Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

Entrepreneur’s Journey conducted an experiment to test how much traffic the Million Dollar Homepage (MDH) could bring in by purchasing the basic advertisement (100×100 pixels).

Our ad (this little ) was placed in the top left corner area on October 5th. You can read the full details about this experiment and the MDH in my previous post - The Million Dollar Homepage.

Advertising Results

I can now report back to you that the MDH experiment ad performed very badly. At this point in time the traffic from the site totals about 30-40 visits and that’s for the last four days. The case study on the MDH site reported more than 500 new visitors per day for the same period of time so you have to wonder what went wrong with our experiment.

I think I know why it didn’t perform well - the MDH is now crowded. When that case study was tested the site wasn’t nearly as crowded with ads as it was when the Entrepreneur’s Journey advertisement went up. In the period it took to raise the funds to buy the advertisement close to $100,000 in new pixel square purchases were made on MDH making the above the fold area very busy. A 100×100 advertisement just doesn’t stand out anymore. I was hoping that the small size of our ad shouldn’t have mattered too much due to the sheer amount of traffic coming through to the site. We only needed a very small sliver of it to get some reasonable results, just as the case study reported.

Perhaps I made a mistake by positioning the ad as far to the top left as I could given that area is the most crowded space. In fact it would be interesting to place another ad somewhere else on the site where the competition for eyeballs isn’t so tough and see how the results compare. But we won’t be doing that, I think it’s best to leave this experiment as it is and report that buying a 100×100 block on the MDH is now a waste of time. You might get better results from a larger square but to be honest if you have a spare $1000 in your wallet for advertising I would spend it on more targeted traffic than what the MDH would bring through for your money.

Smarter Online Marketing

On the same day that our MDH advertisement went live I published this article, PageRank Explained - Keeping SEO Simple, on Entrepreneur’s Journey. The posting of this article turned out to be a much more effective marketing tool than an advertisement on MDH and offers a great comparison study of online marketing.

During the same period that I reported above for the MDH advertisement, the PageRank Explained article brought in over 1000 new direct referrals (visitors), a handful of PageRank 7 backlinks (these are damn valuable) as well as lots of PageRank 6 and 5 backlinks and accounted for the first 1000+ unique visitors day. Previously Entrepreneur’s Journey averaged about 500 unique visitors per day and after this article there were a few days spiking over 1000 (as high as 1400 so far). Things will settle down over the next few days no doubt but clearly this result was a lot more successful than a MDH advertisement.

A Secret Formula?

Let me explain how this happens and how you can replicate it on your website or blog. There is no guarantee or secret formula for a result like this, but if a combination of variables come together the effects can be amazing as your article spreads like wildfire over the web generating lots of backlinks and traffic. I will break down the important variables for you.

First, write a good article. Okay, it’s not quite as simple as this, it’s even simpler! What I mean by this is that the basic, simple articles, with tips and advice - the practical stuff on mainstream topics - have the best chance of being picked up and circulated online. If you read over PageRank Explained you will see that it covers the basics, offers some practical advice that is simple and digestible. None of what I wrote was rocket science but it was presented in an easy to understand manner.

Get a big site to link to your article. This part is a little harder but is a key factor. I’m pretty sure I have Roger Johansson from 456 Berea Street, a fellow 9ruler, to thank for the success of my article. He made a small post about it that opened up the floodgates. He obviously has a massive audience on his site alone (his site is a PageRank 7 and has been successful online for a few years now) and his attention brought in many more links from other bloggers and helped to get the article into the Del.icio.us popular list.

The point here is that network effects are absolutely vital and one of the best ways to get a network effect happening is to have a popular site link to one of your articles. You have probably heard of Slashdot, the most popular site for news on IT related matters. The site is massive. The traffic the site gets is even massive-er. The site has so much traffic pulling power that there is a term used whenever a site receives a link from Slashdot - “You have been Slashdotted“. Darren from Problogger was recently Slashdotted for a second time, bringing in over 40,000 visitors in under 48 hours. That’s some traffic power!

Network Effects

So how can you benefit from network effects after writing an article that you think deserves some attention? There are no guarantees however there are things you can to do encourage network effects.

1. You can be blunt about it and directly email the large sites mentioning your article and hope they will read it, find it interesting and then post about it. This is a risky practice because you don’t want to become annoying, pestering other sites about your work to the point where they ignore you. You also better be damn confident that what you have written is good because you are not going to be selling your article to a warm prospect if you are some random stranger with a blog no one knows about that just emailed out of the blue.

