and only one of them comes out successful.

This phenomenon isn’t new. From job interviews, to getting a promotion at work, to making money on the Internet. What is it that causes some people to succeed and others to fail? I’ve been busy lately with quite a bit of travel but I did have a few minutes to read the New York Times last week and came across this article which I bookmarked to share with you.

From the article:

“After three decades of painstaking research, the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck believes that the answer to the puzzle lies in how people think about intelligence and talent. Those who believe they were born with all the smarts and gifts they’re ever going to have approach life with what she calls a “fixed mind-set.” Those who believe that their own abilities can expand over time, however, live with a “growth mind-set.”

You Are Not the Best Person You Can Be.

That pretty much sums up the answer. If you believe you can’t do something because you’re not talented enough you’ll probably never do it. If you embrace your mistakes and use them as an opportunity to learn, the research shows you’ll undoubtedly achieve more than someone with a closed mind. The ability to learn from experience was cited as the No. 1 ingredient for creative achievement in a poll of 143 creativity researchers cited in “Handbook of Creativity” in 1999.

The next time you don’t think you’re talented, smart, or good enough to do something - do it anyways! Even if you fail use your failure as an opportunity to learn and more importantly grow towards your ever expanding potential

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For a company that prides themselves on customer satisfaction and hassle free operation (Apple), things in Canada are quickly snowballing into a PR disaster as a result of Rogers pricing options. Obviously Apple was aware of the prices before Rogers released them. They probably came out of a slick PowerPoint presentation detailing the geographic difficulties facing Canadian cell phone providers and whatever other jargon Rogers partner management division could find to justify the pricing. Rogers has a monopoly on GSM service in Canada, so there are no other options for consumers.

It’s clear that the pricing was disastrously incorrect. Why? and what to do now? Large or small, setting fair market prices relative to your global peers is vital. Whether you’re working at home selling an internet marketing package or providing cellular service to millions of consumers, finding the correct price point can either make, or break you.

I also mentioned Subway sandwich prices because yesterday Joe came back for lunch bearing a $20, footlong sub sandwich. He hadn’t looked at the menu assuming all subs were around the $5-8 mark, and clearly this wasn’t the case. $20 is not a typo - that is correct. $20 for a sandwich, from Subway. I should note that it was the lobster and seafood sub, but twenty dollars for one standard fast food sandwich is insane.

#1. Don’t Be Evil

I’m referencing Google’s mantra here because I find it so relevant. If you had a monopoly on a service in an entire country, would you try and pull a fast one and gouge customers? If you answered yes, it’s likely you’d be a great fit within Roger’s mobile division :). Would you ever sell a fast food sandwich for $20 bucks knowing that the average price is less than half that?

You Can Pay to Use WhyDoWork.com

it’s likely you didn’t know that, but we do offer a paid subscription service to our site with some great benefits like no advertisements on the entire site, one-on-one coaching and job search advice, and featured profile placement on our main page. How much for all that? It’s currently priced at $20/year or $1.67 a month.

I like free, and the other administrators also like free so it’s not something we promote to death. I’m certain if we made some empty promises and set up a multi-level commission structure and handed out one page sites for affiliates to promote we’d recruit hordes of noobies ready to lay down whatever price we set but it all goes back to point #1.

How Did We Set a Price?

Our price is set under the assumption that regular, repeat visitors will not click ads 90% of time that they visit the site. Assuming we bring in $14.00 for every thousand pageviews, a user generating 900 pageviews a month would represent about $12.00 in revenue. Since we’re assuming this user wouldn’t want to click anything 90% of the time they spent on the site, we’re left with about $1.20. Put a small markup of about 45 cents and voila, we’re at $1.66/month.

Looking at other social sites that offer paid membership upgrades or packages, we’re confident that for a small niche of users this is the best value available on the Internet. If you’d like some insight into how to price your own products, here are the two scenarios facing all businesses, large or small:

Option 1: Lower Prices Compared to the Competition:

• Aim for a high volume of sales with low profit margins
• Main goal is to expand the market, steal market share from other competitors, to
remain competitive in the market, or to keep competition from entering
the market.
• Using the companies I’ve referenced above, consider lower cost entrants like Koodo mobile or Virgin Mobile in Canada. Both try and undercut the competition and steal market share.

