Promote My Site

Mar 05

2008

Ramblings

Posted by Oliver in SEO

I sometimes come across things that really really amuse me but aren't, in themselves, post-worthy. So I do what we all do, have a chuckle and forget about it. Today I thought I would try to capture some of them and hand them off to you. A mini-roundup as it were:

I was reading an excellent article about how captchya's are being broken left and right and someone suggested that we switch from text to a HotCaptchya. Go on over and see if you can pass the test 'for the other team.'

We recently did a longish post on Outsourcing to India and while responding to comments found a great article from Lazy Owner on Outsourcing. I think I like his article better than ours. Dang.

Back in January we wrote about using Bugzilla to control projects. We're in the midst of a pretty big project, with hundreds of items to complete, test, and integrate. And we have people working on the project in three different locations on two different shifts. I was just able to go through fifteen or so tasks and dispatch them back to where they needed to go with only a few minutes coordination overhead. All thanks to the lovely and free Bugzilla. If you do big projects you owe it to yourself to get off the spreadsheet and onto the 'zilla.

Would you believe someone has sold 15 Social Site Submissions for $10 on eBay? With 200 happy customers? Amazing.

I just read a really good article about letting Page Rank flow into your Contact page. I'd never thought about it, but, duh, of course your "Contact Me" page should rank above other people with the same name. We don't over-tweak our robots.txt file because we decided a long time ago that we'd rather spend an hour writing content than trying to over-optimize search engine behavior.
- Maybe we're just strange because we rarely no-follow links, except maybe to Wikipedia. <lol>

It's rare for me to find a new SEO/SEM blog and immediately find two great posts, but that's why I was so delighted to find Marios at All Things SEM:
- Sphinn: Many Voices. I like analysis based on numbers. And I really enjoy sphinn, so when you put the two together, well you had me at standard deviation.
- Scaling SEO Services. We're all about SEO tools here at Promote-My-Site, so when someone says they're important, well, we love it.

Why pick famous people for their Digg names? It's not really iikely that Kevin Federline is really my friend on Digg, is it? is it supposed to make me react to the shout more?

Speaking of crazy stuff, we were on a conference call today with a customer discussing, for at least 15 minutes, how to make sure that they had the right licensing paperwork for their servers and laptops when the project is complete. Ok, reasonable enough, but if you figure that the maximum possible cost for the licenses was under a grand and their cost for my team on the call was about $4K/hour, then that was pretty much a wash. Plus, of course, the answer is that the XP/Vista licenses are glued to the side of the computers and everyone on the call should have known that.

I got an email from a client complaining that he was going nuts looking for a simple semi-WYSWYG HTML editor. I love an opportunity to "give" stuff out. So I sent him over to the FCKeditor site. It's an open source PHP based editor, so you can easily install it anywhere on your intranet. But better yet, they have a "demo" version running on their website, so I can use that when I'm on the road and don't feel like logging into the VPN. Very very supercool - it has all the basic features and toggles between raw-HTML and WYSWIG.

That's all my scratchings for today! Have a great day.

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Mar 05

2008

117 SEO RSS Feeds Worth Reading

Posted by Oliver in SEO

Speed Read Your RSS Feed I recently did a quickie post on seoMoz about getting your RSS feed right and, in passing, mentioned that I had tested my theory on a LOT of SEO RSS feeds. Funny what people will pick up on - I got a number of requests for my feed list. So here it is:

Did I miss something? Drop us an email.

Self Promotion Warning

Most importantly is, well, us: Promote My Site Click here to subscribe to our feed.

You can also find the actual file on google docs right here.

What's the Point Jim?

With all that reading, you'd think I'd be smarter by now! Actually, like most people who have large RSS feeds, I don't read as much as I skim the headlines and pick and choose. However, my main justification for the time consumed is that I also use articles as "gifts" to clients - people always appreciate targeted suggestions. Unlike a lot of so-called networking opportunities, sending a potential/customer an article that is NOT self promoting your business and that has value is a powerful behavior.

