Monthly Archives: May 2007

Social Traffic Site MyBlogLog Goes 2.0

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Insiders at the recent blogger convention SOBCon revealed plans about $10 million wunderkind social network site MyBlogLog. In the mix: a rebranding, a new widget and features to protect against social spam that is becoming more pervasive on the networks.

David Dalka mentions that during SOBCon upcoming changes to the popular social networking site include:

  • A rebranding (to reflect it’s acquistion by Yahoo!)
  • Some MyBlogLog 2.0 upgrades – site redesign and a Web2.0-ish widget upgrade
  • Anti-social spam features like avatar moderation and masking type features

Since Google rules the roost at the moment on the search engine front, there’s plenty of opportunity for Yahoo! and Microsoft to capture mindshare and market share on the non-search engine traffic fronts.

There’s opportunity to look at the hubs of highly targeted traffic clustered around social sites and forums.

So far we haven’t heard not many high profile forums being acquired have been reported in the mass media, even though transaction values for these deals can range from the hundreds of thousands to the millions.

Selective media focus? Perhaps. But as social traffic and social media continue to Continue reading →

Ranking For Your Name In Google = Money In The Pocket

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Most information marketers might focus on developing a strong product, or a sales page with high conversion rates, but it pays to rank at the top of the search engine results for your name and/or your company name, even if you don’t give a flying H1, H2 or META about Search Engine Optimization.

Witness the case of musician “AM”, who gave up his given name and goes by his initials and has been lost in the search engine results pages. (Wall Street Journal “You’re Nobody Unless Your Name Google Well“)

AM probably has lost countless sales due to fans landing on the pages of AM radio stations or American Greetings Corp (stock ticker: AM). Appearing on page 20 of the search results could spell online death.

You could counter this in a number of ways.

Increase your search engine Continue reading →

Friday Podcast Episode 4: Develop Podcast Content for Traffic and Profit

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This episode of the Friday podcast focuses on creating podcast content designed to drawn in highly targeted and relevant traffic.

[audio:http://www.whoisandrewwee.com/podcasts/WhoIsAndrewWee.com-friday-podcast4.mp3]

For session notes, click more:
Continue reading →

Customer Engagement Makes You The Big Internet Marketing Bucks

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There’s a constant debate about the “best” way to earn online income, and the simple answer is that there is no optimum path to achieving this goal. But one thing is certain, the deeper the engagement with your visitors, the more you’ll benefit.

Here’s why: The whole system of Internet Marketing profits is based on effort and engagement.

Witness-

Web advertising (text links, banner ads, Adsense) has a back-of-napkin payout of about 1-10% against your time and resorces.

Comparatively, CPA (cost per action) marketing where you’re rewarded on leads taking an action (filling in a form, submitting an email address or zip code) pays about 5% to 30% return on your effort.

Affiliate marketing with payouts on completed transactions gives a payout of 10% to 90% (depending on whether it’s a physical product or digital one).

And the big kahuna is product creation with payouts of 20% to 100%, and you control the highway toll booth so to speak.

The higher payouts are proportional to customer engagement, and your efforts to profile and understand them.

With that equation clearly in mind, why would you Continue reading →

WordPress Blogging Pipeline and Projections

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One of the WordPress development team, Ryan Born, noted in his post WordPress 2.2 Release Candidate 1 will not include a tagging feature, the next version could include a comprehensive taxonomy framework which could open up the field for interesting plugins.

The year has been an interesting one for WordPress bloggers with the release of about 5 major and incremental upgrades since the start of the year.

It’s interesting to see WordPress grow from more a GNU General Public License hobbist project, to a comprehensive solution that corporates are increasingly embracing.

The fact that new WordPress versions currently do or will eventually include native functions like:

  • Email functions like (phpMailer)
  • Tagging (which helps out the information sorting and relevance process in the age of info overload)
  • Widgets (to expand its functions from it’s base text/graphics-information Content Management System publishing origins)
  • XML-RPC APIs for otherwise static “Pages” as distinguished from the dynamic “Post” counterparts
  • Further ATOM feed and API support for increased content distribution syndication

These initiatives give WordPress a big step up from other more Web1.0 corporate-oriented blogging platforms.

And ultimately it’s about choice. If you choose to Continue reading →

Inside MyBlogLog

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Lee Odden interviewed MyBlogLog CEO Scott Rafer and got some insights into the blossoming social community site. From the looks of things, there are certainly some interesting developments in store for the young blogging community site.

To date MyBlogLog clocks in at about 50,000 users, fairly impressive considering the fact that it launched in Mar 2005. And with the recent acquisition by Yahoo! it looks set to grow from strength-to-strength (Especially with a 2% daily growth rate).

From my personal observation, MyBlogLog users tend to be fairly active, especially since the service combines the best features of blogging and social community sites.

As Scott observes, the MyBlogLog widget (typically displayed in the right sidebar of most blogs) certainly proved to be its secret weapon.With blogs already being very social-oriented, the widget only helped accelerate the pace of the service’s “virality”.

It’ll be interesting to see Continue reading →