Option 2: Higher Prices Compared to the Competition:

• Aim to maintain a quality position in the market with high profit margins to
support production costs and promotional activities.
• Purpose is to offset development costs for a product with a short life span,
substantiate a quality image, take advantage of a high-demand and low-
supply situation, or to charge more because the product or service is hard for
competitors to copy.
• In the case of both the million dollar sub and Rogers iPhone, it remains true that both are in low supply from the competition. Both TELUS and Bell can’t offer the handset so there’s no threat there, and I haven’t seen a lobster sub on Quiznos menu at any time.

Option 2 Can Work, BUT…

It will only work if your product is totally unique, and your business perceived to be of the highest quality. Rogers already has somewhat of a crappy customer service reputation so no consumers are really that interested in paying them premium prices.

Try and apply the above options to your business and see where you fit. Are you pricing your products correctly? If you’re pricing high, are your services top quality and unique? Regardless of the business your in, taking a close look at these tips will be extremely valuable in your quest for success.

Time to go try that super expensive sub! (maybe just the six inch)

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I was watching some tv episodes tonight @ the site Hulu.com. It’s a great website backed by FOX and NBC to try and grab some revenue from those that would otherwise illegally download. It is only open to residents of the US, but if you download and run HotSpotShield you can watch from anywhere. I’m in Canada and it works just fine.

After watching a great episode of The Office, I started thinking about how much time I spend in front of a computer instead of the television. If I want to watch an episode from any of the 12 seasons of South Park, I head over to the comedy network, for any movie I’ve ever liked, I usually check out watch-moves. Less and less of my time is spent in front of the television, and more and more is spent in front of the computer watching streaming versions of my favorite shows.

I give streaming high definition (HD) about year before it’s everywhere. Say goodbye to pricey television sets and cable boxes, your laptop or LCD monitor will be your new high-def set.

Everyone Google is Catching On

I just read an interesting post over at Mathew Ingram’s blog. He delved into the question “Is Google a content company now?” in reference to their agreement with the creator of the popular television series Family Guy to host 50 two minute clips that will be distributed through their AdSense program to be collectively known as Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy. These short clips will be used to deliver ads, and fans of the series will no doubt view all of them.

It’s a relatively cheap experiment and an ingenious way to get eyeballs. This will work. AdSense already includes a great set of algorithms to detect on page content. When the algorithm finds a page related to the Family Guy series, it’s logical that these clips would show, and any fan of the show would undoubtedly watch.

It is win-win for the television producers and Google who will see great success if they can hit the target audience. MacFarlane (creator of the clips) is providing a new shortened but impactful media format, and Google is providing relevant advertising to suit the content. I think it’s brilliant.

Can Your Site Handle AdSense Video?

As an AdSense publisher it’s been my experience that video ads pay better. To see the supported formats follow this link. All you need to do to enable your site to support video ads is make sure you have both text and image options enabled. The inventory is quite low, but hey, if your site is about Family Guy you just might be in luck.

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Although it’s tailored to AdSense publishers, it’s adaptable to any other text based advertising program you run as well.

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You Have a Single Site Sales Page for a Product > $10

You have a long pitch, a few testimonials, and eventually collect an email address and later sell a product or sell your product right on the spot. In this case your investment should focus on no more than trying to bring potential customers to your site. Your brand isn’t extremely important but your traffic is. In this kind of scenario I usually invest roughly 30% back into the business. Basically every 3rd sale you make, take that money and experiment with driving more traffic to your site via paid reviews, Yahoo or Google Ads, or paid links. Businesses such as this can get great results from free search engine traffic, so make sure you’re also building up organic links to your site with the anchor text you’re optimizing for.

