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Methodology

How to tell real facts from marketing pitches?

Some products we are analyzing

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We designed a calculator based in several factors known to influence AdSense revenue:

- extension of project (the more content, the more chance to earn from ads)

- language (English paying triple than Spanish, for instance)

- subject (cars earn more than bikes)

- Clic-thru rate (CTR). A measure of how attractive are ads for users. Hard to master, but critical for success.  There is a whole discipline called “adsense optimization” that addresses Adsense revenue at the time of writing and designing websites.

- Ad density (there is an optimal ad density, and it is dangerous to drift away from it)

- SEO (the site needs to rank top in Google, otherwise it will not earn money)

- age of project (ranking improves with time, provided we do not do anything punishable)

We also included development costs, based on the amount of text. Of course we cannot compare a good writer with a software that generates text based in simple rules. But provided we pay a ghost writer 5 cents per word, no matter how good or bad, we can calculate the cost, and compare it with the previsible revenue.

Finally, we add the number of days necessary to recover the initial investment. We assume that hosting and web maintenance are very cheap, which is the case in most cases. Of course, it would be better to grow a site slowly and regularly, and keep a link-exchange campaign and fresh submissions to directories. However, we leave this out of the calculator for simplicity sake.

This is intended for domain owners who want to get some revenue from their speculative domain activity, and also increase the selling value of their virtual real estate.

The calculator provide results that match quite closely our current Adsense campaigns, although there is always room for improvement.

This calculator is open for discussion by Adsense gurus.

See: adsense-calculator.php

Use Viral Marketing to build PageRank and obtain thousands of incoming links

Viral marketing is a powerful technique that allows fast, efficient dispersal of an idea around the marketplace.

The guys who invented ICQ got rich because every user drove his friends into getting an account in order to keep in touch. Soon, the user base of the first instant messenger grew over the millions.

You need to invent something unusual, useful and able to create its own distribution channel. You might find some good idea and have it programmed by some expert in India or Argentina for maybe U$D 2 per hour.  Use the proper marketplace (rent-a-coder.com, elance.com or many others.

I invented several of those systems, and together they spread my message across the web. For instance, I wrote a book named “Cyberbusinesses” with my experience making business in the web. At first I planned to sell it, but I was advised to go for a free distribution in the web. As a result, many persons from the strangest places read it and became clients. If you read Spanish, get it at www.Cibernegocios.com.ar .

It is better to do something close to the field you are targeting. Calculators are easy to program and very useful. You need to define a problem and how to solve it. For instance, a site of mine sells swimming pools, and we created an online calculator that gives the volume of the pool as a function of its measures. It calculates the water cost and also forecasts how long it will take to load assuming a certain input flow. We plan to add other features like that, and we found that many users like it and recommend it to fellow prospective buyers.

Even if something is already invented, you can emulate it. Maybe your service will be better, or maybe you will get many users that want to try the new version of an old tool.

Being creative is sometimes natural and sometimes learnt from books or colleagues.

I propose you a game that can enhance your creativity. I have a software called Synonymizer, with a free version that allows phrase generation. Download the software at http://www.synonymizer.com.ar and use Phrase Generator.

Let’s say you are marketing vitamins.

A typical phrase for Phrase Generator could be: Vitamin consumers need advice on toxic doses

Out of 225 phrases, the system selected:

• Vitamin consumers need advice on toxic doses.
• Vitamin consumers need advice on cheap interaction.
• Vitamin users want advice on cheap prices.
• Vitamin consumers want ideas on average shelf-life.
• Food consumers need advice on average intake.
• Food users want advice on average doses.
• Food consumers want ideas on maximal interaction.
• Medicine consumers need advice on maximal prices.
• Medicine users want advice on minimal shelf-life.
• Medicine consumers want ideas on minimal intake.

Maybe you can create a calculator for any of those needs. How about “How much longer will I live if I take some vitamins?. Depending on how many and how much you take, you get extra-months or years. It can be done. It will not be terribly serious, proven and scientific, but it can be done. Just stop short of offering death at age 130 for those who eat vitamins by the pound. (ask me if you like the idea. We have the means to do it).

Also, you can do “How less will I live if I keep smoking and growing fat?”. In the same page, if you want to call the attention of your vitamins public. Or in a separate one, if you sell something against smoking.

By the way, if you sell tobacco, I can demonstrate that one pack a day will shorten your life in 12 minutes and 3 seconds, which will not stop anyone from buying your stuff. If you don’t like to blatantly lie, just add a small disclaimer like “This is just a game. No basis whatsoever”…

Another viral marketing idea coming from the above listing. How about a budgeting spreadsheet for buying meds smartly, according to the bulk discount, the expiration date and daily intake?.

