iamned.com Blog

Google at $700 a share may seem too expensive, but it isn’t. Google and facebook will dominate all aspects on online and offline media, and the eventual transfer and exchange of all information on planet earth though all mediums. The potnetial for growth is staggering. Google will have a market cap of 2-4 trillion in the not so distant future after putting Yahoo, Microsoft, Ebay, Amazon, Viacom, time warner, and other internet and media companies out of business. (the process of which google will render these companies defunt is complicated and will be reserved for a later article. But one only needs to compare the stock charts for Yahoo and Google to see yahoo’s and microsoft’s inevitable fate).  Also, the government wont step in unlike the case with microsoft and try to break up the  monopoly.

With a market cap of 2 trillion google will be trading at $7000 a share, which is still a 900% profit. As you can see, that leaves a lot of opportunities to make money buying GOOG now at $700 a share.

The best move google could make at this point is to buy Facebook for $30 billion worth of stock and cash or buyout BIDU. Buying out facebook would pretty much seal google’s total domination of the internet since Facebook probably poses the greatest threat to google if anything does.

Youtube was purchased for 1.6 billion last year and now it is easily worth 10-15 billion.

$30 billion may seem like a lot but when you consider that goog has a market cap of 200+ billion it isn’t much.

The staggering rise of google, amazon.com, bidu, and the stock market overall coincides with the transition to a type 1 civilization within the next 50 years, at which point the goals of The Creators will be nearly fulfilled.

The response for  my post on buying links for SEO was sooo incredibly polarized that there is almost no point in trying to refute those who disagree with me.
Here is my original

My analysis is rock solid. Anyone who still disagrees can suck it. werd

We are living in a new world order of youtubes, googles, diggs, bookfaces, web 2.0, smarties and an global economic boom or infinite wealth creation and economic euphoria. Economic free trade and spending. Debt and buying. Consumerism and globalism. Spendism and materialism. Economic perpetualism, the world is a continuum.  The Creators are in power, one nation, one world run by an elite. rich getting richer; make the wealth gap wider!
Tons of internet related headlines

We’re in the middle of a massive internet and global economic boom. We have a spending and college education boom. We need more education to make more money so we can spend more. Smartists and spendists of global consumerism and materialism. One world gov. and free trade.

After being a mamber of digitalpoint for two years I finally got banned for getting too many infraction points. Infractions are issued on a scale of one to possibly five and apparently if you get just 10 points you are banned from the forum.

If a moderator is having a bad day he’ll slap you with five infraction points, which is half of the total required to get banned. Frankly that is excessive, and there should be oversight to prevent a mod from issuing that many points at once. Worse, infraction points take a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time to expire. I have infraction points from last year still waiting to be cleared which gives you an idea of how demented the system is.

There are many other problems but those are the most pressing ones.

With regard to internet moderators abusing their powers this is nothing new. A moderator’s job is to ensure that posters follow a set standard of rules; not create arbitrary rules or bend the rules just cause they are having bad day or to fulfill a power trip.

Fortunately there are other webmaster forums which don’t have such strict rules. In spite of these obtuse policies digitalpoint will contiue to prevail as the number one webmaster forum. Hopefully smaller webmaster forums will be able to establish a foothold, but it sems that isn’t going to happen.

With google suposedly cracking down on so called ‘paid links’; sites that sell them as well as sites that purchase them a lot of webmasters are now advocating purchasing links strictly for traffic to avoid any penalties by using ‘no follow’ attributes. Sounds like a good idea, huh? Buy links, get traffic, avoid any penalties and both parties (the link seller and buyer) are happy.

Unfortunetely, buying links for traffic purposes is a very bad idea for many reasons. First,the purpose of SEO is to rank higher on the search engines so you get free traffic and by using ‘no follow’ you forfeit this benefit, second paid links usually don’t bring in much if any traffic from the site which you purchased links from, and third economic theory dictates you will probably pay more for the links than you will be able to monetize the aditional traffic.

When you buy a text links for SEO purposses you are making an investment in your website. The purpose of the link is to help you rank higher so you can get free, targeted traffic. By investing in the links, your site can earn more money from the additional traffic resulting from the higher rankings. However, no follow non-seo links won’t allow your site to rank higher in the search engines and you relinquish that benefits of free traffic.

Second, you usually don’t get much traffic from links. From personal expierience I have done links exchanges with my myspace site www.myspace-resource.info and the vast majority of sites I exchanged with don;t bring in much traffic. Only one site I have exchanged with brings in decent traffic, but that site gets over 10,000 visitors a day. And even then, we’re only talking maybe 100-200 uniques a day. Good, but not nearly enough to make your site a success. For most niche s, however, you will get much less traffic. Myspace happens to be a very high traffic niche. If you’re buying traffic links from a legal or medical site much trafifc will you get? Not much maybe 10 visits a day if you’re lucky.

Third, economic theory dictates you will pay more for the traffic gnerated from the links than you will make monetizing the traffic. Savvy webmasters caculate the average CPM for their pageviews. Then they estimate how many pageviews their site loses by adding an outbound link, and calculate a monthly total. Then when they sell a link they charge that amount plus an aditional markup to make a profit. But now you have to not only monetize the traffic to match the CPM from the site you bought the link from, but you must also surpass the premium as well. So now you’ve dug yourself into a pit.
My advice is if you’re going to purchase links, purchase then for SEO and traffic purposes, but be careful. Don’t buy links form unrelated sites; otherwise your site may get peanalized or the link wont pass any link ‘juice’. If you follow this rule you should not incur any difficulties when purchasing links.

