Alex Schultz: APIs

% Returning Visitors

This is such a cool metric and one which I truly love. How many of the visitors to my site are returning and how many are new visitors. Ideally I love to see the absolute number of returning visitors growing faster than the new visitors to the site simply because that shows the site is getting more sticky and people are enjoying it so much they are coming back of their own volition. As a site owner I feel this is a metric you should keep a close eye on.

The left image shows 2006 April returning visitor rates for my cocktail making site and the right image shows 2007 April returning visitor rates for the same site. In that time I have tripled the site traffic but grown the returning visitor rates 50% faster. This is awesome news and I am really excited to see that the site is getting better and more sticky.

The whole question is how to make that EVEN better and draw more people back to my site. Returning visitors are hugely valuable since they are free traffic and engaged. It's worth investing time and money in increasing this metric even though it's a really hard one to move.

Sometimes I feel unworthy to be on the web

Browsing YouTube and a few of my favorite blogs today I was quite simly blown away by what I was seeing and I wanted to share that experience here, 2 YouTube videos and a blog post. The first YouTube video really started it all off and it is called Web 2.0... The Machine is Us. For someone in the trade that's a pretty obvious statement but I have never seen it expressed this well before... see below:

The second really exciting video for me was a piece I saw in the comments of the previous video called black button. It reminded me a lot of the short plays the drama groups used to put on at school and really engaged me for the full 7minutes of the piece with just two actors talking. It also brought back memories of the play Copenhagen which I saw in london with my Physics class in my final year of school (and feel all scientists and engineers should be forced to see). Powerful moral content, strong acting and a simple set. Sheer brilliance:

The final piece I wanted to share is humourous but simply amazing and that is a post from the blog indexed. On Indexed Jessica Hagy draws little management consultant like graphs to explain everything. She does it with humour and her tongue firmly in cheek but she really often hits the nail BANG on the mark. This post is about the relationship between accessibility and desirability but read the whole blog, go back MONTHS, you will be glad you did.

So these three items... what do they have in common. Two things, 1. I loved them, really truly enjoyed watching them and thinking about them. 2. My web offerings don't equal the talent of these individuals and yet I am positive earn me more money. That's totally not fair and I hope that YouTube paying users a share of their revenue will rectify that, cos these guys deserve it!

Keyword Spamming YouTube

Google is being exploited by spammers on Google video and YouTube. When they start paying for content it will only get worse! Jeremy wrote a little rebuttle of a MyBlogLog spammer, cornwall seo talks about it too and browsing google video directly after that I started seeing the same there.

I am a big fan of NCIS... I can't help it I like the humour coupled with the overwhelming sense of coolness and fairly decent plots. Very quickly since google video integrated YouTube listings into it's search results (great quick exploitation of synergy there well done G men + women) I realised that all my fave shows were now being offered up as bootleg copies:

This in itself isn't the end of the world since it costs $1.99 to get the CBS version and I can keep it on my machine easily and (thankfully) don't have to get up every 10min to move onto the next clip but it led me to test out a theory on another nasty spam technique I used to use in my early days of SEO (which timed with Napster). Keyword stuffing...

On this page you can see a search for NCIS turns up Gilmore Girls and South Park (page 2 of results). You can also see that the descriptions are keyword stuffed with "ER", "CSI" and various other popular TV shows.

The joy of using back links to help determine the keywords a web page is valuable for in Natural Search means you can devalue the keywords on the page (to some extent) or at least get a hint to pick the most relevant ones. Combine this with the fact that (excepting cloaking) the page has to be user readable it's not too hard to see why keyword stuffing doesn't work for webpages any more. I however rarely read the descriptions of the YouTube and G Video's I watch and so spamming the description isn't going to hurt me. Combine that with the fact all Google has to go on is title, description, #times viewed and a little bit about the uploader I think we are coming to an interesting challenge for Google to deal with, similar to Jeremy's mybloglog problem and eBay's keyword stuffing problem in search results.

Good luck Google... get your brains on it (and get your users tagging that content ;) )!

SEO table stakes, my top 3 - Porthos.com

So I spent a little while chatting to the awesome folks (Hal and Ryan) over at porthos.com over the weekend. They have been making an effort to improve the SEO on their website and after a chat we had back in december their results have improved considerably. This chat really set me thinking alongside a few articles by Rand over at SEOmoz.org which talked about the basics of SEO and how having been involved in SEO for almost a decade many people who know about SEO consider the basics to be universally known and understood. That of course isn't true! So I thought I would post my 3 SEO basics here and share the knowledge:

1. Think of the keyword first: there are three components. This holds true for every small and large web retailer I have worked with from trulia.com to arenaflowers.co.uk
• what is the value of traffic from a keyword for you? (variable a)
• how much competition is there on that keyword? (variable b)
• how many searches are there for that keyword?  (variable c)
• (a*c)/b = relative focus you should be putting into ranking for that keyword
2. Content is king: You hear this a lot in the market these days esp. with social media but I don't neccessarily mean huge volumes of user generated content (although this has worked for me in cocktails). I mean make good quality content for search engines and users.  Why and how?
• search engines are looking for good quality content and striving for that end so my philosophy is don't keep trying to be one step ahead with spamming them
• users need to like your site and convert when they land on your site
• good quality content = good coding = usability. Use <hX></hX> tags, use Alt text, use meta tags, structure your site right for partially sited accessibility AND therefore search engine friendly code.
3. Get your linking strategy right: I see this as having three components
• lots of high quality, relevant inbound links with your target keyword (point 1) in them from other sites
• a flat internal linking structure within your site so that search engines can reach all your pages within about 2 clicks of any page
• get your keywords in your url structure. We all know it helps with search engine ranking and user click throughs on your search results, so why have horrible urls?

