knofun

So recently I have been really into promoting eBay’s program and having a lot of fun. We have created a bunch of niche sites and use eBay’s api to get listings. Funny thing happened though, I really started to get addicted to some of these sites. My Dad has always been into real estate and would always point out cool buildings and why they would or wouldn’t be a good investment, so even though I can’t buy any of them at the moment I find myself clicking and clicking on the Commercial Property listings on Property for Pennies. So much cool stuff out there.

Another thing my Dad was always into is classic cars. We originally made Carsforagrand.com for people that need cheap transportation, but the thing that keeps me clicking is the cheap classic cadillacs, Chevys, and Fords. Just old cars that people have had sitting on their property god-knows-where that are cool to look at.

play, ventures, web marketing cheap cars, ebay

I’ve been seeing more and more of this so I thought I would chip in my 2 cents. There is a company out there called “build a niche store” or BANS. (No that’s not an affiliate link) They produce software that allows someone with little or no web experience to set up their own “niche store” using eBay’s affiliate program. Now, this in itself is not a bad idea. If you read my blog, you know I have several of these sites and push the ebay program in general. But the fact that it’s such a great program and so many people have done well off of it makes it easy to entice and exploit people trying to make a buck. Which I also don’t have a problem with, what’s that saying, “there’s one born every minute?”

Problem is, all these sites look like shit. I’m sure the owners are making some money, but come on. Take the site that inspired this post, Modified Car Auctions UK. Nice niche, nice idea, HORRIBLE site. These guys need to go pick up a php book and go visit the ebay developers site and save themselves some money and us some sore eyes.

Update: Ok, time for a little egg on the face. The site I used as my example above is in fact *NOT* a BANS site. Nevertheless, my point never was that BANS is a bad site or that the people that produce it are scamming people. My point is please don’t litter the web with MFA or in this case MFeB crap. Take your time, do it right, and make a ton of money.

ventures, web marketing bans, ebay

Wow so after I got all excited copying Shoemoney’s Below a Buck idea, it looks like he is making so little from that site he doesn’t even care if it’s up anymore. A quick visit to the site shows an error:


Warning: connect() [function.connect]: Can’t connect to 127.0.0.1:11211, Unknown error (0) in /home/websites/belowabuck/html/config.inc on line 15
Could not connect


Looks like their memcached server is down or something… oh well. We are doing well with CarsForaGrand!!

Update: It’s back up. Maybe they are making money after all?

web marketing below a buck, ebay, shoemoney

I have been using StumbleUpon’s Paid Ads for a few weeks now, and have some feedback.

Biggest thing: Budgets
Right now you can set a daily budget for all your ads, which seems cool but is really ineffective. This is compounded by some of the problems below and I will get into those. Yes I know you can in theory control this by using the # of visitors per campaign option, but is still not as effective as saying “spend $100 on this campaign per day.” This allows us to more accurately measure ROI using the SU program.

Setup vs options
When you set up a new campaign, you can only set destination url and one category. Once your campaign gets approved you can go in and add some paramaters like Country / State / City targeting and gender / age range of visitor. Cool, but why can’t I do that on setup? Also being able to select one category is really limiting. Why can’t I say show this page to people that have these 3 categories but NOT this one or show it to anyone who has any of these 3 categories? Seems pretty simple.

Let me know!
You have my email address, use it! Because of the manual approval process (which I understand completely, you don’t want spam/pr0n sites whatever), we have no idea when our campaigns go live. So you end up with a situation like I had this morning, where I had an old campaign in there that had run out of $$$ so wasn’t running. I added some new campaigns and then added some $$$ for them and went to sleep. When I checked them this afternoon the old campaign had resumed and sucked up most of my daily budget. So yeah its my bad for not pausing it, but at least let me know when campaigns are approved and start getting traffic. Also if I had a daily budget per campaign, this could be avoided.

Basically, I love SU’s ads program, $0.05 per semi-targeted visitor is cheap, and SU traffic is generally pretty good. I always average over 2 pageviews per user and under a 30% bounce rate. Pretty good no matter what your content is.

geek stuff, stumble, ventures, web marketing marketing, stumble, stumble upon, traffic

I used to read Jason’s blog all the time. Nowadays I can just get a pulse of what the hotbutton issues are for the day, and visualize what his blog looks like. Link to Mahalo SERP page for this, link to Mahalo SERP page for that.

