might also see that you haven’t – or that you lost less than you desired.

See the problem is, you aren’t measuring all the changes that can happen, so you don’t know what effect each of your decisions is making on your overall health. You might give up at this point.

Let’s say in addition you also measured body fat % and found that even though you lost almost no weight, you dropped 5% body fat. Now you have more data to start making smart decisions. You can surmise that even though you didn’t lose weight, you lost fat – and gained muscle. Now you can make a more informed decision moving forward.

Ok, that was just a general example of what proper data tracking can do for improving your decisions.

 

Selling Websites – Tracking Rank

Let’s look at it from the selling websites point of view.

Selling websites (and indeed anything) is all about establishing value. When you start a website from scratch, or if you buy a website to fix it up – you need to understand where the website is starting from, where you want to go with it, and how every decision you make affects the value of the website.

One of the greatest points of value is traffic – specifically search engine traffic as this is effectively “free” traffic. The value is implied by what it would cost to buy it. Whether you start a website from scratch or buy a website and spruce it up – one of your goals is going to be to increase the website’s traffic, and that means you need to increase it’s presence in the search engines.

The more keywords you have ranked higher (preferably in the top 3), the more traffic you will receive.

So just like with weight loss, in order to get our website into shape with the search engines, we need to track how each of our important keywords is ranking. The position of these keywords, the amount of back links associated with them, and the rankings of the site pages is all critical to know in order to decide which actions to take for improving the website.

Today, the Noble Samurai folks have announced how the changes to the rank tracker are going to work. Check out their blog here for the information.

If you recall a couple weeks ago, the Noble Samurai folks announced that due to changes in Google, they were no longer able to provide mass free rank tracking (and in fact they had to make major changes to keep the software functional). If you witnessed the big fuss over the event, it is likely related to people’s need to track their information – this is a critical element of doing business.

You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

125x125 v1 You Cant Improve What You Dont MeasureMarket Samurai (and Article Samurai) has presented one of the best rank tracking programs there is – especially since it has been free in the past.  It tracks all of our critical data – search engine ranking, backlinks to pages, and page rank, including tracking of offsite web 2.0 properties which you don’t even own.

The short of it is that 92% of their customers are going to continue being able to have free rank tracking. Not only this, but their rank tracking is moving to a cloud based service so it will be much quicker and easier to use. To top it off, if you need more than 50 words tracked (their free base service to current customers) it is incredibly cheap to add more.

If you aren’t using a service like this, you should be. You can’t be in the business of selling websites without something like this.

You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

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Cheese and Whiskers

By on February 20, 2012 in Selling Websites

One of my favorite concepts in marketing is the concept of “Cheese and Whiskers” – introduced by Dean Jackson on the I Love Marketing Podcast.

This is a concept which at the very least is eye-opening. To me, the idea is one which has driven me to rethink my approach to everything, especially when it comes to selling websites.

Here is gist of it. Most businesses, when they present their products or try to make sales, are essentially after your money – and you (the consumer) know it. It’s obvious. These are the whiskers.

The analogy is that of a cat and mouse game. As Dean puts it, a mouse will go to insane lengths to get at the cheese (chew through feet of wood wall for example), but the second a hint of whiskers is nearby (the cat) – the mouse instantly bolts, and is gone for good.

How does this apply to your marketing message? Ask yourself, are you offering pure cheese to the mouse, or can they see your whiskers? The cheese must be an offering which has no appearance of being associated with the desire for the customer’s money. Interestingly, this also ties into the main theme of Pitch Anything.

Ultimately, if you ever give a hint that you need what your customer has, you will trigger fear in them. This is the same as the cheese/whiskers concept. So how does it apply?

The way I see it, there are two levels to this. There’s your communication – how do you phrase your inquiries and social interactions with your market? The second level is your personal intent.

On the level of communication, Dean gives some excellent examples. In the podcast he talks about a business which provides birthday marketing services for restaurants. The two examples of marketing he shows: In the first, the business goes to different restaurants offering their marketing services – listing all the benefits of their service over others. In the second example, the business simply contacts different restaurants and asks “do you do parties?”

In both cases, the goal is to get your foot in the door and establish a relationship. In the first case, you are clearly trying to sell your services (and get their money). In the second case, you are providing the potential client with an opportunity to make business – you also simplify the communication.

As Dean says, the one thing everyone in business is allowed to do (and comfortable doing) is to bring in money. If you provide that opportunity, the answer will be yes. In the first situation, the only thing being provided was an opportunity to spend money on a marketing service. In the second situation, the door is wide open.

The concept is simple, yet can be challenging to wrap the mind around. I like to approach it from this point of view:

When I am selling websites, what am I offering on the purest level?

If I am offering a pure opportunity for my customer to gain, then I am offering pure cheese.

If I am actually offering someone the opportunity to give me their money – my whiskers are showing.

 

Food for thought ^_^

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Article: How to Build a Successful Blog the Unconventional Way

By on February 17, 2012 in News

Half of the business of selling websites is establishing their value.  This means either building them up from scratch or renovating aged sites.  In both cases, it’s important to understand how you can instill value.  

While you can certainly build up traffic by ranking keywords, it is more important to make sure that traffic is valuable – that visitors are engaged and ultimately you can demonstrate good monetary value for each one.

There are different ways to go about learning, and I think its important to read the impressions of experienced individuals.  I like to recommend The Challenge for the processess.  This article below gives some excellent insight – and even though the author calls it “unconventional,” I’m of the school of thought which says this is the way to do it.

How to Build a Successful Blog the Unconventional Way
http://www.johnchow.com/how-to-build-a-successful-blog-the-unconventional-way/

Life is all about choices; so also is blogging. In blogging, you can choose to run with the crowd and be just another blog; or you can stand out from the crowd and be a lone voice. When building a blog, you can also choose to follow the norm; and achieve normal results or act unconventionally and achieve extraordinary results. The choice is yours to make.

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Article: How Much Should You Charge For Advertising On Your Blog?

By on February 10, 2012 in News

Building (or buying) and selling websites is the main goal here, but ultimately it's about making money off the investment of an internet property.  While you are building up a site, if you have decent traffic one way you can earn some extra $$ of a site is to sell ad blocks.

This can be a great way to prove income for the site if Adsense isn't working or you don't have a product running yet

How Much Should You Charge For Advertising On Your Blog?
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/10201/how-much-should-you-charge-for-advertising-on-your-blog/

 

I’ve made money using this method since the early 2000s. It started off as a trickle – my first ad sale was direct to a small business for $50 a month for one banner on my card game website. From that point forward I’ve grown my income from direct ad sales to the point that I’ve made as much as $5,000 a month from it, and at least $1,000 a month from direct ad sales for ten years straight.

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