   You need to keep it casual and in fact it’s probably better to not start off talking about your article and instead foster a long term relationship with other bloggers so when the time comes and you do write a fantastic article you only need to contact your mates for some extra exposure. Of course as with most relationships it should be give and take so be prepared to return the favour now and then as well.

2. Comment and link to a lot of other bloggers. What is the golden rule to get a person’s attention? Pay some attention to them! The same rule applies online. If you comment on a lot of other blogs and websites, and when I say comment I mean intelligent, conversation participation comments (express your opinion folks, it’s not hard), not spammer “look at my website, it’s ace!” comments, then you open up the doors for other people to get to know you and your site. Write some content on your blog that mentions some of the big blogs and you may just get the attention of the author. The more bloggers that know you, that track you through RSS, the more likely you will get a link back when your brand new article goes up.
3. Consistently write good original content articles. This requires a lot of work and I can vouch for it because this is what I aim to do with my blog writing. Many bloggers write news-bite sized articles, with daily updates made up of links and a little commentary. There is nothing wrong with this practice and many very successful blogs use this strategy. However if you want to encourage incoming links nothing works better then a new and original article. If you can keep writing these on a regular basis your blog will build up a great database of solid content and slowly your blog will build a loyal audience. People will know as a thought provoking author writing original ideas and interesting commentary.

As your audience expands each new article you write will be exposed to more people and this is when exponential effects can occur, and it’s a beautiful thing. For example my first significant successful article was probably Making Money From Your Website Using Advertising published in May of this year. Now back then I probably had about 50 daily readers and that article might have brought in another 25-50 over the next month as readers linked to it, forwarded it, etc., increasing my traffic. This continued happening as I wrote each new original article, however since each time my base traffic figures were increased the amount of exposure each new article brought in was greater as well, increasing proportionately to the amount of current readers I had. Just last week my current 500 or so daily readers helped to bring another 500 readers for my latest article.

This is not a science and the numbers will never be consistent but I think you can see my point. The bigger you get the better each new article will perform for you, provided you keep writing good stuff - that’s the hard part and deservedly the best writers get the most attention if they stick to it over time.

Successful Online Marketing

The clear answer to successful online marketing is that content is king. We know this. Looking at the big picture content maybe the most important ingredient but without consistency content is not a long term strategy. If you do not continue to produce fresh content then you won’t build on your efforts in the past. You must commit to building an audience using each new piece of content as a building block placed on the previous piece of content. Only by doing this as a long term strategy can you hope to build and retain an audience that will keep coming back.

Best of all this type of audience doesn’t cost anything but time and energy, which, if you are working on something you enjoy, will be a pleasurable activity that you undertake with enthusiasm. Your readers pay you with attention in exchange for entertainment. Unlike Pay-Per-Click or paid advertising, the audience doesn’t stop coming when you run out of cash for clicks.

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Australian IT: MICROSOFT will start selling paid search listings, which allow advertisers to purchase advertising space alongside search results, on its MSN website.

The widely expected move comes as Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, continues to take on Google in the web-based information and services market.

At stake is the lucrative income from online advertising, particularly ads that are displayed next to search results, the main driver of search leader Google’s revenue.

This had to happen eventually. The big three search companies in order of popularity are Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN Search. Google has long been the leader in the Internet paid search industry and derives most of it’s billion dollar income from paid search listings. Yahoo! is slowly getting things together after buying Overture and now the last of the big three, MSN Search, is joining the game.

I’ve already started to see what appears to be paid search listings in things like my Hotmail account and other Microsoft Network sites. It will be interesting to see how well these listings perform against the other options in the Pay Per Click arena.

I don’t think I’d want to see too many players entering the Pay Per Click paid search industry or at the least I’d prefer not to see many dominant players. Google dominating at the moment is a good thing because you can focus all your efforts on one search engine and get great results. If all three search engines were equal and the systems to advertise on them were all different (as they are now) then maintaining a paid search campaign would be just that little bit harder. It would open more doors for good PPC campaign management software/tools/services if you were thinking business opportunities like a good entrepreneur should.

I wonder if we will see the rise of niche search engines that actually manage to do well, Blinkx being the only example I can think of now that is reasonably well known. For example, why not a shopping search engine, or news search engine, or blog search engine…wait a second, doesn’t Google already do all that? Perhaps I’ve just answered my question. But seriously there must be other niche concepts begging for a dedicated search engine beyond what we already have covering the most popular industries such as music and news.

