But my dissatisfaction with sex-based ads on the internet isn’t the news. There were no Press Releases posted, not a lot of blogosphere buzz (although mashable beat me to it by a week — must be something about actually focusing on news, eh?), and definitely nothing on the Facebook home page — either pre- or post-login.

Flyers Basic is a CPM (short for Cost Per Thousand — “M” is the roman numeral for thousand) based model. That is, Basic is based on impressions. It is sold in chunks of 5K, or $10 per buy. There’s no obvious discount pricing published. I believe this has been around for awhile, however unpublicized it is.

The PPC/CPC (Pay Per Click or Cost Per Click — they are interchangeable in this context) ad network is the interesting part. It’s modeled after the granddaddy of PPC advertising, Google AdWords. Ads start at a penny a click, so throwing a few dollars at the system to see what sticks isn’t a really costly endeavor. It’s auction-style, so if there is competition for your keywords — which are not free-form, like Google AdWords, but instead based on the existing content in user profiles — you’ll either pay more per click or not have your ads shown.

I’m running some test ad campaigns myself right now. If they are a dismal failure, I’ll let you know. If they are amazingly successful, well, I might just keep that little detail under my hat for a little while. ;-)

The Economics of Not Outsourcing the Ad Platform

An interesting question from a business perspective is: how come MySpace didn’t do this? Myspace’s approach was, instead, to court the big search engines for a big cash infusion. They went ahead and got a $75 million dollar per quarter guaranteed minimum AdSense payout from google for exclusivity rights on search. Yes, that’s right, $900 million over three years. (Which, incidentally, means you can put a targeted ad up on MySpace through AdWords. Just start a “Site Targeted” campaign and enter myspace.com when prompted. I haven’t found the results to be phenomenal there, for what it’s worth, but I’ve only done some relatively broad testing.)

So, does this mean that Facebook values the ad network at $300 million per year? Well, let’s do some quick shoot-from-the-hip math.

Compete says that facebook is currently receiving north of 27 million monthly unique visitors currently, who are generating 350 million visits. That means that every visitor, in aggregate, is visiting just shy of 13 times per month (350/27). The traffic has been rising dramatically, of course, so this is a somewhat optimistic number. Nine months ago it was 10 million visitors and 140 million visits. So let’s use a nice round number of 300 million visits. Given the growth path, I think that’s actually pretty conservative. All we’re assuming is that the network doesn’t grow at all and the current user base continues their usage patterns.

Now let’s take a look at the pages per visit. Compete shows an average over the last nine months of about 40. Yes, that’s really friggin’ high. Smart Guy groupies only stay for 9-10 page views at the most. The average is actually somewhere around 4. You definitely have to give it up to social networking as a kick-ass way of creating user stickiness. It’s really quite amazing.

Okay, so we have 300 million visits, who are generating create 12 billion page views. Assuming one impression per page, a click-through rate of 1 out of every five thousand, and an average click price of ten cents, we have the following statistics (all are per month where applicable):

• 300 Million Visits
• 40 Impressions Per Visit
• .02% CTR
• $0.10 per click

…which gives us, when we multiply all the figures together, a conservative monthly gross of 24 million greenbacks. Mind you, both the CTR and click prices are conservative, which you’re pretty well aware of if you’re on either side of the AdWords/AdSense food chain.

As luck would have it, if we use the Facebook Flyers Basic program, with its CPM cost of $2, as a metric instead, we get the same result. The math is (12 billion impressions / 1000 impressions) * $2 per CPM. That’s $24 million a month.

So Why Do it Themselves?

Well, the powers that be at Facebook simply did this analysis and came up with better numbers. And, indeed, if you adjust any of the numbers upwards just a bit, you come up with much more favorable financials. Use the August numbers from Compete, for example, instead of my conservative rounded-down estimate, and the the total impressions jumps from 12 billion to 14 billion.

Or, if I substitute in numbers from my own AdWords campaigns (which I monitor closely to keep costs in check), I come up with a CTR of 0.05% and a CPC (cost per click) of 21 cents. That’s an instant quadrupling (and then some) of our gross sales figure.

It’s a hard call, because the Google/MySpace deal undoubtedly had the same upside. Remember that the $75 million a quarter was just a minimum payment.

I think that, in the end, it’s a question of culture. Facebook has prided itself on staying independent (and, indeed, reportedly turned down an offer from Yahoo somewhere north of $750 million almost 18 months ago), and maintaining a degree of control over the user experience. Whether this is good or bad remains to be seen (who’s ego will we read about in coming years?), but so far, I’m incredibly impressed with Facebook both from an entrepreneurial perspective and as an end user.

How are you using Facebook? Have you found profits through it?

No, Mrs L’Engle, may she rest in peace, and Vanessa, in all her glory (clothed or not), can help your business.

Pay Attention to What People Are Talking About
I’m here to tell you that, if you’re at all interested in link baiting, SERP stuffing, and that whole business of making money with your blog, you really ought to pay attention to fads. According to Google Trends, here are the top ten search queries around 11pm GMT today, September 7:

1. vanessa hudgens pictures
2. madeleine l engle
3. bin laden tape
4. sarah larsen
5. bird rock bandits
6. a wrinkle in time
7. vanessa hudgens naked pic
8. southwest airlines passenger
9. hudgens photo
10. emery kauanui jr

Am I link baiting with this post? You betcha.

