Random thoughts…

This is great video. Check it out. I met Bernard Ablola on PubCon conference in Las Vegas. Bernard is great guy and he will be very successful very soon. I checked his website this morning and found that video for Apprentice… and it made my day. Good stuff! Don’t laugh. I will start some venture with Bernard very soon and let you know how many millions we made! I think he will make more money with me then with Donald Trump:-) We have good ideas already in progress!

I just might say I am totally hooked on this blog: Xooglers. A gathering spot for ex-Googlers to reminisce and comment on the latest developments in search. Very interesting reading. Gives you idea how Google works…

I finally decided to stop guessing where visitors are clicking on our websites. Yesterday I purchased ClickTracks, which is program allowing you to see where people are clicking on your website plus much more. There is stuff you will not see in Google Analytics (which is not working properly at this moment anyway).

Just short example from this real estate website homepage:

I always thought that people are more interestd in New homes from Builders than Resale Homes (listed by agents). Now I know that nearly three times users are interested in Resales homes… but you can also see that they want to go and browse homes for sale. They don’t want to sign up for FLASH REPORT with dayly emails about homes for sale… very interestign stuff. It seems we have to redo the page completely, but it is good to know what to do and what is important to our users.

Some time ago I found out that few changes in color and placement of ad makes huge difference in CTR on Google Adsense ads. I didn’t find that myself. Actually my friend Vlado is taking care of some of my websites and he had much better results with ads than I had. Very similar websites were bringing triple or even more in ad revenues. These were all website with very small number of visitors (60-90 per day). I didn’t even pay attention, because I thought it doesn’t make any sense to spend more time on such small websites.

Let’s just got to very hypothetical example. Again, I am not discussing any existing website. It is all just example.
Website A and website B have all 90 visitors a day. Both are about the same topic.
Website A has regular AdSense code. No special placement and no color changes. Ad revenue per day $0.25. CTR about 0.50%.

Website B has optimized colors and placement. Ad revenue per day $3.00. CTR about 20%.

$3.00 per day is not a lot of money. But this is not website which will appear on the first few pages on search engines. This is average website lost somewhere in the SERP (search engine result page). If you look from long term view it is still worth it to do proper changes and make money. Especially if you have more websites like that. All combined together can bring nice extra money.

Recently I was checking one of our competition website. The have big button right on their homepage asking to check their Business Reliability Report from BBB. So I clicked and saw this:
Better Business Bureau: “The Bureau processed a total of 27 complaints about this company in the last 36 months, our standard reporting period. Of the total of 27 complaints closed in 36 months, 14 were closed in the last year.
These complaints concerned:
13 Refund or Exchange Issues
9 Service Issues
1 Delivery Issues
4 Billing or Collection Issues

They were closed as:
21 Resolved
6 Administratively Closed”

That seems to me like pretty big number of complains. Do clients even read that? Do they base their decision on information like that? I would think that yes, but maybe they just see BBB logo on website and assume that everything is all right.

We have really successful incorporation service website (www.Incparadise.com) and I decided that we have to better capture all these people who are coming to us to incorporate their businesses. We do great job incorporating them, but they soon forget about us and I want to create something so they have reason to come back. I was thinking hard what to do, but didn’t get better idea than to set up Discussion Forums. I call it Small Business Forum. The idea is that people will ask questions to each other, we will help moderate, bring some experts, etc. So I hope it will work!

Information is the key to power. That’s why it is so difficult to find out some relevant information about Google AdSense or AdWords. If we know how such services really work we might get very rich and powerful. And that’s why is trying to keep all the info under lock so they can keep the power in their hands. From time to time it is possible to get a glimpse of what is going on and this little bit older article from Robert X. Cringely is putting some light in Google AdWords. Very interesting reading. You might be paying $1.00 for the same click someone is paying $0.10. And it is not about text of the ad, web page content, etc. The described articles clearly shows that all variables reminded same. See the article here.

We all want to get traffic on our websites. Right? When you build regular website you have to rely on regular link building campaigns, paid links, PPC or other paid advertising to get traffic. But what about blog? Blog itself helps to bring more traffic through RSS, comments, blog directories, etc. It seems to me that if I am going to start new website and one will be in the form of blog and other regular web site that blog will always win in the amount of traffic. Blog has many more tools hidden inside, which we regular folks don’t have idea how they work… but they help to get visitors to our pages. Blog helps to get faster feedback for website owner through comments visitors can leave. I am starting to think that blog shouldn’t be add-on to existing website, but the core system for publishing. I am going to do some experiments and share the results soon:-)

The waves were really good. Probably not for the pro surfers but they were perfect for me. Not too big, not too hard.

Trying to catch this one!

This is happening a lot! Waves passing by:-)

Finally!

Isn’t this what life is about? It is good to be successful in work. Doing great projects and working hard, but it such a good feeling to go surfing during weekdays and beet the weekend crowd!

This was my first time on PubCon (WebmasterWorld) conference. I don’t really like conferences. I always feel that it is waste of time and I would do more productive stuff staying at home. Well, I just have to say it was eye opener. Not really because the information provided was something you cannot find on Internet. Nobody said something so new and exciting that would be worth to go there. You can find anything on the Internet in few minutes. It is not about not having information available, but it is getting more and more difficult to comprehend what is really important. So what was the value of PubCon? Hang out with people in the same business, having personal contact from search engine people (Jeremy Zawodny, Yahoo.com or Matt Cutts, Google.com). Listen what they have to say. Get the feeling how they understand their role and function. You had to read between lines to get the feeling what is really going on. And here lies huge opportunities in understanding, seeing the trends, getting to know the players of this game and that’s why I say it was totally worth it.