I was talking to my hosting provider (we have a rack there), and we were talking about marketing and finding customers.

He had mentioned this to me over a year ago, and was talking about how difficult the law was making it to boost his wifi signal beyond a certain area.

I was confused - why would he want one?

Why not? I’ve got a ton of bandwidth available and I’ve got the equipment also. It’s a fantastic way to get my company name out there in front of everyone.

I laughed. And then I realized what a genius he was. With Toronto-wide WiFi, people will be looking to connect wifi. And every time they do, they see a nice little ‘PriorityColo - Web Hosting’ provider (which actually works well too). For geo-centric websites, where the location of the server is very important, PriorityColo is exactly who they are looking for (while living in Toronto I had 3-8ms ping times to my servers).

Imagine setting up something like this near hotels or other busy areas. You could even extend it, and not even provide service (though I would consider that very lame).

Anyone know the finances behind getting a T1 and setting up a wireless access point?

My recent posts have included one about Google opening up the directions API, and about Loki and its geo-location systems.

The next flood is open APIs - everything is opening up, and while it is exciting, it is also a bit overwhelming.

Beyond the above two (all great fits for iBegin), we have Garmin releasing an API to interact with its devices, we have Google Mapplets, and Facebook’s shift into a platform. And those are only a few. What about integration with login systems like OpenID and Yahoo? Exporting capabilities so others can create too?

I think we are reaching the point of so many powerful (ie - highly trafficked) sites having open APIs that it is becoming more and more important to have someone fulltime mashing your data with these systems. The above examples I gave are all perfect fits - figure out the closest gas station using Garmin. A mapplet for important categories like cafes or fast-food. A module so Facebook users can not only search but also incorporate their reviews, pictures, and events into the system. Allow Yahoo!/OpenID/Google ID users to login so they don’t have to create yet another account.

And the list goes on and on - whew … keeping up is becoming harder and harder.

There is a lot of talk about walled-garden et all, but I believe with the hyper-activity now going on in building out APIs that anyone can use, it is becoming more important to just by everywhere. Users don’t like being forced one way in another - but they do like it when you support a multitude of systems.

Companies were initially afraid of search engines - but then became best buddies with all the traffic they sent. Same thing happened with social networks - they were very resistant at first, but now you see Digg and Del.icio.us links everywhere. Sure they send traffic to Digg/Delicious/et all, but they get a lot of traffic back. And the same thing is going to happen (especially in the local space) with all these open APIs. Garmin works hard to get its users. Google is always angling new ways to keep users on their site. Facebook works hard to keep users on its site. It makes sense to leverage their platforms to get more traffic to your sites.

Think about this - a user (with a Yahoo account) ends up on your website. They want to add a review - but have to be logged in first. In one situation, you require them to create a new account. In another, they can login using their Yahoo account. The choice should be obvious.

I believe the ‘winners’ will be those who are found everywhere, on all the major platforms.

This post is about making money from domain names. The reality is that domain parking is not only here, it is going to grow (and evolve). With companies that have some serious money behind them [100 million+] (eg GeoSign, DemandMedia, iReit, etc), domaining isn’t going to go away.

I’ve never been impressed by parked pages. Completely boilerplate, they look awful. I’ve never doubted that domains get a lot of traffic - I just don’t understand who actually clicks on those links. All my tech-clueless friends have said they come across these pages regularly, hate them, and never click on ads.

Regardless - innovation is afoot. The reality is domains get a lot of targeted traffic, and PPC is not the best way to extract maximum value. The standard PPC site can only go so far - you can spruce it up, add pretty colors, etc - but the underlying system is the same. The long term value is very low, and the growth of type-in traffic is pretty much flat lined.

We’ve dabbled in this lightly via iBegin - for example, Minnesota.com. The site has grown roughly 300% in traffic since we put up the new system - not too bad. And this is just the start - we intend on growing this out - reviews, photos, and better monetization (eg hotel affiliates, real-estate, florists, etc). But that is for another day.

