iamned.com Blog

Want to make lots of money online with your new site? Sure you do. We all want to make money online but a lot of webmasters fall into the huge trap of putting the cart before the horse and as a result fail.

When launching a new site there is only one thing to worry about: GETTING TRAFFIC. Thats right. Traffic is key. No amount of custom coding, content management systems, layouts, designs, etc will help you if your new site doesn’t get any traffic. But many webmasters make the mistake if investing lots of money in custom designs, CMS (content management system) and other expenses without having a solid plan to actually drive traffic to the site. As expenses mount the webmaster will have to find a solution to the traffic problem of his efforts will be moot.

A much simpler and economical solution is to have a solid marketing strategy in placed before launching the site. That way as soon as your site launches you can begin making revenue off the traffic immediately.

Before you build the site ask yourself these questions:

“Where will I get visitors?”

“How much will it cost to get these visitors?”

“How will these visitors interact with the site?”

“How much traffic will I need to break even or turn a profit?”

“How will I ensure that some visitors return to the site and possibly refer their buddies my site?”

Once you are able to answer those questions I recommend taking the next step and building the site.

I read a lot of internet entrepreneur/internet marketing/ SEO type blogs and it isn’t uncommon for a blogger to set out on an ambitious project while completely oblivious of that fact that it is doomed to fail because of a fundamental flaw. The goal of this section is to explain why the blogger’s project is doomed to fail by pointing out the flaws.
Today I will be reviewing Eureka Diary Building A Website Galaxy from July 11th, 2007
In exchange for being reviewed the blogger gets a free backlink. The link to the blog be found here: http://www.eurekadiary.com/75/building-a-website-galaxy

In a nutshell the idea behind the website galaxy is to create a bunch of ‘moon’ sites on that link to a ‘planet’.Then each planet site links to a ’sun’ which is the main site. Technically this would be a solar system, not a galaxy, but I digress. The moons, planets, and sun would all have different IP addresses and use RSS based content as well as varying wordpress based templates.

To be blunt, the reason why this galaxy will fail is because driving traffic to any of the sites (planets, moons, sun) will be nearly impossible. Second, interlinking 20 or so PR0 sites together will garner no additional ranking or PR juic to any of the moons or planets.

Regarding the first flaw establishing solid, search engine rankings usually takes a long time. You can’t just slap up some RSS content and expect to start drawing in visitors. It just doesn’t happen unless you target the least competitive of keywords. But it is difficult to monetize the uncompetitive keyword unless you drive A LOT of traffic to them. While you can get a lot of search engine traffic to a new site through various blackhat methods I’m assuming he isn’t going to use blackhat but just use RSS feeds and aggregation. What will happen is that he will get his sites indexed, but won’t get any traffic.

The second flaw is that interlinking a bunch of PR0 sites together won’t give you a search engine or PR boost. One problem is that all the planet sites link to the sun, but the sun doesn’t link to any sites. It would be more efficient if the sun linked to each planet so that way you would only need a single powerful link pointing to the sun to get the entire galaxy indexed. Instead you need to point links ot each individual planet.

Overall, it is a commendable effort but one that is doomed to fail. Hopefully he will take it as a learning experience.

What is the next Myspace? what is the next digg? what is the Next facebook? answer: myspace, digg, facebook. There is no room for any more competitors. If you visit any forum or read internet related news you will see entrepreneurs trying to compete with the extablished social networking sites like Digg,, Youtube, Facebook, and Myspace. They spend thousands of dollars on scripts and coders trying to get their foot in the social netwroking web 2.0 scene TO NO AVAIL.

THE BATTLE LINES HAVE BEEN DRAWN. The victors gull the spoils. there is no room for a next myspace or a next digg. Such efforts are futile. First mover advantage is SO strong that even comanies with MILLIONS of dollars in promotional efforts and media coverage can barely make a dent.

Consider Google and yahoo. They control 90 percent of ALL internet search. #3 and $3 are microsoft and ASK. yes, even microsoft a 300 BILLION dollar company can only scrape 3% marketshare an Ask.com which has been around for oever adecade with hundreds of millions in marketing can only get 2% of all search engine based marketshare. Google and yahoo dominate search and it will remain that way FOREVER.

