o’neill media

I have read a ton of posts out there over the past weeks / months regarding traffic building and search engine optimization. So far, the traffic building stuff I’ve read has been lame, mostly because its way too generic, and the SEO information seems easy enough, submit to directories, build links optimize your site, blah, blah, blah. I’m sure this could be a decent way to get kinda ranked, but what’s the point if you’re not #1, which is where the real magic comes in. So I’m going to document my building of the site with SEO and traffic building. This domain hasn’t been active since 2/8/06, and I posted for the first time yesterday. So I have a PageRank of 0, and no inbound links. I have one thing going for me though, I got this domain 2 1/2 years ago, so at least I won’t be put in the so-called google sandbox, which is apparently a holding pin for domains that haven’t lived for at least 18 months (a combat against spammers). So I’ll update you shortly with what I have done to the site, and how it works.

I have been looking at click arb more and more over the past few weeks, and I have to say, I still don’t know how it works in practice, and would really like to see some firm numbers on how much money people make using this tactic. SEOmoz put together a good example of how click arb is used in practice. Obviously the traffic on a term like credit card offers must be huge, because, in this example, making $0.12 a click is not much of a margin, especially including the high bounce-rate that goes along with this type of spam.

Check out SEOmoz’s review of arb on credit card offers on their blog here. There’s more to come on this topic as I learn more.

I have tried every type of VoIP service there is from the Lingo’s and Vonage’s of the world, to the Skypes, to the Jajahs. Techcrunch ran a story today about the new crop of VoIP services that includes Jajah. Jajah allows users to make phone calls over IP networks, but allows you to maintain your own phone line. Techcrunch believes that there is too much work for people to go through the steps to use these types of services instead of traditional VoIP services, as if traditional VoIP services aren’t hard to use. I agree that it does take some time to get these services working on a daily basis, but the benefits are huge over traditional VoIP, and what you are asking the user to do, is not too much of a pain that they would rather pay money for calls.

This new breed of startups can quickly wipe out the traditional players, because there is no hardware to install, and the connection isn’t horrible like traditional VoIP. We have used Jajah for a couple months now and would never make an international call using anything else. The ease of use and great pricing has lead me to use it as my #1 choice for these types of calls. Techcrunch did introduce me to hullo, which I’m looking forward to testing out, it appears to be a downloadable version of Jajah, and may have some newer applications.

This is a great site that let’s you get the value of your house immediately, Zillow.com pulls comps from the area and shows you an approximation of your homes worth (the data seems a little off) but a great concept nonetheless, I hope they keep improving on this. I think the Internet (the great equalizer) should have made some kind of a dent in the commissions that real estate brokers are gauging people for. The key to their success is access to the MLS, they keep the access to that thing so tight that regular people never know what’s available unless they have a broker to do a simple search for them. I’ll say one thing, I’ve never worked with a broker that was worth a quarter of what they were paid. Maybe there are a lot of great ones out there, I have never met them.

My solution, I am giving my million dollar idea away here. Make an open-source platform for real estate listings. Craigslist has done a great job, and people are getting adequate principal-to-principal sales through it. But let’s develop an open-source platform that does all this stuff where sellers and brokers can list properties for free, and buyers and brokers can look for properties in an easy manner. Craigslist can definitely do this, but will need to alter their UI significantly.

I just bought the domain name oslistings.com, and plan to use it. Well, I actually probably never will, but I’ve got it in my bag of tricks for later. I want, and would be, relieved if someone would just do it first.

This is a scary thought. Some members of the search engine watch forum are claiming that 100% of their traffic from 3rd Tier Search Engines are giving them 100% fraudulent clicks. It makes me think that if these guys were actually restricting all of their fraudulent affiliates their $210MM TTM Revenue would be somewhere around $2MM.

Save the cheesy imagery all you consultants out there, blogging is your answer. I said last time that yes it was possible for people to make money from their blog, but doing this through google adsense is not going to get you there. The people who will be making money (and who are currently making money) off of their blogs are service professionals. People who provide a very distinct service to a certain community can find a fast and simple way to become a thought-leader in their space by simply publishing their expertise on the web. If you know what you are talking about, and have something interesting to say, you will become respected among your peers simply about writing about your experiences in a blog.

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Tech M&A is having a great year this year. In the first nine months of 2005 there have been:

159 Tech Deals; and

$8.6 billion in total transaction value

This is astonishing considering 2002 (many consider the bottom of last cycle) had the following transaction stats:

178 Tech Deals; and

$4.8 billion in total transaction value

Amazing, that means that deal value in the past three years have
almost doubled (~$27MM in 2002 vs. ~$55MM in 2005). My opinion is that
not only are acquirers hungrier for deals, but the currency of most of
the acquirers have risen, and the business models of most of the
targets have definitely matured.

from Venture One via Forbes

Sorry, but you can’t. Most blogs start out with Google Adsense to subsidize their writing habits. Unfortunately, unless you write about luxury jets or mortgages you will probably be seeing about $0.20 per click for your efforts, and that’s only if someone clicks on one of those ads. I know, I know there is a segment of the population that will just click everywhere on your site, and knows nothing about what the ads are for, but I’m sorry, people are becoming increasingly web savvy and these ads just don’t speak to them. I’ll give credit to Weblogs Inc. for creating a company that pretty much existed on Google Adsense, BUT that’s with arguably the biggest blog (Engadget) in the world on their side. Even then, with god knows how many page views the entire network had per month, they only made $2MM, this is really surprising to me, and a testament to how little money there is in the blog world.

Google Adsense comes in handy for filler, but overall this is never going to pay the bills. People have moved over to AdBrite which at least gives you the luxury of seeing what the advertiser is paying, but this is a stopgap solution as well. The next step, banner ads, but I’m sorry if you ever want to build a formidable web business, banner ads won’t cut it either, but that is a topic for another discuss. The barriers to entry in blogging are too low, and the content is becoming increasingly competitive for eyeballs to be worthwhile at all for an advertiser to pay a premium for your content. It’s unfortunate, but if you are a blogger you do it for personal reasons, or for love of the medium, that’s it. It’s a great forum for what it is, but it is not a business.

This is not to say that it is not possible to make money off of your blog. Check back tomorrow to see how, but direct online profits alone will give you little to nothing. So I’m going to go to the movies by myself with my Adsense earnings from this month.

If you evolve past the google adsense stage in your Internet career, one of the first dire situations you are bound to face off against is the third-party payment processor. He is a clever foe that does little and takes a lot. The lowest fees that I have seen on the Internet have been about 2.18% and a fixed fee of about 0.24 cents.

I have worked with a few of these companies, and the experience has been painless overall. The one thing you should definitely be aware of is that these guys usually claim that they will be able to process your application in a couple days. I have applied or helped people apply for three different accounts. One was through Yahoo! Small Business, the processor they use is Paymentech. The process was overall painless, and the account was set-up in hours. I have heard some negative things about these guys though, they are big and established, which is a great thing, but buyer beware. I have read that if you go near your montly sales limit, it is painful to get them to have them raise your limit, which obviously leads to lost sales.

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