An Open Letter to Tribal Fusion

May 2nd, 2007 by Chris

There is a saying in business, the pigs get fat, the hogs get slaughtered. Meaning if you’re too greedy you get bloated and you die.

With the introduction of Tribal Fusion Direct you have become a hog and your core business is suffering because of it. No longer are you the high paying niche CPM network every publisher wants to join, instead you are seen as a clumsy network that has fallen in many cases to a second tier remnant provider.

Almost all your problems hinge around Tribal Fusion Direct. You do not allow publishers to opt out of it, or serve it from a separate ad code, as you should. Instead, to serve your good ads, we have to serve these crappy low paying ads as well. You allow us to set a pricing floor, but we cannot set it any higher than $0.60, and it is global for all media units, so we have the same pricing floor for popunders as well as banners.

Perhaps your focus on these high volume, low rate, low quality ads has drawn attention away from your core business of niche targeted advertisements and thus are the cause of the decline in those ads as well, perhaps the decline is unrelated, but the fact that your core ads have declined isn’t helping your position much either.

Last month my take-home revenue (after your commission) from you was just over $1 CPM for popunders. So far this month its only around $0.60 CPM. That is ridiculous. In looking at my ad selection I see lots of popunders available at rates of $10 CPM or more, but I also see many Tribal Fusion Direct popunders whose rates are NOT published (why not more transparency here?) and I know in any case that you’re undoubtedly serving some of those that are paying less than a $1, but I cannot raise my pricing floor on popunders to a level that I would find acceptable.

Both Value Click Media and Casale Media blow your average popunder rate out of the water. True, your market popunders are far superior, neither of those two places can compete with rates like $10 CPM, but your TFD rates are like an anchor weighing down your average to a horrible degree and until you let publishers turn TFD off, the average is what really counts.

Of course your overall interface needs work too. How old is it now exactly? Key of this is your default management. Why should defaults need to expire every year and be updated? I have never seen another ad network do that. Also, nearly every other ad network now has easy support for floating defaults, you need to add this as well.

One solution to all of this for publishers is just to ban, by domain, all of your TFD advertisements. If you allowed us to serve TFD advertisements through a different ad code, or allowed us to set pricing floors in our ad codes, most of us would be more than happy to run the TFD ads, but when you force us to accept them all wholesale if we want to run the market ads, we’ll either have to drop you lower in our chain, or ban all of the TFD ads and not run them, at all. Either way, you’re losing revenue.

After years of being my primary provider, you’ve now been relegated to second tier for banners and third tier for popunders. Things are not looking good for you.

You need to give publishers more control over the ads. You need to update your backend. You need to allow us to create separate ad codes for Market & Direct type ads, or to set pricing floors with each adcode, not with each site as a whole. You need to allow floating defaults, remove the default expiration, and make the whole system easier to setup.

Posted in: Ad Networks by: Chris | 8 Comments »

Why Don’t You Have an Ecommerce Site?

May 1st, 2007 by Chris

Ecommerce is solidly about half my business. Right now I have big projects in the works on both the ecommerce and publishing sides, and the success of those projects could tip the scales further, but right now it is around 50/50.

I’m speaking of profit, in total revenue ecommerce wins by a long shot thanks to the cost of goods sold. This actually has hidden benefits. Putting hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on a business credit card gets you all sorts of points or miles. I am spending 400,000 of my said miles, earned entirely from my business credit card, to fly my wife and myself to Rome, first class, in June. I’ve flown to Europe, and to Africa, and long flights in coach make my considerably long legs hurt. I’ve never quite been so happy to have so many necessary business expenditures.

That is just icing on the cake though, the really impressive thing about ecommerce is how immensely profitable it can be. So why don’t more people, like you, do it?

There is a larger barrier of entry certainly than just starting a content site. You need inventory, and that can require business credit. You need to form a business entity and setup for state sales tax withholding (at least here in the US, though I’m sure other countries have similar systems). You’ll need a merchant account, and while the hoops to get one of those are few, there are hoops you have to jump through. Additionally most of these things are out of reach for minors, and many publishers do start publishing when they’re underage.

Then there is finding a product. I recently discussed how many wannabe publishers fall into a trap of playing copycat and not doing anything original. This is even more important to avoid with ecommerce. You absolutely need to find as unique a product as you can, or else price competition from large stores, ebay, and the like will eat away at your profits.