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Mar 03

2008

Outsourcing to India

Posted by Oliver in software, India

We've talked about why you wouldn't want to outsource to Amazon (and were proved right when they went down hard recently) but when Aaron wrote an excellent article on The Future of Business Process Outsourcing I thought it might be good to give a (slightly) dissenting opinion. He makes a lot of very good points about the hardware and software side of outsourcing, but I think he kind of runs off the rails when he looks at the opportunities and people in India.

Aaron's Complaint

It's a long article, and worth reading, but he's basically frustrated because it is hard to find people who will tackle what I'd call small(ish) projects - things under, say, $250K per major piece. I'd agree, but then again we have a shiny technical group, so we do all that in house. But one of his observations is that this is really hard stuff to send to India. I'd really agree with that. A 5 person three month development project can't be green-fielded to India. The overhead of getting it running and the risk simply do not make it worthwhile. However, if you have a larger project ($500K budget) then you'll definitely be able to invest in India and get a tremendous time/money boost.

Our Background

In a previous life Don and I had a technical team (7 total) and a business process team (60 total across 3 shifts) that handled internal operations for a very large multinational. We spent three years building the group from scratch and it had several key distinguishing factors that made it different from the average "outsourcing team" in India:

2% annual turnover
Promotion from within
Promotion of females to management positions
Fresher training plan

Rocket Science

It ain't. You can't run a group in India like you would one from the US, but they're still people struggling with Maslow's Hierarchy, though perhaps with some different ordering. I mean, really, if you haven't looked at that picture in a while, then look around the categories, think about the people you've worked with from different countries and cultures - you'll be shocked at what you can fit in there. (The real beauty of being an academic is that if you're the first to write down something obvious you are famous forever.)

(Those of you familiar with India will appreciate the color coding! And, no, I'm not going to explain that joke if you don't get it.)

So let's just assume that you are having regular team meetings, offsite team building exercises, reward dinners, and all that jazz that you have to do with remote teams. Let me give you a

India Specific List of Success Factors

In no particular order:

Have a real presence
- Show up often
- Plan for the long term with facilities and equipment
Work type is important
- Don't try to outsource small stuff
- Start with smaller projects, with closer deadlines, and with lower risk and complexity levels. Your Indian team needs to succeed and learn how to work with you under good conditions rather than while flat out and scared.
- If you don't understand what you want the project will fail
- No customer facing activity, even internal customers
People are key
- Hire someone in the states who has built a team and succeeded as it is too expensive to make a mistake
- Hire a manager in India who has successfully managed for an American company
- Hire expensive high quality high level people - there is little cost advantage (3:1 maybe) there because of shortages but they are critical to getting leverage from large teams of freshers (10:1) and juniors (8:1)
- Bring your senior staff to America. Plan on this process taking a long time to arrange if someone needs a passport because they will probably have to make three trips to their home state to get it. Over a several month period.
Culture
- Lean the culture
- Learn what areas your people are from
- Native costume day is a great icebreaker for when you're in town
- Learn how to ask questions like an Indian not an American
- Yes doesn't mean yes and no doesn't mean never
- Learn how to eat the food ... with the right hand
- Before you eat meat in front of a vegetarian, ask
Relationships are critical
- They will want to know a lot about your family and life
- You should ask them about families and life
Personal Stuff
- Anticipate Delhi Belly, even in the ITC Sheraton in Bangalore
- Don't fly Indian Airways, certainly not in coach, and even business stinks. First is meh.
- Get a driver who speaks English well and always get the same guy. Tip effectively, your life is in his hands.
At Home
- Your home office technical staff needs to be more senior and better communicators because their job will be harder. On the other hand, since they will be doing technical leadership and the really interesting work you'll be able to hire better people.
- Don't have all the meetings on US time - this is rude, swap it around

My Favorite Non American Place In The World

I really really like India as a country - a big messy sprawling vibrant alive democracy. With great food and tasty cold beer and beautiful sights. And, yes, grinding poverty which is being pushed back as fast as humanly possible. It's good to remember that in the 1940's about 1 in 5 draftees were unfit for service in the military because of poor childhood nutrition or gross physical infirmities.