So I was intrigued when a friend of mine told him about his upcoming system - Domainer.com. His first live example: Bags.com.

The idea is simple - take a domain, add in content via bloggers (who have agreed to have their content distributed), add some extra relevance via tags, and then sell the product directly (via Shopping.com) instead of using a PPC aggregator like Google or Yahoo.

What was interesting was that he was able to negotiate the ability to replicate blog posts completely on their site (eg Dior Flight Hobo). The idea is to be a win-win for both parties - the domain (getting intrinsic traffic) sends traffic to the blogger (who is properly cited), and the blogger acts as a content creator for the domain.

Domainer.com has taken steps that the original URL (for each blog post) be given its due - linking back and using the ‘cite’ attribute (created by W3):

The value of this attribute is a URI that designates a source document or message. This attribute is intended to give information about the source from which the quotation was borrowed.

Does Google care for it? Doesn’t seem like it.

I’m not a fan of SEO for parked domains - a site that *only* has a bunch of ad links should not be getting any search engine traffic. But I think bags.com may be the exception. Or it is close - just not there yet. While I like the content (you can think of it as the ugly cousin of an aggregator like popurls ), the presentation leaves me unhappy. The content is there, but it seems like it was jammed on the side so one can claim that they do have content. I’m not sure what the purpose was with the 468×60 banner on top - it links to a page just like the links on the left menu do. Why add such clutter?

I wish the site involved a bit more user-generated content. Does it cause moderation headaches? Yes. But in the grand scheme of search-engines, it also creates unique content. Let me get involved somehow.

Right now I would give the site a C+. It definitely extends the idea of Bags.com. It definitely makes it more compelling than a bunch of ad-links. But it falls short of being truly useful. I have no way of participating (not even an ‘email a friend’ link). The store is the complete focus, with the content on the side.

I think in the case of Bags.com a dual-pane approach for the index page may work better. Left side can say ‘Interested in buying bags?’ and the right side can say ‘Want to read about bags?’. At least give the content-side its fair shake.

Regardless - good first version, but it needs some updates before it truly becomes useful. Right now it feels like an SEOed storefront with some content on the side.

I said I would come back to this.

We released iBegin Weather on May 10.

The site isn’t amazing. It isn’t ground-breaking. What it is is useful. It is clean, fast loading, and gets the damn point across (the weather) with a minimal of intrusions and confusion. I’ll do a comparison with other websites another day

So to me it is a form of evolution - taking data and presenting it in a more viable way.

So on the first day of operations we got 148 unique visitors. These were greatly driven by my own sites - from blogs like ForeverGeek and Blogging Pro, to our own iBegin Blog. The next few days it leveled off a bit (~125 unique visitors a day), after which it has gone up every day since. Yesterday it did 421 unique visitors.

I realized early that weather is a personal thing - people not only want to read it quickly, they want a quick way of getting it (be it RSS) or even displaying it on their site (widget).

So we spent quite a bit of time on the widget. We made sure it was fast (cached). We made sure it was customizable (a lot of options). And we made sure (again) it was simple - no flash interface, no heavy-graphics loading, none of that crap.

And then we promoted it. We emailed a few bloggers. We bought a few paid reviews (which led to a crappy experience). We did PPC.

In 9 days, I can only chalk this up as success. The widget is driving traffic and searches to the site. Yahoo reports 28 backlinks to the frontpage, but 1156 links to the entire domain. We have almost 150 sites using the widget (most of which don’t exist to Google). Our #1 referer is a high school in Kentucky!

This post is powerful. Stop for a moment and think about it. We found an enterprise provider of some essential data, we put up a clean website for it, we built an intelligent widget system that is both customizable and loads blazing fast, and then spending a little time emailing/paid reviews (~5 hours) and PPC (very little ongoing cost - I am stunned by how little widget promotion is done through PPC), we are building backlinks and traffic at a fantastic rate. The site almost has 10,000 pages in Google (in 9 days, no sitemap).

