Ryan Jones Blog – dotCULT.com Ryan Jones Blogs About Internet Culture, Marketing, SEO, & Social Media

Using a nice little keyword tool I stumbled upon a keyword that gets a few hundred searches but nobody is bidding on. Things like this are rare and I quickly placed my adwords ad for such keyword.

I got a Great quality score, and it returned a minimum bid of $0.04. I copied another ad campaign, so I left my max bid at 35 cents.

A quick search for the keyword showed ONLY my ad – no others.

The problem is, I received 2 clicks on it today totaling 46 cents in cost. That’s 23 cents/click!!

If the minimum bid is 4 cents, and I’m the only person bidding on this keyword… why wasn’t I only charged 4 cents?

In a story that’s surprisingly not showing up on any of the major news sites, online betting site Bodog.com has lost it’s domain name. I’d have linked to the site here, but there’s no site there to link to.

It seems that Bodog failed to show up in court to answer an infringement claim filed by 1st Technology. As a result, the judge gave a default judgment against Bodog for the amount of 48.6 million. Unable to seize any assets, 1st Technology took the Bodog.com domain name.

Bodog quickly moved their site to newbodog.com, however the loss of the domain name will be a major problem for their business. The fact that this story isn’t seeing major news means that many players will be left in the dark not knowing about the new website.

Even worse, is the affect on their traffic from the domain loss. Bodog enjoyed very favorable search engine results – including being #1 in Google for the term “betting.” Having lost control of the domain, they will be unable to do a 301 redirect to their new site or anything similiar. In the eyes of Google, Bodog went from being an authority site to being a brand new gambling related domain that has 0 inlinks – and lots of duplicate content.

Basically, they’re fucked.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

In his recent book, fark.com founder Drew Curtis talks about seasonal news stories. You know, the news stories that seem to pop up every year around the same time.

That’s why most journalists love the first week of September. We can just sit back and let the stories write themselves. Open up word, change the date, submit, drink beer.

We love this time in particular because many seasonal articles overlap.

With school starting, the backpacks are too heavy stories are starting to show up now, and any day your local newspaper should be running the “traffic will be heavy this weekend as Americans travel for labor day” articles they love to print.

It’s also about the time parents are getting their first college tuition bills, so you’ll soon be hearing about tuition increases as well.

After our vacation we’ll all hurriedly write articles about celebrities and finally air those feel good humanity stories we’ve been saving up before diving headfirst into a 4 month long political frenzy. (which seems to come earlier and earlier every year)

This week though, we don’t have to do anything but serve up the same tired old articles we did last year (and probably wrote 5 years ago).

I’m writing this one so that next year all I have to do is change the hyper links before heading up to the lake for the week.

Speaking of the lake, I’m taking the rest of the week off to go play disc golf and drink beer. I’ll see you guys Tuesday.

If you were one of the first to get an iPhone, you may have experienced a little bit of shock when opening your first phone bill since switching. Personally, my bill was 20 some pages long – compared to the 3 pages Cingular used to send me before becoming AT&T.

The reason for killing an extra tree? It seems that AT&T itemized all my data usage. Since I constantly checked out websites on my phone at work, in the car, on the toilet, in bed, etc, I had LOTS of data line items with a charge of 0.

I laughed when I got my first bill, and thought “wow, I wonder how many trees the iPhone is killing” before dropping it all in my shredder.

The good news is, it’s going to stop! I just got a text message from AT&T saying that they’re going to remove item detail on my next bill, and if I’d like it to get it online or call 611. That’s a change in the right direction. Now if only they’d actually offer that $5 unlimited texting they talk about on TV instead of hiding the required “data plan purchase” away in the small text.

UPDATE: The shoutwire post is no longer available, so I’m re posting it here in its entirety.