It was esp. interesting to me going through these points with Hal and Ryan because in return they treated me to some fun wine tasting and taught me a little bit more about wine. 2 simple points came out: see how a young (2004) cabernet tastes sweeter than a more mature wine (2001) and the bitterness of tanins from a mature wine made with unripe grapes is too strong to go with steak or a mild meal but tastes awesome with a strong cheese. Now I have heard them I get it and will use them a little bit in future at the summits and dinners I hold in my work. Perhaps whenever someone talks to you about SEO you will remember that just maybe the stuff we take for granted as universally held fact just isn't!

Starting To Promote the Widget

Today I made a change to the cocktail making widget I have blogged about a couple of times. I added a link at the bottom saying "get this on your blog" and linking back to the widget generation page. We will see how that does in trying to convince people to add this widget to their blog. I am pretty excited about the potential though, one month in and a couple of large blogs have started using the widget (most notably get real denver) which means the widget is now at well over 10 000 views a day. I was thinking if I could convince just 2 of those viewers daily (0.02% of those who see the widget) to install the widget I could hit 1000 blogs in a year (with the blogs already signed up and not taking into account the exponential growth potential).

I am going to be really interested to see how this experiment grows and am already wondering what I can make my next experiment do!!!

The Power of Focussing on Something

Today's post is something that is very interesting to me. How you can acheive results by just shifting your focus. I have 3 main websites: cocktail making, paper airplanes and butterfly tattoos. A great set of comments on this can be found in the awesome book good to great in which particularly the discussion on Chrysler Acquiring Gulfstream is particularly enlightening. If you deviate from your core, if you look somewhere else than 100% at what is most important to you it will not succeed as well as when you have 100% focus on your most important project.

For me an example of this can be seen in the image below which is the % year on year growth rates for my website traffic and website revenue (I have removed actual amounts) and this graph is mid way through Nov. hence Nov 2006 not looking so great.

When I looked at this graph I was shocked (I first looked at it in March 2006) to see my revenue growth year on year had gone negative in Nov and Dec 2005 (actually first time in 10yrs of running my own websites). This corresponded with me planning and executing emigrating to the US in December 2006. After settling into the US things clearly recovered until March 2006. This was a huge month for me with my first major international summit (I was jointly responsible for running), the first class I taught at our marketing college (on internet marketing... it was awesome ;) ) and my parents visiting the US. My site growth then decelerated as did my revenue growth until the second summit of the year happened in July 2006. I took the second half of July 2006 off to enjoy myself and work on things I enjoyed. Since that date I have worked on my personal projects at home and not taken much work home with me. I have focussed at work more on 2 key projects which really matter to me (and I can't talk about here) and my site revenue growth (see blue bar above), my site traffic growth (see red bar) and my projects at work are going really well and even reaccelerating.

I did a lot of things to produce this reacceleration (I launched a cocktail widget, I totally recoded my cocktail site, I added videos to my paper airplanes site and more) but the key point is the focus and this is what I want to say. When you can contribute significant focus to something it will go better than with partial focus. I am now thinking about that a lot as I work and play.

How to use the Typepad Widget API with PHP

The Typepad Widget API is awesome. The concept is that you have a great widget you want users to add to their sidebar. Typepad want this to be a small self contained piece of DHTML code and want to be able to do all the verification of the user on their side without giving the widget owner any access to the user's account.

Browser based authentication used at both the eBay and Yahoo! developer programs (and explained beautifully in diagram form on the Yahoo! site) simply won't work for this since it gives the programmer access to your eBay/Yahoo/Typepad account (were they to use it). So Typepad found a solution to the problem that is really simple and elegant.

All data is sent to the API in a POST command along with redirecting the user themselves (rather than just a server to server POST call). Typepad's Widget API requires fields identifying you as a developer, your application, what it is called, verifying you are who you say you are (with a token) and finally containing the FULL HTML you want inserted in the user's sidebar to be sent to them through the POST command.

The user then lands at a Typepad log in page and all the data is carried through with them to a page where they can effectively suggest whether or not to keep the Typepad widget. GREAT!

I love this method, it's secure, clever, simple and behaves exactly as you would expect... Having worked with Google AdWords/Base/Adsense APIs, Yahoo! APIs, eBay APIs and a fair few others I have to say this Typepad Widget API has been the simplest yet. Well done Typepad!

Linkbait for Typepad

I have been playing with the joy that are widgets for some time now. You can see a lot of my attempts at www.randomdomainname.co.uk. Widgets are simple and fun to program but they are also a great potential source of linkbait.