You Have a Small Informational Site and Depend on Ad Clicks

You have a small site, probably running a content management system like Wordpress, and you have a few articles on anything. Suppose it is a site about tennis.  You would probably have a few articles on proper technique, the world’s best players, equipment reviews, and general information on the sport. All of your revenue comes from qualified visitors clicking ads related to the topic in either a PPC (pay per click) model like Google Adsense or commission based ads from selling products like racquets and tennis shoes through places like Amazon.com. I can almost guarantee a positive return on a site like this. The key to reinvesting into this sort of business is to have a lower acquisition cost vs. click return from Adsense or your favorite advertising service. For example, lets say your site about tennis earns you $0.25 every time someone clicks an ad about tennis. If you can figure out how to bring in visitors for $0.10, you’ll earn $0.15 on every click, and be able to scale accordingly. Spend $100 on clicks and you’ll bring in $250. Joe provided some great tips on how to find keywords to target in the post How to Dominate the Google Search Results. An important factor here is to find the ’sweet spot’ where your earnings and traffic are maximized. I’ll post more on that later.

A Forum/Social Network is the Heart of your Business

You rely on others to generate your content for you. Without visitors your site would die, and you need your users to discuss, share, and spend time on the site. Reinvestment is essential to keep the site going. Long Tail keywords in search engines are your path to success. It is possible to boost your traffic in the search engines by taking a closer look and investing more heavily in acquiring traffic via these keywords. ROI on a forum can be lucrative if you can maximize your new visitors from free search engine traffic. In this type of scenario I usually recommend investing up to half your revenue (50%) back into the business. It is essential that your forum be sticky and hangout place for your users. In order to make this happen you’ll need to keep things fresh, and this takes investment.

Conclusions

Any business will require some sort of investment for optimal success. Find the right mix that works for you and don’t be afraid to experiment. The best results often come by accident!

I’m glad to be posting again, I’ve been in Washington DC the last few days picking up a car and it was quite the drive back to Canada. Here are some pictures!

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Something is brewing at Google. A few hours ago Google posted some interesting information to their Adwords blog. Here’s the juicy part:

In early March, we announced that we’d soon incorporate an additional factor into Quality Score, namely landing page load time — where load time is defined as the amount of time it takes for a user to see the landing page after clicking an ad. In early May we announced that landing page load time information had become available on the Keyword Analysis page.

Starting today, this load time factor will be incorporated into your keywords’ Quality Scores. Keywords with landing pages that load slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.

That is extremely important news for anyone using Google Adwords to advertise their business. Google believes that users have a better experience when they’re not waiting around for a page to load, so naturally load time is a factor when automatically trying to judge quality. If you can lower your load time, you’ll get a higher quality score and lower CPC, so you’ll end up saving money!

If you need some help, a tool like the Website Optimizer can help you find the bulky elements of your page.

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Their latest release has some interesting projections on web advertising for this, and the years to come. Here’s the parts that matter:

Even though IDC anticipates that the threat of a potential recession will decrease ad expenditure across all media by as much as 7% in 2008, IDC believes that quarterly online advertising growth will still increase at rates around the 15 - 20% range in 2008. IDC forecasts that U.S. Internet advertising spending will more than double in five years.

The current economic crisis has not affected U. S. Internet advertising spending: Total revenue increased by 23.9% to $7.1 billion in the first quarter (1Q08) compared to $5.7 billion in 1Q07. Clearly any kind of slowdown in other markets is not transferable to the web.

More important than pageviews and unique visitors in the future will be user loyalty.
Check out this post if you need a refresh on how to measure loyalty for your site.

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Get out of Jail Free

If you don’t know, the above clip is from the movie Shawshank Redemption, and for some reason every time I think about the topic of re-applying for something online that clip comes to mind. Try and map the discussion in that video to your own mistakes as a webmaster. If you watch it directly on YouTube you can see some annotations throughout.

I’ve Been Dreading Today

I guess my connection to that video really connects to my views on the whole DMOZ Open Directory. Ever since we were de-listed in ‘04 for no reason, I’ve been reapplying politely once a year, and every year I hear nothing back. Like Morgan Freeman, I no longer give a shit about DMOZ.