If you’ve ever sat down and talked to your grandparents you’ve probably heard countless tales of what life was like back in the day. You might hear them talk about long forgotten technologies like rotary phones, black and white televisions that had 6 channels, an antennae and no remote, or (depending on your age) items like punch cards and the telegraph. Today’s generation would be hard pressed to remember records, reel to reel recordings, or dialing the operator to make a call. If you kept listening to old Grandad he’d regale you with stories about 10 cent gas and 5 cent stores before going off on a rant about Hitler and those damn Japs as he slowly drifts off to sleep in his chair. I myself even remember complaining about gas going up to 89 cents. Ah, those were the days.

You may be laughing and calling me an old man, but we’ll all be there one day. We’ll be able to tell our kids about long gone technologies
too – when we’re not busy yelling at them to get off of our lawn or ranting about Saddam Hussein.

So before I drift off into a rant about those damn terrorists, let me present my top 10 endangered items / ideas list. I predict that most (if not all) of these things will be extinct long before our grand kids send us off to the old folks home.

1. The Newspaper. Just last night I was having dinner with my grandparents and we were discussing my cousin’s inability to find a job after college (side note: Don’t list beer pong on your resume.) My mom chimed in with “it’s not like he’s trying, he’s only been looking online.” As somebody who’s currently looking to hire both programming and graphic design interns (seriously if you’re in the Detroit area drop me a line) I had to chime in with “well, where else should he look?” Should I get help from a PrincePerelson professional job recruiter to make sure I get a good hire?

Have you looked at the want ads lately? Compared to sites like monster.com or indeed.com the newspapers can’t compete – and it shows. Nobody’s advertising there. All 3 jobs I’ve had since college have all been found online – and I certainly wouldn’t think of even posting a job somewhere else.

The same is true for news. I don’t know anybody under 30 who gets a regular newspaper subscription. We all go online for our news. As far as the paper is concerned, it’s old news. Not only that, it’s 100% objective. As proven by all of today’s social sites and news aggregators (like this one) today’s youth wants insight and opinion. Above all, they want to be able to discuss the news with others. The newspaper industry is dying a quick death and most of them don’t even realize it. Instead of embracing technology they’re still fighting it by locking up content and trying to sue Google for sending them traffic. Of all the technologies I’m about to list, this one will crash and burn the hardest.

2. Land Line Phones. I could have said pay phones, but they’re just a symptom of a greater cause. Land line phones are all but dead. If the cell phone didn’t kill them, services likeSkype and SIPphone certainly will (provided it’s not windows update day.) With cell phone long distance being cheaper than most land lines, there’s really no reason to have another phone at home. T-Mobile seems to have spotted this trend and is offering a cell phone that also works on a wireless router, but even that is a dying model. As cell phone competition is increasing it’s only a matter of time before rate plans are reduced to flat monthly fees. We saw it happen with regular long distance, and there’s no reason to prevent it from happening with cell phones. Hang on to that old corded phone in your parents kitchen – it may just be worth something in a few years.

3. Phone Books. Sticking with the phone motif, printed phone books will have to be #3 on the list. I personally throw them right in the recycle bin when the arrive, and you’d be hard pressed to find a 20-something who isn’t using theirs to prop up a table, tear in half, or for shooting practice. You don’t have to be a strongman to tear one in half. There’s a trick to it. Catch me in the bar and bet $20 and I’ll show you how. This is another area where online services are stepping in and doing a better job than print media (we’ll see a few more of those a little lower down.) EvenYellowpages.com can’t do as good of a job as Google, Yahoo, MSN , and Ask are doing. Looking at daily traffic reports for my 20 or so clients, Google local is delivering about 70-80 times the visitors asyellowpages.com and bluebook.com. The situation is so bad that Yellowpages .com has even resorted to offering “paid inclusion” programs, and advertising programs where you can pay them to place your ad on Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc. That’s not a sign that things are going good for them. The same arguments here can also be applied toward dictionaries, thesauruses, and eventually even bibles.

