DaveTheTruth – Where the truth be told!

Now I’d like to start off by saying that I am just as Capitalistic, Opportunistic, or whatever, as the next American, but I’ve gone through this moral quandary in the past, and this whole death of Michael Jackson has made me wonder if business has a different moral code then one would think?

When Anna Nicole died I was brokering domain name sales and was very active in the domain marketplace. All of the sudden places like ebay were flooded with hundreds of lame domains for ridiculous prices. I thought this was pretty stupid, but as someone who is always looking for new ways to make money, I did some research and saw that some of the better domains were actually being sold for tens of thousands of dollars.

It was months later that Britney Spears went completely nuts-o and shaved her head. That day I bought every BritneyRIP.com quality domain name I could think of from GoDaddy. I was essentially banking on the idea that Britney was on the verge of killing herself one way or another. Then nothing happened (as you know). The longer I owned the domains, the worse I felt about it, and even as I saw Britney continue to decline, I really just felt like I was bringing bad karma on myself with this whole scheme.

Michael Jackson Domains

So I threw the domains up on eBay and didn’t get any bites at all, decided to cancel them out of my account and let them expire. Fast forward a few years to the death of Michael Jackson and you’ll see a public grabfest of people trying to make money off the pop star’s death. It’s ten times bigger than any Superbowl, with players like MTV, ABC, NBC and every other major network, who profited from boosting their ratings in the middle of the day for the “Memorial Service” at the Staples Center that had a BILLION people watching it; to the little guys consisting of thousands of sleazy “Internet Marketers”  trying to sell Michael Jackson ringtones on twitter, or better yet, horrible domains for ten-thousand-times what they’re actually worth (THEMICHAELKINGOFPOPJACKSON.COM for $500k, what are you HIGH??? hahaha). This got me to thinking, “am I getting soft?”, “why didn’t I buy some domains?”, “is this immoral?”

The ultimate question is “is it immoral to profit on someone elses death?” And the easy answer is “No”. There are whole industries based on people dying from the car manufacturers of hearses, to mortuaries and even cemeteries and gravediggers. So the short, logical answer to the question is a definite “no”, but is it immoral to either bet on someone dying like they do with the Celebrity Death Pools? Or is it immoral for one person’s first reaction to the news of someone famous dying, to find a way to profit on this death immediately?

I’m not one to judge, and I do not have the answers but I can tell you that at my age and through my experiences, it’s not MY way of life. I may not have the most money, and may let opportunities pass me by because of what my gut tells me, but at least I have no regrets and can sleep knowing that I have done nothing to adversely affect any one or their families.

What is your take on this logic? How do you feel about profiting on someone’s death? I’d love to hear your comments.

I’ve seen a lot of confusion over this topic recently, and honestly I didn’t even know you could put a nofollow in a meta tag until recently, because I’ve always just put the rel=”nofollow” directly in the links I wanted to nofollow. I suggest taking this approach 90% of the time because then all you have to do is put the relation in the header or footer file and that’s it. With nofollow’s in the meta tag you are basically telling the Search Engines that they shouldn’t associate your site with this page, or any of the links on this page. The way you do this is you put one of these two tags in the head of your code:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>

Now if you don’t even want the page indexed you put NOINDEX as well as NOFOLLOW, but if you don’t mind the page showing up in the search results, but don’t want the page, or any of the links on the page to use up your “Google Juice” then you put: INDEX, NOFOLLOW.

The truth is that these tags are getting to the point of being obsolete. It used to be very effective to sculpt your Page Rank with the use of the nofollow attribute, but now the algorithms are so advanced with the big three (Bing.com, Yahoo! & Google) that it doesn’t even matter. They’ll figure out what is a good link, what is good content and so on.

I’ve been noticing some much different things regarding nofollow links and links in general just in the past few weeks, and have come to the conclusion that the SE’s don’t need the nofollow anymore when determining your link popularity. You’ve got to figure that nofollow is pretty old at this point, and really is out of date when you think about how Google (especially) works.  I can see the nofollow continuing to be a relevant tool if you’re using it for what it was intended for, (if you are linking to someone else you don’t know or have control of, if you use the nofollow and they turn out to be a spammer, then you won’t be adversely affected because of this link), but from a PR Sculpting or backlinking point-of-view, I see the nofollow is becoming less and less important every day.

The truth of the matter is that the fake, opportunistic and uneducated members of these communities will hopefully be in the minority, which makes it easier to identify the people that REALLY know what they’re talking about. If everyone is a self proclaimed “expert” then it might be hard to determine whose advice you should really follow because it will all sound pretty good. But in the case where there are people with horrible information, they will be outed and flamed as people with inaccurate information. This “outing” will reveal two things very quickly: it will show who knows something well enough to out someone else for their miss-information, and it will also reveal what type of class and tact the one with the true knowledge possesses in case you ever are inclined to do business with or a favor for.

