Web Site Design and Development

How are we to write well, and consistently?   There are days when writing is simplicity itself, when ideas and connections seem to grow in natural abundance, when we feel the only limitation of human eloquence is our typing speed.  Then there are days when we must write through the dense stickiness of our own stupidity.

This is writing’s horror and its beauty:  only your mind sits between your contribution to the world and the void from which it springs.

Can we trick our minds into performing better?  I believe we can.

I blundered into this Monday knowing I wasn’t wearing my big brain.  It’s the week I finally finish up my taxes and get them to my accountant.  It’s the week I pay my insurance bill.  It’s a week so full of dullness that wearing my small brain is a form of prosaic justice.  It’s a week that would put my big brain to sleep.

Small brain or not, though, I still have to write.

So this week I’m trying on a new trick to keep my small brain from hurting itself while running with sharpened pencils.  The trick is the stack of twenty.   Here’s the trick if you want to try it out yourself.  Take out twenty file cards, and plan your week into twenty tasks.  In my case this worked out to be nineteen cards with either a blog post or online article per card, plus a card for the remaining tax work.  Planning out the week took about fifteen minutes.

The idea is that as you complete a task or article, you put a big checkbox on the card and move it to the done stack.  If something unforeseen comes up and you handle it, write a quick card for it with a big check mark and put it in the done pile.  If you have any cards left over, you can always recycle them into next week, and if you get through the whole stack, your small brain will delight in its accomplishment.

All of this is a way to make your small brain feel good about itself.   You need this if you’re having a small brain week.

Your big brain doesn’t need such a simple trick as this, but if you’re anything like me, you can’t always wear your big brain to work.

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Many of our readers will recognize Dave Smith as the author of The Real Estate Blog Lab, a very popular blog about Dave’s experiments with using Wordpress. Dave also runs several blogs for his wife, Barbara Lasky, including the Tucson AZ Real Estate Blog and Tucson Real Estate In the News. Tucson Real Estate In the News has propelled BarbarLasky.com into a first page position on Google, while his other blog ranks equally well on MSN. Answering my call for guest authors to write about their Internet Marketing Strategy, Dave emailed me details on his real estate business. These included some production statistics that Dave later asked me to delete; I hope Dave will forgive me if I let you in on the secret that they were excellent.

Dave writes:

About 85% of our business for 2007 came from our Internet marketing. This is what I’m in charge of doing (you probably already had that one figured out).

2007 was our best year yet. Barbara has been in the business full time now for six years. I’m a newbie at just over two years, but was the database administrator for Long Realty Co. with more than 1500 agents in fifteen offices. They have expanded since I left.

I don’t know how many prospect/clients we are working with currently. I know it is quite a few. We have two sources of business.

1. Past clients and referrals from them.
2. The Internet marketing.

We have done more referrals this year than ever before. We have two commercial deals closing this month with a 20% referral which will be somewhere around $2.3 million between the two of them. These came from Internet leads from our blogs.

We do almost no print advertising except on our Sunday insert a few times a year. No magazine or other media. No mailings, nothing else except a small drip campaign: once a month a post card goes out with a tip of some kind from Barbara’s sharper agent account.

More Guest Authors Wanted

Do you have experience marketing your real estate business online? Has your web site rescued your business from the gloom of oblivion? If so, our readers want to hear your voice as part of our ongoing series, “What’s Your Real Estate Internet Marketing Strategy?” Please contact John Lockwood if you’re interested.

Related Posts:

What’s Your Internet Marketing Strategy: Author’s Guide

AdSense and I have a checkered past. I had an account several years ago, but never made much from it. Last week I decided that really ought to take another look at ad networks like AdSense, since I believe that Pro Blogger / Online Publisher is a legitimate career path for an Internet writer (albeit one with a long start-up curve and a crowded field).

So last week I put up some AdSense on a popular real estate blog I own, and again the results were not all that spectacular — a couple of bucks per day. But things got interesting soon.

Ask any kid with a chemistry set. Nothing interesting happens until you mix two things together.

Enter Associated Content

You wouldn’t think that Associated Content would have much to do with AdSense on the face of it. AdSense lets you generate ad revenue from your web site, and Associated Content is a place where you can sell writing online if you don’t mind not getting paid much.

What tipped me off to the idea that those to things are actually not all that different was a single unifying statistic, CPM. That’s an ad term that you probably know, which means “Cost per Thousand (Impressions)”. Of course as a publisher I’m not interested in cost so much as revenue. Some people call this RPM (Revenue Per Thousand). Google uses the weird expression eCPM, or “Effective Cost Per Thousand”, but effective or not, we’re talking about revenue here.

When I signed up for Associated Content, I knew the rates would probably be lower than they would be for direct writing sales. I tried them out because I thought it would be an easy way to make a quick writing sale or two, and I wanted to see what they offered.