So lets review, again, Chris’s criteria for ecommerce product selection:

1. If Wal-Mart sells it, you shouldn’t. It is far too commonly found and you won’t be able to compete on price.
2. It should be expensive enough that the shipping fee isn’t a large portion of the item cost. No one wants to pay $10 to ship a $10 item, but $10 to ship a $200 item, no problem. It’s a mental thing.
3. It should be expensive enough, with good enough profit margins, that you do not need huge numbers of sales to have a profitable site. I like to aim for at least $40 in profit per sale.
4. It should be expensive enough that people will look online for the best deal.
5. It should be durable and simple. No electronics, nothing complex. You’ll blow all your profit dealing with customer support, returns, warranties, etc.
6. Storage is a consideration, but we all have different limits. If you have an apartment, find something small, a house, something bigger. An old barn? Sell something really big. Of course, if you find a good reliable drop shipper you do not need to worry about storage.

I know I’ve mentioned these points many different times, but they bear repeating. Follow this formula and ecommerce success can fall into your lap.

So, how do you start out finding such items? Well, if you can manufacture it yourself you’re best off, that way you know no one out there has exactly the same thing and you can price it however you need to. However this can (although not always) cost a good deal of money. I am starting to have my own designs manufactured and it is going to cost me nearly $200k probably to bring the first item to market.

One step down from manufacturing is importing. You buy a large lot of goods from an overseas factory of wholesaler. For instance, a container of African wood carvings from a wholesaler in Tanzania, a container of dolls from a factory in China, or a container of home décor items from a manufacturer in India, you import this, and then sell it. The main cost here is the huge lot size, you’ll have to buy a large amount of inventory up front, but the benefit is you get it from a lower price than going through a domestic distributor. You’ll also have to pay for shipping and customs duties. This can be a headache of paperwork for neophytes, I know it was for me.

If you can’t make it yourself, and don’t feel up for importing, look local. If you can find a small local manufacturer, or even a craftsperson, you can often get a good deal on the item, you will have quick access to their inventory, and you won’t pay much if anything on shipping from the manufacturer to you.

If there are no good products produced locally, put your thinking cap on. Try to think of what you want to sell. The obvious choice is something related to your current sites, assuming you have them, so that you can cross promote. Keep my guidelines mentioned above in mind. Once you have an idea, search the Internet for it. Check for retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers. How much does it typically sell for on eBay? Are lots of people selling it? Could you beat them in the search engines? If you cannot figure out who makes a product, buy it and look on the packaging.

The payoff for an ecommerce site can be huge. My newest site is making an eCPM of around $1000, albeit on very very low traffic. I’m sure the traffic will increase eventually, and even if it doesn’t, at the current rate alone it’ll earn in profit $5k-$10k per year, with me only spending 5-10 hours of further work in total for all the orders that make up that amount.

I really think any website publisher who doesn’t at least try to get into ecommerce is really doing themselves a disservice. There is no greater partnership than that between a content site and an ecommerce site. Ecommerce sites can also be less dependent on high volume traffic (ie good search rankings) for profitability, and so can be more stable in terms of revenue.

If you need any help vetting your ecommerce ideas, be sure to post in the forums.

Posted in: Ecommerce by: Chris | 2 Comments »

Basic foundation for all sites

April 28th, 2007 by Shawn

There’s a basic foundation, or recipe if you will, for all new content sites that I produce. Each item in the foundation serves it’s purpose for generating traffic, retaining visitors, and/or monetizing the site. In no particular order:

Related articles
This is generally the base of any site. It’s debatable how many articles you should start a new site with, but a dozen is a solid amount. It’s more important to regularly add new articles then it is to start with 50 and to never add anymore again.

Articles have many benefits, such as displaying your knowledge/credibility in a field, increasing the time a visitor stays on your site, and making your site larger. While articles do bring you more search engine traffic, more and more content sites are produced everyday — being found for terms in your “How to buy a television” will get increasingly harder over time.

Directory of related businesses and sites
You can either purchase a business directory from a private seller (DigitalPoint is good) or find a reliable website that sells them. I love directories because of the long tail keyword searches that they generate in the thousands. For a real life example, a site of mine has been found for the terms “bennetts used cars denton tx” and “used cars in houston 77016.” These kind of terms are the majority of my traffic.

With a few bought or bartered links, your directory will start getting indexed and will bring you traffic within a week. You should have links that point to different city/state pages in your directory, due to the amount of pages that your database will produce. To expedite crawling and indexing, buy a few links.

While directories can generate a lot of traffic, they can also generate residual income. Directories have a lot in common with the phone book. You have two kinds of listings — basic and purchased. Purchased listings are in the yellow book, bold, large, and standout from the rest. Taking into consideration that most directories have thousands of business listings, it’s important to have a system like this setup so that advertisers can purchase an upgraded listing that gives them more exposure.