And my team in India and the Indian co-workers and friends I've had over the years have only strengthened my attraction to the county.

So if you have the money, the time, and the need, then extending the capability of your company by building a team in India could be a professional success and a personal reward.

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Mar 02

2008

Bad SEO Tool Security Can Get You Pwned

Posted by Oliver in SEO tool, Security, evil, architecture

I was reading this really cool article on Chlorine Trifluoride, which apparently can basically burn through just about anything, including sand, asbestos tile, glass, and probably even leftover high school cafeteria pizza. I completely love this description:

It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic [ignites on contacts - ed with AP chemistry] with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively.

Speaking of Explosive

We have been spending a lot of time looking at SEO tools while deploying some of our own (Yahoo Store SEO Analyzier, Digg Friend Finder, Backlink Pinger) and while we've talked a lot about SEO Application Architecture we never did much writing about security. I guess we thought that with all the, er, black hat stuff that can go on around this industry that people would be careful about how their SEO applications were architected.

Uh, No

Without naming names, though you'd recognize them as very big players, we found dozens of security holes in their applications, including but not limited to:

Wide Open Ajax Services - Ajax is a wonderful thing. And FireFox protects the browser against cross site scripting. But if the service on the back end is willing to accept a call from anything and doesn't verify that it's the client that's actually calling, then someone else can write an application that does the same thing you do, but uses your server to do the work. For example, another server running PHP could use curl to load one of your pages and then make web service calls to your "public" service and you'd be hard pressed to tell. You'd think you were getting lots of traffic, but you'd just be providing the back end for someone else.
Javascript Based Security - It's hard to believe, but we've seen plenty of applications that take a login in javascript, make an Ajax call to authenticate, and then enable a button or show content using javascript. If some hacker couldn't figure out how to rape and pillage those systems I think they'd get kicked out of their club.

About That Picture

That is a picture of a couple of pounds of Chlorine Trifluoride going off inside an asbestos berm test container. Or it is your website as some hacker takes control of your PR checker (for example) and hoses down google with it until they block your IP or penalize your site?

Ouch.

Perils of Outsourcing

Of the dozen or so tools we found with major security flaws the most common theme was not age of deployment, or country, or sophistication of the tool. It was that the development was outsourced by a very non technical person. Not non-technical as in "doesn't understand SEO" or "can't figure out how to tickle google" but as in: not much exposure to complex software engineering.

One thing you should know: we have some extremely technical people on staff. (Not me, I just fetch the coffee.) I think we could probably safely outsource applications built to a safe and sophisticated architectural specification, but it'd be tricky.

We described our SEO architectural technical stack earlier, but here it is again:

Promote My Site SEO Application Technical Architecture

Here is my rule of thumb: if you can't understand that picture, you can't export the work. You need someone working for you who "gets" it. I'm not bragging - we're not perfect and there are a lot of things (*cough* graphic design *cough*) that we don't do very well and have to get help with.

Conclusion

If you are going to outsource some development and you'd like to avoid a meltdown, well, you should probably get someone on staff or at least locally consulting with you to ensure that you have proper security. If you can't look at the code that your overseas outsourcing partner is giving you and make sense of it, then you probably shouldn't be trying to play that game.

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Feb 29

2008

From Stinky Pig to PR3 Tiger in Four Months

Posted by Oliver in startup, SEO tool, Promote My Site

On November 1, 2007 we launched Promote My Site and on November 8th we figured out that Google Hated Us and on February 29th 2008 we woke up to find our site was now a PR3. How did we do that?

Tiger?