However, if you’re interested in making money with the web, these trends are worth paying attention to. And, no matter how in touch with pop culture you happen to be (chances are that if you understand the intricacies of “SERP” you’re probably not all that up on High School Musical!), monitoring this type of data is extremely useful for creating content people are interested in, feeding your creativity, and having small talk to fall back on at cocktail parties. And no, that last item isn’t for humor’s sake. Never underestimate the power of networking and schmoozing!

That being said, there’s likely something new in the top 50 on either Google Trends or Yahoo Buzz that you can capitalize on every day.

Not Just for Content Creators, This Can Help you Sell your Product.
It’s true. Really Smart Guy is not just a meta-blog about blogging. I’ve got the far more ambitious goal of actually helping you grow your business and your wealth, and if you use the web for marketing, even in the slightest, paying attention to BuzzTrends (now there’s a good domain/company name for a marketing statistics firm, eh?) can give you new ideas for marketing programs. Sure, A Wrinkle in Time will have drifted off of the BuzzTrend composite list by next Tuesday, but that just means the window of usefulness f or your ad window is small. Fashion a relevant ad (people still have to read the darn thing) that pitches your business, and you might just find that an $8 ad spend over the weekend earns you hundreds of leads and a return on investment that would make Warren Buffett cry.

I’ve also been exploring the technical requirements for a bigger project while getting tapped on the virtual shoulder on a regular basis with web development questions. This led to the articulation of something that, as a software and support guy, comes as second nature, but seems to escape so many whom I speak to.

Your Web Site is a Software Application.

That means that the rules of software development apply. It means that where it makes sense to apply processes associated with software manufacturing, you should wholeheartedly do so. And it means that if all you’ve ever done is blog about how poor you are, you probably ought to change your mindset before going out and trying to do much with web-based businesses other than blogging.

If you’re using the web to extend your offline business, you don’t need to think about software. It’s perfectly ok to use a word processor to place a virtual business card on the web and place the URL on your business card. If you’re a writer, then use tools like blogger and wordpress. If you’re a broker of used goods, then yes, craigslist and ebay are web tools you should be using. If you need to do something more complicated that increases the value of your business through custom software, that’s easy! Hire me.

But if you’ve never touched html, if you don’t know the fundamental differences — and I’m not talking about code syntax — between Java and JavaScript, and if you haven’t the foggiest what I’m referring to when I say “data abstraction” or “presentation layer”, then you’ve got some reading and studying to do before you start thinking about building Facebook plugins and online storefronts.

All of this being said, if you want to ignore my rant and forge ahead anyway, here are some basics you need to know about software development.

1. You need to think about your business before even considering your application. Software people — usually with a title like “Product Manager” — call this a Roadmap. The application you want to develop is serving a purpose, right? Well, like any investment, the costs associated with the application need to be weighed against the reward, both potential (optimistic) and likely (realistic). Is there a better place you should be spending your time and money? More importantly, are you interested in a given feature, application, or business simply because you’ve fallen in love with the idea? Don’t do it. The three shower rule applies.
2. You need to document your functional requirements before you start writing code. If you happen to be doing the development, then maybe you can take some of shortcuts here, but that amounts to shorthand notation, not skipping this step. For instance, consider a user management application. You know, those things you use every day when you need to login to something. Great, so you need some place to store the user and password, you need a form that accepts these inputs, and you need a way of providing feedback like “Sorry, bad password, stop trying to hack into your boyfriend’s account.” Anything else? No? How about security concerns? How do you reset a password? How do you register a new user? What about when a user name is already taken? What about password requirements, like length or a rule against using dictionary words? The point is this: until you start making a list (at least… what we software guys call “use cases” would be even better), you’ll forget lots of stuff that needs to be in there. Make your list first, and you won’t find yourself rewriting code you should have constructed properly the first time. Or worse, paying your $100 an hour IT guy to do it twice. Oh, and yes, there’s an acronym for this one: “FRD”.
3. You need to capture your technical details. Just as I’ve described above with your features, making a list of your technical decisions — both in terms of architecture (e.g, the server operating system, the development tools used, how data is stored/cached/handled) and your details, like the type of data you need to maintain in your database, will save you a great deal of heartache later. On bigger projects, both your FRD (functional requirements document) and TRD (technical requirements document) go through several iterations before any development begins. (Aside from, perhaps, some user interface design for inclusion any these documents, which happens often with web applications, because a skilled developer can do web UI mock-ups faster than a designer can create mock-ups in Photoshop.)
4. You need a guide, young padawan. It doesn’t have to be me. I’m admittedly pretty expensive. That being said, I’ll happily answer simple questions from any reader and would be delighted to critique your business plan off-the-cuff. If you want a formal evaluation or some actual development work, of course, the first thing I’ll ask for is if you’ve been through the first three points above. :-)

One journalist even noted recently that he’s blowing off LinkedIn in favor of Facebook. ArsTechnica recently had an article on how one of the huge differences between Facebook (login required) and Myspace — turns out that Myspace attracts a lower socioeconomic class in aggregate than Facebook does (I did some digging, and I think this article by Danah Boyd was a major catalyst to Ars, SlashDot, and BoingBoing picking up the article — blogrunner has a page with some relavant links to related blog posts and news articles). That makes sense, actually, because myspace has always been wide open, while Facebook, up until last September, has been segmented to only the educated (or becoming) part of the population. And in America, unfortunately, there’s a lot of socioeconomics that goes into the availability of quality education, financial aid be damned. We can argue about causation, but there is definitely a correlate.