Service or Tool
This is something that helps users or visitors accomplish a task. A service or tool brings you recurring visitors and generates traffic for you virally, making your site less dependent on search engines. A perfect example of this would be Universal Wedding Registry — it’s marketed “by the people” and it keeps visitors coming back to the site without relying on the all-mighty aglorithm of Google.

More common, less unique examples of a service or tool would be a mortgage calculator or a budget worksheet.

Community/Visitor Interaction
Your site needs to have a community feeling. While you may not want to deal with the hassles of a forum (early promotion, moderating, etc), you need a way for visitors to interact. A blog or mailing list are simple options. Another idea I use sometimes would be to enable people to write reviews on the business listings in your directory. Much like a forum though, that requires moderation due to potentially libel or slanderous comments.

In addition to having a community feeling, setting up a point of interaction usually provides you with the contact information of your users. With their permission, this is data that you can store and use at a later point for marketing purposes (specials/coupons to affiliates, ads in newsletters, etc).

What to feature?
With so many major parts to a site, it becomes hard to decide what to market to your visitors — meaning, the action that you want your visitors to take. Made for Adsense (MFA) sites push AdSense, obviously, hence the name — your site should have a simple, straightforward objective as well.

Do you want to push your directory and try to get advertisers? Want to market your forum? Trying to get a big newsletter base? Just want people to click on ads? It’s up to you — there’s no right or wrong. For example, every section/article of WebsitePublisher pushes ads (3) on them. At the top, middle, and bottom of every article you can find a banner, usually AdSense. With it’s current setup, first time visitors that land on these pages through the search engines arrive, read, then click the banner never to return again. If I were Chris, I’d push the forum’s recent posts in the middle banner space — it would allow me to generate some revenue from the article, while retaining some visitors for the community.

Of course, it’s current setup is fine too. While my suggestion can potentially make the community larger, it’s current setup maximizes revenue and gives Chris a bigger check in the mailbox each month.

Does your site consist of some cheap articles and some ads — or is your foundation strong?

Posted in: Website Management by: Shawn | No Comments »

Perception IS Reality

April 13th, 2007 by Chris

In this blog post I kinda touched on this topic, but I have a better example for you now.

My gardening blog (recognize the design) isn’t large, isn’t popular, and isn’t anything special. Around 16 months old I’ve got less than 40 posts in total. Although, I am starting to post more. I’ve been gathering pictures & materials in that time and had it redesigned, expanded with a forum, etc. Now though, its all ready and all I need to do is write.

Anyways, a combination of my wicked SEO skills, or maybe the SEO fundamentals of a good keyword rich domain, using your site keywords in your title, and getting incoming links to use those same keywords in the anchor text, have resulted in me having the #1 position on Google for “gardening blog” and a host of other related “blog” keywords.

Other than webmasters of other blogs looking for places to exchange links with, who would ever search on those keywords? Well, apparently a whole lot of marketers & PR (Public Relations, not PageRank) types. More and more people are recognizing the marketing arena that is the blogosphere and they are trying to get word of their products or services out there by reaching out to bloggers for links & mentions.

So, I’m getting a decent amount of traffic on that keyword and a good deal of emails from people asking to interview me, or mention their product. The one today was someone from Martha Stewart Omnimedia, so they’re not just small companies.

These people do not know how small my blog really is, all they know is that I’m ranked #1 when they search for “gardening blogs” to market to and so they think my blog is the most influential.

So, a lesson to be learned from this is that preception is reality. On the Internet know one knows you’re sitting in your home office in your pajamas. Act bigger than you are, and people will believe the perception. Obviously #1 search engine rankings help, but also having a well made professional and modern design. Including corporate standbys like privacy policies or terms of use. Then of course, having tasteful advertising. Sites without ads are more often seen as small hobby sites, and sites with annoying ads are more often seen as shady little companies. You should also brag about your content as much as possible.

Now I just need the free samples to start rolling in.

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization, Website Management, Website Promotion by: Chris | 2 Comments »

A Death Knell for Bad MFA Sites

April 11th, 2007 by Chris

Really bad MFA (made-for-adsense sites) with little to no content, stolen content, or illegal content routinely trick users into clicking ads or otherwise break Google’s terms, and yet still they proliferate.