If you wanted a recipe for a site where you drive non-SE traffic while also driving SE-traffic, this is it.

Between the BlogFlux/BlogTopSites merger and a stomach bug, I haven’t been able to get much done.

And yet - while I wasn’t doing much directly, the system itself was working flawlessly. The best example: widgets.

Lots of talk these days about how awesome super fantastic widgets are. Yet very little of that talk has been spent on the downsides - how it is a JS call (and thus extra HTTP calls), how it basically hammers the widget-server, how it going down can make your website unusable (do you really trust the widgets you are using?), how you have no control over what data is acquired.

If the path from ‘Visitor’ to ‘Customer’ (ie makes you money) is from A to Z, the widget itself is somewhere in the middle.

Widgets are also useful in two ways:
1. Generating direct traffic to your website.
2. Generating backlinks to your website.

What I’ve done (with great success) is let #1 be optional, and let #2 be mandatory. The benefit in this way is that the webmaster (who will implement the widget) - he has the power to do what he wants. When it comes to compelling reason to using a widget - not having to link back (in any noticeable way) is way at the top.

In my previous post on ForumTemplates.com hitting the 100,000 download mark, I also mentioned how it wasn’t getting any search engine love, even with all the links.

Stefan Juhl and I had a little chit-chat going on in the comments, where Google does recognize 3000 pages, but thinks only 42 are unique enough to mention.

The problem that arises are two fold:

1. Stefan suggests I put in more text, as that might be confusing the search engines. But adding more text would serve no purpose - this is a design that people are downloading/buying - text serves no real function here. Google keeps telling me to design for my users, not search engines. And I have, but it seems like it isn’t working. At all.

2. We have a lot of links as our freebie templates (over 100) require a link back. These aren’t paid. But we could be getting penalized because they are ’site-wide’ (in the context of the forum software). This is a the slippery slope I was talking about in an earlier post. People saw the design, liked it, downloaded it, and installed it. That is as good of a vote (via link) as you will get. But it seems like we are getting penalized. Fantastic.

So we will see. The site *is* successful (zero PPC, weak organic). But I also believe the site is more than good enough to rank highly in the organic results. Yahoo! shows over 800,000 backlinks. People like this stuff.

Some of our divisions are quite quiet, just slogging along, making money without making a peep.

Case in point: Forum Templates. It just crossed the 100,000 downloads mark yesterday. It employs two people full time.

This incidentally is the one site Google gives no love to. Just filed a reinclusion request, I think it is because the domain was PPCed when we bought it (well over a year ago). At the same time, Google reports ~9200 links to the frontpage, ~50,000 to the phpBB page, and ~97,000 to the vBulletin page. The grand total comes to 157,342 links.

My first ever re-inclusion request (previously when I bought a domain that was PPCed and couldn’t get to rank, I simply moved on to another domain), I will post on how it actually goes (other sites in my sitemaps account account for roughly 150,000 unique visitors a day, so it is in good company).

Pretty simple.

Matt complains about selling text links through WordPress to game search engines (he focuses on templates, but you know the gist of it).

He does this on a blog that has the following links:
* Donate your car
* Online payday loans
* Payday Loans
* myspace layouts
* Free web directory
* Professional Web Hosting
* domains
* Payday Loans
* Articles & Tutorials
* Rome hotels

Kettle, pot, black - you know the drill.

It has spread to every nook on the internet - Google picked up Doubleclick for a sweet $3.1 billion

With it, Google gains access to some big-name clients of DC - brand managers for major companies that have a lot of money. PPC is just a facet of internet advertising - there is also banner advertising (which Google has a small share of, and DC a large share of), CPA (which Google is expanding into, and DC has the highest quality network for), and email (which I don’t think Google is going into any time soon).

Anyway, the story goes that Google beat out Microsoft (again). And by beating out Microsoft, they also beat out Yahoo (after all, all three are going after the same - internet advertising).

