New About Us Page

by Michael Wong on August 9, 2010

In over 12 years in this industry I have probably visited thousands of About Us pages. It is typically the first page I visit after the homepage, mainly to find out what the site is about, and often to find out whether I should trust the people behind the site.

I have written many ‘About Us’ pages over the years. My last effort was a very long bio that took something like a good ten minutes to read, and that was the edited version. It was a good read (well, at least I thought so), but I have to admit it was way too long, especially for impatient web surfers.

Recently I was inspired to rewrite my About Us page on this blog into something that quickly and effectively informed users what I had achieved in this industry and what I was about. And I feel I have written my best About Us page to date. Well, until the next one anyway.

I broke the page down into four sections:

  1. Section 1 gives a brief summary of who I am and what I have achieved in this industry;
  2. A timeline of what I have achieved in this industry and when;
  3. My guiding principles; and
  4. Books I really enjoyed reading.

I think I could have gotten away with just the first two sections. But I think including my guiding principles and the books I really enjoyed gives people a deeper understanding of who I am and what I am about.

Have you looked at your About Us page lately? Does it is do a good job of selling you and your company?

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Internet Marketing Center On Life Support?

by Michael Wong on June 4, 2010

Do you remember Corey Rudl?

He was a popular internet marketing expert, until his life was cut short by a tragic car accident in 2005.

I have fond memories of him and his accomplishments. But since his passing, his company, Internet Marketing Center (IMC), has been like a ship lost at sea without a captain.

Sales and conversion rates have tumbled over the last few years. But some events have occurred recently that has me asking, “is this the beginning of the end of Internet Marketing Center?”

I ask this question because:

1. I reported a bug in their affiliate reporting in January that stopped you from viewing sales and commissions from previous months. It still hasn’t been fixed five months on, despite repeated promises to get it fixed.

2. I have been an affiliate of theirs since at least 2003. In that time they have never missed a commission payment. In the last six months I have received just one commission check. And that check was just returned by the bank.

3. Two emails to them in the last two weeks have gone unanswered, despite their promise of a response within one business day, and typically within 8 hours, in their autoresponder.

4. Their support site at http://support.marketingtips.com/kb/ is inaccessible. Click on any of the support links at http://www.marketingtips.com/support.asp and they lead to a blank page. It’s been like that for at least the few days I have tried.

5. I called them during office hours but no one picked up the phone, despite trying several departments. The sales department’s voicemail box was fall. That is not a good sign.

So I don’t know what my sales and commissions should be. I haven’t received any money from them in six months. And I haven’t received an email response from them in two weeks. And no one is picking up their phone. Hmm….

One final observation is that I see that IMC just auctioned off one of their assets; CarSecrets.com, for a paltry $7,197.00.

The product was created by Corey in 1994. The domain was registered in 1999. For $7,197.00, the winning bidder received:

  • Intellectual rights to the entire CarSecrets.com web property, including URL.
  • Full, exclusive rights to the Car Secrets Revealed ebook.
  • Full, exclusive rights to the companion Secrets of Buying and Building Your Specialty Car ebook.
  • List of 21,837 customers, complete with email addresses and contact information.
  • 45,000 opt-in email subscribers.
  • 1,300 affiliates.

Was that a fire sale?

According to the auction listing, the reason for the sale is to free them up to concentrate on their core business. That is fair enough. But is the timing of it just a coincidence? Why did they accept of such a paltry amount for so much? And why aren’t they responding to emails or picking up their phone?

It doesn’t look good on the surface, does it? I hope I am completely wrong about the state of affairs at IMC.

So, come on guys (and girls), get your act together and sort yourself out. By the way, don’t forget to send me a replacement commission check while you’re at it - soon!

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A Quick Update

by Michael Wong on June 2, 2010

Hi,

How are you?

WOW! I can’t believe it’s been almost nine months since my last blog post. How time flies.

I was kindly reminded that a few people do enjoy my blog when Nguyen Loc Duy, from Beeworks Consulting, wrote to me last month to ask what has happened to my blog. He told me that he drew inspiration from my posts.