Trying to compete with myspace, digg, facebook, and youtube is like trying to compete with General Motors in 1930 or Microsoft in 1987. Not gonna happen. Linux and Apple only commands a tiny fraction of marketshare. here is another statistic. Myspace, myyearbook and Facebook combined control 95% of ALL social networking traffic. All those hundreds of other sites only have a tiny tiny fraction of marketshare. yet those sites were created with MILLIONs of dollars of funding. You think the founders will see a possitive ROI? Fat chance. I woudn’t be surprised if most of them go bust in the comin year.
Nevertheless, this doesn’t stop many entrepeneurs from flushing thousands or even millions of dollars down the toilet in a vein effort to compete with these established sites. My advice. Stop trying to

Auction ads is a new service that allows internet publishers to display targeted ebay based ads on their websites. When someone clicks an ad and wins a bid on ebay the publisher gets a small commision. The publisher also gets a cimmision if the visitor uses the ‘buy it now’ feature or creates an ebay account.

I decided to run auction ads on my main website www.myspace-resource.info. each page has roughly 2-4 blocks of auction ads code. After a few days I noticed some clicks coming in yet no revenue. After a week I made my first commision. 25 cents. woo hoo! I decided to keep the ads running for an entire month so i would get a better perspective of the effectivness of the auction ads.

After one month here are my final auction Ads stats:
Total           1372029     3828     0.28     $81.87

I got 1.4 million impressions. Got 3828 clciks and made about $82. That averages out to a little more than 2.2 cents a click. OK but not stellar. Since I didn’t have adsense ads on Myspace-resource.info I was expecting more revenue for a month worth of clicks. With adsense I can make between $10-15 a day with my site. Auction ads earned me a a measly $2.8 a day. Not so great.

Does auction ads work? For some people , yes, but it doesn’t seem live a very good adsense alternative. The main problem with acution ads is that the person clicking the ads has ti auctually buy something. That is a MAJOR barrier. With adsense you get paid per click regardless if anything is purchased.

Overall Rating: Two stars out of Five

Social bookmarking is the practive of using bookmarking and aggregation type sites such as digg, reddit or stumbleupon to submit stories and ‘vote’ on stories you find useful. The more votes a stry has the higher is may rank and the more traffic it gets. Socail bookmarking is like traditional linking except there is a social element involving an online community.

Since 2004 social bookmarking has EXPLODED in popularity. Digg gets millions of pageviews a month and is rated as one of the most visited sites on the web. meanwhile webmasters and bloggers spend a great deal of effort getting votes and and trying to improve thier rankings on social networking sites in the hope of driving more traffic to thier sites.

Unfortunetely, social bookmarking is a waste of time because supply vastly exceeds demand. there are TOO MANY stories being submitted and simply not enough carbon based lifeforms to read them. To get an idea of how many stories are submitted visit the digg upcoming section http://digg.com/news/upcoming There are over 8000 stores 99.9% of which only have one digg. I can guarantee with great certainty that none of these stories are gonna make it to the front page, nor will they get any traffic.

So how does make it to the top of social bookmarking sites? Usually those with conections and a large readerbase. If your blog is very popular like DailyKos or Johnchow getting on the front page of a social bookmarking site is easy becuae you have a large readerbase to vote on your stories. if you don’t have a large reader base you simply won’t be able to garner enough votes to make a dent.
Also social bookmarking sites provide little if any SEO benefits. Having your link on some sub/sub/sub page with a [rel=no follow] attribute won’t improve your rankings. Being on the front page of a social bookmarking site yields the most benefits in terms of SEO but as i said before getting on the front page is exceedingly diffiucult for most webmasters.

So where does that leave us? Unless you get a lot of traffic and reader, I recommend ignoring the social bookmarking sites alltogether and focus on getting SOLID HARD links via old-school 90’s era link exchanges. Find sites that are related to yours and try to exchange links with them. It is much more effective to have a quality site giving you a permanent home page link than being burried on some social bookmarking site. Not only do you get SEO benefits but you also get some traffic as well.

As a word of caution don’t try to game social bookmarking sites via ‘digg clubs’ or other shenanigans. You may get your site banned and won’t be able to reap the later benefits of social bookmarking sites should your website become more popular and develop a bigger readerbase.

As a few people know wickedfire is an affiliate marketing forum created in May 2006 by Sitepoint member MookJon. The original selling point of wickedfire was to create a ‘free speech’ community where people can discuss affiliate marketing without all the constraints and rules of traditional forum edicate. For example, you could cuss or flame someone without be given a warning. For the fist few months months following its launch Wickedfire was a pretty cool place to hang out. There were lively discussions about Adsense arbitrage and various other forums of internet monetization.

However, in the past few months the forum has become very cliquish and the posting activity has fallen markedly. Noobs and anyone with an opposing views are usually banned immediately by one of the many mods without even a single warning. A simple question such as “What affiliate programs work best” will be greeted by flames by Jon’s loyal legion of sycophants and diciples, and the orginal posted will eventually be banned.
In addition, these people have little sense of humor. It is extremely easy to agitate them since most members are unable to differentiate a harmless joke or irony versus a personal attack. ‘Free speech’ certainly exists on wickedfire unless, of course, someone gets offended or insulted. But isn’t the who point of ‘free speech’ to protect UNPOPULAR viewpoints? As a result, trolling wickedfire has become a perverse hobby of mine. In the past nine or so months I have created probably thirty troll aliases. Of all the forums I have visited they are BY FAR the easiest to troll. It is effortless and entertaining provoking these prudes into trite arguments.