I would typically get frustrated with communities with tons of newbies, people pitching their latest junk and scammers. Now I have seen the light from a great thread at the Warrior Forums (I’m davidthemavin on this forum) which has shown me that these people not only allow me to shine to the community, but to also show me what other people are actually worth my time.

Here are some great places that you can find some other excellent members and information:

Search Engine Land <-I’m Davidthemavin & CommonDavid

SEO Chat Forums<- I’m Davidthemavin & CommonDavid

A lot of people are making a whole lot of money advertising through Pay Per Click marketing. There are some tricks and tips I could give you, but then everything I would be doing would be less effective because everyone would be doing it. Instead of spelling it out for you I’ll point you in the right direction.

Step 1: Research, research, research! Before you do anything you need to research everything; the market, the competition and especially the keywords. Once you get into your research you’ll be able to tell whether or not the market is even worth advertising through PPC marketing. PPC can get very expensive very quick, and there is a steep learning curve if you’ve never done it before. This means you need to really decide beforehand if you should even partake in this form of search engine marketing.

Step 2: Building your campaigns. Now that you have your list of keywords, you need to arrange them into small groups, each with a number of very targeted, keyword rich ads. Each keyword you bid on initially should be an exact keyword, which is in brackets [keyword]. You will need to bid on both the singular and the plural if you bid on the exact term. This will take a lot of time, but when you have all your campaigns aligned, your chances for success will be much greater.

Step 3: Figure out how you’re going to bid. Now that your campaigns are ready to go, you need to figure out how you’re going to bid. There are basically three ways you can choose to bid, I prefer to use the market saturation method for new sites, and the hybrid strategy for established sites:

a. Market saturation / Branding & marketing exposure / PPC Blast – Goal: gain as much market exposure as possible. Increase brand awareness. Get as many visitors, impressions etc. Gather conversion anduser information. Perfect for new, redesigned or reinvented co’s & sites.
Notes: Includes extensive kw research. High bids on all terms. Increases popularity of website immensely. Receive longterm roi of brand awareness & return visitors.

b. Targeted Strategy / Conversion strategy / Roi strategy – Goals: generate the best roi..
Notes: Carefull attention required, constant tweaking & optimizing. Takes about a month of investment before plan becomes effective. Kw’s are highly targeted, so requires smaller ad budget . Requires constant attention and analyzation of kws that convert vs those that don’t . Good for well established sits looking for very targeted traffic. Very specific, longtail kws only. More time into optimizing, less money spent on ads. Once optimized little investment needed in optimizing.

c. Sales cycle strategy / buying cycle strategy / hybrid / three tier strategy-Goals: increase brand awareness while optimizing for conversions.
Notes: three tiered – general, shopping & longtail. Mixed first two strategies.

Step 4: Monitor and optimize. Once your campaign is running you’ll need to continuously monitor and optimize the campaign in order to get the best ROI possible. The best tool for this is the PPC Spy Tool PPC Bully Software. This software is amazing and will help you determine what you need to do to tweak and turn every one of your campaigns profitable.

The truth of Pay Per Click advertising is that depending on the industry, even if you know exactly what you’re doing it is very easy to loose money. The reason for this is because many companies out there who are buying PPC traffic aren’t tracking their progress and profitability, and are running campaigns that just are not profitable. These companies don’t know, or just don’t care that their campaigns are not profitable, but they are spending an exorbitant amount regardless, which drives up the price for YOU. This means that because some “director of marketing” or “Internet Marketing Specialist” doesn’t have a clue as to what they’re doing, it will make it that much harder to run a profitable campaign. As I’m sure you could hypothesize by this point, if you have enough of these people running unprofitable campaigns, it makes it impossible to run a profitable campaign in this market. This happens more often then you’d think.

In order to save yourself money and time the best advice I can give you is to research exactly how to run a profitable campaign through a resource like StomperNet, or HubSpot, or better yet hire professional Internet Marketers to run your campaigns for you!

Another thing that you need to know before you decide to run campaigns in a competitive market is that you may need to budget a number of months (2-5) of PPC investment before your campaign turns profitable. This is because you will be starting from scratch, so you will need to build up return visitors, return customers, Word of mouth affect and even online discussions of your product or service before it will be profitable. In less competitive market, you should be very close to breaking even within a month, and profitable within two months… so be patient and give it some time!

Until next time Good Luck & Happy Marketing!

These types of ads are brand new to the Internet and are pretty interesting and will most likely prove to be effective. It looks like they might be ads for people’s blogs who are digging? Is it an April’s Fool Joke or is it a way of giving back to the community? What do you think?

