Good article on the domain industry in 2006 over at DNJournal –

“Whereas the former may begin to fetch multiples of 20-30 years revenue or even higher” (refering to quality traffic domain names) “those holding domains less suitable as advertising platforms will see their sales values shrink to 2-3 years revenue, or less, as more and more domain professionals wake up to the reality that it’s time for the domain industry to focus on traffic quality.”

As you might have guessed from my last post, I’m going to be out of town for a while.

Today I suddenly discovered that I could not purchase an item I need locally, so I headed over to Google.

In my search for the out of season item I used both Google’s natural results, and Adwords. I searched both last night and this afternoon. Last night I clicked a couple ads, and looked at a few sites, but couldn’t find what I was looking for. Earlier today I went shopping and realised my only option was to purchase the item online.

After spending about 5 minutes looking around Google I finally found a site that had a big inventory. It didn’t have exactly what I was looking for, but after a little reading I realised I what I really needed was something a little different. A few clicks later and that sites had an order from me for over $100.

As an internet marketer, I ask myself, what did the other sites do wrong? Number one, limited selection. While one site had roughly what I was looking for, all their inventory was low cost. This made me skeptical of the quality. I wasn’t looking for a bargain, I was looking for something that works. Other sites sent me to a landing page where I had to re-enter my search term, and then it send me to a very ineffective search results page that was even more confusing. Finally, the site I landed on had a very inventory of items. Each item had user ratings and a very comprehensive description. Minutes later, they had my order.

Whether you are an internet publisher or an internet marketer its critical you look at things from the eyes of your customers. How can your visitors buy your product if they can’t even find it? How can visitors register for your message board if they never see the register button? The list goes on and on.

A successful website is a machine. If you want it to work it has to be well engineered. It has to function in a way web users are familiar with.

If you understand this, along with the other fundamentals ofbusiness, success online is virtually guaranteed. It may take time, but if you work hard and smart, you’ll make it.

I’m taking a break for the next week and a half, so don’t be alarmed if there are no updates on the blog. I’m not certain if I will have internet access or not. Don’t worry, things will resume as normal when I return!

Nominet UK won $1,300,000 AUS (about $970,650 USD) in a data mining lawsuit over a company that scraped data out of their public whois database and then mailed registration “invoices” to the domain owners. The defendants were found “liable for copyright infringement and breaches of Australian fair trade laws.”

MarketingSherpa released a study on eye-tracking search engine results. Buried in the article was this:

Mainstream marketers, however, are only now starting to catch on. This partially explains why marketers spent $5.5 billion on paid listings in 2005 compared with just $660 million on optimization for organic listings. MarketingSherpa’s research team expects to see optimization crack $1 billion at long last in 2006.

Its no suprise then that rip-off SEO firms are flourishing, charging customers bargain prices and delivering top results for keywords no one searches for. On the other hand, this also means search engine optimizers can expect even more competition..

I’ve often wondered what kind of toys we would start seeing once big corporations found out free tools can dramatically increase website traffic. It looks like I don’t have to dream any longer.

Here is an excellent example — a family tree site, MyHeritage.com, has a free face recognition tool. I don’t know how much this cost them, but I’d venture to say it wasn’t cheap. This is certainly a lot more than a lone webmaster programmer could create.

SEOs have been giving away tools for some time now. Shawn Hogan, the founder of digitalpoint, has learned first hand just how powerful of this strategy can be. Within hardly a year of publishing a few free SEO tools he has brought in traffic that resulted in the largest free advertising network and one of the biggest webmaster forums on the internet.

At MyHeritage you can upload photos of people and run them up against a database to see who is the closest celebrity they look like. I said screw that and tried uploading photos of actual celebrities to see if it could correctly recognize them. Despite some failures, this definately works! As you can see in the screenshot below, I uploaded a picture of actress Natalie Portman, and it returned a positive result. (It didn’t do so well with Michael Jackson which it recognized as Michelle Pfieffer.)