Well, ok, maybe a bear cub. But it feels very tigerish to go from the sandbox to having almost every page on your site in google's primary index. Like when you hit a really good 3 wood off the tee box and you feel like Tiger even though your ball is 60 yards back from where his would land.

What Kind of Difference Has It Made?

A lot in terms of search results driving traffic. We still post daily, and we get a fair number of people who come to the main site just to read the daily post, but more and more of our traffic is coming from people searching for terms that we put up on the white board six months ago and said: we need this traffic organically.

How'd You Do It?

It was pretty straightforward:

Fill out the google form for recosideration
Write good content every day
Spend 1 month laying a base of decent inbound links
Reply to every post with an incomming link

I don't think any of that is rocket science, but ti does require daily application and attention.

Dense Content

Not as in stupid, but as in longer posts predominate. We have an average time-on-site of over six minutes and three pages. I think our average post is 400 words, so that is about right in terms of reading speed.

I think that adding images and diagrams to our stories has also helped our readers. I love a good Victorian novel but I know that sometimes when I hit a blog post that is a giant field of text, I just think, "I will read that later." As if. So we've tried to balance quick loading times with some visual relief. But we've also tried to make sure that the images relate to the post in a useful or humorous way. One of my favorite SEO blogs has these great pictures all over it but they're essentially eye-candy and don't relate to the story. Which kind of annoys me while it puzzles me - if you're going to take that long to dig up a photo, why not get one that applies to the story?

Tools

We have seen a LOT of people coming to our site to use the tools (Digg Friend Finder, Backlink Pinger, and Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer) and they tend to stay on the site even longer than the readers. We also see a lot them come back several times a week. This is especially true for the Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer - there is a great deal of SEO functionality goodness there, plus re-doing a store is an interactive/iterative process.

Linkbait

We haven't ever set out to write linkbait. In fact, most of our posts are pretty boring to the general public - we are aiming for SEO business people and practioners And while they will enjoy linkbait, and may even admire its creation, it doesn't speak to our need for legitimacy in our target marketplace. So we don't do it.

Having said that, we have put out some things that we knew would attract a lot of attention: a downloadable list of 2,162 social networking and bookmarking sites, reviews of some popular SEO software, etc. But the goal of these posts was never linkbait, which I think is pretty obvious from how they were written.

Future Plans

Actually, while we will still be careful to target good inbound words for our customer base, we're not going to pay much more attention to page rank because it is only valuable to us for two reasons:

Speaks to competency in our chosen field - would you buy SEO tools from a company that can't rank?
Provides us the ability to target new keywords and get good organic search traffic from them to drive business

All in all, I have to say, the 29th was a good leap day for us!

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Feb 27

2008

Downloadable List of 2,162 Social Bookmarking and Networking Sites

Posted by Oliver in social network, social bookmark, Niche Social Media

[Ok, read this post, it's a doozy, but before you go download this list, you should check out our new Social Heartbeat Monitor . Look left. Yep, there it is. You might also want to read this article on why we built it to replace the file discussed here.]

About six months ago we started looking at social networks. Not just the top tier sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, etc, but the second and third tiers as well. There are a truly huge number of social network sites out there. Almost every niche has at least one if not many sites devoted to it.

For example, take Memeza. It's a Pligg site for Zambian news. You might think that's pretty small and insignificant, but if you've got a story that would be of interest to Zambians it only takes 2 votes to get to the top page.

It's PR 4. Think of how that might be useful.

A lot of Sites Out There

There seem to be lots of different lists of of social network sites. The lists usually have numbers of sites in double digits. We've scoured the web for everything we could find. Every time we found an article along the lines of "Here are 18 social networking sites you should know about" we added those sites to our list.