These ideas are VIRAL. People will show the site to their friends, to prove their point.

Back to Synonymizer, you can create 10 webpages using those phrases as the main theme, in order to capture possible new clients.

Those phrases are repetitive and stupid for a human reader, but for Google they are excellent quality content for a drug website.

Another idea. Have you noticed how fast some news spread around? Why don´t you create a news that fits your need? It does not need to be real or true. I created a site called www.False-News.com , where I can publish whatever I want. It has some categories:

• Blatant Advertisement
• Current False News
• Wishful Thinking
• Inventions (weird, funny, unusual)
• Irrelevant Real News taken from the brainless press
• Crazy Ideas presented as False News
• My opinions transformed into false news.
• Real news that only seem false (weird, unusual)

This website experienced much faster growth than all the rest. And I have a privileged exhibit room for any future announcement I want to do. It can be mine or yours. If you purchased this book or other product from us, and have something to publish in this format (weird, funny, witty) I will publish it there.

Now, about the Viral Marketing version of GGG.

When people use the Freeware version of GGG, discrete links to our sites are included in the generated pages. This helps our sales because of direct clicks, and also improves our ranking in Google, Altavista and other search engines.

You can use a branded Freeware GGG to include your own brand and link in the pages generated by your customers or site visitors.

For $99 we will compile a Freeware version for you to offer to your visitors or clients. This version will create Optimized pages with a link to your promoted site.

Link popularity is a key factor in attaining high search engine ranking.

This way, all the final users will indirectly generate link popularity for your sites. It will be their pages, their servers, they page registration and other promotion efforts, all working for you day and night. And they will be grateful to you because of the superb free tool you gave them…

If you also want to collect a commission from every sale that we make with your branded version of GGG, you just need to sign up in the Affiliate Program:

This affiliate program is free to join, and it is open to every webmaster, even if they did not purchase any product from us.

You can even use this e-book, with links to your website, as a Viral Marketing tool. As you probably know, people like ebooks. The content/advertising rate is higher than in regular pages. They spread easily thru its own channels. Ask for a quote.

In such a competitive field as Search Engine Positioning, there are no fixed formulas for success. Creativity is a key ingredient in the mix. Check our websites to see which of our tools can help you design original, viral content.

Plan 1 – Small Site

Setup

Host the site in a Linux Server with 10 mb of space and 100 mb of monthly transfer
Define Keywords (in collaboration with client) – Create a logo – Create 1000 keyword phrases to use along the site – Create 100 content pages with original text – Install a script for content management – Create a sitemap and a Google Webmaster account to manage it – Submit to 50 directories

Maintenance
Hosting – Monitor legitimacy of traffic and Google ranking – Write 300 words per month

Cost: U$D 300 and U$D 30 per month

At this point we are focusing on WordPress-based sites, because they are easier to optimize due to availability of good plugins.

See our Domain Development Plans for more details and options.

Since I started DomainGrower.com I am trying to predict how a domain will perform, depending on its name, the intended market, and the investment the owner is ready to do. Every domainer wants to make sure the investment will be highly profitable, and they ask about Google Ranking, Traffic, Adsense revenue, maintenance cost, increased domain-site value and finally, profit.

I am not able at this point to provide exact projections or a formula. However, I have now a pretty good idea of how the domain can grow and how much will return.

Very good domains convert visits into sales at 1% or more. This is quite unusual, but sometimes we see it. When your domain does not sell any particular item, just adsense clicks, the conversion rate can be 0.5% and be very good. It is also important to assess the quality and quantity of the traffic. If your visitors are real estate investors ready to buy expensive property, the clicks will be very valuable. Maybe U$D 40 or 50.

On the other hand, if they are poor Hispanic teenagers looking for free music or porn, their clicks will be much less valuable, maybe $ 0.03.

My advice would be to focus on a niche audience, providing some free service that could mean value for them. Adsense revenues will help pay the bills.

After that, you can start thinking into selling some valuable items. As your audience grows you can find new demanded fields where you can offer quality contents. At that point, maybe 6 months after start, you will jump from red to black numbers. In a year, the increased value of your site will be also reflected in the domain name value.

Ask us about the value of your existing domain or developed site, and listen to our domain growing suggestions.

The other result refers to the extent of indexation. It seems that penalized sites receive only superficial indexation. For instance, if a site is well indexed, all the word strings will be indexed, and searching for phrases within quotes will find them. If the site is badly indexed due to penalization, only individual words will be indexed, and the strings will not be detected. Interesting…

The other result is that penalization covers all subjects, even those unrelated to the main one. For instance, a domain penalized for duplicate content will be penalized for content that has nothing to do with the abused content.