Right now Jason has 15 articles on the front page of his PR7 blog, calacanis.com. Of those 7 promote the idea of “human search” or link directly to Mahalo. 5 of these exist for no reason other than to link to a Mahalo SERP. Of the remaining posts, 2 are devoted to Jason declaring his “a-list blogger” status and getting his laptop speakers replaced, 1 is promoting his facebook group, 1 is talking about what other people are saying about him, 1 is an insightful post about Google removing paid links and what he would have done about the situation if he were still running Weblogs (interestingly enough he also says all the cross linking on Weblogs blogs was not for SEO), 1 is linking up Brian Alvey’s new comic book site, 1 is a review of smartlinks (talking about how they link to mahalo), and the last is a youtube video of a little kid rapping.

The posts I take issue with are the Mahalo SERPS, I know he is just promoting his new company but it feels a lot like linking strictly for Google’s benefit. I know tons of people read his blog, so I don’t have a problem with his self pronounced ‘a-list blogger’ status, I am glad he is getting replacement speakers and as a leader of a tech company it is important to know what people are saying about you. Funny stuff and linking to your friends is all good too.

I really was into Jason’s blog when he was promoting Weblogs, and in retrospect I guess he hasn’t really changed the blog that much, he has just started a new company I’m not all that interested in. In past days all those links to Mahalo would have been talking about handling his staff of writers, tech problems related to publishing, content on his network, stuff that I am into. Now its all human powered search and I’m sick of it. I know you need PR7 inbound links to drive free traffic to your serps by getting them in google’s serps, but come on! At least if you are going to give yourself all those inbound links take off the “nofollow” on Mahalo’s outbounds!

My 2 cents.

Oh yeah, and when was the last time he mentioned the Knicks?? Just kidding, I know that was a low blow.

geek stuff, web marketing calacanis, mahalo

So for the last three days Google Adsense has not been reporting properly. I guess I am spoiled by the big G always being so on point, so I am a little confused by this one. The situation is when you login to your normal Adsense control panel you are presented with an overall view of that day’s earnings and you can hit a dropdown for detailed stats by channel. Every Adsense publisher I know uses channels to optimize and track their ads, this is a heavily used feature of the program. To have it not working is disheartening to say the least.

I understand that every website / program has problems from time to time, but usually Goog will let us know on the Adsense Blog or something. Jensense hasn’t even posted anything, and she is usually on every little rumor. The only peep from Google has been users posting Adsense support responses on DigitalPoint:

Hi,

Thanks for your email. There appears to be an issue with channels not
properly tracking data, rest assured your aggregate data is registering
all impressions and clicks.

I’ve escalated your issue to one of our tech specialists. We’ll get back
to you shortly. I appreciate your patience.

Sincerely,

Sean
The Google AdSense Team

My guess? The last post on the Official Adsense Blog is about being able to manage your ad units from your control panel as opposed to modifying the code on your pages. This probably involves you being able to change things by ad unit and channel, and somewhere in there they had a bug in the reporting code. But come on Goog, let us know!!!

update: Seems to be working better but still showing a disparity between aggregate stats and channel stats. Google Groups has some more info as well.

geek stuff, web marketing adsense, google

Just launched a new site that finds you cars for $1,000 or less, all makes and models. Good for collectors looking for restoration projects, or for someone who needs some inexpensive transportation.

CarsForAGrand.com

Check it out, comment here. Thanks!

Yes, I got the idea from Shoemoney and his Below a Buck site, but he lags. Took him 2 1/2 weeks, took us a day. Just kidding, I love shoe and his blog is an inspiration. Remember Shoe, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!!!

ventures, web marketing cheap cars, ebay

A few weeks ago, I was shocked to find Zeropaid.com had been banned from Digg for “spam.” I don’t have the exact quote for reference here, but I recall it being something like “This domain has been widely reported for spamming the digg community.”

Let me explain a little bit about our news and how we promote stories on Digg and elsewhere. We employ an editor and staff of talented and dedicated writers to generate our exclusive technology news. We are included in Google news and have been linked to from such illustrious sources as WSJ, MSNBC, Wired and more. Naturally we want to give that news as large an audience as possible, and getting a front page Digg is something highly prized by the writers on our staff, kind of a badge of honor or at the very least recognition that others value their work. So we submit our most worthy stories to digg, and a couple of our staffers will digg it. We do not have any duplicate accounts or an army of diggers. We do add digg badges to the stories we submit so our readers can interact and cast their vote if so they choose.