How about a search engine focused entirely on Internet business that had amazing filters removing all the “get rich schemes” and putting all the great content sites to the top. Now I’d being using that and advertising on it too!

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Download the MP3 [ 45 Minutes - 10 MB]

This is a big one! I cracked the 45 minute mark with this podcast. There is a reason though, there’s a lot in this show with the main feature being an interview with Peter Harback, the co-owner with his wife of Cool Things, a website and retail store that sells “Cool Gadgets for Big Kids” (a toyshop!). Peter offers quite a good insight into his business so I expect you will enjoy this interview.

Also featured in the podcast is some music by a friend of mine, James McIntosh, who recently launched his own blog at Jameses.org. He provides the vocals and guitar on his track Perspicacity.

Enjoy!

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What is Google’s PageRank? If you have ever done any reading about search engine optimization or were just curious how you can get your site to the top of the Google search engine results, understanding PageRank is vital. I’m going to introduce you to the basics of PageRank and also provide a brief discussion on how much you should really worry about PageRank if you are running a website or Internet business.

Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, invented PageRank and it forms the basis for how Google works. Google didn’t become the best search engine in the world by chance, it became the best search engine because it provided the best results. PageRank is in fact the technology that gave Google its competitor-killing edge, a way to greatly improve the accuracy and validity of a search response to a user query.

In essence PageRank provides a means to determine the value of a website for any given search term or keyword phrase. This value is determined by how websites link together with the more popular (and theoretically better) sites receiving more links. It’s these incoming links that help the site have a high PageRank value and thus display higher up in search results.

Let’s read how Google explains their PageRank system:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

The key rule to understand is that it is a combination of variables that determine how well your site performs in Google. These are the most important variables to worry about:

• Incoming links to your site.
• The relevancy (to your site’s theme) of the pages linking to your site and the PageRank of these pages.
• The keywords that other sites use to link to your site.
• The keywords on your website in particular in places like page titles and headlines.

Some of those factors you can control, others you can manipulate but not directly control. The important thing to understand regarding PageRank is that all those variables will determine how high your site shows up in search engine results. PageRank is the name for the technology that ranks sites and includes all those variables and many more.

PageRank Numbers - The Little Green Bar

If you install the Google Toolbar into your browser you can choose to switch on the PageRank display (it’s in the options). This will make a little green bar appear above web pages you visit. The green bar represents the PageRank of the page you are viewing in your browser. The ranking starts at 0 (no ranking) up to 10, the highest ranking and can be blanked out completely if the page has been banned from Google. If you don’t want to use the toolbar you can try this free PageRank lookup tool to find the ranking for any web address.

Google created quite a storm when it launched its green PageRank bar. Webmasters became obsessed with methods to increase their PageRank and high PageRank sites started selling text links for hundreds of dollars. A link from a high PageRank page, from a PageRank 7, 8, 9 or 10, has been known to make lower PageRank pages increase a full number, even two if the incoming link is from a PageRank 10, and there is no doubt it is good for search engine rankings.

The problem with PageRank being displayed in a little green bar is that it is very hard to really gauge how valuable a ranking is. The Google PageRank technology is complex containing many variables, some of which I mentioned above, and to interpret a number from 0-10, especially when only Google really knows how it works, is difficult. Worse still, the visible representation, the green bar that the public can see, only changes on a quarterly basis, while the real PageRank of a page changes on a daily basis. Most of the time you are looking at a very outdated ranking value.

PageRank paranoia is an issue that every webmaster may fall victim to. There are rumours that Google will be changing the PageRank system because they are not happy with how it is being manipulated and interpreted. As a rule of thumb, watch the green bar with interest but don’t take it too seriously or spend too much time trying to force it to increase (staring and yelling at it will do you no good, trust me on that one).

The Randomness Of PageRank

Search engine optimization experts actively track PageRank and investigate things like page backlinks to try and work out what the top search engine ranked sites are doing right so they can replicate and then surpass them in the rankings. This is a very good strategy for any person running a web business looking to improve their search ranking. There is no need to reinvent the wheel - copy what works and do it slightly better than the competition.

This is all good in theory, but unfortunately there is a good amount of randomness in PageRank and search engine results. Google of course would argue that it’s not randomness and their PageRank system is merely using algorithms that we don’t understand, and no doubt that is true, but for the human webmaster trying to get traffic, PageRank and Google can be baffling sometimes.