However, I am not making a difference between penalization types, which probably exists. In the next test I will include one domain that was penalized for duplicates and other penalized for linking to bad neighbourhood. Let’s see if the penalizations are similar.

I am now working on a new experiment (3rd of my controlled series) using more domains, mixing penalized with healthy domains.  

On the other hand, I am analyzing the directories I use for submission with reciprocal link exchange. It seems that some of them are considered bad neighbours, maybe because they include black hat sites, or they sell links, or whatever. My analysis includes only existing factors, because I am not free to upload test pages to them.

There are a few factors that warn you against bad directories: bad ranking in Google while searching for their own Home Page Title or Description, as compared with Yahoo or MSN. Also, few indexed incoming links, and other parameters. We are trying to establish the most reliable of those parameters.

For all the Penalization Detection experiments we need to focus on keywords that have 10-200 results. Less, is not enough to detect a fall in rankings. More, are difficult to detect and count.

We plan to offer a Standard Penalization Detection service (exact value), and a Penalization Diagnosis which will try to find an explanation for the issue. In most cases we detect bad linking, code problems or duplicate contents that explained the problem and could be corrected. 

Before Adsense, the perspective was even worse, because not even high traffic websites achieved revenue. Thanks to Adsense, the advertisement serving program run by Google, things have gone better for webmasters, who can now collect some money. This advertisement serving was Google’s and Yahoo ‘s great success.

So, it is all about signing up to Adsense, place a little Javascript on the pages, and start making money. For example, PodcastDirectory.com gets 35.000 dollars per month for Adsense, and seatguru.com gets 15.000. Right, the first one has a million hits per month, and the second, 700.000. Humble websites with 400 visits a day (which are not that easy to obtain) can collect 40 dollars per month, luckily and with tail wind…

There is also a theme-related matter. A website in an “expensive“ field, such as medical malpractice, will get more valuable clicks than a website with poor advertisement opportunities, such as a personal blog.. If we multiply the monthly revenue by 18, we will get the approximate value of each website, following a pretty conventional valuation model.

Let’s suppose our site has no Adsense, either because we do not want to damage our image, because the revenue is not enough, or other reasons. Thus, we have a highly visited but profit-less site.¿How do we value it?

Websiteoutlook.com is an online free tool for website valuations. According to it:

PodcastDirectory.com is worth $60580
seatguru.com is worth $70200

This is less than the value coming from the real revenue, but is still pretty good for a website that pops up a number live and free, without asking for anything but the domain name.

See these SEO related sites:

seochat.com is worth $340,000
seobook.com is worth $342.000
webuildpages.com is worth $37,529
seoadministrator.com is worth $23,000
domaingrower.com (this site) is worth $2,379

If I was to valuate a website, I would ask lots of things. Firstly, how the website makes money, its development and maintenance cost, etc. And after offering my valuation to the clients, I would listen to their opinion, and, maybe, basing on it I would adjust my value algorithm.

Analyzing some small and medium size sites, own and from clients, I find that the automatic valuation comes quite close to the real asking price for the developed sites. The predicted values for very large sites (google, yahoo, microsoft, cnn, wired) are not related to real market values, as expected, because many other considerations apply, besides some site metrics.

So, what is this website valuation model based on? In the linked spreadsheet there are some details, as indexed pages, Alexa ranking, backlinks, and the relation between these values.

Website valuation data.xls

Another factor, not taken into account here, is web positioning. Websites positioned for SEO, that allows offering services, should have an increased value. To know, a positioning index should be established for each site for a group of keywords, as the one I suggest elsewhere, and multiply it by an activity-specific rate.

The site itself, WebsiteOutlook.com, has an Alexa rank of 11.000, 370.000 indexed pages, and, according to itself, it’s worth $217.000. The many indexed pages correspond to every search saved in a new page. They double as cache and indexed content.

Having figuring out their algorithm, we should be able to duplicate their valuable site, improve it, and also calculate the increase in value of any client website enhanced by SEO (Google ranking) and Domain Development services. Is is also a nice tool to establish link value, predict traffic and check the value of promotion campaigns.

A well-deviced but unsuccessful approach to the Idea Market

Around 2000 there was Ideaexchange.com, where ideas could be bought and sold. The ideas had a short public description, and a longer hidden explanation. If you paid the price, you would access the whole thing. Idea authors charged for their complete ideas and the website collected a percentage.  Buyers could call for an idea on a certain topic and also comment on the ideas they bought for others to join or beware.