As for the future of wickedfire it will continue to smolder until Jon either closes it down to work on another project or enough people get fed up at the hypocrisy and decide the leave the forum. Posting activity has declined markedly in the past four or six months and I expect that trend to continue. Even Jon’s loyal legion of ass kissers can’t save Wickedfire from its inevitable failure.

Most webmasters try to improve the rankings of thier sites in the search engines through what is called SEO. The most common form of SEO is buying links, trading links, social bookmarking, and writing unique content.

However, trying to optimize your site for the search engines by applying SEO is generally a waste of time and is ineffectual.

The reason why is that SEO invloves a linear solution to a non linear solution (search engines). Almost all search engines are non-linear systems have have VERY complex rules. SEO, on the other hand tends to involve brute force such as buying X links with Y PR and writing Z number of content pages. When you try to solve a multivariable, non linear problem using linear methods you innevitably fail. At best you can approxamate the solution of a non linear system via a linear process, but the results are lackluster. If you took calculus you learn how to approxamate the vlue of a complicated funtion through a tangent line. SEO is the equvalant of using a tangent line on Google.

Thats why SEO generally doesn’t work. People buy pricey high PR links expecting to see a significant rankings boost only to notice a negligible or nonexistent affect. They mistakingly assume that Google can be ’solved’ via a linear solution such as buying high PR links.

So is there light at the end of the tunnel? Unfortunately, no. If I knew the answer I wouldn’t tell you and I would be retired on a private island.

As as everyone probably already knows the famed technology pundit Dvorak wrote a blurb about how web 2.0 is a bubble due to pop one day. My analysis:

Dvorak is completely wrong here as he is wrong about most things. He is an old toad who has almost never made any correct predictions and cant form a single coherent piece of analysis and is probably exhibiting symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer’s.

For one, web 2.0 isn’t a bubble because in order for it to be a bubble it would have to draw in much more capital. The original web 2.0 bubble drew in BILLIONS of dollars from millions of investors. This included retail investor with etrade accounts to VC firms. This isn’t the case with web 2.0.

Second, most of the web 2.0 companies and all of the popular ones are 100% profitable and sustainable while bubbles are characterized by unsustainable business models. Facebook and Myspace draw hundreds of millions dollars in revenue and millions in profits.

In addition those sites (as well as all web 2.0 sites) have very little infrastructure. No warehouses or distribution centers as in the case of the ill fated webvan.com, pets.com and furniture.com. All that is need to run a web 2.0 company are a few programmers, a server, and some form of advertising. Thats it. Bubbles implode when revenues are unable to cover infrastructure costs , which isn’t the case.

In conclusion, Dvorak’s tirade should be taken with a gigantic grain of salt. His analysis and reasoning is completely flawed. In the years to come Dvorak influence in the industry will fade as he becomes irrelevant.

With the launch of my blog I am going to explain the format. My blog posts will fall under the following categories:

1. Dispelling Crap! Posts that fall under this category will dispel some of the more common misconceptions about various aspects of internet marketing. An example of such a post would be Why Social Bookmarking Is a Waste of Time

2. Blogger Noobs. In this section I will critique a blog posting from an internet marketing/entrepreneur type blog and explain why that post demonstrates noobishness and a lack of understanding of various aspects of internet marketing or SEO. Of all the sections this is probably my favorite.
3. Macro Industry News. In this category I will discuss various macro trends affecting internet. Sites that are commonly discussed in this section are Facebook, Myspace, Google, Youtube, and other various wellknown Web 2.0 type sites.

4. Micro, local forum news. This section covers various trends affecting the more popular internet marketing forums such as digitalpoint, sitepoint, wickedfire, and myspacepros to name a few.

5. Random. Posts in this section don’t fall in any of the aforementioned categories.

Welcome to iamned.com, my first blog.

Brief introduction

My name isn’t really ned but it s C. H., a forumer and webamster. I currently run a cruddy myspace resource site that I’m looking to get off my hands called www.myspace-resource.info. That is my main site. In addition, I frequently post in the following forums:

digitalpoint
sitepoint
myspacepros
wickedfire (joined)

The goal of this blog is to discuss trends affecting internet marketing and development on a local and macro level or whatever is on my mind.

Without any further ado, I’ll begin with my second post which discusses the format of my blog.