Yahoo is looking especially vulnerable. Since picking up Flickr (which I still argue was mostly for guaranteed ad-inventory), and Delicious/MyBlogLog (both for user behaviour/tracking), they’ve been relatively silent. There was suppoused to be a deal for Facebook, but that has not produced anything.

If there is one product that I think Yahoo is pushing ahead of Google is local. Local is more than just local search though - it is about a presence in the local area. And while I argue Yahoo! Local is superior to Google Maps, Yahoo has really pushed ahead of Google with key partnerships with newspapers, the latest being with McClatchy.

So while Yahoo continues to sustain PR black-eyes, what can it do?

Buy up companies in the emerging local market.

With that in mind, and a way to get a leg-up on Google (for once), Yahoo could go and buy out (for relatively cheap) both Local.com and Yelp.

Local.com keeps making noises about how much traffic it pushes (roughly 11 million unique visitors a month). They claim $35 RPM (revenue per 1000 pageviews), and ~$90 per 1000 daily visitors. While their CPM doesn’t compare to Google’s, it has gone up significantly, and by utilizing Panama, it should be able to make even more. As Google and Yahoo jostle for the local market, Local.com and its 11 million unique visitors a month make perfect sense. There are some other things to consider (eg Local.com heavily invests in PPC), but a great domain with steady traffic could be a good call. And local.com needs money - it just received $8 million in funding.

The other site would be Yelp, which simply fits into Yahoo’s strategy of user-generated content: Jumpcut, Flickr, Upcoming.org, and Del.icio.us. User generated, active participation, without too much butting in by Yahoo (though I am sure quite a few Flickr fans would disagree). They would get their hands on some of the most loyal visitors in the local area (you don’t drop 400 reviews on a site and then just get up and leave). Yelp struggles with their ad-sales, but few sites get as much attention as they do (especially considering how much real traffic they do get). But that attention has helped them skyrocket, with Hitwise reporting that Yelp’s traffic has increased 91% in just six months.

Get the top independent local search site, and the top local review site - I do wonder what the valuation would come out to, but I am sure Yahoo has enough cash to scoop them both up.

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar. Edward R. Murrow

If there is one thing we struggle with, it is the amount of misinformation out there. As an organization, we are subscribed to blog results from both Bloglines and Google Blogsearch on every domain and sitename we operate (Technorati RSS feeds seem to update without any new updates, so those are manually checked).

It is absolutely stunning how people can get simple things totally wrong. Not only that, but many people somehow equate all websites with free-speech. It simply boggles their mind that www.whatever.com is my site - I can do whatever I want with it.

But my two points here are different. The problem I am talking about is bloggers often times would rather be loud and wrong than anything else. Too often stories spread that shouldn’t have been even repeated. And not only do they spread, but they get more sensationalist as people try to drive traffic to their site. Case in point: Muslims & the Apple NYC cube. The original (unsourced) story was some muslim was suppousedly offended by the apple cube story. It suddenly morphed into ‘Muslim community offended by Apple NYC cube. Our subtle jab and the stupidity of the story and sensationalism was met with incredulity, as if we were promoting an agenda. In the end, the source turned out to be a forum posting. Some random idiot on a random forum morphed into the Muslim community. And I still see this bloody story mentioned.

While politics is the breeding ground of misinformation (eg Barack Obama was raised as a radical Muslim), its disgusting how this has spread into every facet of our lives.

A recent blog post (which ended up with 20+ comments) recently insinuated that Blog Flux deliberately does not have categories for ethnicities. That we were deliberately stifling people who blog around ethnicities.

I was absolutely floored. Hell, I’m an ethnic minority (and have received my fair share of racism). Instead of even bothering to ask us (or suggest), they instead decided to publicly suggest we were just a bunch of stifling racists. Fantastic.

There are far too many prominent bloggers who spout out ‘facts’ without even doing more than a cursory look at what they are talking about. Frankly, its gone on too long.