There is little doubt that this tool will create a lot of traffic to MyHeritage.com. The question is, will the traffic be targetted enough to be profitable? I’m sure MyHeritage is measuring this very closely.

If you run a forum, or are thinking about starting one, check out this new article “The Ultimate vBulletin Optimization Guide” by Chris over at WebsitePublisher.net. In it he covers the basics including vBulletin SEO, getting users to sign up and start posting, and integrating a forum into your site.

I started a new board in mid November and I’m nearly at 600 members, growing at a rate of close to 50 a day. I can tell you that out of the box vBulletin just isn’t going to cut it if you want a fast growing forum.

I finally got a hold of a copy of SEOBook about two weeks ago. I would have gotten this review up earlier but a combination of Christmas and a huge development project left me little time.

When I interviewed Aaron for this blog some people asked me if SEOBook was worth the money. At the time I hadn’t read it so I could not give my personal opinion of the book. So what is the deal with this $79 book?

SEOBook is packed with excellent tips to building a great website (many key points that are completely missed by novice webmasters, I might add.) Aaron does an excellent job connecting different website publishing concepts and tieing them all together with SEO.

If you’ve read Aaron’s blog at SEOBook.com you’ll know that he often questions if he is taking the right approach to something. In the book itself he points out specific mistakes he’s made in the past and how he is doing things differently today.

Aaron covers a lot of topics in SEOBook’s 241 pages. Everything is there from logo design to CSS to choosing the perfect domain name to affiliate marketing. Is this an excuse for filling pages? As Aaron himself points out, he could have split this into several books and probably made more money.

Some readers may have been expecting a book full of technical tricks and techniques to getting good rankings. The truth is that Aaron provides a very comprehensive look at what web site owners who want long term rankings need to do. In fact, I think a more accurate name for SEOBook would be something like “What you need to know if you want to make money online doing something other than eBay or pyramid schemes.”

The price of SEOBook has been a big issue for some people. $79 for a book? If you are serious about website publishing and development you only need to pick up a couple of new ideas from the book and you’ve made your money back and then some.

When he first launched SEOBook Aaron originally had the book priced lower. At the urging of other SEOs he raised the price. Additionally this helped to filter out problem customers and make it more profitable to affiliates. As someone who does both affiliate marketing and sells personal services I can tell you these are two very legitimate reasons for a higher price.

As a bonus, you also get access to several SEO tools and a copy of SEO Interviews (95 more pages!) In it, Aaron Wall talks to several of the top people in the search engine optimizing industry. If your curious about the world of SEO - black, white, and grey - you should take the time to read this too.

Here is the bottom line –

SEOBook may not be for you if:
1) You expect a few killer SEO tricks that will allow you to instantly recieve top rankings
2) You’ve been a website developer for a few years and spend hours a day reading multiple forums and SEO blogs
3) You can answer 98% of the questions asked by new and experienced members of webmaster forums

As far as I’m concerned, SEOBook is a must read for anyone serious about web site development you need to read SEOBook. (notice, thats not an affiliate link, the above has been my honest opinion on SEOBook.)

After all the hype, it looks like Alex over at The Million Dollar Homepage is finally wrapping things up. He is putting the final available 1,000 pixels up for sale on eBay.

I’ve seen a few people start blogs in hopes of blogging their trip toward one million dollars — well here is one guy that did it.

From August 26th, 2005

I thought, this could be something crazy enough to work! Because I think people like crazy/quirky ideas. If this captures people’s imaginations and people check out the site, then the pixels on the homepage will have value - and people will buy them (to display their ads etc). That’s the theory anyway. The way I see it though: I’ve got nothing to lose by trying. And I’m sure it’ll be fun.

to January 1st, 2006

..demand has completely outstripped supply. We had to suspend orders twice over the past few days due to the sheer volume of orders.. I am doing the most fair and logical thing and auctioning the last 1,000 pixels off on eBay

If you thought you were hearing a lot about The Million Dollar Homepage before, just wait until when this auction ends.