All About Content

Well, gee, who asked him anyway?

(More on why GrayWolf hates me on Cape Cod SEO — because there ain’t no way I’m sending any link love his way after that indictment.)

…And what does he mean, I have nothing original to add? Is there anyone else who covers industry-breaking news like my own site redesign, my experience as comment spammer, the fact that I don’t like slugs, or any of the other fascinating things that I write about here on All About Content?

Hmph.

When I first read about ICANN revoking a registrar’s accreditation, it didn’t really make an impression on me; it’s not until I read the latest StepForth article that I realized how big this story was.

Forget optimizing your site if you can’t even access it. It seems like a complete deterioration in service on the part of a company called RegisterFly meant that customers’ domains were, in effect, being held hostage.

Stepforth quotes a Business Week article:

This has been a travesty. The transfer system was designed to work between two trusted registrars and completely breaks down when one has gone bad. RegisterFly has held customers hostage by not providing the “auth codes,” by arbitrarily locking domain names, by changing the “Whois” info, and by arbitrarily putting your domain into “ProtectFly”, their service to protect your identity but also keeps you from transferring your name.

We have lost domains and, more importantly, production Web sites have just gone dead, heading to a RegisterFly parking page instead. Try explaining this to customers depending on these sites for their business. RegisterFly’s debacle has ruined businesses and lives. And this could have all been avoided with a better process in place and more in-depth criteria for accreditation. This process must be improved before the Internet can truly be used for mission-critical applications.

The small-business owners who are being affected by the RegisterFly debacle have my sincere sympathy. Read the Stepforth article (or the original WebmasterWorld post if you have a login) for some tips on protecting your domains.

I’ve been paying a lot of attention to paid blogging services recently and thought it was time I shared some thoughts.

Several months back I signed up for the 3 major paid blogging services to evaluate one of the newer ways publishers have to monetize their sites (although I haven’t necessarily been too keen about what I saw as a lack of transparency). To give a balanced perspective, I decided to also sign up as an advertiser on each of these services — ReviewMe, Blogsvertise and ReviewMe. A 4th player in this game is SponsoredReviews.com, which I’ll give a short mention but haven’t had long enough to evaluate properly.

ReviewMe
ReviewMe is the paid blogging site you turn to when you’re looking for exposure on high-quality sites, but that quality comes with a higher price tag. ReviewMe was created by the same people who operate Text-Link-Ads.com, so if you’ve used TLA the interface will look familiar.

Once you’ve selected the blogs you want to approach and added these reviews to your cart, you’ll be asked for the link and instructions for each of blog — essentially this is your chance to pitch the blogger. It’s important that your pitch be well thought out since on 50% of your reviews (on average) will be declined by the bloggers; if that happens, you’ll have wasted your time researching the blogs and writing your pitches.

The same is true if the bloggers you target don’t get around to checking their email for a while; if a blogger doesn’t respond to your request within 3 days, the order is cancelled. Three days, in my opinion, is too tight of a deadline to require a response.

The advertiser admin interface is best suited for ordering between 1 and 5 reviews at a time since inputting a large number of instructions at the same time (assuming you’re not simply cutting and pasting) can get unwieldy.

Interestingly, ReviewMe does not require any text links within the body of the post, although most posts of any substance will include some.

Pros: Access to high-quality blogs/bloggers, you control who does the reviews
Cons: Higher cost, about half the bloggers you approach will decline, orders expire after a scant three days, no control over tone of the text or anchor text

Blogsvertise
Blogsvertise, of all the services, gives the advertiser the least control. To spin it another way, Blogsvertise is very low maintenance, which might be attractive to advertisers who just want links, links, links and don’t care where they come from. (Blogsvertise requires that each post contain at least 3 links to your site.)

Each time a blogger submits his post for payment, an editor at Blogsvertise reviews it to make sure it has met the criteria and then forwards an email to the advertiser with a link. In my albeit limited observations about Blogsvertise’s review process, they don’t have the tightest QA control since I’ve seen quite a number of Blogsvertise-initiated blog postings with broken links — something the advertiser obviously isn’t going to find worth his money.

The admin is surprisingly basic: you indicate what link you want placed and how many posts you want to buy. The price is preset for you. There’s also a space for notes to the bloggers — which the bloggers are instructed not to copy and paste, though that doesn’t seem to stop some of them — where you can request specific anchor text. There’s nothing else to do except watch the new links proliferate (although unfortunately there’s no way to pace the rate at which the new links are created so you’ll get the majority the first few days

You can pay by credit card or PayPal (for some reason, though, you can’t save your credit card info to your account and then pull up the card on file when it comes time to pay. A minor point, but an inconvenience nonetheless.)

Pros: Very low maintenance
Con: Low quality blogs, no control over pricing or targeting

PayPerPost
As the first of these services to go out and heavily promote text link ads, PayPerPost has also appeared to take the brunt of the criticism from folks like Jason Calacanis. (I even wrote a post called Pay Per Shill, when I first learned about it.) I don’t doubt that PPP’s strong and frequent reminders about disclosure requirements has more to do with that than with potential FTC scrutiny.