Well a recent Adwords change now allows advertisers to see traffic, ctr, and conversions for specific domains in Google’s content network (adsense), thus allowing them to weed out poor performing sites. (screenshot)

This could be both good, and bad, for publishers. It is bad for you if you’re one of the aforementioned sites and are likely to be dropped by advertisers. It is good if you’re a quality site that delivers good traffic and may qualify for higher CPC rates. Afterall, if advertisers can weed out the poor converters they will be more willing to pay more for content network clicks.

Forum discussion here.

Posted in: Ad Networks by: Chris | 5 Comments »

New Google Sitemaps Developments

April 11th, 2007 by Chris

Well, I suppose it is no longer “Google” sitemaps. While Google pioneered the protocol it has been adopted by the other major search engines as well.

Just announced is the ability to finally allow search engines to auto-discover your sitemaps, ie you don’t have to submit it to them, just place a line in your robots.txt file like so:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Also news is that Ask.com joins the other search engines using Sitemaps.

For more on Sitemaps try the official site Sitemaps.org, Google Webmaster Central, or this older post.

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization by: Chris | 1 Comment »

AdBrite Having Problems

April 11th, 2007 by Chris

One of the perpetual risks you will run into when using smaller ad networks is that they are more prone to infiltration by spyware/trojan/virus drive-by-download advertisers. You may think this has to do with their lack of ability to filter such crap out. In reality though I think it has to do with their willingness to moreso look the other way, if they had people manually approving ads and working with advertisers this wouldn’t happen.

On my one site that uses Adbrite I’ve had numerous people, mostly UK residents, end up with these problems, although I myself had my anti-virus filter triggered once. This has been going on for weeks.

I’ve gotten one response from them about it:

We apologize for the ongoing perpetuation of unauthorized advertisements, such as drivecleaner.com, systemdoctor.com, or errorsafe.com in our network. We would like to notify you that in order to achieve a thorough and lasting resolution to this issue we have tightened restrictions around the submission of ad copy, begun scanning all advertisements for potential abuse, and forged partnerships with established anti-spyware and internet security companies to ensure detection and removal of these ads. Locating offending advertisers unfortunately continues to pose several difficulties. To that extent, if you are still experiencing problems with any advertisements that you believe to be abusing our network, we would appreciate any information you could provide about these ads, particularly the following:

But that was last week and this week its worse than ever.

If you use Adbrite check your site out, and you might want to suspend the ad serving until they get this fixed.

Posted in: Ad Networks by: Chris | 11 Comments »

Adsense Changes

April 5th, 2007 by Chris

For the first time since it’s launch in late June of 2003, Adsense has changed the base format of their design. They’ve removed the border between ads as well as lessening the overall outer border. Apparently they’ve tested this format to a great degree and found it performs better. One can hope.

The other thing is they’ve opened up two additional formats, 250×250 & 336×80, to image ads. This is certainly a good thing as more ads generally means more money, and those two formats in particular are very popular for many publishers, including me.

Posted in: Ad Networks by: Chris | 1 Comment »

Is SEO Science or Marketing?

April 4th, 2007 by Chris

More or less everyone who practices SEO today used to do something else. Maybe they went from programming to SEO, design to SEO, marketing to SEO, business to SEO, or some other shift. It is simply too new of a field for someone to just start with it. It may be the previous life experience prepared, or failed to prepare, an individual for this field. It may be the previous life experience biased on individual one way or another. How you see this happening will probably mostly depend on if you view SEO as science or marketing.

Personally, my previous job was doing research in a genetic engineering lab at a university campus. I was dual majoring in computer science & genetics and got a dual-job doing research and working on a website for the lab’s genomic database. So I am very much a man of science, of critical thinking, and logical reasoning. I believe SEO is a science.

One of the problems though is that obviously many people do not feel the same way. I don’t know the background of everyone who professes to be an SEO expert, but I’m sure many moved from non-technical or unscientific fields. So, if SEO is science, then you have people untrained in scientific principles & methods making observations and reporting their conclusions as facts. Is it any wonder you get so much misinformation out there?

An easy example I want to use is one used in one of my earliest college level science classes (I do not remember which). A researcher made a study that showed a direct relationship between quality of home appliances and intelligence in children. The researched concluded that newer or more expensive home appliances must therefore have an affect on intelligence. To go back even further I recall in high school being presented with the statement “Dog eats meat, man eats meat, man must be a dog.” Both examples show how logical reasoning can break down by attributing coincidence as causation.

In the case of the appliances, the truth is wealthier families tend to both have more highly educated parents and nicer appliances. Higher educated parents also tend to have more intelligent children. That the appliances had a direct affect on intelligence was a faulty conclusion to make.