We've researched 2,162 social nework sites. Here's how they break down:

Status	Total
Alive - the site is currently functioning as of last week.	1,613
Dead - It's dead, Jim.	351
TBD - We still need to look at these, but they're not dupes.	106
Waiting - We're still waiting on registration.	11
Zombie - It looks alive, but posts are 180+ days old or it just doesn't work.	81
Grand Total	2,162

A Present For You

We've put the entire list up on Google Docs as the Promote My Site Social Network and Bookmark MegaList V18. Here's a snapshot of the first few rows to entice you to go download the document.

More than just a list of names of social network sites, we've also included the URL and Domain so you can dedupe it against your own lists, as well as a status as of last week and our comments. If we get enough interest we'll put together an application so that people can query the database.

We thought about making this premium content, but compared to the stuff we're working on for premium, a raw list of social networking sites just doesn't cut it. We hope you'll keep an eye on us for when we start releasing the premium tools.

[Remember, check out our new Social Heartbeat Monitor. and this article to explain why we built it.]

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Feb 26

2008

Yahoo Store SEO Tool

Posted by Oliver in Yahoo Store, SEO tool, free

Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer

What if there was a free tool for your Yahoo Store that:

Suggests better keywords you could be using in each page in your store?
Shows your PageRank for every product in your store?
Shows your backlink counts for every product in your store?
Shows how well you're using meta tags for every product in your store?

Wouldn't you jump all over that?

Yahoo Stores are a powerful and relatively simple to use ecommerce solution but they certainly don't go out of their way to help merchants improve store and product Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The only SEO tools that come with the store are the new Search Engines section and the new Keyword Finder. The search engines section allows you to turn on sitemaps and provides a link to Yahoo Site Explorer -- not exactly the pinnacle of SEO analysis for your store.

The Keyword Finder is interesting, but the limitation is that it only shows keywords that people used to come to your site. It can only show you the keywords that you've already been successful with. Wouldn't it be a lot more useful to find out the keywords that you should be using?

With Promote My Site's new Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer there is a solution to help you work through any page or product on your Yahoo Store. You can get an immediate feel for how well each of your pages are doing, and a deep insight into the keywords that are actually present on your page and perhaps some keywords that you could add in order to increase your traffic. At the same time you can see how your individual products are doing with backlink popularity.

In our next article we'll go into the operational details on how to use the Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer but let's start with a high-level first....

How Does it Work?

It all starts with telling the Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer where to find your exported page information (objinfo.xml). If you haven't make your objinfo.xml file public, go ahead and do that right now by going to the Search Engines link in your Yahoo Store manager and clicking "enabled" for objinfo.xml.

Yahoo Store objinfo.xml

Unless, of course, you're trying to keep your store a secret from the search and shopping engines, in which case keep it unpublished. By the way, you really ought to have your sitemap.xml turned on too.

Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer Overview

Depending upon the size of your store, it may takea while to load your store into our system. After it is loaded, you'll see your complete product catalog in a scrollable grid. You can sort the grid by clicking on the header fields, and there is a set of filters to allow you to focus on specific parts of your store.

Drill Down Process

For each product in your store, you'll be able to see this data:

Pagerank
Count of Yahoo backlinks
Count Google backlinks
AltaVista index status
All The Web status
Page Title
Meta Description
Meta Keywords

Just select the row with the product you're interested in and click "Get Data" and it will load the statistics for that record.

Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer Drill Down

How do you know what pages to look at?

You Know Your Products And Competitors!

Well, of course you do. You can scroll through your products and examine those which:

Have strong or weak PR
Have many or few backlinks
Have strong titles, meta descriptions, and meta keywords

Yes, there are a million reasons to look at a page - you might want to play offence and go after a juicy niche or play defense and strengthen your core money maker. You could also spot product pages with strong PR that you might want to cross link to products with less PR.

Of course this is super-cool, but what can you do with it?

Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer Cycle To Improve

Review, Improve, Rinse, Repeat

Dive into a page and do some keyword work for any one, two, or three word phrase:

Google traffic estimator
Google SERP location
Yahoo SERP location
MSN SERP location

One of my favorite features is the ability to click through any keyword or keyphrase and go over to Wordtracker and find out alternative phrases to place on the page for more potential google love.