I’ve been a member of the network for over a year now, and my affiliation started the way most of the users joined up — I met someone the old fashioned way (yes, that means in person, face-to-face, with real conversation and chemistry), she snapped a photo or two, and I wanted to see them. Are you going to post those somewhere? “Yeah, they’ll be up on my facebook tomorrow sometime.” And yet another profile was born.

Now, the relevance to this post to this blog as a whole isn’t immediately obvious — I’m aware of that — but the fact that I’ve been getting Facebook invites from random bloggers and readers around the world who I really have only a tenuous relationship with means that people think there’s value in (a) a large personal network, even if the relationships aren’t particularly deep, and (b) most of the Facebook newbies aren’t being all that selective about who they call a “friend”. Both of these trends are something that I noticed on Myspace the first time I used the thing. That and the fact that the thing is written in ColdFusion and had (has?) more technical/scalability/usability issues than the clock settings function on your old VCR. It’s gotten better, yes, but it’s still amazingly slow, ugly, and difficult to use, especially when you consider that it is the canonical poster child of what we’ve collectively named “Web 2.0″.

[Sure, this last point is debatable. While the geek in me says that Web 2.0 is all about usability improvements to web applications with technology like AJAX, the entrepreneur in me realizes that the power is in the network. Web 2.0 is not anything with AJAX, pastel colors, and rounded corners, it's any application that leverages user-generated content to improve the overall value of the app. Social networking as a genre is thus the killer app of Web 2.0. Offshoots of this phenomena that have become serious players in the application space are now included under the Web 2.0 umbrella, perhaps -- Writely, now known as Google Docs, comes to mind -- but while you might think that this has nothing to do with leveraging user-generated content, I'm here to correct that notion. Google's applications -- including gmail, docs, blogger, etc -- are still about leveraging user-generated content to the profit of the network owner. In Google's case, it's all about leveraging the AdWords platform across more content pages. More content means more ad inventory, which in turn means more impressions, clicks, and dollars.]

So what am I getting at here? Basically, I feel like my Myspace relationships are significantly less valuable than my Facebook relationships. I have segmented my online social networking profiles for the most part. Facebook contacts are people I have drinks and meals with. Sure, I have plenty of business contacts in there, but what fun is life when you don’t mix business and pleasure? As anyone who has ever worked with me knows, I’d love to feed everyone under my entrepreneurial umbrella. Let’s work hard, play hard, and make gobs and gobs of money while having the time of our lives. That being said, Facebook, for me, is primarily social — there is literally no one in my network who I have not had a drink or meal with. Or would like to.

Myspace, on the other hand, includes “friends” that I’ve never met and probably never will. It includes lower level friends — like the server at the local burrito place. Or that girl I went out with once back in ‘01 — we’ve kept in light touch, but lost our respective phone numbers years ago. I don’t check it often and I don’t really care to. My inbox is full of spam anyway.

LinkedIn is segmented, too. There are probably only 2-3 people in my linked in network where I haven’t actively moved around thousands of dollars with (or more), i.e., everyone in my network engaged in significant economic activity with me at some point. In many ways, that waitress at the burrito shop is a better “friend” — I see her more often and she has a bigger impact on my day-to-day life — but she doesn’t belong in my LinkedIn network because I really couldn’t speak to her employable skills other than handling a cash register.

I’ve gotten away from the business aspects of social networking a bit, I know, so I’ll try to circle back and leave you with a few quickly digestible tidbits. As most of you who have my email address know, I recently decided to go back to school. I am doing so just for fun. This action has solidly moved me from Generation WTF (there’s a solid 5 year gap between Gen-X and Gen-Y, for godsakes! What were you crazy demographers thinking? Hence “Generation WTF”.) to Gen-Y. I am now in the habit of hanging out with Gen-Y folk that are full of hope, eager to learn, and excited about everything. It’s amazingly awesome. In the process of this move, I’ve noticed a few habits that you’ll really appreciate if the Gen-Y demographic is potentially in your client base.

• Email is a given, but it’s secondary. It’s like text messaging, only longer and slower. Less intimate than a phone call, a text message, or a facebook message. It’s equally private, and used with the same dependence as cell phones, but it is definitely NOT the primary method of interaction. I had an instructor give out his cell phone to the class the other day, telling us to text him if we were going to miss a class. Really. Email is not used to invite people to parties (sorry, evite), it’s not used to organize meetings, and it’s not usable for much other than notifications from older people or faceless entities (like Amazon or the University).
• Person-to-person interactions where a phone call is too much (either in terms of commitment or time) are handled via text message or facebook. Facebook wall-to-wall conversations are the default, with facebook private messaging (essentially in-network email) filling the gaps where private data that you might not want to share with your entire network (or, perhaps, the world) is involved. Yes, the phone is still used, but those rules haven’t changed in at least a decade (Yes, I know about Alexander Graham Bell — phone habits definitely changed in the 90s when wireless phones became a required accoutrement for everyone old enough to carry a wallet).
• Facebook is king. I now get an equal amount of email from facebook notifications as I do from clients and colleagues (yes, I’m still running my businesses). Like I do with email, I now just leave my facebook window open all the time when I’m at my desk or laptopping.
• Myspace gets no play. Nobody mentions it, nobody uses it, and nobody cares. We all have accounts, we all check once a week, and we all participate, but it’s only to keep up with the peripheral acquaintances and/or throwbacks who have yet to hop on the Facebook bandwagon. I’m not saying Myspace is dead by any means — you certainly can’t argue with their traffic, users, or mindshare — but for the soon-to-be elite demographic portion of Gen-Y (with disposable income), Facebook is where you need to be.