The concept of linkbait is really simple indeed. You create an awesome article which other people on the web want to link to or a great tool/widget which other users want to place on their site and contains a link. Distribute said article or widget through any promotion you have available to you and suddenly you have hundreds of high value links across the net.

My latest experiment in this field is my cocktail of the day widget on typepad. Using Yahoo! site explorer I have followed the progress of the back links tracked to my cocktails site since I launched the widget. On launching the widget I had 186 tracked backlinks, within 2 weeks of certification I am now at 494 links and growing at c. 20links a day still. Many of these links are from high page rank pages and blogs.

The Blog owners get a cool tool that let's them show a cocktail of the day on their blog and I get a really awesome set of backlinks to my website. Everyone's a winner and I hope this will help me to continue to build traffic to my cocktails site.

All your base are belonging to Google Base

So this weekend I have been completing the user sign in functionality for my cocktail making website. Am not too nervous before adding it since it is stuff I would want and I will use so I hope other people will enjoy it too but if not, I'll use it :) so it's worth it. In the process of making all the current revisions traffic has been growing to the site esp. through natural search from Google. I have made some tweaks in the interlinking of the pages in particularly to make the site more palatable to google and I have more to come.

I have been monitoring the SEO results for key terms for my site such as "cocktail recipes". The results have really frustrated me, a competitor has uploaded 10k cocktail recipes to google base and as such google has added a cocktail search box to the top of the search results page for anyone who searches for the keyword cocktail recipe or cocktail recipes so they can dig into the cocktail recipes in Google Base. This is leading to an escalation, to retain traffic I am going to have to start adding content to Google base. I don't blame my competitor, he's got a short term boost in his share of cocktail related traffic and if he hadn't done it someone else would but where does this end?

As a publisher I want traffic from google badly and to get that traffic it looks like I am going to have to gift them some content... in fact not just some content but all the content I have taken 5yrs to get hold of through kind additions by my users. At what stage will google say thanks for the content, give me an attribution and then not refer the users to my site 100% of the time (as they do now)? If I were google that's where I would be going since webmasters are always going to need the traffic google can send (even if it's a % of what it is today something is better than nothing) and so will be incentivized to put content into base and google can monetize more effectively by just taking the base content and attaching ads to your hard work without giving you a share.

Then you come to Yahoo! who I prefer since at least they are asking users directly to give them answers and they aren't asking webmasters to give away their hard work. At some stage Yahoo! will have a huge list of answers to most of the big questions being asked and then why should anyone ever leave Yahoo? Of course microsoft has their own Base type product on the roadmap at the moment too. In all of this I see a threat to the small content publisher like me... although I am confident that I can stay ahead of the big boy's search technology and user features in my specific area, I cannot continue to rely on search (in 2-5yrs time) as the main driver of users to my site... I need word of mouth, I need links, I need gorilla and viral marketing but am I moving too late?

Should the search engines be competing with every niche webmaster at the same time for content while being their lifeblood for traffic? Right now I simply don't know but I'll tell you what I am scared they will kill my little sites with their own content within the next few years.

Affiliate Marketing 2007

I spent a lot of time in 2005 encouraging friends in the affiliate community to build apple widgets and get into the widget space in general. With Vista coming and live gadgets being a large part of that, with sideshow and other widget type "easy program desktop apps" I honestly believe that 2006 is the year to position yourself for entering into the "I have a small snippet of code... add it to your dekstop/website, get a great user experience and earn me $$$".

Looking around I see a hell of a lot of people entering this area, with postapp, typepad widgets, the plethora of live gadgets and apple widgets and even big companies entering the space, for example the yahoo finance widget. Widgets rock, widgets can make money, widgets can be link bait and guess what those clever folks out there playing around with the web have worked it out and are moving into the space heavily. If you aren't already moving rapidly you will need a really good idea to beat those first and (in particular) second movers who have had some time to think about what they are doing in this space. These guys will make the new big money in 2007 but a few guys will start making big money on something else before everyone else spots it... So for me the challenge of what's next springs to mind again.

Well I will stick my neck out and suggest we are about to enter an era of back to the future and in 2007 push technologies will make a resurgance. "Oh don't be soooo 1999!" I hear you all shout but no... wait and think about it. VOIP is growing like crazy and instant messengers have never been larger. Mobile commerce has taken off in Japan and in JP and EU the mobile phone companies are raking it in with text messages (now I have a blackberry the idea of paying 10c a text message seems crazy!). I see a lot of convergence in this field though as large WIFI networks take off and blackberry/treo etc... get integrated into more consumer (rather than business) mobile phone style products. More products like sony mylo will launch and you will soon be reachable almost anywhere for free (or a slightly more expensive mobile contract) by instant messenger in the large cities. This will open up millions of people used to text to more innovative text services previously held up by a. the lack of easily sending texts from computer apps, b. the cost of text services and c. the lack of IM apis (which all the interoperability conversations should help). This discussion misses off the whole upside of IM on the desktop too.

So think about it... what can be done when you can alert anyone, anywhere to anything and how can you make money from that. In 2007 this will be a big new:old thing... I am sure of it!