Their official reasoning behind it is that it adds a new layer of security for those who rely on Google daily (read: everyone) as it is now much more difficult to sniff search queries on public wifi, via spyware, and any other attack vector.

Sure, that sounds pretty cool, thanks for doing that.

Wait a minute…

This is all fine and dandy, until you get to this part:

When you search from https://www.google.com, websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won’t receive information about each individual query.

Every single site owner and SEO on the planet should have had their ears (eyes?) perk up when they read that part.

It gets even better when you hit this gem:

If you choose to click on an ad appearing on our search results page, your browser will continue to send the relevant query over the network to enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to you.

What does this all mean? It means Google has just blocked referrer keyword data from organic results from ALL analytics platforms whenever a user is logged in to their Google account. However, if a user reaches you via an Adwords PPC ad, they’ll still pass along that referrer data to your preferred analytics platform.

Want to see how useful the data they give is? It’s already showing up in my analytics:

MAN THAT IS SO HELPFUL, THANKS GOOGLE

To say this is an abuse of power is quite an understatement. Google very well knows the search queries that sent users to you, seeing as how they are the ones who sent them in the first place. But in order to avoid anti-trust issues, rather than only allowing that data to show up in Google Analytics, they’re going to block it from all platforms instead. So in the effort of being fair, they’re screwing over everyone.

This just goes to show that Google is NOT on the publisher’s side. While publishers are the entire reason Google is in business (They’re the world’s largest scraper, their index is entirely full of other publisher’s content), Google has decided that unless you’re paying them to run your ads, you don’t deserve to know how people got to your site through their engine.

Well, this should at least stop those nasty SEOs…

In reality, it will make analytics a slight bit less useful, but there will still be all the data coming from users who aren’t logged in to Google, which I would imagine makes up quite a few users in actuality. However, it’s still extremely inconvenient for those of us who look at our referrer data to determine which pages on our site we need to beef up with new internal links, content, images, or videos in order to increase their rankings even higher.

But you know who else it screws with? SEOs who are smart enough to use their analytics data to power their Adwords campaigns. For some stupid reason, most people treat SEO and PPC as mutually exclusive ideas that will cause the world to ignite if you were to combine them together. However, a smart website owner, ecommerce store owner, or affiliate marketer will build a site that performs well in the SERPs as well as on the Adwords PPC network, and they’ll use the data from PPC to optimize their sites and the data from their organic traffic to optimize their PPC campaigns. With this latest rollout of SSL, a schism will be formed between your organic traffic analytics and your PPC campaigns.

The Bottom Line: Google’s customers are ADVERTISERS, not website owners and publishers.

Below are my thoughts on the difference between Project Clients and Product Customers and why having a product is infinitely better in the long run.

Project Clients

When you work at an agency or as a freelancer or consultant, you have project clients. Project clients are people who come to you with their problem and it’s your job to fix it, or build it, or make it better. The reason they’re coming to you is because they don’t have the personnel or tools internally to complete the task, or don’t have the time or bandwidth internally to tackle the project themselves.

When you’re in the position of the agency, your job is to take whatever wild, off the wall problems and projects your client have and come up with solutions. You will literally see everything if you work at an agency for a few years. People will come to you with a $500 budget who want you to sign an NDA for their genius iPhone app, or people who have a decent budget for a project but will pick apart every single task and line item to confirm you actually know what you’re doing. It takes a strong constitution to not enter rage-mode when talking to most clients, specifically because: you are the expert, but they act like the expert. That’s simply infuriating.

When you have project clients, you’re selling your expertise in units of time. You can’t put a price on your years of knowledge, so you put a price on a one hour unit of your time. If a project doesn’t take a long time but requires a seasoned expert, you are forced to quote more hours to make up for the fact that you won’t make much if you quote your actual time needed. That just plain sucks because you can’t get away with saying “this is going to take a half hour, but only because I’ve been doing this for 5 years and am one of the best in the world at doing this” because if you said that, your client will give you the middle finger in return and demand to be billed practically nothing.

Because your income is entirely dependent on the number of hours quoted to your clients, you are constantly in search of more projects. Agencies have a nearly 100% churn rate; sure, some clients will come back with more work, but 99% of them will be one-timers. You don’t have subscription income, you have no idea how well you’re going to do once all of your current projects are finished up. You can only depend on your reputation and the fact that the trend seems to be to hire you for more work. That’s friggin’ terrifying, and forces you to constantly be taking on new projects whether you really want to or not (sure, you can have a mass exodus of paid subscribers if you have a product, but that’s fairly rare).

Ultimately, you’re at the whim of your new leads. You have nothing consistent, nothing dependable when it comes to revenue. So you’re forced to be everyone’s call-boy, dealing with every little triviality and nuance of someone else’s project, explaining to them why you can’t make their massive pivot in their project because you bid them on what they wanted, not what they have now changed to a few months later.

