Mike Blonder: Thoughts on Technology, and the Web

Life is getting tough for open source. I purchased two bare-bones Intel motherboards complete with Core Duo chips and had the worst time getting the SuSE Linux Distribution (first 10.0 and then 10.2) to run on the platforms. The problem is that the new hardware had some radically different features, specifically a controller located off the motherboard, not supported by the Linux kernel included with SuSE Linux 10.0.

"Not supported" is decidedly bad news for open source. Intel is the largest chip manufacturer and, possibly, the largest manufacturer of motherboards for personal computers. The kind of headache that I experienced trying to install the distribution on the platforms is certainly not the kind of headache that the average user will tolerate.

My initial attempts were met by dark monitors, and repeated failed installations that bounced me back to manual installation screens. Error messages were weird: "Image Not Found" despite the fact that the factory disks were loaded in the Sony DVD/CD Reader Writer that I purchased with each of the systems. My calls to support did not produce a fix. I was pleased, however, to see that the typical brush off from SuSE technical support for folks with older copies of the operating system was not the order of the day. Support was willing to work the problem(s) through, but was at a loss to offer a working remedy.

When I loaded the DVD into our Mac Mini and FTP'd over to the Mac I was able to install the operating system on both of our systems. But, as of yet, I have not gotten the faster of the two boxes (2.4 Ghz processor, 2GBs memory, etc) to work with the Sony Drive and the Operating System.

On Monday of this week (April 30th), the print edition of the Wall Street Journal® ran an article in its Small Business section on Search Engine Marketing, "In Search of Traffic" by Kelly R. Spors. This article was, in fact, the feature article of the entire section of the paper. Most of the "news" detailed by the article is, however, rather old and stale. "To be successful online, [small companies] must learn to harness one of the Web's most powerful tools: search engines." Duh. This has not been news since, let's conservatively say 1999, 8 years ago.

As well, Kelly R. Spors, suggests a strong ambivalence towards consultants (like me) who work with small companies to improve their rankings with search engines: Spors writes that "[e]ven worse, big competitors can afford to pour lots of resources into [search engine marketing] -- putting small companies at a bigger disadavantage" which is to say that the investment often pays off. In other words the big competitors are making the right move working with SEO types. But later in the same article Spors cautions: "businesses should be careful when hiring an SEO, because not every company offers the same expertise, says Ryan Allis, chief executive of Virante, a Durham, N.C., search-marketing consulting firm." This ambivalence reappears a bit later when Spors notes that "[t]hen there are fees. The prices for SEOs can be bewildering to many small business owners,. Costs can range from $500 a month to several thousand-for what often seem to be almost identical services".

Kelly Spors, I would suggest to you that successful search engine marketing is not the simple process that you suggest when you prescribe the following medicine: "Add lots of relevant descriptions to the site's text, including the search phrases for which you want a high ranking. Have other sites link to it. Offer a blog or other informational content for customers." As I have noted elsewhere in this blog, your prescription, for most sites, will end up a big goose egg (meaning a zero).

Bottom line, SEO expertise keeps pace with search engine technology and, therefore is a constantly moving target. What worked yesterday will not work today, etc. Never forget that you get what you pay for. If a business expects to sell a $1,000,000 or more, online, then, I think, an SEO budget of 5% ($50,000) per year makes sense.

On another note, I was surprised that the writer was not familiar with the "long tail" search notion, referring, instead, to a strategy of using outlying keywords, sufficiently off the track and down the list of keywords for a type of business, but specific enough to attract qualified clicks. If you are going to write for a general audience, then you ought to do them a favor and look into the concept and deliver the "skinny" in a form that the audience can run with. Kind of a drag.

The Journal has done this before, meaning the paper has written on online marketing topics from a very general standpoint. I deal with this stuff day-to-day via my business, best plain web pages and can say that the long tail search stuff does work. I've reviewed logs and have noted highly specific searches for a customer of mine that has a low Page Rank, but is nonetheless booking business.