New Digg Ads

The truth is that this was just a silly April fools joke by the good people at Digg! I will admit they had me going for a minute, but still interesting ads nonetheless.

In order to analyze, research and compose an effective and profitable Online Marketing Plan the first thing you need to do is analyze your site and your site’s statistics:

Analyze – Do you have analytics & statistics set up already? If no – set them up! Does the site get organic traffic from the Search Engines? Are other sites already linking to your site? What kinds of keywords generate traffic for your website? Where / what type of keywords are you not getting traffic from? -> This leads to us to the research.
Research- Extensive research then needs to be done to determine what the competition is doing, what the market contains as far as volume, and of course keyword research. If you don’t already have a site built, then always start with the research phase! You may think that you’ve got a great idea for an e-store and you’ll become a millionaire in a year from selling X Ray Film Online, but the truth of the matter is that only around 18k people search on Google for the number one keyword for this market “X ray film“, which is hardly a millionaire’s market.

Compose- Throughout the first two processes of Analyzing & Researching what you don’t already have data for, you should be documenting your results. Once you have gotten to the composition phase, however, you need to really take all of these findings and compose them into an actionable plan of what exactly you’ll need to do to conquer the market! This phase can take just as long if not longer then the first two phases combined, but if you really take you time and work it out, you can implement a winning strategy, or even hand your report off as a consultant for $XXX,XXX.
Good luck and happy searching!

I’m always finding out about a new feature by Google, GrandCentral that rings all your phones at once with one special number, closed caption features on YouTube, new features in Google Docs etc. Google is quickly becoming the end all be all of the Internet, and this new and impressive list of features goes even further!

Being able to search locally on twitter is a very good tool for not only connecting with people, but also finding users that are looking for your goods/services.
I used to use twitterlocal, but now you are unable to search with this tool. As an alternative you can still use the twitter search: http://search.twitter.com/ by searching for you keyword, and if you want to search for a location simply put this in the search:

keyword near:”los angeles, CA”

Or just use their advanced search for more options: http://search.twitter.com/advanced

There’s a bunch more tricks like this you can do with the twitter search so check it out.

There is also a website Nearby Tweets that you can use, but I’m pretty sure it does the same thing as the twitter search.

Good luck and if you need any help with PR, SEO, SEM or SMM feel free to contact me any time for more tips!

How do Alexa, Compete and Quantcast get their stats? How do they rate each other? Which is the largest? Why do Alexa and Quatcast hide their own stats? Which tool gives the most information?

While I was doing a bit of analytical research I found a bit of interesting information about some of the tools I use on a daily basis. One of my coworkers was asking if there was any way to see how many visitors &/or pageviews a site had, and so I pointed her to the three mega tools that I use to get a rough idea of how much traffic a site gets: Compete.com, Alexa.com and Quantcast.com.

She then asked me how they got these numbers and I told her that Alexa had a toolbar that it used to collect data. Compete asks website owners to put a line of code on their site so that they are then able to map out how much traffic not only that site gets, but also how much traffic and from where visitors are coming and going (EDIT: according to Alexa employee they also get data from purchasing it from ISP providers). This gives Compete a broad view of not only the traffic of the site that installs the code on their site, but also any site or search engine that is linking to or from the “coded” website. Quantcast also has their members put a code on their site, and they call this their “Publisher Network” and tout it as being easy and free (EDIT: according to Alexa employee they also get data from purchasing it from ISP providers).

Now that we all understand how they collect their data, let’s look at how they rate each other (the more interesting part). How would you rate your competition on a public website? I’d probably say I was the best, but in this instance that’s not quite the case.  Quantcast says they’re the biggest and the best, but only by a slim margin. They rank themselves as the 836th most popular site with around 3MM monthly visitors (908MM people worldwide in their network though), while they rank Alexa at a very close 892th!  Compete is ranked way back in 1,689th place by Quantcast. These results are actually probably pretty accurate, but I wonder why Quantcast hides some of their own personal demographics: Geographic, Demographics, Lifestyle? You would think that if you run a company that is based on revealing everyone elses visitor stats, why would you have a problem revealing your own? I think it could just be part of their marketing, but I’m not sure how to reveal all of their stats which seems a bit odd to me?

Quantcast hides their own demographics

Now Compete, they’re a different story. First off they’re trying to sell their more advanced Compete Pro program for an arm and a let. The intro package costs $199 per month, the Standard is $299 per month, and the Advanced is a whopping $499 per month! Not sure why they think they can get people to pay top dollar for something that is free on Alexa and Quantcast, but oh well.