Now if I could just come up with a nifty way to directly capitalize on this knowledge… without resorting to developing more of those (ugh) silly Facebook plugins. How many wall applications does one really need?

I don’t really want to take the time right now to write a primer on this (been remarkably occupied of late, as you’re all aware of from my posting infrequency), but here are a few quick notes on things to pay attention to when managing your adwords campaigns:

Mind Your Conversions

The single greatest feature of web marketing is the quantifiable ROI. If you aren’t converting ad dollars into sales, you need to get a new job. Furthermore, if you aren’t converting your ad dollars into profitable sales, you’ve got a lot of work to do — either figure out how to turn a higher profit or spend less on your advertising.

Top Placement Usually Isn’t Worth It

If you pay attention at all to adsense monetization on your own content sites (whether you make $20 a month from your blog or $50K a month from your free dating site), you know that there is a wide disparity between ad #1 (which is more or less the price that google recommends as your “Max CPC”, incidentally) and ad #2.  Sometimes, especially on higher cost keywords, this disparity can be over 100%. So the $2 a click you need to spend to guarantee top billing on every search your potential customers perform could drop to under a buck if you let your standing drop to #2.

This begs the question, of course, of whether or not paying for the top spot is worth it at all. It probably is in some very distinct circumstances. If a client is worth thousands of dollars in revenue and your using geo-targeting to focus on specific markets, for instance.

However, if your product or service is at all commoditized and your sales are primarily online in nature (meaning you never meet your clients face-to-face, and the relationship is thus not based on your ability to schmooze), then the probability is significantly higher that your customers are going to shop around anyway. So spend your time (and the associated money) on writing compelling ads and fortifying your web presence so that those costly clicks convert. Don’t double your ad spend getting to the top of the list when your customers are going to click the back button and do some comparison shopping anyway.

Use Your Thesaurus, the Nearest Five-Year-Old, and Your Generation-Y Ambassador.

Getting in the minds of your customers can be tricky. You know what you’re selling, but it takes some creativity to get anywhere on that proverbial long tail. If you’re part of the ipod economy, for instance, “ipod” is the obvious high-traffic keyword. And I’m sure you can get the next 50 or so variations — anyone can come up with “apple ipod”, “ipod accessories”, “buy ipod”, etc. But even aside from the slight variations, e.g., “after market ipod”, consider the other options just for the word “buy”. A quick browse at thesaurus.com returned 20 variations within the first entry alone, including everything from “acquire” to “peddle”. Should you put those into your adwords campaign? I would. I’d also dig deeper into that thesaurus and think outside the box as much as possible. I didn’t see “procure” or “pick up” on that list, but I bet those two get impressions, too.

After you’ve satisfied the English Teacher buried deep inside you, grab your nearest kindergarten pupil and have them spell your major keywords. Sweet treats will probably help :-). This exercise will easily double your number of keywords, because as much as we all like to think we’re literate, there’s quite a few folks out there who would spell “purchase” with two Es.  Then there are the homonyms, like by instead of buy. While you’re doing this exercise, also consider the mistypings. I bet “ipodd” generates a pretty large number of impressions in its own right, for instance.

Finally, tap a 20 year old and do the same exercise. How would you say “ipod” on facebook, to your best friend, or in a text message? This is probably not the best example, because iPod is such an icon across both culture and generations, but I’d put the shortened term “pod” in my campaign nonetheless. Don’t forget the hip-hop based urban slang, either.

Monitor and Adjust

Again, the beauty of web marketing with AdWords (and its competitors) is that you can monitor your return on investment (ROI) in near real-time. Watch your spend, mind your conversions, and analyze your ROI often.

You’ll also want to make use of Analytics for this, because the Traffic Sources > Keywords section. Export this list, which represents how users are already finding you, and you’ll have a great starting point for your keyword list.

(Yes, I’ve left out landing pages and content relevance from this discussion. I’ll cover that another time. It’s a big topic, after all!)

Most of them, however, haven’t been good for much other than a few technorati authority points. There are several styles of promotional campaigns like this: Memes, Contests, Direct Exchanges, and “ViralTagging”. If there’s enough reader interest, over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to analyze the various types of linkback campaigns. Today’s topic is “Memes”.

Meme Who?

According to Wikipedia, “Biologist and evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in 1976. He gave as examples tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothing fashions, ways of making pots, and the technology of building arches.” The entry on memes goes on to mention viral marketing as an example of a meme, stating “Viral marketing [is] A type of marketing based on memes and using ‘word of mouth‘ to advertise (see the recent example of Snakes on a Plane).”

Within the scope of blogging, a “meme” generally refers to the concept of establishing a topic or set of questions and “tagging” several other bloggers with the meme. The idea is that the bloggers tagged hopefully grab the meme and “pay it forward”, writing about the topic themselves and then tagging five more bloggers who have yet to participate.

So who starts these things?

One recent example of a very successful campaign that almost qualifies as a meme is Darren’s (problogger) Top 5 Group Writing Project. The Top 5 promotion was extremely effective and successful by most measures, earning new eyeballs for nearly everyone involved. The primary beneficiary, of course, was Darren, because he got the most linkbacks and exposure (linking back wasn’t even a requirement, but most of the hundreds — perhaps thousands — of participants did so).