Up to that point, I didn’t think anyone really cared to be frank. Despite what I thought were some decent posts, the site attracted only about 800 visitors a month and few subscribers. So, I diverted my energy elsewhere.

So what has been happening with me?

Well, I am starting a new company here in Australia. I have decided it’s time to pursue a new strategy in this business. For the past eight years I have done very well as an affiliate marketer. It has paid the bills and given me and my family a wonderful lifestyle.

But something has always been missing. And the point was hit home the other week when a friend asked me what my website was.

As an affiliate marketer, I pretty much operate behind the scenes. It’s a one-man business. And that has suited me just fine. I prefer it this way. It’s an easy life. I have never really had to provide customer support for most of the products I have promoted. And the business generates passive income while I sleep, eat, and even on vacation. I have gone on vacation and earned more money on vacation than the previous month working full time. Seriously!

But now I have come to a point where I feel it is time to move away from affiliate marketing. The industry is becoming super competitive. People are teaching all kinds of systems, and even offering tools to copy successful affiliate campaigns. There are a lot of affiliate marketers out there who are much smarter and more successful at this game than me.

I can see a day in future where most of the work will be carried out by superfast computers that are built by Ph.D. computer engineers, using systems that incorporate a massive amount of data from the weather, news, economical data, shopping patterns, and advanced algorithms to optimize bids and rankings, and test millions of variations of a landing page.

Imagine a system so smart it can calculate the optimum bid, keywords to bid for, and adjust ad copy for thousands of campaigns, based on massive amount of market data, in a split second. It will know the time and day of the week to enter and exit markets for optimum returns.

The system would be so smart that it would be able to calculate the chances of success for a particular product before you even release it by running simulations of a product release.

I would love to build such a system. But I don’t have the means or the brains to accomplish such a project.

It’s not too dissimilar to today’s commodity and stock trading systems. Prior to the 1970s, stocks were bought and sold by hand. Now they are traded using superfast computers.

One system is called, “high-frequency trading” (HFT), whereby computers make decisions to initiate trades based on information that is received electronically, before human traders are capable of processing the information they observe. This is fact, not fiction.

I am no expert, so here is Wikipedia’s description of HFT: “High-frequency trading is a set of computerized trading strategies characterized by extremely short position-holding periods. In high-frequency trading, programs running on high-speed computers analyze massive amounts of market data, using sophisticated algorithms to exploit trading opportunities that may open up for only a fraction of a second. The programs can even inspect major orders as they come in – large institutional orders, as for pension funds and mutual funds – and jump ahead in the queue to skim off profits, a practice known as flash trading.”

According to Rob Iati, Partner of The TABB Group, high-frequency trading firms account for 73% of all U.S. equity trading volume.

Well, you might think we have forty years before the affiliate marketing industry is taken over by computers. Think again. Major pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers and PPC management companies already use computerized bid management systems. They are still quite primitive in their scope right now. But it will only be a matter of time before they take over most of the work that affiliate marketers do today.

The forums are full of affiliate marketing novices wondering why they can’t make PPC campaigns profitable. The answer is because they are up against people with bigger budgets, more powerful systems, and years of industry experience.

I started my affiliate marketing career back in 2002 soon after AdWords launched. It was easy pickings back then. I could invest a few hundred dollars and get a few thousand in return. There was little competition. But I got stuck in my little, lazy, cozy world.

In the past few years, smart affiliate marketers have grown to such a size that they are now spending six to seven figures a month on PPC. It is extremely difficult to compete against companies with budgets hundreds or thousands of times bigger than yours. They can just take a loss until you give up that market to them. If the industry has gone from requiring budgets of thousands to budgets of millions in a few short years, imagine what would be required to compete in this industry by the end of this decade.

I also predict that future affiliate marketing campaigns would be used as loss-leaders. They would be used to generate leads, and lose money on the initial sale. Profits are made on follow-up sales. A lot of traditional marketing channels follow this model.

The majority of affiliate marketing campaigns today only pay commissions on the initial sale. With that model most affiliate marketers would not survive.