So shocked as I was (and frankly a little hurt : - ) about Zeropaid being branded as “spam,” I wasn’t too worried. After all, we don’t spam and Digg is one of the good guys right? This was just a case of our competition falsely reporting us right? Sure enough, I think our editor sent an email and *poof* we were unbanned. Cool, right? Wrooooooong!

After being reinstated, we have submitted a few stories to the normal digg reaction, everything going good up until about 30 diggs, and then wham we get buried. I shurgged it off and told the guys to try harder. I did do some research, and found that some people were complaining about being buried after being unbanned. Hmm maybe there is more to this.

Come yesterday, our editor Jared posted a great article on P2P in China. We submitted it to digg last night and crossed our fingers. Sure enough, BURIED after 30 or so diggs. See for yourself:

http://digg.com/tech_news/China_Taking_P2P_to_the_Next_Level

We DID however get a full mention and link on TechCrunch which was cool. I was bummed about the burying but still wasn’t ready to complain. But then I saw the TechCrunch article get submitted and eventually make it to the homepage. Enough is enough, I say!

When you submit an article on Digg, the second of four rules is:

Link Directly to the Source: Save people time by linking directly to the original news story.

Kevin Rose had a dream of Digg, and this is not it! This is not it! (sorry for my lame Gladiator reference) It’s not fair that another author gets the credit when my editor was the guy busting his ass, and it’s not fair that another site gets the revenue boost and link love of a front page digg. We didn’t break the rules, but we sure got hosed. Notwithstanding the cool backlink from TechCrunch, thanks guys.

Oh well we will continue to do what we do and produce great original technology news regardless of Digg, but nevertheless I feel it is their responsibility to address these issues. Yes they need to police the community to combat the ever rising tide of spammers, but doing what they are doing now is like tapping everyone’s cellphone to catch Osama.

digg, geek stuff, web marketing digg, techcrunch

Wow. Someone write this down as a historical day for internet marketing. Oh wait, I am. Let me preface this by saying I use StumbleUpon a lot. I am an avid Stumbler and Stumble Marketer, and I participate in a lot of group Stumble marketing so when I find a new technique that seems intruiging, I pay attention.

So to the good stuff. I fired up Firefox (yeah i meant to say that) this morning and had a wierd red 1 by the stumble button. Curious of course, I moused over it and it said I had a “site waiting for me.” Wow, I’ve been working in web development for 9 years and I’ve never had a “site waiting for me.” Naturally, I was excited. I clicked, and got a message from a SU user drcoolj telling me about a house for rent in Canada. I am friends with drcoolj so I am sure we have done some SU exchanges in the past, but this is a whole new level of SU marketing.

I did some investigation (clicked one button on the toolbar) and found that he accomplished this through the “sent to” functionality of SU. Currently there is no way (that I saw, am I wrong?) to send a page to all your friends at once, but even with a rapid fire cut and paste recommendation it seems pretty effective. Nice idea drcoolj, especially for something like a rental ad.. immediate google love!

geek stuff, stumble, web marketing seo, stumble, stumble upon

So I was stumbling along when I was supposed to be working as usual when I stumbled on this article about getting stumbled. Whatever, I give a lot of seo/webmaster/affiliate stuff the thumbs up so that makes sense. But wait! I stumbled back into my memory (yeah I know, but its funny to me) and remembered this SU vs fark shoemoney article that I stumbled on a few days ago. Must have worked well for shoe cuz he followed it up with the oh-so-classic digg vs SU post the next day. Seems to me that Stumblers like stumbling on stories about StumbleUpon!

Zeropaid gets a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon, and we are featured on the front page of digg about once a week on average. Here are the main differences between Digg traffic and SU traffic:

• I get about 3 times as many visitors from digg as I do from SU
• Digg users have a bounce rate of 90.27% and SU users have a bounce rate of 31.69%
• Digg users spend an average of 28 seconds on the site (we are a tech news site, I’m guessing all they need is the first paragraph?), and SU users spend on average 5 times that
• Neither of them are all that good for making adsense revenue

The lion’s share of Google Adsense clicks come from visitors that get to our site from…. Google Search. This is the real beauty of SEO, the holy grail of leisure income: get users from Google, send them out through Google and every once in a while check your bank account. Great in theory, but harder than it sounds. So why bother with Digg or SU? Well, I like traffic. All kinds of traffic, I don’t discriminate!

Real reason? People blog. And link. And what do they blog and link? The things they see every day, on their favorite news site or through their favorite website discovery toolbar. So get stumbling!

geek stuff, ventures, web marketing