This is not a good canonical example, however, because there was a cash prize involved, thus blurring the line between meme and contest. The “tagging” concept also prevented a huge jump in linkbacks, because at best you were looking at 6 links that way — one from Darren and one each from the 5 folks you tagged. So it was viral, yes, but the one person it really helped the most was the one guy on the internet who probably needs links the least. Just kidding, Darren… but it does illustrate a point. It’s a lot easier to generate buzz when you already have enough readers to populate a small city. Wealth begets wealth.

Another recent meme — one that did not have the contest angle — was the popular The Face Behind the Blog campaign. This was a fun entry, too, because it wasn’t simply a list of links — there was actual content involved, and the folks you tagged rewarded you with photos and some skeletons from their closet. For a fair number of folks, this was a very successful campaign — it fostered new relationships, generated a common thread across many different blogs, and caused lots of linkback love for those that participated wholeheartedly and/or got involved early.

Now, these last two points are key. Here’s what I mean by wholehearted participation:

• Make an effort to contact all of the folks you’re linking back to directly. I know, that’s a lot of stinking links, but how much more likely are they to check out your blog, read your post(s), and link back? I’m just speculating, but I think the ratio jumps from 15% or so to about 90. I don’t think I’ve ever not linked back to someone participating in a meme that I’ve participated in. On the other hand, if a meme is a runaway success, and you’ve got 50 new links a day coming in for a couple of weeks, how could anyone keep up? And still write compelling content?
• If you slack off on the above point, at least track the meme back to its original publisher and reach out to them. Send them an email and leave a comment on the meme posting. That way, everyone else who comes along and takes part will grab your link too.
• Get in early. I posted my Face Behind the Blog entry at least two full weeks after the meme had started. It was worth a few link backs, to be sure, but had nowhere near the energy it would have if I had participated from the get-go. Just look at the total number of participants (you might, ahem, use that big search engine that starts with a “G” and search for “face behind the blog” in quotes) and you’ll realize how much I missed by only getting a dozen link backs from the deal. Granted, I was also lazy and barely followed my one advice above, but I had just reached the Technorati Top 10K, so it was easy to rationalize that I too busy. ;-)
• Write good content. Your new visitors shouldn’t come to your site, scan your three last postings, and click away in disgust. If your blog is light on content, then all those new page views you’ll get from meme-ing are almost a waste. You want new visitors to feel like you’re adding value, spawning them to come back and read more. A good blog should make new visitors bookmark and/or seek out your RSS Feed link. I know, this is an old song, but it’s still a good one.

Now, what went into the success of both of these memes?

Well, first off, both were initiated by folks with mindshare. When you’re a Darren Rowse, you can throw up a meme on your blog, not tell anyone, and can pretty much expect that you’ll get 100 comments in the first 8 hours. But for the rest of us, it helps to have existing relationships with several bloggers. You should be able to tag 10 of your friends (or “friends”) and have 10 linkbacks immediately. Furthermore, those 10 new posts on other blogs should reach a readership that is complementary to your own. If your ten friends happen to all have blogs with 3 RSS subscribers and just started writing last week, that doesn’t help a whole heck of a lot, now does it?

Secondly, it helps to volunteer to keep the master list. It’s a lot of work for the originator, because it takes a fair amount of effort to update a blog post with 100 new links, but it’s the bait, and if you’re starting one of these, you’re going after lofty goals anyway, so be prepared. Besides, if you don’t keep a master list, the meme can easily spread, yet leave you behind. All it takes is one fellow deleting your link, and the next 500 people who participate won’t even know who you are! (Ok, that’s a little less likely, because so many meme participants just copy/paste, but I was exaggerating for effect.)

Finally, encourage participation. One of the great things about these types of campaigns is connecting with new people. There’s a big difference between admiring another blogger and trading blogroll links. It’s another step still to get to the point where you’re chatting or trading email on a near daily basis. These might be “virtual” friends, but, just like in the real world, who you know is often more important than what you know.

Want to get in on one of these? Well, how about John Cow’s Feed My Feed promo?

I can’t speak for all of the blogs on this list (alas, I haven’t yet subscribed to all of them), but I can vouch for the first ten. They are solid blogs and I feel honored that Really Smart Guy was included in such a quality list. (Sorry it took me so long to post this, Bob.)

Simple! You just copy the list down below on your blog, hence creating link backs for your blogging friends and then click the RSS feed link to subscribe to all of them. Then you add yourself and up to 5 other bloggers and their feeds to the end of the list before you publish it on your own blog. Show your friends some link love

Just imagine if just 10 people would do this and then 10 more after them. That would get your blog 100 extra link backs and 100 extra feed subscribers!