To show a more relevant example; there are those out there who believe that domain age is an important factor for SEO because they have seen a correlation showing older sites ranking well. In actuality older sites tend to have more content, more links, and if they were all that bad they wouldn’t have lasted so long. Older sites, also, tend to have more experienced webmasters, webmasters who probably know more about making a site friendly and accessible.

So you have people out there who do not have the critical thinking skills to realize that they may be attributing a coincidence as causation when they say older domains provide a direct benefit to SERPs. Not that of course that I can prove they don’t, it isn’t possible to do a proper experience showing such, but I think that if someone saying that it helps unequivocally without mention of it possibly just being a coincidence shows a lack of forethought.

Search Engine Marketing, the use of paid placement to achieve promotional goals, is certainly marketing. However, most easily defined, SEO is the reverse engineering of a computer algorithm based on intuitive observation and limited experimentation. If that isn’t science, I don’t know what is. If I had to pin it down I would say it most resembles meteorology. We don’t control the weather anymore than we control the algorithm, all we can do is study it and do some limited experimentation.

You wouldn’t ask a marketing consultant to reverse engineer a Wii, you shouldn’t ask one to do it for Google’s algorithm. I think that my background in science, and as a result my natural skepticism and love of cold hard factual data, has had a lot to do with my track record of being proved right about controversial SEO topics. Meta Tags, Outgoing Links, Special TLD Bonuses, time has shown me to be right on all of these. I think it’ll do the same for domain age and other more recent theories.

So, what do you think? Is SEO more science or marketing? And if it is one or the other, does the one it is not have any business practicing it?

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization by: Chris | 10 Comments »

Media Whiz & AdNet Interactive

April 3rd, 2007 by Chris

Back in November I was contacted by by Matt Romano from Adnet Interactive (a Media Whiz company, they also own Text-link-ads) who was apparently their head of network development. He signed up my literature site to run popunders at a nice flat rate with unlimited inventory that was enough to earn him my top spot. The terms were net 30.

I searched for comments on these companies by other publishers but could find anything negative about them, and they seemed professional, so I had no qualms about signing up. Now I get offers from ad networks and affiliate programs frequently, but most I don’t follow through with because so many networks out there rip off publishers. Yet, I decided to give these guys a try.

There was a slight issue with their ad display, they said they’d take all my daily uniques, but in reality they only ended up taking about a third, still, it was good money.

The December payment was due at the end of January, it never came. Many email complaints later I finally got it almost at the end of February and they offered many excuses, explaining how it had been mailed, etc. It was postmarked February 22nd.

At the end of February I also suspended ad display with them, and its too bad too because that was when I was on the frontpage of Digg & Del.icio.us, but it is what I had to do. Once they paid me I turned ads back on though and then turned them off again later when the January payment was not received.

As of now they owe me for January, February, and March. I have an account with Burst!media, and they pay net 90, so I’m not adverse to waiting 3 months for payment, so this has more to do with honesty. The terms were net 30, they delayed. When I questioned them, they made up excuses. Now I haven’t gotten an email reply from them in 2 weeks and if I call their listed contact number I just get some chick’s voicemail at Media Whiz’s office. No menu or receptionist, or even company greeting. Spiffy.

UPDATE 4-4-07
Someone at their company (maybe thanks to Google Alerts) saw this post and they’ve really tried to make things right. Apparently a series of unfortunate events happened.

One thing is when they initially setup my account they made an error and they were supposed to setup the account for autopayment monthly and instead it was set to invoicing where I had to send them an invoice for payment (which I didn’t know I had to do, oops).

The other thing is somehow I wasn’t getting Matt Romano’s emails. He could get my emails, but his replies weren’t coming through. They didn’t get stuck in my spam filter, but I think maybe my server’s firewall might have been blocking his IP. It could be an IP of theirs was used to do a drone brute force attack and my server banned it automatically as it tends to do. Regardless, he was trying to email me, just failing.

So I received two calls from them today, one from a vice president, who apologized and explained the issues and I believed him. They are a very large company, stiffing me on this relatively small payment doesn’t make sense. They’re now overnighting me the checks, which is nice.

Once I receive the checks I will hopefully continue to run ads with them, its a good rate and they have excellent inventory. Hopefully we will not have problems in the future.

I thought about deleting this post, but then people would only suspect them of threatening me into removal, so I thought an update would be best. I may even eventually write a formal review on them for the site, but I use them in a rather informal way (no real account to login into like a typical adnetwork, just providing them inventory for individual campaigns).

Posted in: Ad Networks by: Chris | 14 Comments »

« Previous Page — « Previous Entries
Next Entries » — Next Page »

Top of page...