Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

One of the things we learned a few years back is that turning viewers into users is pretty important in growing an online business. As anyone who runs a forum-based website knows it can be frustrating to see so many “lurkers” who simply read the online conversations taking place without ever contributing. On the revenue path, a vistitor usually needs to become a user before they can become a customer - any webmaster’s ultimate goal.

Here are three things you can do to graduate your visitors to users:

1. Offer something of value for free. Some sites promise free stickers in the mail if you sign up for an account, others dangle email coupons for subscribers to newsletter lists. Review App gives registered users access to online features like wish lists and the ability to post photos. Users won’t sign up just to be on your email list - give them a reason to take the next step.

2. Hold out your best content for registered users. This is similar to the idea of offering something of value mentioned above but it can oftentimes have a much larger impact. For example, on one of our web projects we routinely saw about 200 users sign up for accounts each month to access online “members only” features like those above. We then decided to make a key piece of information on our site - directions to bike trails - available only to registered users. We instantly went from 200 registrations a month to 2,000 and today the site is registering more than 100 folks PER DAY! Since the information left off is minor in relation to the other content available our search engine-visible content is  affected very little.

3. Make it easy to sign up for an account. You’ve seen it before - a sign up form that scrolls for pages and pages just to get a free account. Some sites may even require a credit card to start a “free trial” while other sites’ sign up forms are choked with marketing offers for seemingly unrelated items. The shorter your member sign up form, the more likely folks will get through it and become users of your site - so keep it simple! Review App new user forms ask for 2 things: an email address and a screen name - that’s it.

Giving your visitors a reason to become users and making it easy for them to do so is a great way to improve the number of folks entering your transaction funnel. Take a look at your site and see what you can do to increase your user base!

It was all over the news last week - ex-Googlers launched a “Google-killer” search engine that was going to blow away the competition. Morning news shows picked up the story and curious netizens (myself included) flocked to the site causing it to overload in the surge. Co-workers at companies around the country stated “we need to optimize for Cuil” (seriously). So what’s the deal?

From a marketing and online traffic perspective Cuil is mostly a disaster (see the visitor estimate chart from Alexa above). Cuil did a great job generated buzz and PR but clearly people came, they saw, and they never returned. Surely the folks at Cuil expected the launch to kick start their site’s growth but when your product isn’t quite ready for prime time this strategy can backfire.

So what did Cuil do wrong? Here’s are my thoughts:

• Over-promised and under-delivered. The promise was the Cuil answered search queries better, faster, and more thoroughly than existing search engines. Based on my (and others’) tests it failed on all three fronts. Some searches returned zero results where other search engines return thousands; other queries returned strange and irrelevant listings at the top for simple keywords. On top of it all, Cuil was painfully SLOOOOW on launch day.
• Unprepared for launch. Clearly Cuil wasn’t prepared for the curious users who flocked to the site on the first day and this meant the site was slow or unable to load entirely. Bad first impression for customers who may never return.
• Terrible name. Come on - if you can’t afford “cool.com” then pick another name. I won’t remember how to spell your brand, I’m not sure how to say it, and I don’t understand what it even means. Seriously horrible branding.
• Unconventional layout. Yep, there’s a reason search engine listings aren’t laid out “magazine-style.” When folks are searching they’re usually in a hurry to get somewhere else and they’re not interested in curling up on the couch and perusing the listings before going to an actual website. Give users the relevant information with a minimal amount of scrolling and eye movement and they’ll appreciate your service (and perhaps return). The thumbnail photos are terrible as well and most don’t always come from the website that’s being listed. The WORST search engine user experience I’ve seen yet.

Those are the big problems, each one pretty much a company-killer in its own right. Of course time will tell if I’m right to pronounce Cuil dead on arrival - anyone want to take bets on how long it takes?

After writing on the subject of how much webmasters rely on Google earlier this week I realized I forgot to mention the one product that is, in my opinion, the most risky for webmasters: Google Maps. Even if you don’t have a website of your own you’ve no doubt used websites that have integrated Google Maps into the site to help you find directions, locations, etc. It seems that everyone is using Google Maps these days including some big companies like Zillow and Trails.com.

But is this wise? First of all, let’s consider why Google created Google Maps in the first place. It would be nice to think Google built an open mapping application to help out small business owners but in reality Google Maps was created to make money (eventually, somehow). Serving all those map requests and licensing the map data is EXPENSIVE and clearly Google would like to recoup that investment. It’s not obvious how they plan to recoup but it’s safe to guess they will do that through sponsored location marks. That means sites like Trails.com may start to see icons on their maps for Krispy Kreme donut shops or Jiffy Lubes scattered among the trail locations.

Suppose Google doesn’t decide to monetize their maps through location “sponsorships” because advertisers aren’t interested. This won’t be good news either (remember how I mentioned that serving maps is expensive?). In this case Google may decide to pull the plug on the Maps API entirely. Thousands of websites would go dark instantly without any real mapping alternative. There’s no such thing as a free lunch and those who rely extensively on Google Maps for their web operations may be in for a wake up call in the future.