The Original List:

• Subscribe to JohnCowdotCom
• Subscribe to BobmeetsWorld
• Subscribe to LifeisRisky
• Subscribe to TheKingKongBlog
• Subscribe to My New Hustle
• Subscribe to GadgetTastic
• Subscribe to Life of Browie
• Subscribe to Disregard Me
• Subscribe to Everybody Go To
• Subscribe to Brian Vaughan
• Subscribe to Realy Smart Guy
  
• Subscribe to Sam Breadstone

The Extended List:

• Subscribe to JM Options Trader
• Subscribe to Christy’s Coffee Break
• Subscribe to Behind The Page
• Subscribe to TheNextPost
• Subscribe to Hem
• Subscribe to Million Dollar Portfolio
• Subscribe to Unknown Namespace
• Subscribe to Desty Online
• Subscribe to Blogigs
• Subscribe to Make$Money$
• Subscribe to Slyvisions: Online Tips, Tricks,and Tools
• Subscribe to BlogoZine
• Subscribe to The Prize Blog
• Subscribe to PolliWogsPond
• Subscribe to My Journey to One Million Dollars
  
• Subscribe to JulieAnneBonner
• Subscribe to UglyMailbox
• Subscribe to Vincent Chow dot Net
• Subscribe to RevieWOW
• Subscribe to TheInternetExperiment
• Subscribe to Profitable Productive Blogging
• Subscribe to Jason’s Random Thoughts
• Subscribe to Bleneral dot Com
• Subscribe to Chatsquatch.net
• Subscribe to Manila Mom
• Subscribe to Personal Finance
• Subscribe to Studs Cash Page
• Subscribe to 40Hourstogo
• Subscribe to A Nice Place in the Sun
• Subscribe to a Cowboys Wife
• Subscribe to Making Money Through Internet
• Subscribe to Earn Money on the Web
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One of the big hassles with Amazon Associates is how affiliate links are created. I’ve been a member for years (about $100 in commissions in the last couple of years, if you’re curious), and despite repeated entries on my task list to install and play with WordPress plugins for Amazon, I never got around to it until a couple of weeks ago.

Now that I have, I wish I’d done it literally years ago. If you’ve ever created an Amazon affiliate link and you use WordPress, go download the WP-Amazon plugin now. I can’t believe I ever created an affiliate link without it.

And the number one method of measuring success is…

1. You read the following sentence and don’t laugh. Bloggers get laid.

I guess he really liked my obvious love of cows. :-)

Go check it out. But don’t leave me! I promise I’ll still post my brainiest ramblings here.

Ouch.

I was searching for the American Servicing Company’s customer service phone number, with whom I have a mortgage. They’re a subsidiary of Wells Fargo. Here, see the miserable search results for the following terms yourself:

American Servicing Company

American Servicing Company Phone Number

American Servicing Company Contact

Anyone want to forward this to the Wells Fargo CIO? You should hire me for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) assistance. Looks like you need it!

As for me, I now have to wait until I can read the customer service number off of my paper statement. How’s that for efficiency? :-)

Of course, since I’m always keeping busy, I haven’t had time to really investigate (let alone write the appropriate front end code) , but sometime in the last couple of weeks, Google quietly pushed the ability to send out reports from analytics on a scheduled basis.

Looks like this solves 95% of the problem. From any screen in analytics, now, simply click the “email” button in the upper left hand corner of the display panel. Notice the button highlighted with a red oh-so-subtle circle in the screen shot to the left.

The new pink “Settings” Control in the Navigation Menu on the left is only used to manage existing email subscriptions setup through the button I’ve circled. This was confusing to me when I first noticed the email buttons and started clicking. Since the email [circled] button is contextual, however, this makes some sense. This particular screen shot is showing unique visitors (hey, I know 80-100 is low. I never said I was an A-List blogger!).

Here’s a shot of the setup interface:

The Format options are pretty self-explanatory. The XML and CSV formats are probably most useful if you’re integrating the data into another application (as in, anything from Excel to SalesForce), whereas the PDF is probably ideal for humans.

As an example here’s the output that the TSV format gave me for the last month of Page Views (the first and last time I’ll ever use that format):

# —————————————-
fuery.com
Dashboard
May 12, 2007 June 11, 2007
# —————————————-

# —————————————-
# Graph
# —————————————-
May 12, 2007 - Jun 11, 2007
Pageviews
255
231
247
277
237
242
181
233
317
281
270
283
258
220
225
236
239
252
240
250
255
252
260
251
299
257
282
272
262
255
281
# ——————————————————————————–

Existing ad companies that focus on gaming aren’t to worried. Yet.

See the article from Business Week.

Could be an interesting ad format when it comes to fruition.

Credit goes to Courtney Tuttle for infecting my brain with this particular train. :-) I like this one because if done properly everyone gets an equal share of the benefits — it’s not one of those cases where the first few who initiate the train are the only beneficiaries.

Court adds, “When I saw this train, I decided to join immediately, mostly because there aren’t very many people on it yet. If you join today you will likely get a nice payoff. I’m betting that this ‘tag matrix’ will fill all the way up.”

=========Copy and Paste below this line======== Instructions: 1.) Copy and paste the matrix of “ViralTags” below courtesy of Founders Cafe. 2.) Substitute the Host Tag and one of the “Viral Tags” in the matrix with your anchor text of choice with your blog’s URL. Please keep anchor text to a max of 3 words to keep the matrix size manageable. 3.) When you get a ping back from someone that has your link in one of their “Viral Tags”, practice good karma by copying his/her Host Tag’s anchor text (automatically the associated link will also be copied) and paste it over one of your “Viral Tags” below. 4.) Encourage and invite your readers to do the same and soon this can grow virally. Host Tag: Really Smart Guy 

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As luck would have it, on the very same day, my friend Eric Giguere published an article on his AdSense blog about publishing Full Feed RSS on WordPress 2.0+. He actually dug into the code and hacked it to display the entire feed within the RSS description tags, which some readers apparently [incorrectly] display as the entire content. Up until yesterday, I’d never caught a mistake on Eric’s blog, so I just followed his instructions without pondering the problem. Unfortunately, after trying Eric’s instructions, FeedBurner claimed that my RSS Feed was no longer valid. So I reverted back to the original code. Sorry, Eric.