4. The Music Album. Technically, this concept is already on life support. There was a time when people would buy an album and listen to it from start to end. There was also a time when the order of the songs added to the overall music listening experience. Unfortunately, that time coincided with the popularity of the phonograph. In today’s ultra compressed post-Napster music industry nobody buys albums; they buy songs – for $0.99 each. Of course, most of you probably favor the free but illegal downloading option. Even then, I’m willing to bet you download more individual songs than complete albums. Buyers aren’t thinking of music in terms of albums anymore. Perhaps it’s a good thing though, as very few artists think of music that way either. In a way, I could have listed the “CD” here instead, but I’m not 100% convinced that the death of the CD wasn’t caused by the death of the album.

5. Record Stores. Here’s another one currently pricing iron lungs. It’s only natural that when the album dies it takes the record store with it. The album may have gone quietly, but the record store is making it a slow agonizing process. Thanks toiTunes , and all of the post-Napster clones, today’s youth aren’t going out and buying records. Sure equal blame can be given to the high price ofCDs or the fact that most CDs only contain 2 or 3 decent songs, but that’s an economics argument better left for another time. Record stores are dead. Ask Tower or Harmony House. Next.

6. Video Stores. Video may have killed the radio star, but it’s going to suffer the same fate as its audio counterpart. We’re already seeing services likeNetflix replace the mom and pop video stores all over the country. With a simple business model and ease of use, the internet is killing yet another once flourishing business sector. As a child I’d spend hours walking the aisles looking for new movies. Now, I simply spend minutes looking at myNetflix recommendations.

7. TV Channels. Cable TV may be in it’s prime now, but it’s days are numbered. Expect to see great numbers from the cable companies in 2009 when the analog stations suddenly go silent, but after that it’s going to be a sharp decline. WhenTIVO came out the general TV viewing philosophy changed from that of a channel to that of a program. The decline here will be slow as the big companies cling to their outdated business models, but eventually we’ll see the A-La-Carte channel plans we all so desperately desire. After that, services like Joost, YouTube, and iTunes will take over selling by the program. Eventually, you’ll be able to enjoy the features of the IPTV Extreme on the Firestick to watch your favorite shows like House, American Idol, or Survivor Moon.

8. The 9-5 Workday. If you work in the tech or programming industry you’re probably laughing and pointing out that it’s been dead for some time now. You’re right, it has – and it’s going to get worse. At my last job it was the norm for programmers to come in between 8 and 8:30, eat a 15 minute lunch at their desk, and pack up sometime around 6:30 or 7 – only to check their work email again as soon as they got home. With outsourcing the job now picks up in India before the US developer even gets his coat on. In Japan it’s common for employees to wait each other out at the end of the day, as they’re all afraid of being seen as the first person to leave the office. Unfortunately that trend is coming stateside. Long gone are the days where we could make $100,000 salaries simply for knowing HTML. Bubble2.0 is different.

9. Unions. It naturally follows that as we start embracing the eastern working philosophies we’ll start shedding some fat. THe biggest area of bulk plaguing the American economy now is unions. They may have worked for dear old granddad, but they just don’t make sense anymore. Unions don’t promote work, and they consume resources. Today’s economy rewards hard work. With a union, most employees are promoted and rewarded based on time logged. Not only is it not best for business, but it actually demotivates employees. There’s no reason to work harder than the guy next to you if he’s going to get the same pay increase right? With GM spending millions on Viagra for retirees it’s no wonder they can’t compete with the Toyota’s of the world.

10. Film. Technology is rapidly replacing film in both still and moving pictures. With digital cameras being ubiquitously installed in pretty much anything that plugs in, there won’t be a need for film. It used to be one could only achieve certain photographic effects in a darkroom, but programs likePhotoshop and the GIMP are quickly replacing skilled dark room technicians
. Camcorders are also going digital, and movie studios are starting to follow suit. It’s a gradual transition, but we’re transitioning nonetheless. We’ll still have to solve the problems associated with storing all of these pictures and videos, but companies like Google (YouTube) and Yahoo (Flickr) are doing a pretty good job in the interim. Then there’s the digital degradation issue too, but most photos should easily last 10 years or so. By then they’ve probably either been copied to new media, or long since forgotten about. You didn’t really want to save that picture of you hitting the bong in your underwear did you?