So what is good about Project Clients? You can be up and running with a few gigs within a week of starting if you have a good Rolodex and reputation. That’s basically impossible to do when starting from scratch with a product. Additionally, the more customers you please, the larger your network becomes of professionals you can turn to for testimonials and referrals. Testimonials, referrals, and your reputation are the life-blood of an agency or freelancer.

Product Customers

Ahhh products, my main love. The benefits of having a product are nearly endless, but it all ultimately boils down to this: you’re in charge. People either want what you have or don’t. If they reach out and say “I like your product, but it needs this this and that before I’ll pay you for it” you can just say “sorry” to them and tell them good luck in finding their uniquely customized version of what you built that fits their exact business needs.

The bottom line is that when you own a product, people come to you. They buy what you built. They don’t approach you with their idea and ask you to build a custom solution, they come to you because your solution you’ve already built fits what they need. This is a huge, massive, epic difference, and I feel that it strongly aligns with your own happiness and well-being. You can maintain your focus on your product, making it better every day, and every improvement increases the reach and appeal of the entire product to potential new customers.

Why? Because when people buy your product because it’s what they need to solve their problems, they’re validating your idea. It’s such a hugely satisfying thing to wake up to someone having subscribed to your product in the middle of the night, I can’t even begin to describe it. It’s simply fantastic. Your product exists separate of you. When doing client work, the project cannot continue unless you (or your employees) are working on it. Your effort is directly tied to your revenue. With a product, you are now detached from the revenue stream. People can sign up and pay for your product without you having to touch anything or do anything at all.

Also, subscription products have predictable revenue milestones. You can leverage your customer base through affiliate and referral programs to help grow your user base. You can offer free trials to build up a kick ass mailing list and then market to that list over and over without having to do any outbound marketing at all (I will cover this topic quite a bit in the future, don’t worry).

The other major advantage of working on a product as opposed to a bunch of client projects is that all of your effort goes into improving a single entity, rather than dividing your effort into multiple projects that ultimately don’t even belong to you. When you work on your product, you’re progressively improving it. Each bug fix a customer finds, each feature request (that aligns with your roadmap) that you add, each support email you field in your public facing FAQ system, all contribute to your singular product, making it that much better. That’s a really big deal, as you’re helping your individual customers and making your product great all at the same time. Whereas when you’re working on a client’s project, while you’re helping to make their project better, you retain none of that value. It’s all fleeting, and the client gets to take away all the value.

I’ve had weekends where I just couldn’t stand working on my product, and so I just let it sit there. And you know what? It went great. I got new subscribers, it ran fine, nothing caught on fire, and everyone was still happy on Monday. There is no direct connection between the hours I have to work and the amount of money I make now. Sure, I could put in 60 hours a week on marketing and significantly increase the amount of new signups per week, but it’s my decision to do (or not do) that. Sometimes I feel like doing that, sometimes I don’t. I don’t have any investors waiting on me to make millions, no clients waiting for their project to be finished, just customers to make sure my product is available when they need it.

The Ultimate Takeaway

Customers buy your product for what it is at the time of purchase. Clients pay for what they expect you to build, which can lead to frustration and disappointment on both ends. Products are purchased on face value. Projects are based on a proposed outcome that can be interpreted by the client.

So Why Even Do Client Projects?

Because it’s quick easy money. Because you can learn how to do stuff on someone else’s dime (come on, how many of us have taken on a project we weren’t quite sure of whether we could do it simply so we could basically get paid to learn how to make it happen?). Because you get paid up front rather than after 3 months of development and another 3-6 months of aggressive marketing to land enough customers to cover Ramen for the whole team.

There’s a lot of perks to doing client work, and that’s why it’s such a black hole. It takes a lot of balls to branch out and build your own product, but that’s only because the reward is so high if you nail it and make something that is successful. The trick is to take on client projects to keep the lights on and maintain a minimum standard of living, while working on your product in the rest of your free time. Then you can slowly taper down client work into your product and yahtzee, you’re a startup founder who isn’t broke.

1) Competitors validate your model and niche/market.

The big buzzword nowadays is “disruptive ideas”…projects and startups that flip a market on its head and make everyone see things in a totally different way. It’s extremely difficult to predict whether a disruptive idea will actually stick and take hold, and even harder to test such a belief. So this often leads to people believing in and launching projects and ideas into markets that literally don’t exist.

The Lean Startup movement is all about testing your niche or market thoroughly before actually committing time and money and effort into actually building things out. This is smart. The simplest, easiest way to test a market? Look for competitors. Look for companies that have done something similar to what you’ve had in mind, see how they’re doing it, how people like it, how much they charge. Dissect them. Then make them your bitch.