So coming back to why I am starting a new company here in Australia. Well, one of the reasons is because it’s time I moved my business over from the US to Australia. This has been my home for the past six years, and probably be for the next sixty (touch wood). I also hate having to deal with two tax systems. It is a headache I can do without.

Another reason is because I just turned forty and have this feeling that the next ten years will, and has to, be the best ten years of my life - business-wise. An uncle once told me that it was all downhill after forty. I actually felt the change after thirty five. But I feel I still have the energy and drive to continue working as hard as I do throughout my forties. I am not sure if the battery will last beyond fifty. To be honest, I want to be able to take it easy by then.

The final reason is because I feel there is something missing from my business and my life - something I can be really proud of. It’s all good and well earning a living. But money is a means to an end. It pays the bills. Pure and simple. It is not something I can hold up and say look at how much I have made, or feel good about.

So the other week when a friend asked me what my website was, I was stumped. I realized I didn’t really know what to say. I own this blog, but that is not my business. I own Mike’s Marketing Tools, but that is an ugly old site that I cannot even recall the last time I updated it.

Most of my work can be seen as ads in Google. But that isn’t exactly something to show people. Add on the fact that I feel the affiliate marketing industry is getting ahead of me, and I thought it was time to go in a new direction.

So I have decided I want to build a brand and loyal following which will form the foundation for future growth. The foundation has to be strong. It has to be a product or service that people trust, and come back to again and again. I guess most successful companies follow this model. There are plenty of examples online.

Take TechCrunch. It started out as a tech blog in 2005. Now it has grown into a network of blogs covering tech, mobile, gadgets and IT, and expanded into Europe, France and Japan. It also hosts conferences with big name sponsors and speakers.

37Signals is another company that built a massive following with their Signal vs. Noise blog, which attracts over 90,000 visitors a day. That helped drive sales for their expanding line of web applications and sales of 30,000 copies of their Getting Real book.

SitePoint is a popular web developer site. With its loyal following, it has grown into a business that spawned 99designs, a crowdsourcing site for people looking for graphic and logo designs. And Flippa, a site for buying and selling websites, with sales of over $35 million.

Another side to my mid-life crisis (that is probably a term that has come to mind as you read this article, right?), is that once I build up the business I want to give back and help those less fortunate than myself. I didn’t have an easy upbringing. My mother left when I was nine. My father passed away when I was twenty-three and left me a pile of debt and an eighteen year old brother to worry about. So I have had to find my own luck in life. Despite my difficult upbringing, I know I have had it better than a lot of people out there.

People just need a break to help them on their way. My lucky break came when I discovered the internet. I want to help give others their lucky break. Organizations like Kiva.org do a wonderful job of helping people help themselves. Kiva allow ordinary folks give microloans, typically only a few hundred dollars, to entrepreneurs mainly in developing countries. The loans are split amongst dozens of lenders, and with the power of peer pressure, an incredible 98.16% of loans are repaid.

At the time of writing, 457,491 Kiva users have funded 193,771 loans (average loan of $391.12) to 360,676 entrepreneurs, 80.2% of those were women. Total value of loans is $139,939,710. Isn’t that incredible?

I am all for charity and regularly make donations. But there is nothing better than people helping themselves. Give people food and shelter and it will feed and house them for a while. Give them the means to build their own business, and get out of poverty, and it can help them towards a better life for them, their family, their children, and their children’s children.

And the great thing about microloans is that when loans are repaid, you can lend the money to someone else. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.

So, I am still around. I am busy planning the next few years of my business and working on launching my new projects. I am also working on another project with a couple of mates. They currently work full time but dream of working in their own business. I am trying to help them fulfill that dream.

I will reveal more details nearer the launch of my new sites, hopefully in the next few months.

In the mean time, thanks for your time, and please take care.

Best regards,

Michael.

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SEO: New Domain Ranks #2 in Google Within 24 Hours, and Stays There!

by Michael Wong on September 17, 2009

google-200I have a confession to make…

The main motivation for my last post SEO: How I Chose the Domain for my New Blog was to get my new domain, MarketingMunch.com, indexed in Google in anticipation that it might end up in the Google Sandbox.