So there you have it. 10 items you’ll be able to tell your grand kids about while they’re changing diapers and trying to think of an excuse to leave the room. It’s not that they won’t care what you’re talking about, it’s just that you’ll have told it to them at least 70 times by then. Of course that won’t stop you – and it also won’t stop them from listening either. Trust me on this one. Go talk to your grandparents. Ask them about their childhood. Not only will you learn something, but you might even gain an even better story to tell your kids. At the very worst, it’ll at least get granddad to change the subject away from kicking Hitler’s ass.

Oh, and hey…. get off my lawn…. damned kids.

I just did a post over on shoutwire called 10 endangered ideas. Basically, it’s a look at 10 things that exist today that our grandkids (or kids) won’t be familiar with. In other words, dying technologies. Go Check it Out. It’s a good read.

If you’d like to see some of my other shoutwire feeds, you can subscribe to their RSS feed below:
RSS URL

Or you can view them all at this link:
www.dotcult.com/shoutwire.php

Depending on how long I decide to stay at Shoutwire (their advertising is pissing me off) I may or may not integrate that with this blog.

I’m just posting here because I feel a little guilty. Most of my better posts have been going over on Shoutwire, but I know some (or all 3 even) of my readers would enjoy reading it.

Update: Google added the word excessive in front of the passage I mentioned today (8-16-07). It clarifies a little bit, but still begs the question: what’s excessive?

Google recently updated it’s webmaster guidelines with some information that’s causing a big stir on the internet. If you look under the examples of “link schemes” you’ll see this little tidbit:

Link exchange and reciprocal links schemes (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)

Am I to understand that one can now be banned from Google for having reciprocal links? If so, there’s some serious implications that come to mind:

1. What about all of the sites that pre-date Google? Reciprocal linking happened way before Google was around. You can’t expect all these websites to suddenly change.
2. What about sister sites? Example: On Noslang.com I link to my drug translator, and on the drug translator I link to my slang translator. I don’t do this for pagerank, I do it because my visitors may be looking for a slang term that the other dictionary includes. It’s proven useful. Am I to get banned because both sites are relevant to each other and helpful to the user?
3. What about press mentions? It’s very common for a website to link back to a news article that mentions them. You want your visitors to see your press accolades. Are these seen as reciprocal links and bad for my website?
4. What about blogrolls or blog networks? Even Matt Cutts had a blogroll at one time, and many of these people linked back in their blogrolls. It’s helpful to users because they can read similiar content. Is this a penalty? Backlink Doctor has the best guides on fixing your site if a Google penalty has hit you.

There’s got to be a better method than “banning” that the guidelines mention. If Google can detect reciprocal links, they can just as easily not give them any weight in the algorithm. This way, users still benefit and the search engines aren’t “gamed.” Maybe it’s just a clarification issue on the webmaster guidelines page, or I’m reading it wrong.

Either way,I think we still need some clarification on this new update from Matt and Adam – because as it’s written I’d venture to say that about 90% of sites are in violation of the new guidelines. Of course, banning everybody who uses reciprocal links would certainly save on bandwith and allow Google to index the remaining web with near real-time updates. Isn’t that what we’ve all been pushing for?

Today is the day many football games have been looking forward to since the Old Trafford brawl. We’ve been dreaming of new rookies, new animations, new moves, and end zone celebrations. I’m talking about Madden 08.

Like a child eagerly heading downstairs on Christmas morning we’ll all be heading to the stores (or the mailbox) today in search of gaming greatness. This Maddenolidy though, it seems as if we’ll be opening up a big pink bunny suit instead of our red rider B.B. guns. (sorta like how you’re reading tired cliches here instead of insightful commentary.)