Compete also shows their own stats as much larger then they probably are, but they are trying to sell a subscription service here people. They say that they’re bigger then Alexa, but not quite as big as Quantcast. Actually, they fall right in between the two of them perfectly with Quantcast getting 1.96MM visitors, Compete getting 1.56MM and poor little Alexa only getting a measly 1MM visitors a month.

Compete.com's Vistor Stats

Ahhh Alexa, how are you fairing with the days of the useless toolbars on the brink of extinction? Not well, so bad in fact, that you have Yahoo as the #1 site and Google as the #2 site. Also, they don’t even show ANY of their own statistics. This is ridiculous in my mind, but oh well, times are tough and businesses have to do what they have to do to try to keep their image up, even if it means hiding how badly they’re doing. Alexa does rank Compete 1000 more popular then Quantcast, but with the wimpy Web rankings of 3,012 and 4,729 respectively.

Alexa's Stats

Although these tools are cool, and give you a rough idea of what kind of traffic a site may have, I wouldn’t bet the farm on it and have personally seen statistics off by as much as 100%. They are fun tools though, and maybe one day they’ll all partner up to create the coolest spying stats system ever!

EDIT: An Alexa employee’s comment below:

“I was just poking around and found your posting and I thought I would take a minute to clarify and correct a few points:
1) Quantcast and Compete get their data by buying it from ISPs. Actually, they buy it from the exact same ISP, NetZero if Om Malik is correct. They augment that data with the code snippets. Also, you say that these sites are sometimes off by as much as 100%, but I can tell you that when I look at our traffic the Quantcast and Compete data is off by many times more than that amount.
2) As to why Alexa is not in Alexa’s rankings, it is simply because users of the Alexa Toolbar are MUCH more likely to visit Alexa, and hence our ranking would be artificially inflated and our standard methodology for determining the rankings would not work for us. So we don’t show it. If we begin to show pageview and visitor estimates for other sites we may begin to shoe-horn in our own data as well.
3) As to why Alexa Ranks Yahoo higher than Google, we don’t. Google surpassed Yahoo in January of this year. I suspect you were thinking of Google as the larger of the two because it gets so many more searches. Google won that battle a long time ago. But if you are looking for the site that gets the most visitors and pageviews, Google won that battle only recently. The reason Quantcast and Compete show Google surpassing Yahoo long ago could be because they have US only data for these sites. Alexa has global data.”

—>>> So the Alexa guy is saying of course that Compete & Quantcast have the same exact inaccurate data, they can’t show their own data because it’s not fair because of the toolbar, and Google didn’t get as many visitors as Yahoo until just recently – accounting for Yahoo’s #1 ranking and Google’s #1.

First off, none of the data is accurate… end of story. I personally use the Alexa ranking for a quick refference as to whether a site is huge or not, and that’s it.

If Alexa can’t show their toolbar statistics, then why not just show their REAL statistics from the beginning? What are they scared or think that they have a special code of secrecy?

To say that Google didn’t get as many visitors as Yahoo until just recently is just fabricated. Show me one reputable article, source etc saying that and I’ll show you a liar. How could Yahoo be loosing the search battle with more visitors??? Impossible.

The reason the US is in such a bad place economically has to do with the way that Corporate America has been running. Many Americans including myself are shocked at the level of greed that has washed through Corporate America, breaking the traditional mold of “Let’s all be millionaires” to “Let’s all be billionaires and continue to grow our personal assets while we blatantly waste corporate money on ridiculous objects while we continue to take advantage of the lower and middle class.”

Bailout Burning Money

Obama has made it clear that this will not stand, and has just put a half a million dollar pay cap on all executives that are working for a company that is receiving government bailout money. This is a great start, but this is just not going to stop. I cannot see a solution short of nationalizing these institutions working as the greed is so deep in this sub-society’s being that they just don’t get it. After spending millions and millions on new private jets, parties and other extravagances that should’ve been canned and sold long ago the richest of the rich have this to say “We didn’t use the taxpayers dollars to buy that stuff”.

Are you kidding me? It’s all taxpayer dollars as far as I’m concerned! What a ridiculous way to think, that because you didn’t take the money from one account and WASTE IT, it doesn’t directly impact the money from another account that was funded by the taxpayers.

I for one say hang them all out to dry, bring them all up on charges, seize their personal assets and take away their pets. Okay, maybe all that is a little extreeme, but isn’t there more we can do to analyze their wealth and see what could have been done illegally or recklessly so we can put more of the actual companies’ capital back into these businesses without using tax dollars?

Update: 2/4/09- Now Goldman Sachs CFO is crying about the strings that are attached to this taxpayer money. What arrogance! http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090204/bs_nm/us_goldmansachs_cfo_1