The site wasn’t due for launch until early next year and I wasn’t sure if Google would sandbox it. So I thought I would make it live as quickly as possible so that if it does get sandboxed, then it should be out of the sandbox by the time the site is due to launch.

I found it interesting that Google indexed and ranked the new site #2 for the search query ‘marketing munch’ within 24 hours of the post going live. That’s right - 24 hours.

I know that for a fact because that’s what the Google cache version showed when I checked a couple of days later. I just checked it again and it is still ranked #2. The Google cache version shows it was last indexed on the 11th of this month.

The link in that blog post was and still is the only link I have pointing to the domain.

So a few points worth noting:

  1. Not all new sites end up in the Google sandbox. It’s been a month now since MarketingMunch.com was indexed so it shouldn’t be sandboxed in the coming weeks, but you never know.
  2. If you want your new site indexed in Google, quickly, then adding a link in a blog post is a great way of achieving this.
  3. You can get a top 10 ranking in Google with just one link from a quality source.
  4. The domain’s PageRank is showing as zero for me, so it is possible to get a top 10 rank with a PageRank of 0.

At this point you might be thinking ‘marketing munch’ isn’t a popular search term. A search for “marketing munch” (with quotes) only returns 208 results in Google. And you are right, there isn’t a lot of competition for that search query, so getting a #2 ranking wasn’t that difficult.

But I can tell you that I was able to get the #1 ranking for a popular search term that returned 3.3 million results with just one link. It was a profitable search term as well, earning me thousands of dollars a month when it reached #1. It took a bit longer than MarketingMunch.com, but it did get there.

You’re probably wondering what is the search term. Well, I’m sorry but I can’t share that with you for obvious reasons. ;-)

I have another confession to make. The main motivation for this blog post is to add a link to a new domain, Tested AdWords Methods that I just registered, for the same reasons I linked to MarketingMunch.com.

I couldn’t just post a simple link so I thought I better make this post worth reading. This new domain is actually going to replace MarketingMunch.com because I decided last night to change the business model. Hopefully this will be the last time because I’ve changed the business model several times in the last few months. But I think I’ve finally hit upon a business model that will work.

Okay, enough confessions for today. :-)

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SEO: How I Chose the Domain for my New Blog

by Michael Wong on August 15, 2009

domaindice-200I’m working on a new blog offering Google SEO & AdWords tips and thought it would be interesting to tell you about the process I went through over the last three weeks trying to come up with a good domain.

I would be the first to admit that coming up with a good domain is actually something I’ve always struggled with. Many of my domain choices have been rather poor. So this time around I thought I would put a lot of effort into coming up with a really good domain.

TrafficBlogger.com

Two blogs I admire are ProBlogger.net and CopyBlogger.com, so the first domain I thought of was TrafficBlogger.com. The domain was registered so I inquired about it and the owner asked for $500. I offered $400 and he accepted. We agreed on using Escrow.com to ensure I get the domain and he gets his money.

In the midst of this I discovered that trafficblogr.com was available so I registered it, but I still felt trafficblogger.com would be a better domain.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten that Escrow.com doesn’t allow PayPal payments unless both the buyer and seller live in the United States. I live in Australia. They do accept credit cards but I need to fax over my credit card and some personal ID. Someone stole $9000 from my credit card a few years ago, so I now don’t give out personal details if I can help it.

I explained this to the domain owner, and suggested we use Sedo.com instead. Sedo doesn’t have such issues. But then he didn’t respond to my emails. I thought that something was wrong and sensed that he probably wanted more money.

While I was waiting for a reply, I visited trafficblogger.com and noticed that it was now hosted by Sedo.com. I clicked through to the Sedo sales page for the domain and entered a bid of $1. It responded with, “Unfortunately, your offer is too low and cannot be accepted. Please submit an offer above the seller’s minimum bid threshold of 4000 $US.”

$4000!

