Mar 10
A few days ago Maholo founder Jason Calcanis posted a blog post about 17 ways to save money in a start-up. Because of one controversial statement in an otherwise mundane post, he started an intense debate in the blogosphere. I’m not going to weigh in because practically anywhere in the tech blog world you go you can find an opinion. What I am going to talk about is the real purpose of the post which, IMHO, had nothing to do with start-ups or saving money. It was linkbait.
Inbound links are gold from an SEO point of view. If they are from sites relevant to your site’s subject matter they weigh heavily in your favor with the search engines. They also drive a lot of traffic if they come from high traffic sources. Any savvy blogger is on the lookout for ways to acquire links and controversy is a proven tactic. This is known as linkbaiting- writing pieces that piss people off or invite lots of commenting and discussion on other blogs. Calcanis is a master of linkbaiting.
Other common ways to fish for links are insulting Apple Inc. (draws the fanboys in droves), writing contrary comments on sites like Techcrunch (however they get so many that this is no longer very effective) and guest-posting on the blogs of others. Guest-posting is pretty easy as most bloggers are thrilled to have someone else write for them and flattered if you ask nicely. Just write something and submit it to a blog you like.
Linkbait is a better tactic than simply requesting a link exchange because it is in relevant context which makes the links far more valuable.
If you blog and don’t have traffic, add in a few creative linkbait initiatives. Even one good link can make a huge difference in your popularity.
Here’s a pretty cool linkbuilding chart.
Mar 03
How much would a domainer think a domain like eBuild.com is worth? $500,000? A million? As a parked domain it might be valued somewhere in those ranges. And if you owned it, as a domainer, you’d probably be pretty happy with that valuation. But what if I told you that its real value is more like $220 million?
Think I’m crazy? Well, what if I told you that, as a comprehensively developed site, it brings in $22 million in annual revenues off of 300,000 unique visitors monthly? Does 10x revenues sound unreasonable?
That revenue number and visitor count are real. The site is a comprehensive source for builders to learn about and source materials and fixtures. So, one more question: Let’s say you invest 2 million into building out a site like this. Say ten full time people working two years and a pretty good PR and PPC budget for promotion. Wouldn’t $22 million in revenues and a big valuation be worth that investment?
Or would you rather sell it for $500,000?
The future of domain valuation is not in type-in, parked, PPC sites, IMHO. It’s development because the stakes, long term, are much higher. This is where the big money is going to go.
Feb 21
Copyblogger has assembled a series of articles on keyword research and blogging that really constitutes a real guide to choosing a profitable blog subject. Unlike all the get rich quick info out there this is free and really practical- I wish I’d read it when I started blogging several years ago.
Domainers should really look at blog platforms as an easy way to get information web sites up on your domains. We’ve been stripping ‘bloggish’ stuff like comment streams, author names and date stamps off of WordPress templates, adding ten or twelve information posts in categories and launching them as websites on our domains. With the keyword approach in the articles above you can quickly build traffic and revenues on sites like these.
Jan 28
Google is seeing an increase in CTR over the past five months after they made moves to eliminate sites designed solely to host ads, among other things. OptimizeAndProphesize blogger Jonathan Mendez, one of the sharpest SEO pundits out there, offers this take on landing page quality which should raise eyebrows if you are dependent on parked pages for your business model.