There are instances of high PageRanked sites having little to no backlinks. Given that incoming links are one of the most important variables used in PageRank calculations you have to scratch your head and wonder how a site with no links could have a big green bar. Google’s own backlink lookup tool (see this article - Beginners Guide To Backlinks - for details) is another phenomenon that search engine experts often choose to ignore rather than try and evaluate.

Thankfully the randomness of PageRank can result in positive outcomes as well, with your sites jumping high into search results in places where you wouldn’t expect it. The only consistency is randomness but there is logic that can be followed and smart search engine optimization practices that when implemented well will work. Just don’t expect it to work precisely how or when you want it to.

What You Should Know And Do About PageRank

This advice I offer from experience as an avid PageRank chaser and search engine optimizer. The key to gaining PageRank is to ignore it and focus on the variables that control it.

Having people link to your site has always been a good thing and PageRank was in fact a result of this. Don’t get confused with the order of things, first came the Internet and links and then came PageRank. Focus on amassing quality incoming links from quality sites relevant to your site. This practice will naturally improve your PageRank and also increase the amount of visitors coming to your site. Don’t get bogged down chasing links from only high PageRank sites or waste energy adding links from just any site willing to link to you. Do things naturally and your site will grow naturally.

Learn about the importance of keywords. My SEO articles will help you with this. Keywords play a crucial role in bringing the right type of traffic to your site but you should never spend half an hour in front of a computer trying to come up with the perfect title for your article. Name your content logically and think about what search words your audience would use to find your article and you can very quickly and easily develop good keywords without spending hours and hours tweaking every little phrase and heading. See what your competitors do in regards to keywords if you are completely lost.

If you build a good website with good content, always keep in mind your important keywords and proactively work every day to earn and create new backlinks to your site you will improve your PageRank. The best sites with the highest PageRank never worry about PageRank, they simply keep churning out content that people love to link to. This is a strategy that every webmaster and Internet entrepreneur should emulate for success online.

Yaro Starak
Internet Business Coach

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For the bloggers out there you may have stumbled across what is called a Blog Carnival. A blog carnival is a network tool that aims to create awareness of all the great content created by bloggers. Each week the carnival moves to another blog and it is that blog owner’s job to write the carnival post, which links to all the best content created by other bloggers that week. Bloggers may submit their original content to the carnival to help increase the exposure of their blog. Each carnival is focused on a particular niche and with the carnival concept well developed there is generally a carnival for every topic you might be blogging about.

This is a great networking tool for bloggers. The host of the carnival each week enjoys a nice jump in traffic and backlinks in exchange for their work reviewing and recommending the best articles in the blogosphere for their industry in that week. The article writers (bloggers) gain some additional exposure as the carnival is showcased all around the blogosphere.

As with any concept like this there is a critical mass point before a carnival really takes off. You need to have enough bloggers linking to the carnival host each week, enough bloggers submitting articles and enough blogs signing up to host the carnival in the future (throw a credibility standard and quality benchmark in there too for good measure). The more blogs that support the carnival the greater the traffic to the blogs in the carnival and the more desirable it is to become part of the carnival.

I came across this handy carnival submission form that prompted me to finally submit to some carnivals. I’ve heard good things about two business related carnivals that I thought my content would be appropriate for so I submitted my article, How To Buy A Website And Flip It For Profit, to the Carnival of the Capitalists and the Carnival of Personal Finance.

Along with my article you can find links to other great blogs in this week’s edition of the Carnival of the Capitalists at DrakeView and the Carnival of Personal Finance at Canadian Capitalist.

Marketing Results

For the marketers in attendance I can report back that my participation in the blog carnival did not provide any significance difference in terms of a raw traffic increase beyond what a standard blog backlink would provide. I consider participation in a blog carnival similar to other long term online marketing techniques - rinse and repeat and you will build a reputation and traffic through compound effects.

*Update*

The Carnival of Personal Finance performed better for raw incoming traffic numbers than the Carnival of the Capitalists. I can also report that a few additional backlinks from other bloggers were generated as a result of choosing my article as one of their favourites from the carnival. I should ‘upgrade’ my comments above to state that I think a listing in a blog carnival is like a backlink from a popular blog. The traffic is significant enough to register on the metre and, just like a good blog backlink, may spiral off into more backlinks. So ahh, yeah, it’s a good thing to do folks - get out there and write a good article and take it to the carnival.

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