I was happy to pay $400, even as much as $1000 which was my initial estimate, but ten times what we agreed! No thank you.

Somewhere along the line the domain owner decided the domain was worth ten times the agreed price. I don’t think he realizes how niche the domain is. It would only be of interest to someone creating a blog on traffic, and there aren’t that many people who would pursue such a niche. Well, I wish him every success in getting that price.

After this I decided to look at some related domains. I inquired about TrafficTips.com but the owner wanted $7000, later reduced to $6300. I also inquired about FreeTrafficTips.com and the owner wanted $6000 for it. I wouldn’t pay $6000 for FreeTrafficTips.com when the much shorter TrafficTips.com was available for $6300.

I rather like TrafficTips.com and although I told the owner I would pass, I kept the option open. As a domain it tells people a lot about what the site is about which always helps to increase the click through rates in pay per click ads.

I still felt TrafficBlogger.com was more brandable. But when I mentioned those two domains to a friend of mine, he thought TrafficTips.com was better than TrafficBlogger.com. As a result, doubt entered into my mind.

MikesTrafficTips.com

As an alternative to spending $6300 on TrafficTips.com, I came up with MikesTrafficTips.com. The domain was available so I registered it. It’s similar to my Mikes-Marketing-Tools.com domain. The problem was that it’s a bit long and isn’t so easily brandable.

Anyway I decided to look at some other options. The following domains are registered so I contacted the owners of some of the domains.

  • TrafficAddict.com: ‘Addict’ has negative connotations so I decided against it.
  • TrafficBlog.com: The owner wanted $1500 but I decided it wasn’t a domain I could build a brand around.
  • TrafficCoach.com: I didn’t want to brand myself as a coach so didn’t pursue this one.
  • TrafficExpert.com: I contacted but no reply so left it at that.
  • TrafficFanatic.com: For sale at $2380
  • TrafficGuru.com: I contacted but no reply.
  • Trafficologist.com: I contacted but no reply.
  • TrafficTipster.com: This was and still is available but decided I didn’t like domain that much after all.

As I went though dozens of domain ideas it occurred to me just how many variations of a domain are registered - most of them by domain speculators looking to make a big fat profit reselling a domain they registered for around eight bucks.

So I got more creative and came up with TrafficBerry.com and TrafficBerries.com: I was thinking along the lines of strawberry and blueberry. I even came up with this tagline, ‘Fruity bite-size Google SEO & AdWords traffic tips’. I quickly discarded those domains.

TrafficVitamin.com

I’ve been taking vitamins these days and one day while I was staring at the bottle of vitamins on my desk and trying to come up with domain ideas, TrafficVitamin.com popped into my head. I also thought of TrafficSupplement.com. At first I loved TrafficVitamin.com.

I came up with the tagline of, ‘Daily chewable Google SEO & AdWords traffic tips’.

I even came up with this about page description based on the vitamin packaging.

What is Traffic Vitamin?
A natural source of quality Google SEO and AdWords traffic tips.

Traffic Vitamin helps to:
- increase traffic flow to all areas of your website
- increase subscribers, leads, sales and profits

How to use:
- Adults: Take one traffic vitamin daily with other marketing activities, or as professionally prescribed.
- Not suitable for children under 15 years.
- Keep out of reach of competitors.
- Do not use if traffic vitamin has been tampered with.
- Traffic vitamins should not replace a balanced marketing diet.
- Store in a secure directory on your hard drive / Store in a secure folder with your marketing plan.
- Active ingredients: Natural vitamin T. No added hype, artificial tactics, strategies, or sweeteners.

I thought it was a rather clever and cheeky idea. But then I would, wouldn’t I? :-)

I quickly registered those domains, including the plural versions. However, after a couple of days, the domains began to lose their appeal. TrafficVitamin.com just doesn’t sound right.

Brandable Domains

Next, I thought of making up some brandable domains. Web 2.0 start-ups often have unusual domain names so I checked out the TechCrunch company index for some inspiration.

