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It’s Replacing your Television

I was watching some tv episodes tonight @ the site Hulu.com. It’s a great website backed by FOX and NBC to try and grab some revenue from those that would otherwise illegally download. It is only open to residents of the US, but if you download and run HotSpotShield you can watch from anywhere. I’m in Canada and it works just fine.

After watching a great episode of The Office, I started thinking about how much time I spend in front of a computer instead of the television. If I want to watch an episode from any of the 12 seasons of South Park, I head over to the comedy network, for any movie I’ve ever liked, I usually check out watch-moves. Less and less of my time is spent in front of the television, and more and more is spent in front of the computer watching streaming versions of my favorite shows.

I give streaming high definition (HD) about year before it’s everywhere. Say goodbye to pricey television sets and cable boxes, your laptop or LCD monitor will be your new high-def set.

Everyone Google is Catching On

I just read an interesting post over at Mathew Ingram’s blog. He delved into the question “Is Google a content company now?” in reference to their agreement with the creator of the popular television series Family Guy to host 50 two minute clips that will be distributed through their AdSense program to be collectively known as Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy. These short clips will be used to deliver ads, and fans of the series will no doubt view all of them.

It’s a relatively cheap experiment and an ingenious way to get eyeballs. This will work. AdSense already includes a great set of algorithms to detect on page content. When the algorithm finds a page related to the Family Guy series, it’s logical that these clips would show, and any fan of the show would undoubtedly watch.

It is win-win for the television producers and Google who will see great success if they can hit the target audience. MacFarlane (creator of the clips) is providing a new shortened but impactful media format, and Google is providing relevant advertising to suit the content. I think it’s brilliant.

Can Your Site Handle AdSense Video?

As an AdSense publisher it’s been my experience that video ads pay better. To see the supported formats follow this link. All you need to do to enable your site to support video ads is make sure you have both text and image options enabled. The inventory is quite low, but hey, if your site is about Family Guy you just might be in luck.

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Check out this great video released by the Google Australia team;

Although it’s tailored to AdSense publishers, it’s adaptable to any other text based advertising program you run as well.

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A fairly common question I get is how much should I reinvest in growing my business every month? There’s really no easy answer to the question and it depends on quite a few factors but I’ll do my best to outline a few ‘profiles’ that you might fit.

You Have a Single Site Sales Page for a Product > $10

You have a long pitch, a few testimonials, and eventually collect an email address and later sell a product or sell your product right on the spot. In this case your investment should focus on no more than trying to bring potential customers to your site. Your brand isn’t extremely important but your traffic is. In this kind of scenario I usually invest roughly 30% back into the business. Basically every 3rd sale you make, take that money and experiment with driving more traffic to your site via paid reviews, Yahoo or Google Ads, or paid links. Businesses such as this can get great results from free search engine traffic, so make sure you’re also building up organic links to your site with the anchor text you’re optimizing for.

You Have a Small Informational Site and Depend on Ad Clicks

You have a small site, probably running a content management system like Wordpress, and you have a few articles on anything. Suppose it is a site about tennis.  You would probably have a few articles on proper technique, the world’s best players, equipment reviews, and general information on the sport. All of your revenue comes from qualified visitors clicking ads related to the topic in either a PPC (pay per click) model like Google Adsense or commission based ads from selling products like racquets and tennis shoes through places like Amazon.com. I can almost guarantee a positive return on a site like this. The key to reinvesting into this sort of business is to have a lower acquisition cost vs. click return from Adsense or your favorite advertising service. For example, lets say your site about tennis earns you $0.25 every time someone clicks an ad about tennis. If you can figure out how to bring in visitors for $0.10, you’ll earn $0.15 on every click, and be able to scale accordingly. Spend $100 on clicks and you’ll bring in $250. Joe provided some great tips on how to find keywords to target in the post How to Dominate the Google Search Results. An important factor here is to find the ’sweet spot’ where your earnings and traffic are maximized. I’ll post more on that later.

A Forum/Social Network is the Heart of your Business

You rely on others to generate your content for you. Without visitors your site would die, and you need your users to discuss, share, and spend time on the site. Reinvestment is essential to keep the site going. Long Tail keywords in search engines are your path to success. It is possible to boost your traffic in the search engines by taking a closer look and investing more heavily in acquiring traffic via these keywords. ROI on a forum can be lucrative if you can maximize your new visitors from free search engine traffic. In this type of scenario I usually recommend investing up to half your revenue (50%) back into the business. It is essential that your forum be sticky and hangout place for your users. In order to make this happen you’ll need to keep things fresh, and this takes investment.

Conclusions

Any business will require some sort of investment for optimal success. Find the right mix that works for you and don’t be afraid to experiment. The best results often come by accident!

I’m glad to be posting again, I’ve been in Washington DC the last few days picking up a car and it was quite the drive back to Canada. Here are some pictures!

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Something is brewing at Google. A few hours ago Google posted some interesting information to their Adwords blog. Here’s the juicy part:

In early March, we announced that we’d soon incorporate an additional factor into Quality Score, namely landing page load time — where load time is defined as the amount of time it takes for a user to see the landing page after clicking an ad. In early May we announced that landing page load time information had become available on the Keyword Analysis page.

Starting today, this load time factor will be incorporated into your keywords’ Quality Scores. Keywords with landing pages that load slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.

That is extremely important news for anyone using Google Adwords to advertise their business. Google believes that users have a better experience when they’re not waiting around for a page to load, so naturally load time is a factor when automatically trying to judge quality. If you can lower your load time, you’ll get a higher quality score and lower CPC, so you’ll end up saving money!

If you need some help, a tool like the Website Optimizer can help you find the bulky elements of your page.

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