We’ve been tempted to offer further Google Maps integration on our own sites but so far we’ve resisted for the reasons mentioned here. For us this has meant investing in alternative technologies (like professional mapping software from ESRI) and so far it’s worked well to distinguish our services from the competition. Consider who you rely on for the success of your business and make sure you at least have a backup plan - you never know what can happen tomorrow!

If you’re a webmaster who makes a living (or a part time living) through your website, imagine this for a moment: what if Google disappeared? How would it affect your business? As an MBA student at Duke we learned in business strategy classes that over-reliance on a single supplier or partner can be a risky proposition but on the internet in 2008, do we have much of a choice?

Don’t get me wrong, Google is great and I firmly believe the company tries to make good on its promise to “do no evil.” But consider this: What if Google stopped the AdSense program due to ongoing problems with click fraud - how would you monetize your website? Or what if Google started charging the market rate for Google Analytics - say $100 a month? Could you afford to keep using the service?

Even more frightening, consider the power the Google search engine has to direct traffic and customers to your website. We had a bit of a scare with one of our sites just last month when our traffic dropped from around 6,000 visits per day to just over 1,000. Sure enough many of our important keywords had dropped from page 1 to page 7 or worse. If things had stayed that way our business would have been ruined for sure - luckily everything was back to normal after about a day and a half.

E-commerce operators use Google’s Base service to upload products for Google’s product comparison shopping engine; companies and individuals rely on Gmail for critical email communications; Google’s AdWords program drives paid search traffic to millions of websites (though since this is such a money maker for Google I doubt we’ll see this go away any time soon).

The point of all this is to say it’s important to diversify your online partners and suppliers to maximize your business’s flexibility and ability to weather competitive threats. For us this has meant diversifying our ad placement beyond AdSense by partnering with vertical ad networks and shifting paid advertisements to Facebook and other platforms. Google still provides the bulk of our traffic and customers and we love all the free tools they provide - but it’s important to be cautious when relying on such a powerful market leader (as many eBay sellers can attest).

If you’ve been following web development over the past couple years you’ve undoubtedly heard the arguments for separating markup from style information. You know, instead of using tags like <font> and <b> you should be using <span> and applying formatting via CSS. Great advice for sure - but what do the search engines think?

For this test we decided to see whether markup or style could communicate the importance of a single keyword to the search engine crawlers. In our test we created 3 pages: the first contained our keyword with no markup or styling, the second contained the same keyword but placed within bold tags (<b></b>), and the third contained the keyword within <strong> tags. Common wisdom is that <strong> is the better choice because it is markup (rather than a specific style) and thus communicates something (importance) about the words other than how they should look.

Anyway, the result: the search engines still prefer bold to strong. In fact, this is the first time in all our tests that both Google and Yahoo! agree - bold is more important than strong. Interestingly neither search engine picked up our page without any emphasis on the test keyword.

What does this mean? For me it means that I’m not quite ready to start replacing all my bold tags with strong tags. Honestly I understand and agree with the need for separating markup from style information. But it’s just too convenient to simply slap a <b> around a couple words than to go through the trouble of defining a style and calling it via <span class=”important”> or even <strong> which is 3 times as long as good old <b>. Funny thing is, it looks like for now Google and Yahoo agree with me

On the web, more than most other places, appearances really do matter. My friend Joe likes to say that in most cases websites “give the appearance of a successful business” even when very little business is being done. Just because a site has a shopping cart doesn’t mean anyone’s buying but you’d never know that unless you were the webmaster behind the curtain.

Unless you’re a natural at graphic design and layout, it’s generally best to find someone to help you give your website a professional appearance. Admittedly we hadn’t taken this approach ourselves until recently and I still prefer to build out new sites on my own before hiring a web designer. Once a site has proven itself to be viable and capable of returning a design investment I’m more than willing to take the plunge.

This site was designed by the guys at 45royale and obviously it rocks. The design is professional but not because it’s overly designed; rather it’s clean, easy to use, and consistent. Exhibit Instinct designed our site at Unity3.com and was able to give the e-commerce site a lifestyle look and feel that has suppliers knocking down our door to get placement (just remember what I said about the appearance of business though ). We’re in the process of giving our other sites a professional facelift and we’ll certainly keep you posted on the results in terms of increases in visits, conversions, pageviews, etc.

Rather than giving you a list of things to consider when choosing a web hosting service, I’ll keep this very simple: get a recommendation from someone you trust. Sure it’s easy to compare storage space, bandwidth, price, features, etc. among dozens of online hosting providers but you can’t quantify customer service and reliability which are arguably the most important things to consider.

We’ve been using the same hosting service, American Hosting, since 1999 (!) for our sites and we couldn’t be happier. American Hosting doesn’t have a super slick website, they aren’t the cheapest (though prices are reasonable), they don’t offer the most storage (but enough for most folks), and they certainly aren’t a big operation - and that’s why we like them. You can talk to them on the phone when you have an issue and unlike other services they don’t seem to have major turnover in support techs. We’ve recommended American Internet to all our clients and they have been extremely pleased as well.