I thought of making up short 5 to 6 letter domains. I didn’t bother with 3 or 4 letter domains - they are all registered. And ones that are for sale would cost thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars.

I came up with domains like parblo.com, pomaki.com, pamoki.com, and a few others that I can’t remember now. They don’t mean anything, at least not to me. But are short and easily brandable. But I felt a domain needed to be brandable, but also give some hint as to what the site is about. It’s very hard to build a completely meaningless word into a brand. It takes a lot of money and effort. I read somewhere that it costs $150 million to build a brand off-line. It probably a lot less online, but still doesn’t come cheap.

I also came up with JungleApple.com and JungleOrange.com but quickly decided against using them.

TrafficBite.com

So I stuck with the keyword ‘traffic’ and came up with TrafficBite.com. This domain is nice and short and was and still is available. I quite like this domain. I even came up with a tagline of ‘Daily bite-size Google SEO & AdWords traffic tips’.

Marketing - Not Traffic

After thinking about it for a few days I decided I should switch strategies and register a domain that targeted the keyword ‘marketing’, instead of ‘traffic’.

Why?

Because marketing is a much more popular search term. You don’t have to have the word ‘marketing’ in the domain to get top rankings for the search query ‘marketing’, but it certainly helps.

According to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, there are 2.74 million global monthly searches for, ‘marketing’, and 30.4 million searches for all ‘marketing’ related searches. While ‘traffic’ receives just 450,000 global monthly searches, and 11.1 million searches related to ‘traffic’.

The problem is that lot of people searching for ‘traffic’ are actually searching for traffic reports and the like (the vehicle kind), not web traffic. So the number of potential visitors is actually a lot lower than what is reported by Google. Whereas the majority of people who searches for ‘marketing’ are all potential visitors. So it makes sense to target ‘marketing’ instead of ‘traffic’.

I know that with enough inbound links, it is possible to get a top ranking in Google for a single word query such as, ‘marketing’. After all, I have a webpage that ranks #17 for the search query, ‘AdWords’.

MarketingMunch.com

This morning I was playing around with ideas and discovered that MarketingMunch.com was available! It’s similar to TechCrunch. I like the fact that both words start with the letter ‘M’ which makes it easier to remember. It’s also easy to spell. Having said that I accidentally typed in ‘mumch’ a couple of times, so I registered MarketingMumch.com as well.

The meaning is good too. Munch is to chew, or a snack, which plays well with the bite-size marketing tips concept.

So it pretty much ticks all the boxes. So I made a quick executive decision to use MarketingMunch.com as the domain for my new blog. I also registered MarketingMunch.net, MarketingMunch.org, and Marketing-Munch.com to cover the bases.

Potential Trademark Issue

One thing I thought about after I registered those domains was that some people might forget what the domain was and try MunchMarketing.com, instead of MarketingMunch.com. So I entered the domain only to find it was registered. Not only that, but it’s being used by a Canadian company, Munch Marketing Inc., selling table top advertising.

I conducted a trademark search in the Canadian trade-marks database and ‘Munch Marketing’ was indeed registered. It is advertised as ‘Advertising the wares and services of others by means of placing advertisements on table tops in food courts and pedestrian walkway retail corridors.’ Well, that’s not something my new site is remotely about.

It also has a disclaimer that says, ‘The right to the exclusive use of MARKETING is disclaimed apart from the trade-mark.’

I also searched the US trademark database, but ‘Munch Marketing’ was not in the database.

Add to the fact that there are dozens of trademarks in both Canada and the United states that include the word, ‘Munch’, and that I am using ‘Marketing Munch’ as opposed to ‘Munch Marketing’, I am pretty sure there isn’t a case for trademark infringement with ‘MarketingMunch.com’, at least I hope not.

Summary

I think I have finally found the domain for my new blog. It is easy(ish) to remember, easy to spell and brandable. It’s taken weeks of brainstorming and I’ve only wasted aout $35 registering domains I no longer wish to use. But that’s better than not registering a domain only to find someone else has registered it while I was thinking about it. Anyway, I hope my story helps you come up with a great domain for your next website.

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