We had one beta tester notice that they had "rolex watch" (266 google searches max/day) well represented, but when they hit the free keyword search on Wordtracker the found out that "rolex watches" was even better, wtih 847 searches day/max. That's a five minute change that could triple the traffic on a $5K item.

They also noticed that one of their best moneymaking pages was very effective for "rolex watch repair" (28 hits/day/max) but didn't have the keyphrase "repair rolex watch" (15 hits/day/max). Again, that may not look like a big deal, but it was potentially 50% greater traffic on an important page for them.

Start With Baby Steps

Go on over to the Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer, plug in your URL, and give it a whirl. Drill down into your highest traffic and most powerful pages. Find one thing you can improve on each page and make the changes. Observe the traffic. See the effect on the bottom line.

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Feb 25

2008

Digg Friend Finder Bookmarklet

Posted by Don Draper in SEO tool, Digg

You asked for it. And now it's here! The Digg Friend Finder bookmarklet is now available.

Just drag that link to your toolbar. Whenever you're on a page that has some interesting text and you'd like to see which Digg users have submitted similar content, just select the text then click the bookmark in your toolbar.

The Digg Friend Finder page will load, with your selected text already populated in the search field. Just click search and watch the magic.

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Feb 24

2008

SEO Tools or SEO Content

Posted by Oliver in SEOMoz, SEO tool, ROI, Promote My Site, free

This is a really interesting question. The two primary places I go to learn tips and tricks in the SEO world are the guys over at SEOMoz (disclaimer: we subscribe) and Aaron Wall of SEOBook fame. Ok, I have a bit of a crush on John Chow's business model and I think ShoeMoney, Dosh Dosh and a buncha others are awesome too.

Tools with Content the Key

But Rand and Aaron are also tool providers. But they're pretty clearly tool providers who are monetizing other products - exclusive content, a book, whatever. It's not that they don't have very nice tools, but from the outside it looks to me as if SEOMoz's tools and free content drives their subscription model. I think Aaron is pretty much upfront that he sells his SEOBook.

Opposite Way Around

We have content to bring in tool users. We have "free" tools to sell, well, tools. Let me show you why, using SEOMoz's recently published traffic stats:

SEO Moz Traffic

Rand was using this chart to talk about the importance of long tail, but we look at this and think: the people looking for SEO tools are exactly our target market. I think it's great he can monetize people typing in "what is SEO" and "seo" but we think that the orange boxed "tools" queries are more to our liking. This doesn't put us at loggerheads with SEOmoz (what is Turkish for stupid?) because our tools are aimed at very specific vertical markets.

For example, SEOMoz's page strength tool is really quite cool. So we'd not really try to reproduce that (what would be the point, really?) but we might create a page analyzer tool for, say, mobile focused websites.

Vertical Focus Drives Actionability

One of our annoying habits is that we look at ideas and say:

So, what can you DO with it?

Take the Digg Friend Finder as an example - it's blindingly obvious what you can do with that. Ditto the Backlink PInger. Who do we know? Well, as i mentioned, only around 10% of the users have bothered to read the directions for Digg Friend Finder.... If I hadn't started our my career, back in the days of punch cards, as a technical writer I suspect I'd never document anything again.

Actionable Tasks Should Provide ROI

Great, so you can DO something with these tools - what does it buy you? Again, by focusing on a specific niche we provide that ROI. Could we have built a Friend Finder that worked for MySpace, Facebook, Mixx, etc, etc? Probably. But it was not clear to us that we could provide an architecturally compliant application that provided TOS compliant ROI. So we didn't. Simple is good sometimes.

Bias Toward Action

It may be all the startups under our belts (and all the worthless stock options in the file cabinet!) but we're most interesting in things that do stuff. Content is great, and we produce a bit and consume a lot. But you have to translate content into action, either manually (horrors!) or by finding a tool or automated service.