To my deception the website did not last. I do not know why, because in my opinion it was a hell of an idea. Possible failure explanations: Ideaexchange.com did not have a mechanism to convert ideas into projects. The fact that idea posters had to pay a small fee beforehand probably prevented them to reach critical mass. Also, the ideas were too wide (proposals together with jokes, gossip and varied information).

The word “idea” has many meanings, and the marketplaces should limit itselves to measurable ideas, and to ideas that can have any useful follow-up or consequence.

Idea Futures

There is also the concept of Idea Futures, which implies prediction power about the truth of an idea. A nice website called Ideosphere tries to predict events using the reputation of the predictors. Those who earn points predicting accurately are more credible at predicting new issues. The site covers future facts or hidden facts, like science issues.

So, this site deals about Future and Hidden Facts, not just “ideas”. Predictions often deal with the stock market or sports results, and those activities are heavily regulated, which limits this peculiar subset of the idea marketplaces.

Got an idea? We will invest on it!

There are several inventor-investor matching sites, where business ideas can develop into projects. However, most of them are inefficient, with worthless ideas and false investors. Worthless ideas rank from perpetual movement to cold fusion in the kitchen, with better mousetraps in the middle. False investors include those who require a “fee” to analyze the idea and then disappear, and those who are willing to invest up to 10 dollars in your idea, plus those who demand the inventor to fill a 100 page form before anything, with no assurance that even the title will be read.

I have seen them all and I recognize that good matching requires many right properties on each part: financial, geographical, language, age. Also, like in romantic matching, there are many hard-to-define human qualities.

Regulating the entry of both parts (good inventors – real investors) would be an assurance of quality for these idea marketplaces, but that requires time and money. It is hard to find someone able to predict which idea will fly and which will not take off. Who could that be? An academic? A successful businessman? A psychic? Probably none of them. Most likely, a committee with the three of them.

The Web 2.0 is about filtering trash

The Web 1.0 had many data covering the valuable information. Search engines still post: “Results 1 – 100 of about 7,190,000 pages”. 95% of all email is spam.

The news aggregator systems like Digg.com, Reddit.com and Meneame.net (Spanish) became recently very successful as typical Web 2.0 mechanisms. They use qualified voting, social networks and automated quality rating for entries, usually news.

You probably are reading this article because you found it on Digg.com or similar aggregator.

Aggregators as idea marketplaces

Are News Aggregators feasible idea marketplaces? Can you post an idea and see if it catches on? I assume you can .

Business ideas can be filtered by the News Aggregator public and that could be a predictor of its future acceptance by the general public. If the idea is accepted by the masses, savvy investors will be able to catch them.

Political ideas can also have a similar mechanism. Anyone could launch a proposal and the politicians fishing for good ideas could profit from it. Conversely, someone who reaches Top-Digg user status (good Karma in the pligg-like systems) can become a good real-life politician.
 
Empty domain names are like business proposals, and are also subject to Aggregator treatment. Such Aggregator could be the ideal automated domain valuation system.

Aggregators could be used for painters to test their sketches, for advertisers to test their logos or catchy phrases, for models-to-be to expose their beauties, or for conferences looking for appealing speakers. The Barcamp geeky Web 2.0 conferences use such a system.

There are a few necessary conditions for an aggregator to be successful: good coding, critical mass and some of the features described above in IdeaExchange and Ideosphere.

Finally, I started one aggregator for business ideas at www.business-ideas.com.ar and one for local political ideas at www.ideaspoliticas.com.ar . I am ready to start others by request.

• Domain
• Hosting
• Design
• Optimized WordPress blog with all the SEO plugins
• 20 weekly postings with original content (synonymized by me, from the web)
• Submission to search engines and directories
• Guarranteed Top Ten position for some (uncommon) keyword or money back

You will see it advertised as:

INVEST IN VIRTUAL REAL ESTATE, THE 2008 GOLD RUSHSECURE A TOP RANKING IN THE SEARCH ENGINES

DOMAINS ARE MORE VALUABLE AS THEY ARE LONGER ALIVE

It can be used for:

• Personal Marketing –> get a blog to promote yourself as an employee, consultant, politician or whatever.
• Idea Marketing
• Regional Real Estate Marketing –> for Real Estate companies that already have an institutional website, but desire to strengthen their position in a specific region.
• Small Business Marketing
• Individual Product Marketing –> for large companies that already have an institutional website, but desire to build traffic on a single product.
• Niche Marketing

By the way, look in Google for Domain Development Service , and this DomainGrower.com site is 1st among 12,400,000.

Prices can divided into 3 ranges:

• Standard 300-400 U$D
• Intense 600-800
• Full Effort 1900-2500

Ask us about it!