I don’t know about other RSS readers, because I personally user Google Reader as well (and didn’t take the time to test with other readers), but here’s what I did to fix the issue for Google Reader:

• Verified that my installation of WordPress was configured to publish the full feed (in the WordPress administration tool, go to Options > Reading).
• Logged into my FeedBurner account, accessed the feed for Really Smart Guy, clicked on the “Optimize” tab, and turned on “SmartFeed”.
• Pinged FeedBurner to update my feed [almost] immediately.
• Unsubscribed to my own RSS Feed in Google Reader, closed all browswer windows, then resubscribed. I’m not sure that the browser shut-down was actually necessary, but I wanted to be certain.

Voila! It should be noted that I’m using the FeedBurner Feed Replacement plugin. I can’t see any reason not to use FeedBurner — their tools allow for all the feed customization I’d ever want (and then some), I get the cool Subscriber Count widget (although I still scratch my head daily as to why it fluctuates so much), and I don’t have to worry about handling email subscribers. Plus, seeing as how Google owns FeedBurner now, I imagine there will be ample opportunity to monetize RSS moving forward.

By the way, it did take 12 hours or so for my secondary google account (for testing) to update, so even if you ping FeedBurner, your existing subscribers won’t see the change for a day or so.

Turn off nofollow in your comments. “nofollow” refers to a property defined in html link tags that prevents search engines from spidering (or following) a given link. Most blogging platforms automatically add the nofollow property to all link tags because of comment spam. As long as comment spam can be caught using other tools, however, there’s no reason to do this. In fact, giving your commentators (or is it commentors? dammit!) a little linkback love is a good thing. This encourages readers to comment, which should foster discussion, and ultimately improve the quality of your readership, your writing, and your life.

(Well, the last one is up to you, but hopefully you actually like this blogging thing in the first place. ;-))

There are a plethora of plugins that accomplish this relatively simple task for various blogging platforms. I’m personally using Semiologic’s dofollow here on Really Smart Guy.

Of course, this isn’t a new idea. I’ve been meaning to do this for months. Better late than never, right? I’ve also added a nifty new ifollow badge to my sidebar, courtesy of Randa Clay Design.

Oh, and you absolutely must have an anti-comment spam plugin like akismet or spam karma (which I’m using and love) installed with this. But you knew that already, right?

For more mostly objective information on the nofollow tag, see the wikipedia entry.

My blog, however, has been off topic for the past few days as a result. Sorry about that.

During my Sunday meetings, SEO came up, and a follow on discussion today covered many things I take for granted, but seeing them articulated reminded me how important the basics are, so here’s a quick refresher on Search Engine Optimization:

1. Put keywords in the page title, e.g.,

<html><head><title>Put critical keywords here</title>…

2. Put keywords within emphasized text on your page.

This means such as headers, e.g.,

<body><h1>Put critical keywords here</h1>…

Search engines pay attention to bold (<strong> or <b>) and italicized (<em> or <i>) content, too.

3. Put keywords in your URL. For a product like Tylenol:

http://www.tylenol.com/medicine/extra_strength/tylenol/tylenol.html (Notice how many times tylenol is used)

4. Get other sites to link to you. But don’t spam.

<a href=”http://fuery.com”>Put critical keywords here</a>

Use newsgroups, forums, web directories, and like-minded bloggers to earn linkback love.
Unless directly relevant, put your link in your signature and not in the main message. Again, don’t spam.

5. Make sure all of the pages on your site point to your site’s main page. This is good for both humans and search engines.

<a href=”http://fuery.com”>Home</a>

6. Mind your anchor text.

Place keywords in your links, not outside of it.

For instance, this is lame:
Check out my blog here.

Rather, one should do this:
Check out my blog, Really Smart Guy

7. Meta tags aren’t dead

Really. See http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_meta.asp.

8. And most importantly, eat your own dog food.

Remember that you must always be adding value. If you wouldn’t buy your own product, read your own blog, or engage your own service, then you have work to do. Get started.

I was just contemplating subjects to write about and thought about applauding the World Sunlight Map for simply being a marvel of engineering. (That’s where this nifty Mercator map to the left came from.) Could I do it? Yes. Would I ever bother? Heck no. So the folks over at die.net deserve a huge pat on the back for making the web a cooler place.

Then I thought about discussing the recent news that Google is slapping the AdSense arbitrage folks around and squashing the Made-for-Adsense bonanza. But lots of other people have already mentioned the topic and it’s old news at this point. I’ve never made any significant revenue using this business strategy, personally, so I’m not too passionate on the subject anyway. Boooooring.

So I guess I’m left with talking about some core business stuff. I was pondering my recent experimentation with FuelMyBlog and noticing that google analytics reported that I received only a half dozen or so click throughs from FMB in the last couple of days (it was actually 7, but I’m not sure if one or two of those CTRs were me clicking my own smiling face :-)) . I didn’t get too excited about those numbers, despite the fact that most of them were new readers and the not-too-shabby coincidence that my RSS Feed count went up by about the same amount in the last 24 hours.

The business lesson here, aside from “always be grateful, even for small steps” — or whatever form of that cliche you prefer — is that growth snowballs. (Oh, and FuelMyBlog is worth it, in by book, btw.)