PayPerPost, in addition to being the first of these services to catch the Blogosphere’s attention, is also the most aggressive in terms of appealing to advertisers and is therefore probably the most well-known.

Of the various services, this one allows advertisers the most control. You decide how many posts you want, at what price, with which anchor text, and even if you want the blogger to use images in the post. My favorite feature is the one that allows me to create or add different link/anchor text combinations within a single opportunity even after it is already live.

Among the enhancements that have been made since launch is an easy way for advertisers to restrict who can take an advertising opportunity. The ability to segment by a blog’s link popularity, subject matter and PageRank also allows advertisers to offer bigger payouts to those bloggers who are more likely to generate a higher ROI (either in terms of link juice or eyeballs).

Pros: Ability to set prices, filter bloggers to target, specify number of words, specify anchor text for links
Cons: The overall quality of the blogs isn’t as high as you can find on ReviewMe.

SponsoredReviews.com
I only just recently began checking out SponsoredReviews (the latest entrant to the paid blogging game) and my initial impression is that the bloggers who are part of this network have an over-inflated sense of their own value to advertisers. The asking prices from many of the people who bid on the opportunity I posted were way too high, given that many of them had practically no link popularity, authority, history or readership.

One of the features that probably appeals to bloggers — the ability to barter over the price — turned out to require way too much of my attention and maintenance. For example, if someone offered to write a review for $40 and I replied saying that I thought their review was only worth $8 to me, I’d get trapped in this offer-counteroffer cycle that could go on indefinitely. It seems much more straightforward simply to use PayPerPost and just make the payout $7 across the board and not think about it again.

PPP vs. Blogsvertise vs. ReviewMe: And the winner is …
PayPerPost is my recommendation for paid blogging services because of the control the service gives to advertisers over the quality of blogs participating in their ad campaign, while at the same time being easy to use and not requiring too much work from the advertiser to begin a campaign. The latter is what makes PayPerPost scale much better for campaigns that are likely to grow fairly large.

So… should you go out and start buying blog postings by the bushel? Well, while the Web purist in my cringes at the thought, I do think the return on services like these is pretty good. But, as I always caution, moderation is key. This is something you should test for yourself.

Keep in mind that paying for blog “reviews”, if you decide to do it, should supplement a broader, more traditionally “white hat” link-building campaign. Don’t rely on paid blogs to replace natural links.

This has not been a paid post, but I do have affiliate links if you’re interested in signing up and trying any of these services:

My ReviewMe affiliate link.
My Blogsvertise affiliate link.
My PayPerPost affiliate link.

Digg this article if you like it.

I was taking a look at one of my company’s competitors recently and noticed they were using CafePress to sell merchandise with their logo on it. They’re a relatively small site, not one I’d expect to have a fan club, so I did a search on the company’s name to confirm a hunch and saw that the CafePress store ranked very well.

My theory is that the company is using the CafePress domain to help dominate the results for brand searches. I.e., In order to control what potential customers see when they search for your name, you want to dominate the top results and prevent any potentially negative sites from ranking. (Negative sites like that extortion scheme run by Ed Magedson — whom I like to call Ed the Maggot — that tries to pass itself off as a consumer advocacy website. But never mind, that’s a different story.)

I’ve also seen at least one individual do this, although I don’t remember who. But I do remember noticing that this person (or whoever was in charge of his “brand” management) advertised the CafePress store with Google PPC ads. Weird.

There are a number of ways to dominate the first page or two of search results on your own or your company’s name, and it appears creating a CafePress store is one such avenue.

Looking at the company’s CafePress store reminded me of two things: First, I set up a CafePress store many months ago just to see how it worked, and hadn’t checked how that was going for a while. And second, and probaby more interesting to my reader(s), there was a great series of articles in late 2005 by Search Engine Guide author Jennifer Laycock.

In the write-ups she chronicles how she sets up an online business from scratch with no start-up money whatsoever, using only the online marketing techniques she writes about on her blog. After weighing eBay and AdSense as options, she settles on CafePress as the way to go.

I’ve recommended these articles to a number of people who wanted to get started promoting their own projects online. Using only the techniques she shares freely with anyone who is interested, and starting with no special advantages, she proves that it really is possible for just about anyone to succeed in building a small income-generating business with nothing but a little elbow-grease.

As for my own CafePress store, I checked into my account and was surprised and just a little bit giddy to see that I had made five bucks even though I’d never bothered to promote the shop or any of its products. Someone bought a pack of cards. (whoohoo: $5!)

Use my affiliate link to create your own CafePress store — either to sell stuff or just to create another site that you can optimize to rank well for your name. Setup of a basic store is free.

Google announced it will begin deleting personally identifying information from its computers 18 to 24 months after it gets logged, addressing a major privacy concern of consumers and government officials alike.

According to a Google FAQ document about the new policy: “We had previously kept the logs data for as long as it was useful. When we implement this policy change, we will continue to keep server log data so that we can improve Google’s services and protect them from security and other abuses, but we will anonymize our server logs after 18-24 months, unless legally required to retain the data for longer.”