2) They give you something to beat.

The beauty of competitors is they set the bar for you. Sometimes that’s impossibly high (trying to beat Google in search) or crazy low, but regardless, the bar is set. It gives you something to keep in the back of your mind when you’re busting ass on your startup.

The important thing to keep in mind here is that you should not spend your time trying to catch up to your competitors. You should have your own independent roadmap, you should have intimate knowledge of what you want to build and why it makes sense, and you should simply have your competitor’s progress in the back of your head as you execute. You are you, not your competitor. Never ever ever define your product in terms of a competitor. Use a competitor’s progress as a motivator to crush kill and destroy.

3) They make you look great when they fuck up.

When you’re building your startup, your only goal should be to build the best damn thing on the market. It should be shiny, it should be fast, it should be easy to use. It should be better in every way than your competitor, and that includes providing great support, having great up-time, fast response times to emails, and all in between. When you have no competitors, you are on an island when things go bad. You’re setting your own expectations for your customers.

But when you have competitors, their slip-ups and shortcomings become your selling points, whether you ever talk about it or not. As you start to grow, you’ll see people bring up your competitor’s mistakes on forums, twitter, blog posts, and everywhere else and that becomes a perk for you. You’ll see people compare your product to your competitor’s simply because they screwed up and you didn’t.

Remember to stay the course though and make sure to not use your competitor’s screw-ups as your own selling points directly, as that can come off as petty and scare away new leads for your product. Be professional and let your competitors go down in their own fire and fan the flames by doing a better than great job with your product.

4) They give you ideas to steal improve upon.

Let’s be honest: people steal ideas all the time. They’re out there, they’re public, you can stare right at them, use them, test them, and ultimately copy them.

Verbatim copying of your competitor’s ideas is a bad idea. People will notice this. It will get awkward. So the thing to do here is to “meet and exceed”. Look at what your competitors are doing and if it makes sense to add to your product, do it better than they did. Make it sexier, make it simpler. Make your customers go “yeah, well Competitor has that too, but these guys do it so much better”.

The thing to remember is that you won’t take a competitor’s customers simply by cloning their service. You have to give their customers a compelling reason to switch. People are complacent, they don’t like to switch. But they also don’t like it when everyone else’s toys are shinier than their toys. So if you make something more kick ass than your competitor, that will make them jealous and help lure them over.

5) They make mistakes for you so you don’t have to do it yourself.

Have a new idea for a feature or addition but not sure if it will crash and burn? You can move forward and toss it out there and see if it sticks, or you can sit on it for a second and research the current market to see if others have tried it already. See if people are using it or just ignoring it. Let your competitors spend their time and money screwing up so you don’t have to.

Obviously this strategy doesn’t work if the idea literally doesn’t exist except in your mind, but you’d be surprised how many ideas have already been executed in the majority of niches. Startup founders are compelled to keep adding features to their product because they think features = progress = new customers. But sometimes, it’s better to just log all of your ideas and sit on them for a bit, and spend the rest of your time simplifying and streamlining your product, optimizing your funnel, reaching out on popular social media channels, or maybe running some webinars.

Similar to point #3, you can oftentimes benefit from your competitor’s failures. That’s a beautiful thing.

6) Rarely does one company utterly dominate a niche.

People are inherently afraid of competition. The high of coming up with a new, never-before-seen idea can be so easily destroyed by finding out someone is already executing it. So many times have I had my close friends threaten me with death to keep their million dollar ideas a secret because they’re afraid of someone stealing it. All I can do is LOL at such a request. The bottom line is that if you have an idea, and you start executing and then eventually launch, as soon as you are public, someone WILL be coming after you. The day you launch is the day you put a target on your back. So you better not be living in fear of competitors because they ARE coming. It’s just a matter of when.

But even if competitors are coming and they could eat into your market share, it’s not the end of the world. Nearly every single niche ever has a few companies competing in it. And rarely is a niche completely and utterly, 100% owned by a single company. There’s always a way to improve on someone else’s ideas or features, to beat them with your offering in terms of volume or price, to be faster or simpler or sexier or whatever. Don’t be scared, be better.

The simple take away here is no one ever succeeded by being afraid of their competitors. Even if you build a product for a niche with no other competitors in it, the very act of publicly launching will create competitors eventually. In order to succeed, you have to constantly be confident in the fact that you are the best option on the market, you have to be the best in every regard. Let your competitors beat themselves by trying to catch up to you.

serpIQ Saturday, August 20th Free Webinar Registration

I also have another side project in mind that I plan to document and announce here when I get time to build it. Unfortunately, time is hard to come by so currently I cannot discuss much about that one.