Tools are Always Downstream of Content

Would you know to ping your backlinks if a hundred SEO bloggers hadn't talked about how important it is? Yes, I know we talked about how All Your Backlinks are Pingworthy, but I'm not under any illusion about who gets read first if Sebastain posts something about backlinks the same day I do.

Would you know the value of more digg friends if there hadn't been a LOT of discussion by social media mavens? Yes, I gave you our take on Efficient Friending on Digg, but....

But once you read the content you can come to us for tools. Over and over again, we hope.

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Feb 24

2008

Free SEO Tools are the Traffic Gift that Keeps On Giving

Posted by Oliver in SEO tool, ROI, Promote My Site

Promote My Site Launch When we launched Promote My Site we had a pretty narrowly defined target market in mind - people interested in SEO tools that produce actionable reports or measurable ROI. And we knew that we wanted to spend some time blogging about business and SEO and VC -w e wanted to introduce ourselves first, as it were. And we knew we wanted to review some non-competitive SEO tools so that future users could better understand what we used to evaluate our go/no-go decisions.

Planning Never Survives Launch

So we did all that, and after reviewing thousands of inbound traffic referrals, reading comments, answering emails, and noting the kind of comments people were leaving around the 'net about our blog, we thought we understood the market, at least a little bit.

Then we released Digg Friend Finder and Backlink Pinger anticipating that the people who were visiting every day would find them useful and maybe make a few more visits. Perhaps even put the blog on their RSS Feed.

Wow, we did not really anticipate people coming back several times a day, bookmarking us, sending emails about us to friends, etc. (Yes, it is amazing what you can learn from site logs!) And suddenly our overseas reader count really ramped up.

It's all Good

But very strange. It looks like at least half the people using the tools are coming straight to them, which was expected. But the other half are coming to read the daily post and then going over to use the tools.

We couldn't really understand that behavior, so we did a silly post on Saturday - no real change in tool use. Then on Sunday we didn't do a post at all. Tool use dropped around 50%. Fascinating.

Wait, You Said Free is Bad?

No, we said (and will continue to say) that if someone doesn't have a way to monetize what they're doing then it's just a hobby. So why would you depend on someone's hobby site to run your business?

Monetizing the Tool Users

We think that there are three ways to make money out of tool users

Ad revenue. We're currently using google, but expect to implement different models in different parts of the site.
Affiliate programs. We only do this for stuff we respect: iMacro, WordTracker, SEOBook.
Paid subscriptions. Not currently available, but when they are they will offer a huge increase in features and functionality.

We can see that, based on the current traffic and click rates, that the "free" tools will shortly pay for the hosting resources consumed while bringing in paying customers. Which is twofer, if you think about it. So we have a lot of incentive to maintain the tools, ensure that the server has good performance, etc, etc. In other words, this mixed model gives you something to count on.

Why Tools Are Cool

Recall what I said earlier - people are coming back several times a day without needing new content to drive them. Hmm. Leverage, wot?

We've also seen, not viral, it's not that big, but a fair number of new users coming from emails and blog comments. And, finally, we're getting all sorts of new organic SERP traffic from regular-old-google and from a half dozen new country specific google portals. Are SEO folks from NZ more likely to click ads than our Canadian brothers? Who knows, but if we have both then we'll find out and can make adjustments accordingly.

As we continue to roll out new tools (we'll have another one this week too) we expect that the virtuous cycle of increased traffic, revenue, and referrals to continue. This should put us in good shape for paid subscriptions and a cash flow positive business you can count on.

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Ramblings

117 SEO RSS Feeds Worth Reading

Outsourcing to India

Bad SEO Tool Security Can Get You Pwned

From Stinky Pig to PR3 Tiger in Four Months

Downloadable List of 2,162 Social Bookmarking and Networking Sites

Yahoo Store SEO Tool

Digg Friend Finder Bookmarklet

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