Source: Beta News

I get the Google Friends newsletter. I thought this was a cute story, but what I found most interesting is the use of “google” as a verb. For a company that doesn’t want its tradename used as a verb, to the point of having its lawyers send cease and desist letters, it certainly seems counterproductive to publish a newsletter that appears to encourage it:

We admit it: we love learning about all the things people use Google to do. Such as … how to find a lost tortoise. Here’s a story we got from Jim Lyness: “After Christmas, my son Sam wanted a turtle. We bought a Russian Tortoise instead, and named him Rocky. Well, one day, we let Rocky out for a stroll around the house. We could not find him that night, and into the following day. After the boys went to school, my wife Susan and I were stumped. Did Rocky get out the front door?
Susan googled [how to find a Russian Tortoise] and bang — we had a game plan. Russian Tortoises like warm, dark spaces. We started in the boys’ bedroom, again. We pulled the bunk bed back and there was Rocky at the head of the bed. Case solved. When we tell friends and family about googling How to Find a Russian Tortoise, they bust a gut in laughter! “

If you have a story about how Google search has made an impact on something on your world, we’d love to hear it. Use either of the links below - either submit your tale through a web form or upload your story on video to YouTube. (If you shoot video, be sure to tag it “google testimonial” when you upload it.)

Web form: http://www.google.com/contact/success.html

As for my success story, I googled “Google sues media for using google as a verb” to find the article I needed for the link in the first paragraph.

SponsoredReviews.com launched in beta today and of course I went and signed up right away. (Damn, that’s one more site I need to include in my review of paid blogging services, which I said I’d do last month and still haven’t gotten around to.)

Right off the bat, the thing I already like (from an advertiser’s perspective) is that the system more closely resembles an RFP system; that is to say, you post an opportunity (here SponsoredReviews.com uses the same language as PayPerPost) and bloggers can submit bids to do the reviews for you. You can accept a blogger’s bid, haggle over the price or reject the bid outright (if the blog is off-topic, of poor quality, too expensive, etc.) None of the other paid blogging services allow you to reject specific bloggers.

Within 30 minutes of posting an opportunity to see how well SponsoredReviews.com worked, I had 2 bloggers bid on it — which seemed decent for a service that just launched earlier that morning. After about 2 hours I had about two dozen bids.

Like ReviewMe, SponsoredReviews.com allows you to actively approach specific bloggers with your opportunities, which they can then choose to take on if they wish. The mechanism by which to search for relevant blogs to approach is similar to ReviewMe; advertisers can browse by keywords the bloggers have chosen to describe their sites.

As far as the service goes from a blogger’s point of view, I haven’t had much time to play around with it, but I like that I can pursue specific opportunities (like PayPerPost) and that the payouts tend to be higher (like ReviewMe, except the likelihood of actually getting to do a review are much higher. I have yet to be approached by an advertiser through ReviewMe since I signed up).

If you’d like me to review and link to your site, you can do so from my SponsoredReviews.com profile page. But I’d caution you to read the paid reviews I’ve done of other sites first (read: if your site sucks, I won’t hesitate to lambaste you).

Short post about something not related to search engines, but an important reminder nonetheless: if you don’t have enterprise support for data storage, there are online backup options you can consider.

I have terrible luck with computers — my current work laptop has some sort of issue that causes it to spontaneously shut down at random intervals (it doesn’t even go through the shut down process, it just turns off); at my previous job I triggered Microsoft’s Blue Screen of death not once, not twice, but three times; my personal laptop went flying off my desk a few too many times after I tripped over the cord until the thingamajig that the power cord plugs into stopped working entirely (thank goodness my friend was able to rescue the harddrive) — so I really ought to make it a regular habit to back up my computer. But of course I don’t — I imagine I’m like most non-power-users in that way. Actually, I’ve learned enough about my terrible luck that I save all my work documents directly to the network because at least that gets backed up regularly. Now if only my connection to the network wouldn’t crap out so often.

The only thing I back up on my personal computer is my photographs because Flickr makes so easy. But aside from that I haven’t really considered online backup as an option, since that tends to be slow.

But one of the advertisers on PayPerPost is advertising its online backup and online storage for small businesses as enterprise-class. IBackup Online Storage starts at $9.95 for 5 gigs a month and offers a variety of add-on and collaborative features. Their service has won a number of computer magazine awards.

Frankly, since my home computer storage needs are pretty minimal (outside of my photography), it would probably make more sense for me to do all my backups onto disk (see above for story on how I have an extra harddrive sitting around for that purpose). However, if you could use an online storage/backup solution, go visit this post’s sponsor IBackup.com for a free trial.

This has been a paid post.

Online advertising will grow by 21%, reaching $81 billion by 2011, according to a research report by Piper Jaffray & Co. Internet Media and Marketing:

“The historically passive consumer is changing rapidly, not only becoming more informed and confident about purchase decisions, but also increasingly taking control of the consumption of information and content that used to be distributed by networks, studios, publishers and retailers,” said Safa Rashtchy, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray, in a press release.

The report says that consumers are taking control of their consumption of online content and brands.