This year’s version of the game offers little else other than improved rosters, and new animations – except for the increased product placement. Now, things like the coin toss are actually sponsored. Just what I needed!

I’ve never understood why EA doesn’t approach video games from a “software as a service” model. The main reason I buy new versions of the sports games every year is for the updated rosters. My Wii is online, so why not offer me a continually updated roster service? I’d gladly pay a yearly fee to be able to have it automatically update with the newest version of the game and rosters (or just the rosters for my old version.)

I’ll still buy this year’s version, (it should already be waiting at home in my mailbox) and I’ll still play it for hours – not because it’s so much better than last year, but because it’s the only one out there to feed my football fix.

It’s not often you hear the word MySpace thrown around when talking about the over 50 crowd, but that’s exactly where we’re seeing growth with one of our clients.

If you’re an online marketer you’re probably familiar with all the benefits of having a MySpace account. If you aren’t, you need to start reading.

Seeing how well that MySpace advertising worked for my text messaging website, I decided it needed a MySpace account. I was amazed at how many people signed up for it and how easy it was to alert my loyal users about new features through bulletins and such.

Internally, we tried the concept on one of our T-shirt websites. By offering special coupons strictly to our MySpace friends we were able to actually grow sales.

Having some spare time on a Friday, I decided to make one for our client who sells red hat society merchandise. If you’re not familiar with the red hat society, it’s basically a social organization for ladies over 50. I didn’t expect to get any return out of it, but I was shocked just 2 days later when we had over 100 friends to our RedHatsAndMore MySpace Account.

If you’d asked me just 2 weeks ago I would have told you that there can’t be over 100 old ladies on MySpace – and I’d have been wrong. It seems that not only are teens flocking to the social site, but their parents (and in some cases, their parents) are using it as well.

As a society we seem to think of anybody over 30 with a MySpace account as a creepy old pedophile, but that clearly isn’t the case. Grown ups have friends too, and they like to stay in touch with them. Keep that in mind when planning your marketing campaigns: There’s really no age limit on social media.

You might have missed the announcement last week, but Google has gone live with their search session ads. Now, instead of just showing you ads based on the keywords you search for, Google will remember what your last search was and show ads relevant to your searching “session.”

The example given by Google is this: If a user searches for “Italy”, ads for Italy will be shown. If their next search is for “weather”, ads related to weather in Italy will be shown alongside the regular weather ads.

Here’s an example that just came up for me. I had just searched for the term “gothic arbor” to see if one of my clients was listed, when somebody else came running up to say “hey, we’re #1 for plastic grips! Those homepage changes you made worked!” Naturally, I typed “plastic grips” into the search box. Check out the ads that it showed:

As you can see here, the first ad is still for arbors. Google remembered what I last searched for, and showed me ads relevant to my overall searching session.

I’ll be interested to see how well these changes work; not for Google but for overall conversions from the advertiser side. As somebody who’s bidding on some arbor related keywords, I’m not entirely sure I want to be showing up for other searches. It’s possible that it’s going to do nothing but lower my click through rate.

Privacy advocates should take note that these “sessions” are not stored after you leave Google. This feature only works during the same visit to the website, and does not persist over time. For instance, when I come back to Google after typing this post and search for “blog writer” Google won’t show me ads related to arbors or grips.

As many of you know, I’ve given up programming to become the head of SEO at my new company. We’re growing nicely and possibly adding 2-3 more clients. Thinking of that, how many clients is ideal for one person to manage? I’m currently doing all of the SEO and PPC for about 8 different websites. I’m fearful that by adding 3 more clients I won’t be able to give my best effort towards all of them.

Is it time for me to hire? Or do I just need to stop blogging and get back to work?

What’s your workload like? How many clients is each person responsible for? What’s the ideal number?

Any and all feedback is appreciated.