Looking back at the revenue data for my sites over the past two years has been really interesting. I can see clear patterns in what drives revenue and what doesn’t. Seasonal trends are huge – cocktail searches spike in summer and around the holidays. Paper airplanes peak during school holidays. Understanding these patterns helps me plan content and optimization work more effectively.
I got annoyed at some of the ads on my site for a long time ago. They were mainly weight loss ads and they just seemed to be everywhere on the internet. I’ve now blocked them across adsense and I think it’s going to cost me a fair amount of money. I’ll report back on the financial implications but for me I just think these ads are misleading and I don’t want them on my sites any more.
My tattoo site has had quite the journey. It started growing really well, then hit some problems and traffic declined. Now I’m seeing signs of recovery. The tattoo niche is super competitive but there’s still good traffic to be had if you can differentiate yourself. I’m experimenting with some new approaches to content and monetization.
Chrome launched in 2008. I am lucky enough to have 300k visitors a month to my sites which is a decent sample size to get a read on a lot of things including browser market share. A while ago I did a post on browser market share over the last 4 years but now I just want to focus on Chrome.
The most interesting thing for me as an internet marketer is that this growth is not organic. Organic growth tends to look exponential… a great product spreads virally where the rate of growth grows exponentially and this growth is linear. This is a marketing driven product leveraged out of Google’s huge web audience promoting the browser.
Chrome’s lowest % use is the start of the business day on the east coast (6am PST 9am EST) and it’s peak use is overnight in the US when (most) people are at home with internet explorer the inverse.
IE just won’t die as long as IT departments rely on it so much but it is really getting crushed in the home market by chrome and everyone else. Outside of work hours there are now a few hours a day where internet explorer isn’t even the majority of visits anymore. That’s a huge shift.
A few colleagues here at Facebook put together a product called facebook lite. It launched last week to great acclaim and really set me thinking about bloat on my sites.
My paper airplanes site is where I have focused so far. All the site does is show you how to make 27 paper airplanes. There are video and diagram instructions and you can vote on something as your favorite plane. That’s it. Somehow I bloated this into 90 different php scripts to run the site ignoring include files and so on. No wonder I got hacked (it happened again in February and I failed to notice) and always felt sick when it came to planning to update the site.
Videos – I specifically created a section to make my users view more pages using video. I have reversed this decision now making it better for the users even if less page views for me. 3000 people a day are viewing these videos, they are better than the diagrams. This is my most compelling feature and was buried.
Unusual/Fast/Alex’s Favorites/Gliders – Together these made up <10% of my page views and yet were linked from the main pages. They initiated <5% of my visits. Gone.
search – On every page on my site I link to a search product from atomz. In the last year this page was viewed a total of 1000 times. What a waste of valuable real estate. Gone.
paperairplanes.co.uk does one thing and does it well: show you how to make a paper airplane. It doesn’t take 90 php scripts to do that. It takes one page for each paper airplane and a couple of navigation pages. That is it.
My parents bought me a flip mino camera for my birthday this year specifically so I could start filming and uploading YouTube videos again. My paper airplanes youtube channel gets around 1-2Million views a year growing at 50% year on year and has 500 subscribers. Yesterday I uploaded 3 new videos which within 7hours had 200views 15 ratings and 5comments, including this awesome comment:
Whoa! Finally a new video! Nice. You were my first subscription ever. And sometimes I thought of unsubscribing. Recently actually. But I thought… what if he makes a new video. But I also thought it was 2 years since you did. But you did make a new video. It’s awesome btw.
My goal is to build this video channel further. I have never done a minute of work to optimize it and have just used it as a vehicle to store videos for my website. I am going to turn every plane page on my site into a video page primarily and probably add more planes and then start to upload videos of me creating and flying stunt planes since those are pretty easy to do then see how far it is possible to get with a video channel and I will keep you all up to date. 10MM views a year takes 27k views a day or a little under 10x where I am today. Maybe I can do that, we’ll see.
Working on enterprise internet marketing (100MM’s of pages and visits) is very different from sites with 100,000s or 1,000,000s of visits. I am very lucky to have had the chance to work across both of these scales with my personal sites and professional experience. This difference is becoming clearer and clearer to me.
I was recently asked for my personal thoughts in a survey on the challenges facing SEO in a large internet company so I thought I’d start by sharing them:
So anyway those are my thoughts on the challenges of enterprise SEO. Despite these it’s a really rewarding area to work and very possible to have success in this field.
I wanted to share a little list of folks I have heard talk recently (online or in person) who I think are totally amazing and worth listening to:
I am on The Guardian website (a British newspaper website) and I am being advertised to by the Mirage for rooms there (based on the fact that I have been browsing their site). On the whole I love retargeting, I think better ads are a good thing. That being said I would love to see folks being a bit more subtle about their retargeting.
I hope I am not slow on the uptake spotting this but are yelp and yahoo working together on local search? At the foot of a las vegas steakhouse review (this is my favorite steakhouse in las vegas by the way) there is a link to Yahoo! local.
The link is not “no followed” and points to Yahoo local’s las vegas steakhouse page which is currently top ten in Google for a search for “las vegas steak houses” and is actually ahead of Yelp! I can’t see any reason Yelp! would be doing this unless it’s some kind of business relationship.
Looking at the link profile for the yahoo local steakhouse page all 90 back links come from Yelp. It would be great if Google is ok with this for big companies since that would totally alter my backlinking strategy but I guess that the better user experience would be for Google to contain the links to the main web location for all the las vegas restaurants that yelp or yahoo have on their search results pages. I’m going to keep an eye on this one.
