The micro and niche site session moderated by Ted Ulle, Partner The MEWS Group.
Chris Raimondi (I sat with him for a while at SES San Jose, I think - nice guy). Why do I come to pubcon? To get ideas, get concepts and combine the two. Today Iw ill attempt to help you find your own ideas and concepts. Two notions equals and idea. He uses Froogle's recent searches, as an idea pool for himself. There are still plenty of good ideas out there. In the space of a few months an enterprising british guy came up with a $1 per pixel, MillionDollarHomePage, idea. He has is to $585,000 today for a one page Web site. He uses research papers. The anatomy of a large scale hypertextual web search engine and pagerank citation rankings (to figure out Google). People dont read them because its hard to find, etc. but the main reason they dont read it because they see these crazy equations. Don't let it scare you, ignore it and read around it. (I personally do). He figured out Google's algorithm based on those papers, he showed a 3 by 4 celled worksheet with the answer you all want. :) Once you read the paper, you come up with an understanding on how Google "worked." It changed in 2002 or so. PageRank is extremely important, title, anchor text and position (is? was, still?). Advantages of Research papers. Unbiased information, usually given background and other references, based on science and testing, can be applied to other areas with some thoughts and further testing. Three ways to make money; work hard, find a unique angle or idea and exploit inefficiencies (he said he isn't in to the first one). Unique angle or idea; something very few people are using, interesting approach, style or method. Be the first to try a new product or service. Exploit inefficiencies in the marketplace; when people or companies tinker with supply and demand (ebay and products like pokemon (limited supply, limited distribution, no change in price, limit is sales) also (with PPC bidding systems that are not efficiently prices)). What to research; wording, niche, emotions, media, target market. How to find papers; Google Scholar, filetype:pdf in Google.com. He then goes through many examples of how it all works with research papers and ideas.
George Kepnick, Project Manager Geosign to talk about niche marketing. Horology; science of measuring time. The art of making time pieces. Used by collectors/buyers. Four people are advertising on horology. Why bother with a niche market? little competition, large gain on higher conversions and more leads. Content niche tips; create a site around your interests, choose a topic of your writers interest and let them become an expert, have numerous authors write about a subject they are familiar with, discussion forums. Ecommerce niche tips; research your main competitors, research the super store, fellow trends (sunday ads, amazon top selling). Agency niche tips; geo vertical = city x industry, vertical specialization = root term x expansion. Page creation; make it look official, gain the users trust using (images, descriptive text, and targeted copy). Get contact info quickly, lead capture forms should be short and sweet, the less info required the higher the conversion. Getting it out there; PPC is quick, precise, inexpensive, and measurable also use SEO. Keyword expansion and other tips; heavily research competitors; spider the entire site for meta tags, scrap keywords using in house tools or googspy.com and use google news alerts for your competitors site/s.
Ted Ulle, Partner The MEWS Group to talk about this topic. Direct mail: The wonderful world of long copy. Important to measure, run split run tests, longer letters gave better results. Marketing's Golden Rule; write to your best prospect, write "tight" and not "wide". Target Audience, know these people well, write to the peak of the bell curve, get more conversions from the side. Benefits from viral marketing; happens best when you convert your best target, great example is corey rudl, study mailloop.com (aimed at experienced the emailer, names frustrations and promises a fix). Copy Writing for the long page; writing s the essential skill - not length itself, have something engaging to say. Build a flow in your writing; watch the connections between paragraphs, between sentences, end with a question will help with this, Or hint at what is coming next. You want to stop the skimming and encourage the reading. Write some poetry, he recommends... Rhythms and Suggestion the Erickson Handshake, first avoid distractions to gain focus, build a rhythm and then subtly break the expected flow (use the near-cliche to establish rhythm and ease). Write for the screen; respectable font size, thin text blocks, fixed content width, etc. Read "Strunk and White" The Elements of ...". Things to avoid; doubling both the verb and it's objective, making the reader crarzy any information in their head, too much punctuation
Jeff Libert, CEO DirectoryCompany.com is last up to give a domainer's view. Take away for today; there is a market inefficiencies in domain prices now. The revenue they are using to value their domain is the revenue share from PPC company. They are not valuing the full cost of that click. I.e. they are not getting the full amount the advertiser is paying, only a share of it. The most valuable traffic you can get is direct typed in traffic, he says. He said that is without building a Web site, you can get more out of your site with a site. Get those domain names now, he said.