Many years ago we decided to try out another hosting service (a Yahoo! branded option) and let’s just say it was a little too basic (and expensive) for our needs. If you’ve never built or managed a website you may want to stick with an option like Yahoo! but for most folks I don’t recommend it.

Anyway, this all comes back to my original point: get a recommendation, and not just from someone on a random internet forum. Find someone who knows what you’re capable of doing and what your needs are and let them help you find the right host. Everyone has different hosting needs and it pays to ask around until you find the web host that’s right for you.

Business Pundit posted an entertaining trip down memory lane covering 25 of the most spectacular internet failures over the last 10 years. This is certainly a good read if you’re feeling discouraged about your own internet business - at least you can say you didn’t blow through millions of dollars to get where you are today

My favorite failed internet startup on the list has to be the first one - GovWorks.com. For those who may not be familiar with the story, GovWorks was featured in a documentary titled Startup.com which gave an unprecedented inside look into the rise and fall of a real internet company in the late 1990s. This is perhaps my favorite documentary of all time and despite the sobering nature of this cautionary tale I somehow come away from watching it each time with a genuine sense of hope and excitement.

If you have some time today, read through the list and see what you can learn from these catastrophic internet failures. If nothing else it might make you feel good about your own struggle

You may have heard from your search engine optimization consultant that duplicate content is a no-no in the search engine ranking game - but what does this really mean? How strict are search engines in terms of duplicate content?

Let’s first consider the types of duplicate content that a webmaster might post on his or her website. Direct quotes, from articles or speakers, are a pretty common form of duplicate content but we wouldn’t expect to be penalized for this type of content, especially if it is properly credited. Online yellow pages and directories contain mostly business names, addresses, and phone numbers - not original content by any means - and yet somehow these sites get indexed and ranked by search engines as well. And how about online news sites that reproduce stories from the AP wire - these posts are IDENTICAL to content posted on hundreds of other sites yet there doesn’t seem to be any “penalty” applied to the local news sites.

So perhaps the search engines have written special rules to deal with this type of content - but I really doubt it. Instead I think search engines don’t expect web pages to be completely unique but they prefer pages that are MOSTLY unique. What constitutes a MOSTLY unique page versus a not-unique-enough page is certainly a mystery but if I were writing a search alogorithm I’d want to see the ratio of unique to duplicate content at about 1 to 1.

Applying a penalty to non-unique sites can also pose a challenge because search engines don’t always know which site posted the content first (i.e. who the owner is). If a plaigerizer copies your content within a day of posting it on your website, the search crawlers have a good chance of finding your content on his site first and thus applying the “penalty” to your site even though you did nothing wrong. Again, this leads me to believe the duplicate content penalty is a myth because it’s just too difficult to enforce fairly and accurately.

In our own search engine tests of duplicate content we found that two pages, each with identical content (title tags, content, markup, etc.), posted on the same domain, were both indexed by the major search engines. The only difference between the files was the filenames and the resulting search engine listing randomly placed one file as a part of “supplemental results.” Since both files were created at the same time the choice of “supplemental” versus “original” was complete chance.

The moral of the story is that you shouldn’t stress about original content on your website. Sure, you should never copy content from other sites but that’s because you’ll eventually receive nasty-grams accusing you of plaigerism - not because the search engines will start to hate you. Just use duplicate content judiciously and keep increasing your (mostly) unique pages to watch your search traffic soar!

These days there is a new way for webmasters to monetize their content that goes beyond Google Adsense and Amazon Associates: vertical ad networks. Vertical ad networks are basically ad sales agencies that target a particular niche or vertical (outdoor sports, for example). These agencies approach big name advertisers and sell hundreds of thousands of ad impressions across their network of small- to medium-sized sites and share the revenue with the publishers.

The concept for vertical ad networks isn’t a new one but up until recently we’ve found the whole concept oversold and underdelivered. Today we’re working with two vertical ad networks across our sites and are seeing revenues per thousand impressions roughly double what we were generating through Google Adsense alone. Vertical ad networks are able to charge premium rates over typical cost per click campaigns because they are more targeted and offer additional rich media ad capabilities (think flash).

One thing to keep in mind when signing on to a vertical ad network is that these companies will often ask publishers to sign exclusive one-year ad contracts. It’s important to do your homework and understand the CPMs, payment schedules, ad filtering capabilities, reporting tools, et al before you sign on the dotted line. Ask to speak with other publishers using the network and don’t be afraid to walk away if something seems fishy about the pitch (like it’s too good to be true), especially if you’re satisfied with the revenue you’re generating through Google Adsense.

Vertical ad networks are a great option for monetizing your site once you’re built a reasonable amount of online traffic (at least 25K impressions per month). If you haven’t already been contacted by a network in your niche, search online to find an appropriate partner - just remember to do your homework!