Archive for August, 2007
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.
August 13th, 2007
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.
August 9th, 2007
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.
August 9th, 2007
Dear Netflix. Please have somebody watch your DVDs before you send them to me.
I know you can report DVDs as damaged, but I don’t think many people are doing that. The last 3 DVD’s I’ve rented from you have skipped, froze, or just not played.
Normally I’d think that my DVD player is the problem, but I tried it in 3 different players AND my computer.
If I get another DVD that doesn’t play, I’ll be switching over to the blockbuster plan. At least that way, I’ll be able to go back to the store and get a different copy that actually works.
August 5th, 2007
Some of you may have noticed that dotcult.com, noslang.com and feedbutton.com have been down or acting very slowly for the last few days. I thought it was because of the amount of bandwith feedbutton was using (see post below this one) but it wasn’t. I kept running the numbers in my head and thought “wow, a dedicated server should be able to handle these 3 websites with no problems.” It turns out, I was right.
When my sites weren’t responding I went through the usual checklist. Here’s what I did and my thought process:
- Is it my internet connection? A quick visit to some proxy sites show that the site isn’t responding for them either.
- Is the server down? ping…pong it’s responding to that.. A quick look at the apache logs confirm 150 current requests being processed… it’s not down
- Is there a rogue process? su root; ps x …. Nope, everything looks normal here.
- Restart apache anyway. That didn’t seem to work.
- Restart the server for the hell of it… that didn’t work either
- Must be a network issue. tracrt www.dotcult.com … hop hop hop.. interesting….
After it reaches a GoDaddy IP address (ip.secureserver.net) the final 5 hops take 778ms. This tells me that the problem is somewhere within GoDaddy’s network. It also tells me that there’s nothing I can do to fix this problem. I’m stuck calling GoDaddy.
After about 30 seconds of hold time (impressive!) I’m met by a guy on the other end. Before I can tell him what the issue is, he explains to me that I have an unassisted server plan, and thus he can’t help me. He also told me that he can access my sites fine. I tried to explain to him that by accessing them locally from his network, he won’t experience it… to try a proxy site or external internet connection. He refuses.
30 minutes later, I finally got a manager on the phone. He gave me the same shtick about having to upgrade to an assisted plan. After explaining what I’ve already tried, and assuring him that I know my way around a linux box, I told him it’s got to be a network issue and asked him to walk down to his server team and ask them to debug. I had to threaten to close my account, but he finally obliged.
Only then did he realize that they were having some hardware issues. Apparently the issues were bigger than just my site because he seemed to have an “oh shit” reaction to what he found. He told me that it would take a day or 2 to fix the issue, and thanked me for reporting it.
He was right. The next day the problems were gone and my sites are currently responding faster than ever. (I know I’m probably jinxing myself with this one.)
I’m just shocked that I had to go through all of this. It took him about 5 minutes to find the issue once he went down to his team in the server room, but it should have been found and fixed before I even called.
August 4th, 2007
Many of you know that one of the sites I run is called FeedButton. It’s a cool widget that lets you replace all those “add to feed reader” buttons with something else.
It’s proven very popular - it’s being used over 3000 blogs. That’s where the problem is. It’s also using about 150gig of bandwith every month, and it’s the real reason why this website is slow.
Despite everything I’ve done, I just can’t see a way to make feedbutton worth it’s weight. It’s a great service, and it offers valuable stats - but it doesn’t make any money. I’ve made $22 off of it so far this year.
I’m bleeding out money right now. I can’t afford to give it its own dedicated server if it’s making less than $2/month.
I’ve decided that I have the following options:
- Take down the site. - I don’t want to do this. This will be a last resort
- Make blog users host the javascript / images -This is feasible, but really hard to roll out
- Option 2 + limit current usage - Would it piss a bunch of people off if I made their cool widget go away, and linked the button to a page that had all the feed readers listed (for readers to select one)
- Angel Investor - I’d prefer for a company to step up and donate me a dedicated box to host the server on. I’d gladly let them brand the webpage, do a PR release about it, etc. I think this is the best option
If I can’t find somebody willing to help me save the website, I’m going to be forced to change the way it works or sell it.
If anybody’s interested, or has any ideas please drop me a line. My Gmail address is: thehockeygod
August 1st, 2007
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