Unlike DMOZ, I’m more optimistic about reapplying to Google. In the beginning, Google was our number one source of traffic and my number one favorite partner. We had access to a dedicated account rep to bounce Adsense ideas off, got a ton of ‘long-tail’ keyword search queries, and built our main page PageRank up to 7.
Over the last couple years we’ve grown our business purchased sites and rolled them into this one, gone through a few redesigns, and brought on new ad partners. One particular service we experimented with last year was Text-Link-Ads. Since joining we’ve seen our PageRank slide all the way down to 4, and search referral traffic from Google has been dismal:

Scrap Paid Text Links

It’s pretty clear that these text link ads have been a key factor in our demise. Logically we’ve been looking for a way to eliminate with the intent of applying to Google for reconsideration/re-inclusion and I’m happy (and sad) to say we’ve canceled the account. We’ll miss the money but it’s worth it if we can get traffic back up again from search referrals.

Our Reconsideration Letter

Here’s a copy of what I sent to Google if you’re interested:

Greetings,

I am writing to you to request reconsideration for the domain WhyDoWork.com.

We have seen our root level PageRank slide from 7-4 over the past 18 months, and I’m confident we have cleaned up any possible violations through the following actions:

- canceled our premium partner account at text-link-ads.com and removed associated text links
- applied ‘nofollow’ to all paid advertiser links
- applied ‘nofollow’ to all previously sponsored blog posts
- removed conflicting packages from our advertising options (http://www.whydowork.com/advertise.php)

I am confident that we are no longer in violation of Google’s Webmaster Terms & Conditions, and we will work to continue to maintain our good standing.

Thanks!
Matthew Rivard

Note: We have recently merged two of our sites (bloggingmix.com and shylockblogging.com) into whydowork.com through 301 redirection to explain increased backlinks to our whydowork.com/blog.

‘NoFollow’ any Paid Links in Posts

On top of eliminating all text link ads, I’ve gone through old blog posts (from sites we’ve acquired that did paid reviews) and applied the ‘nofollow’ directive to all posts that were sponsored. That activity also ensures that you’re not passing PageRank through paid links in any content you produce. Another idea touching on this is to update your advertisement sales page to let buyers know that all reviews will have ‘nofollow’ applied to external links.

Explain Rapid Growth and Increases in Backlinks

One of our other struggles which I’m unsure there’s a solution for is the massive influx in links we have as a result of purchasing smaller blogs and incorporating their content with ours. This is something I’m unclear on, but note that I mentioned it in my reconsideration letter to Google as blog PageRank has gone from 5 to nothing in a few weeks, I suspect because of the influx in links. I doubt Google can recognize that our growth is legit, so I’d bet we’ve probably been slapped with a sandbox penalty for growing too quickly.

What Do You Think?

In general this topic has already been beaten to death by a number of bloggers. I just really wanted to share that video clip to see if anyone else sees the similarities :). Andy Beard presented Google with a lengthy letter regarding his robots.txt strategy and the effective use of nofollow. He also showed that using robots.txt didn’t have too much of an impact on search traffic.
Courtney Tuttle’s post on the topic was a recommended read by one of our members Trent and I’m glad I read it; it really helped validate why were doing it. Darren Rowse also had some useful insights on the topic, but I don’t think we’re in a position where we can forget about PageRank given the lameness of search referrals from them. In the spirit of making demands, I’d also like to hear from Matt Cutt’s, Google’s primo public ‘SEO guy’ and head of the Webspam team.

I’m hoping that our recent changes, and the cleverness of my association via an old movie clip will be enough to get some Google love back. I suppose only time will tell!

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How can something that small play a role in defining your online business? Take a look at a change Google made a few days ago:

Old Look:

New Look:

If you take look in the address bar of your browser on most sites you’ll see a small graphic file called a ‘favorite icon’ which is basically a small image with the extension ‘.ico’. At WhyDoWork we use the palm trees (  )from our very first logo (it has some nostalgic appeal to me).

It’s Important

If you’re still in doubt whether your audience cares or not if you have one, take a look at how many bloggers covered Google’s change over the last few days. Whether you’re consciously paying attention or not, its clear that there are folks out there who notice. The first time I hit Google after the change I instantly picked up on it.