Picking out of pocket keywords that are somehow quite specific is a valuable tool for smaller businesses to come to the table with some revenue fairly quickly after the launch of an online business. Double surprising is the fact that the title meta tag, together with the file name (whatever.htm or html) itself are heavily weighted; therefore put the specifics of your keywords right there and see what happens.

©Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved, No Reprints Without Express Written Permission by the Writer

Lee Gomes writes for the "Portals" column, which runs in the "Marketplace" section of the Wall Street Journal®. Read his article, "PlentyOfFish Owner Has the Perfect Bait for a Huge Success" if you can. The article was published in the Wednesday, May 23, 2007 issue of The Journal.

This "PlentyOfFish" story is the kind of tale that we all want to hear. Markus Frind, a 28 year old online marketer located where he wants to be, in Vancouver, British Columbia, is making lots of dough online and all by himself. His site, PlentyOfFishruns just about all by itself. His staff amounts to one individual, himself. How much revenue? According to Gomes, "the site brings in between $5 million and $10 million a year."

Gomes looks further and notes more of what I want to hear: "How does he do it? In large part, by keeping things simple." Music to my ears. Check out Best Plain Web Pages for a look at how I see simplicity working for successful online sites.

So I went and visited the site myself and noted a couple of things: 1) Mr. Frind makes good use of CSS: The simple ad list that takes up most of every page is controlled by CSS and table tags (which do not want to go away) 2) Mr. Frind uses scripts when he needs to: for example to quickly capture page view information via Javascript (AJAX) and .asp for membership and 3) Page addresses are simple URLS without funny characters.

On the marketing side, his objective is clearly the best monetization that he can get from his site. The theme is very popular, dating, with a very, very large market. The revenue generator is advertising. The strategy is twofold: 1) as Mr. Gomes notes, "via Google's small text ads," and through 'affiliate marketing.'

The last bit, affiliate marketing, is of interest to me as I recently dipped my toe into the water of an online marketing approach, StomperNet that preaches affiliate marketing all day. I have mixed feelings about affiliate marketing; however, if you want to make money online, it would seem from Mr. Frind's achievement that the combination of a big, popular and pressing market (theme), together with affiliate marketing will make for lots of money.

Go get 'em

©Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved. No Reprint Without Prior Approval

If the state of Vermont is a useful example of present-day rural USA, The disparity in the availability of data services to rural and urban markets is exploding. Consider that a very large chunk of Web 2.0 is entirely unavailable to Vermonters who live outside of the center of any of the country towns that fill the state, or the 5 cities: Burlington, Rutland, Brattleboro, Montpelier, St. Albans. Network connections are either too slow to support video, or, ominously, bandwidth is metered. The latter situation is the case for folks who try to get the necessary bandwidth from a Satellite "broadband" data services provider such as HughesNet. We use HughesNet and recently suffered a 24 hr "throttle down" as the result of exceeding a daily limit of 375 MBs of data. Anyone who knows video, or for that matter, MP3 audio, knows that 375 MBs of data is "nothing," hence my assertion that Web 2.0 does not play in this state very well.

Consider also that mobile telephony cannot be characterized, in any way, as ubiquitous in the rural areas of the state, which I ought to note, also comprise in excess of 50% of the geographical area. Vermonters don't like the look of towers on hills (don't ask me, I had nothing to do with it), therefore, service is non existent hereabouts. Non existent mobile telephony translates into no value from internet banking over a mobile telephone, mobile telephone cameras, etc.

The worst to be hit by all of this are the young folks in the rural public school systems. They are growing up in a world where they cannot develop familiarity with services that are easy to find anywhere else . If the job market treats video over mobile as a no-brainer, a young geek from Vermont is not going to make the cut when a content provider fills some high paying slots in its developer roster.

The point of this article is to describe the situation with the hope that influencers (government, private industry, etc) will hear the alarm and move forward, aggressively to get real broadband to these areas right away, not ten years from now.

© 2007, Mike Blonder, All Rights Reserved, No Reprints Without Prior Permission