Getting started in business — any business — is hard. It takes lots of working for free to get the ball rolling even a tiny amount. Once you push with all your might for days and days with seemingly no reward, you only, then, start to get some payback. And it’s still minimal. It won’t feel worth it. You have to have an extraordinary amount of passion and/or vision. Usually an entrepreneur has both, because one tends to reinforce the other synergistically.

One of the business books I read as a teenager (yes, I was a geek even before it was chic!) stated a rule that I still remember (albeit paraphrased after 15 years): When you start out in business, ten units of effort earn one unit of results. Later, however, one unit of effort will earn ten units of results. If you care, it was Wealth Without Risk by Charles Givens. I don’t wholeheartedly recommend the book, but it’s definitely better than Rich Dad, Poor Dad! (Post a comment and ask me for a real review of both if you’d like to see it.)

That one statement is definitely true, as my FuelMyBlog experience helps illustrate. At one point in the history of this blog, I cared so little about my number of readers that I didn’t even check. When I did start checking, I found I had only ten or so regular readers — and all of them, pretty much, were friends, both new and old. Getting 4-5 new readers in a single day back then would have been like striking gold. But adding a handful of new readers on to 100+ subscribers isn’t quite so earth shattering, now is it? Heck, I lose that many when I don’t post for three days. (Not that I don’t love y’all, please DO keep reading! And don’t hesitate to contact me and let me know what I should be babbling about if this banter isn’t suiting your taste.)

For bloggers and folks making their money (or trying to) on the web in particular, remember that the web is a network — and the ability to grow improves with every new node added. In some respects, getting your first ten customers (or regular readers) takes as much effort as the next 90.

I have a real estate investing anecdote as well. I bought my first house back in 1999. I got told no several times. I knew I could afford it — I was the thriftiest guy you’d ever seen. I drove a 12 year old car and was used to surviving on less than $1000 a month. The banks and mortgage people, however, just saw a 22 year old kid with eyes too big for his stomach. Getting that first mortgage and handling the subsequent landlord duties was definitely a whole lot of work without any reward. Changing locks at 6am before heading to my tech job at a startup was pretty brutal, not to mention the pain of getting acquainted with custom plumbing supply vendors on my lunch break. And boy, were those property tax bills scary!

The second time I applied for a mortgage, however, banks were lining up to give me money. I closed 4 new lines of credit in 60 days the second time around (that’s a good story, too, but you’ll just have to subscribe for that one ;-)). Some of it is learning the ropes — like giving the banks what they want in the format they desire, nothing more, nothing less. Some of it is simply that getting the ball rolling is the hard part — like having a track record of paying my mortgage on time, not to mention actually owning a screwdriver so I could change those locks. And some of it is due to the economies of scale — my on-paper net worth was higher, in this case, so banks looked at me as less of a risk.

The moral of my stories? Get started. Define your customer. Craft your product. Tell said customer about product.

Rinse. Lather. Repeat. Don’t worry about the rewards, because if you’ve laid your foundation well, the rewards will follow without question. You’ll look up one day, finally notice your profits (or your peers will) after solidifying your processes, and wonder how you got there.

Now, the $64,000 question is whether or not this will actually produce new traffic (and consummate readership). I’ll be watching my analytics over the next couple of days and will post the results here.

This is actually a really good test of the FuelMyBlog network. For me personally, if just 20-30 virgin readers are exposed to Smart Guy over the next couple of days, then my participation was well worth it. I might even move the FuelMyBlog badge on my sidebar to a more prominent place. What about you? What threshold of virgin readers would you require in order to make any promotional tool worth the effort? Do you analyze the possible results before engaging in any such activity, or do you just try things shoot-from-the-hip style?

So, ahem, can someone get me a date with “Claire Coffee”, the gal playing the customer? I’m waaay nicer than that Advertiser guy…

Incidentally, this is a nifty marketing ploy. Check out the early numbers after only 40 hours.

So I’ve had a FuelMyBlog badge up for about 6 weeks (it’s on the sidebar to the right if you’re reading this through fuery.com). Here’s a snapshot of my statistics thus far.

Now, based on the Business and Technology FuelMyBlog category, one should show up on the top ten with only 120 votes or so. The #10 spot as of today has 119 votes to date and only 2 votes today. Seems like pretty low hanging fruit. In fact, the top blog of all time, according to the FMB Master List, has only 818 votes. Seems achievable, right? Except that I’ve noticed a few things about FuelMyBlog:

• The daily votes are based on a 24 hour period beginning and ending at midnight GMT. Pretty straightforward.
• The front page updates are not real-time. If I log on at 12:05 AM midnight and give myself a single vote, I have found that the ten folks in the top ten spots on the front page (which apparently displays “today’s top blogs”) doesn’t update. This is true even if the other folks in the top spot also only have a single vote. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve logged on, seen ten blogs with only 1 or 2 votes, found myself and discovered I already had a vote, and added my personal vote, bringing the daily tally (in theory) to 2. Still no dice. Maybe it’s a cron task and I’m just checking at unlucky intervals — my observations are not scientific in nature (or, at least, outside of my own naturally analytic leanings), so this report should be taken with a grain of salt. A small grain. ;-)
• I detect next to no incoming traffic from FuelMyBlog in my web server logs. Google Analytics seems to agree. We’re talking a quarter of 1% of all my traffic. Since my traffic isn’t all that eye-opening in the first place, that’s pretty abysmal in my opinion.

Are any of you using FuelMyBlog? What has been your experience? Is it worthy of further investigation/promotion?