Come for the Ride…

I don’t have the stats to verify whether Google’s having a bad day or if something we did on our end changed the way referrals are ranked. However, it’s scary to know that a huge chunk of your business depends on referrals and rely on just one source.

Google had a bad day today (at least for us). Across the board on Google Base, organic referrals and search network referrals, everything was down to the point of WTF. Seeing how referrals from other sites maintained their average, it would be great to find out why our referrals on Google dropped suddenly. Maybe (Hopefully) it’s only a one day mix up. I wish I had more data points…

This past Monday I attended Startup Riot as an observer. We had originally signed up to pitch but I dropped out last minute due to us not really needing anything. We’re still refining our business to try and rise above the noise so whatever we had wanted to pitch weeks ago would have been outdated by the time the event started.

Overall, the event was great. The venue was easy to find, it was clear to navigate inside and it had a really nice, modern feel to it. I did manage to do some networking and passed some cards out but probably not as much as I would have liked being that I didn’t present.

Being that so many people already wrote nice things about the event, I figured I’ll chime in with some suggestions for next year’s event.

1. Plugs/Sockets! - I know it’s rude to want to play on your laptop and pass notes via backnoise in the background while presenters are speaking, but if both of the above are allowed, then there really should have been more sockets and extension cords on the sides to help make it easy for laptop owners.

2. More Booths - The sponsors got some great exposure from demoing their services at the booths. For the startups that presented, it would have been nice if there were some room carved out for them on the side of the ballroom where they can go stand, demo their product and help answer questions after the pitch. A lot of presenters told the audience they could find them after the presentation to chat - but it was hard to find them all at times. (Maybe startups who wants an elaborate booth could pay for it.)

3. More Job Seekers - I spotted a ton of entrepreneurs, co-founding members and investors. However, besides for Paul who dressed the part, I really couldn’t tell who else was a student or a job seeker. Maybe they could wear a different color name tag?

4. Group the Presentations by Common Elements - 55 companies is a lot of pitches to go through. Even though there were ample breaks in between each group, you could tell by the increasingly harsh comments in the back channel that some people stopped paying attention near the end of the day. If the pitches were grouped by some common element, investors or job seekers would only need to really focus on certain groupings and relax and network during the others.

5. Company Name on Name Labels - While there was probably a great reason why this was omitted, presenting companies should at least have them on their name tag.

With that said, I’m looking forward to next year’s event. Atlanta needs more events like this.

When we decided to make advertising one of our revenue sources, I always knew we couldn’t stick with AdSense forever.  While it was great at targeting ads based off of content, the payout simply seemed a lot lower than joining ad networks and selling ad spots directly to advertisers - but is that still the case?

When I left the agency world, advertising CPMs still hovered between $3-$11 depending on who you are trying to target and who you’re working with.  However, with social networks effectively destroying CPM’s for ads (many times at sub-dollar CPM’s), is it actually a better deal to be running AdSense instead?

Right now, my AdSense dashboard is telling me I have an effective CPM (eCPM) of close to $4 based on impressions and click-throughs.  If I joined an ad network that sold auto ads at $4.50 and then only take a 50% or 60% split of that, my eCPM would only be around $2.25.

Am I missing something here?

The long tail SEO experiment took a bit longer to conduct than others. Traditionally, these things could take a few weeks up to a few months to get right. Luckily for us, a site with millions of pages, it’s easier for us to make an impact on the long tail items than some of the other websites. (We also have more room for error if the terms we picked are not the right ones the first time around.)

Although we only have 4,000+ pages indexed vs. just over 1,000 pages indexed 20 days ago, we made a number of significant changes to our website that we hoped Google would recognize. I won’t go into what keywords we used as it will not apply to most of you that are reading - however, some of the techniques we used that are applicable include:

- Changing dynamic URLs to static looking URLs
- Optimizing different keywords for every page of the website
- Focusing only on one to two different phrases per page
- Making sure every page have unique titles, descriptions, keywords, etc.

The chart above shows our Google organic referrals over the last 24 days and as you can see, once the changes were done, we only had to wait about a week or two before organic traffic picks up.

You could of course pay $30k to $60k a month for 100,000 users to check out your website or if your poor, try to get the same number of users by being good great at SEO. Due to our limited marketing budget, I’m hoping our basic and advanced SEO techniques will take us close to where we need to be for the monthly traffic.

On the flip side, unfortunately I think we can only do so much before we have to step up the paid media. However, I am hoping that cap for SEO traffic is just high enough that we can start making some good money before we have to spend a ton to take our traffic to the next level. Time will tell though!

Overall Rating: SEO = success (and then some!)

We got our results back from the GRA/TAG competition this past week.  While we made it to the semi-finals, we didn’t make it into the final four.  Overall, the process was a great experience and we learned a lot about ourselves (and we were forced to write a business plan.)

One thing I learned about myself is that I really hate suits.  I’m glad I wasn’t born 20 years earlier where wearing it at work was the norm.  Maybe that means I would have been a hippie - I dunno.

Anyway, now that other distractions are over, we are moving forward with web and business development.  We got a lot done w/o any significant funding and I think we’ll be able to continue our momentum by getting a lot more done in the next two months without any significant funding.

At that point, things should look pretty awesome.