Once in awhile a blogger will publish an article so fallacious that I am left with no recourse but to tear it apart. John Cow’s recent guest contribution “You have nothing to lose” which advocates entrepreneurialism, is one of these articles. The analysis in this article is flawed in many ways, and the purpose of this critique is to point out those flaws. My commentary is in red font. To John Cow’s credit atleast he didn’t write it.

On virtually every webmaster forum and on some internet marketing blogs there are two groups of people. One one hand you have the theorists- those who claim to have an understanding of search engines and making money online and on the other hand you have the masses who ask specific questions, expecting specific answers.

Both of them are on the path to nowhere. Those who ask questions will never get satisfactory answers because no such answers probably exist. And if if someone does know the answer they won’t divulge it anyay. Those who theorise are are best wrong and at worse disseminating bad bad advice.

How do I rank higher? No one knows. I don’t know the specfic answer to that. It is obvious to say you need links, content, domain authority, etc but who those variables interact or the quantity of each is a mystery, and that mystery continues to deepen as search engines implement more advanced algorithims to prevent people from ‘deciphering’ them.

How many links to I need? Does PR matter? How about link age? Does link releavance count more than quantity? No one knows for sure. I sure as hell don’t. All I know is you need links and links from higher authority sources such as universities have more weight, but that is the extent of my knowledge; and the extent of information you will get anywhere else. How do I get more traffic? The answer isn’t satisfactory because no satisfactory answer exists. If there does exist an easy way to drive a lot of human traffic to a site for very little cost you won’t read about it on any forum or blog. You will have to find it yourself provided it exists.
Bloggers try to derive their own theories to rankings and making money. Eli from Bleuhatseo for example in his verbose posts attempts to deconstruct the workings of search engines. He presents various arcane thoeries to links building, link authority, indexing, and traffic but none of them are necessarly correct and nor can they be proven. Readers who are desperatley looking for answers gobble it up, which is why bluehatseo is so popular, but there is no evidance anything he writes actually works.

People ask the same repetitive questions on forums and get the usual answers.

I hhave decided to put my seo skills to work by trying to rank a specific page of this blog for the keyword myspace layouts. The page can be found here: http://iamned.com/myspacelayouts.php

I will update the page on a frequent basis so readers can follow my progress (or lack thereof).

Will I succeed in ranking my page in the top 20 for myspace layouts? Probably not, but it will be an interesting learning experience.

A couple weeks ago I blogged that facebook could be worth one trillion dollars at some point in the future. While most people dismissed that figure as being overtly excessive, facisious, and idiotic, but if history is any indicator I can still be vindicated.
With microsoft willing to pay a staggering $500 million for just a paltry 5% of facebook that indicates that people are willing to pay A LOT for the site and given the rate it is growing that figure will only increase.

You pay a premium for huge growth & potential, first and forement.

Would you pay more than $1 for $1 bill? Probably not. But what if you had a 90% chance of making an additional $10? Then it would be a good deal to pay extra.

Just a year ago facebook was worth a billion and three years. And three years ago no one in their wildest dreams could have imagined it being worth 10 billion. But now it is. If I said facebook would be worth $10 billion dollars two years ago detractors would say the same thing then as they are saying now.

The potential is unlimited.

There are so many new web 2.0 websites begin created that the majority of them are doomed to fail and will innevitably wind up in a web 2.0 ‘deadpool’. Everyday there are atleast a dozen or more new sites that is intended to perform even the most mundane of tasks as long you can slap a web 2.0 logo or spin to it.

Why is everyone looking for the next big thing when the odds are so far stacked against them? Thge answer is obvous. To get rich. Virtually every web entrepreneur will sell out for the right price, and that is precisely what all of these web 2.0 entrepreneurs are doing. A group of coders will get together, create a site, perhaps apply for funding, do a little PR and then wait patiently for a buyout.

While many small web 2.0 sites have been aquired for millions of dollars, the supply of sites vastly exceeds the demand. However, since our perception is that these sites are so easy and cheap to create surely is is worthwhile taking a small gamble and building one in the faint hope of being aquired?

The above statement is false for a few reasons. Creating web 2.0 sites actually isn’t particularly cheap nor is it easy. Unlike web 1.0 sites web 2.0 sites are large and complex and involve creating user platforms. Users have to have an interface from which they can interact with a widget and or other users. In addition, users often demand customization and personalization. So not only does the coder need to provide a novel application, but he must also facilitate an interactive and customizable environment.

Hiring coders can become prohibitivley expensive, and adding additional members to a development team will dilute your stake in the company. If five programers create at site and it gets bought out for $10 million each will get $2 million, and after taxes your stake may only be $1 million. Not exactly life changing but good. However, if a VC funds the company your stake will be even smaller. Perhaps you will only get $1 million before taxes.

$10 million dollars isn’t small change though, and thus aquisitions of those sizes are rare. If the site doesn’t get squired which isn’t often isn’t the case the founders are left with a site that will probably fail. As I wrote before Web 2.0 sites thrive on large userbases and networks. Due to the ever gorwing number of Web 2.0 participants achieving the minimum sized network required for self sufficiency is very difficult. If the site doesn’t cross that required threshold it will fail. Meanwhile, expenses are mounting; advertisng and coding in particular. Without a sufficiently large network, web 2.0 sites are usually unprofitable.
In the next two to four years, we’ll notice an ever growing web 2.0 dead pool consisting mainly of sites that were created to be aquired, but weren’t. What does this mean for entrepreneurs?

1. Don’t build a site for the sole purpose of selling out
2. Create a site that is profitable WITHOUT a large nework. A simple website consisting of various articles and adsense ads can be very profitable since it costs very little money to maintain and run.

3. Keep expenses at a mionimum. Only increase spending if you have a plan for directly transforming that added expense into some form revenue & profit.