I’ve tossed around ideas for different blog posts but ultimately, I decided to defer to you guys. I would imagine a lot of you know me from Wickedfire so you know I’m into coding, automation, and SEO. What I want to know is, what do you want me to blog about? Are there certain topics you want me to cover? Stuff you want explained?

One idea I have that I do plan on executing on this summer is to finish my “Niche Product Site” series so that it covers all the basics of doing research, setting up your site, writing content, targeting keywords, building links, and making money from your sites. I think that series can be helpful for people, especially those new to the game.

But that’s only a handful of posts. I want to start pumping out long, high quality articles about stuff, but I need you guys to help me out and tell me what you think I should write about. So if you can, please leave some comments and let me know what you guys want to see!

Bring In The Git

I’m not going to go into too many details as to why Git is great or the technical explanation of how the hell it works because quite frankly I don’t really know. I do know enough about it to know that it’s better to use than not use and if you’re serious about coding, you should use it. Main reasons why?

1. Versioning is a good thing. Versioning + remote backups = great thing
2. You should never modify your production code base. Always branch out from it, code on the branch, test, merge back, deploy. Don’t break working code.

So basically, Git allows you to break shit without risking your entire project (and sanity).

On To The Guide

Anyone expecting a long, thorough guide, will be disappointed. But that’s a good thing in this case, because setting up your own remote repos on your own Linode VPS is stupid easy. There isn’t that much documentation out there for some reason on this topic (I guess all the cool kids are on Github), so that’s why I’m writing this now. So here we go…

1) Install git on your server. SSH into your Linode, and (assuming you’re on Ubuntu) run “apt-get install git-core”

2) On your local machine, install Git. Depends on your OS, there are guides everywhere for this.

3) Back on the server, navigate to and create a folder where you’ll house the remote repo. This should be a non-public folder. I chose /srv/git (my apps are stored in /srv/www/[app-folder]). Assuming you’re using /srv/git, the workflow would be:

4) In your new project folder, run the command git init --bare. This will create an empty repository for your project.

5) Back on your local machine, you need to add the remote repo as a remote target to your Git setup. To do that, run:

What that did was add the remote target of origin. I have no idea why everyone calls their remote repos origin…if someone has an answer, I’ll mail you a cookie.

6) Now, work locally on your project. When you’re ready to commit and push to your server, the workflow looks like:

So if you were working on your master branch, you would use git push origin master. That command would calculate all your repo deltas and push only your changes to your server. WIN.

Moving Forward

Once you’ve nailed that workflow, there’s some awesome advanced stuff you can do. Namely, deploying a Rails app with Capistrano and Git. It’s sexy when it works, but confusing as hell to figure out. I’ll post a few more guides that will hopefully help you get started with that stuff as well.

If things stay down for a while on WF, I’m not sure what will happen in terms of something to replace it. Too early to tell now.

PS: I’m working on something so fucking epic for SEO research you’re all going to love it. I’m hoping to launch it within two weeks and will officially kick it off (with a special Layered Thoughts discount) as soon as its ready to go. Stay tuned!

Sometimes it’s easy to forget the kinds of volume you need to actually get a decent revenue stream going from a CPA site, so this tool kinda helps keep things in perspective. Also, it helps you keep your eye on the prize for increasing those front page rankings of your landing pages because you can quickly see how much of a revenue jump  a higher ranking can provide.

The data produced by this calculator isn’t the be all end all. You probably won’t get exactly this much money each month. The BIGGEST CAVEAT to remember is that if you’re just plugging the Google search data (as most of us focus on) you’re only getting a slice of the search engine data pie. I have sites that do much much better on the traffic from Bing and Yahoo than they do from higher traffic volume from Google. It really depends on your demographic you’re targeting and the nature of your offer and keywords.

Play around with it and let me know what you think. I have it set with the Cornell Eye Tracking SERP data currently, I might make a radio button toggle to test the same inputs with the AOL research data. Let me know in the comments if that’s something that you’re interested in.

Click Here To Use The SEO CPA Revenue Potential Calculator

Depending on the niche, something like this could work REALLY WELL. Any tech savvy niches, like SEO, social media, affiliate, etc (really, any niche where people have Twitter or Facebook accounts) can create a big rush of traffic because of the exponential growth potential. Sounds really hyped up, but it seems like a sound principal.

Since I’ve just started using Twitter again and am working on growing my follower count to increase my reach on it, I think I’ll try a few tests of this system soon to see how effective it is. An ideal setup for me would be: Tweet the link, go to download page, subscribe to blog, receive download link. Seems like a really solid way to increase my feed subscriber base as well as increase the brand of the blog.

I’ll post some updates soon of ideas I want to test this system out with.

Also, just cleaned out my twitter account of a bunch of old shitty tweets and will start passively using it this month to try and add some traffic here. I have a gaggle of posts waiting to be written, will start on them this week.

Happy March