It’s Easy to Make Your Own

Whenever I make a .ico file I usually use Adobe PhotoShop, but I recommend the Favicon from Pics service. All you need to do is upload a photo of your choice and it will be automatically resized and ready to use.

It’s Easy to Implement

 Once you have your 16×16 icon, insert it in your pages using the following line of code:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”path-to/your-favicon.ico” >

Place that line directly before the closing </head> tag and confirm it worked by checking your address bar for the image. After the href= makes sure you have the correct path to where you’ve uploaded the image.

If you don’t already have a favorite icon created, take a few minutes now and get one created using elements of your color scheme or existing logo. It might be extremely small, but your audience will notice!

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Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a series of posts on what to do after you purchase a site or blog. The SitePoint Marketplace is something I check daily. By the looks of it, many publishers in the ‘make money online’ niche are looking to get out as soon as they can so there’s no better time to learn how to merge two sites together.

If you haven’t already read them, please take a look at Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series:

- Part I - The Checklist
- Part II - Analysis of “What’s Hot
- Part III - .htaccess (redirection) Mastery

Last month we purchased the rights to two great blogs. The above posts, and future ones on this topic are a near complete account of the ‘recipe’ we use after acquiring the sites. In my opinion it’s valuable enough information to stick in an eBook on the topic, but free for you as a reader of this site :).

RSS Transfer and Migration

A big piece of any blog is it’s RSS subscriber base. Some will argue that readers follow an individual and not the site. I would agree that this is true, but I think if you sub in an author who can bring enough of a value proposition to stay to the table, then there’s no reason why a reader would leave (unless they were truly in love with the previous blogger in more ways than one.)

If the site you’ve just purchased uses feedburner to manage RSS subscribers you’re in luck.

How to Get Subscribers from the Old Site to the New

Before getting started, make sure you transfer the feed to your account from the previous owner. Once you have the feed in your possession, you’re ready to get started merging both feeds together. For a few years Feedburner has had a function that will automatically forward subscribers to a different feed for 30 days. The actions this function will take are as follows:

Day 1-10: Any requests for the FeedBurner feed are sent an HTTP 301 “Permanent Redirect” response back to your source feed. This will cause most feed readers to forget the FeedBurner URL and use the new URL from that point on. Your subscribers don’t feel a thing.

Day 11-20: If your FeedBurner feed is still getting requests at this point, it probably means that your feed reader is treating that “Permanent Redirect” as a “Temporary Redirect”. That’s actually pretty common, so now we enter “Phase 2″. Now, any requests for your FeedBurner feed will receive a “redirect document”. What is a redirect document? Dave Winer displayed foresight by anticipating this need back in 2002 and provided this specification so that a publisher could keep control of their feed location. We strongly encourage more feed readers to support this specification, and we are going to be widely campaigning for this capability.

Day 21-30: You’re still here? Well, at this point we return a valid feed that contains a single item that says “This feed has moved to (feed URL here)”. So even though all of the transparent mechanisms to redirect the subscription have failed, there’s still a trail for your subscribers to follow.

Services like iGoogle and Google Reader should pick this up automatically. The first step in making this happen is editing the feed details of the feed you’ll be canceling (A). What you need to do is update the source feed to be your new target feed (B), which is the site you’re going to continue to write at.

Once you set the source feed and save, click the ‘delete feed’ for (A). Don’t freak out just yet, you’ll get a confirmation box where you can check to enable redirection:

Over a few days you should see that most subscribers will eventually migrate to your new feed (B). If you end up transferring all the subscribers, your account should look like this:

Note that both feeds of the blogs we acquired are now at 0 subscribers. One crucial point to note is that this redirection does not account for email subscribers. You’ll have to email the feedburner staff (who are very helpful) to manually transfer them over.

The above information will be extremely helpful to anyone who has recently bought a blog, changed their feed address or domain, or needs to consolidate feeds. The next post in this series will cover how to manage the switch (from an emotional perspective) with your audience. Stay tuned!

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