I don’t have a report on the rates yet, because the first article I tried was submitted for up front payment review, which can take up to two weeks. I can tell you that others have reported numbers that don’t impress me much, such as $7.00 per article. Based on that, I doubt I’ll be writing up a storm for them, but we’ll see how it goes.

What really got me interested, however, was when I saw their performance payments, which is based on what they call (wait for it…) PPM, or “Payment Per Thousand”.

PPM, CPM, RPM, eCPM — How Much Money Are We Talking Here?

What got my attention immediately about Associated Content’s PPM was that it was $1.50. My AdSense account hovers around $9.00 per day.

This got me thinking. If AdSense pays about $9.00 per thousand page views, six times as much as Associated Content, maybe Associated Content would turn out to be the victor over AdSense in the Worst-Way-To-Make-Money-Online Throw Down. Are you ready to rumble?

It also got me wondering about how many page views my web sites had, and what that would look like divided by 1,000 and then multiplied by $9.00! It turns out that I may be able to make several hundred per month off of Adsense for a month’s work or so, since I have a fair sized inventory of unperforming content.

“Inventory of unperforming content”. See, I’m talking like a publisher already!

What Kind of CPM do Real Estate Brokers Make?

As soon as I started thinking in terms of CPM, I got curious about how much money I made last year as a real estate broker from my real estate web sites. So I did some really rough-draft calculations, and came up with a figure of somewhere between $20 to $30 per 1,000. That’s not bad considering where we are in the “real estate meltdown” (also known as “the credit crunch” or “the end of carbon based life as we know it”, depending on who you ask). I could probably do $60 per 1,000 if I wanted to hop in the car more and do more sales, but of course that would be cheating.

My Publishing Epiphany

Some time yesterday I had a publishing epiphany, where everything I’d ever written online turned into a viewable page, a 1/1000th fraction of an M that could produce some revenue value for me, some “R”.

The nice thing about thinking about RPM is that it teaches us that we as publishers can increase either our RPM (look for better publishing or ad opportunities) or our M (write more, or promote it better), and either way we’ll get more R, more Revenue.

Perhaps in a future post we’ll talk about the results of my attempting to increase RPM and continue to increase it over time using an open source Ad Server, OpenX.

Ten days ago I posted How To Get 101 Subscribers to your New Blog in 30 Days.   This means I’m one third of the way to our April 10th deadline to claim the 101 subscriber bragging rights.  So here’s an account of our progress so far.

When I posted the article on the eleventh, I had a grand total of eight subscribers, down from a high of ten a couple of days earlier.  Since then, we’ve reached a high of forty-four subscribers as of a couple of days ago, and currently we’re showing forty-two subscribers.  So we’ve added 34 subscribers in ten days.  Assuming we can do that again twice in the twenty days that remain, we’ll finish up with 110 subscribers, well above the 101 we’re shooting for. 

What I’ve Learned,  Guest Posts, and The Winner So Far

Getting thirty-four subscribers again during each of the next two ten-day periods will be a challenge.

I believe that of the 34 subscribers we’ve picked up so far, probably about twenty of them come from my guest post on the Real Estate Tomato.  Another two to four probably come from miscellaneous sources including ActiveRain, and the remaining ten to twelve come from StumbleUpon.  So the likely winner to date for the contest would be Jim Cronin at the Real Estate Tomato, with the runner up spot going to Bob Younce at the Writing Journey for introducing my site to StumbleUpon.

From a subscriber standpoint, the guest post had the best results, StumbleUpon has done a better job in terms of raw traffic.  StumbleUpon has sent me 614 hits to date, versus 120 for Entrecard and sixty-five for the Real Estate Tomato.

Guest Post Progress Stalls

I lost forward momentum on the guest posts after the Tomato article.  I submitted an article to Anne Wayman at the Golden Pencil, but got no response after almost a week and another email.  Since then I’ve sent a rewrite of that article to ChrisBlogging.com.  I’ll let you know if it goes anywhere the second time, and how the other submissions go.

Commercial time:  Do you have great traffic and want a guest post to win a six month ad?  Check out our ad contest.

I’ve been making more progress on submitting some articles to low-paying or link-paying article submission sites.  The ones I’ve tried so far are Associated Content (which doesn’t impress me, even though they pay) and EZineArticles.com (which does impress me, even though they don’t pay).   I do expect to get some benefit from EZineArticles over time given the links they let you publish, but I don’t expect to see results before the April 10th deadline.

Overall Results

I still have my work cut out for me to get to 101 in 30 days, but I’m on track so far, and I’m very pleased with how things are going.  My unique visitor count is certainly better than I expected it to be at this point (more than 200 per day on average, which I consider excellent for 21 days on a brand new domain).  I’ve made some new friends, and it seems like every day I’m learning something new.

In Eight Questions Advertisers Should Ask before Buying a Paid Review, we looked at paid reviews from a consumer’s point of view, with a view to educating advertisers about how to find out if paid reviews should be part of their ad campaign.

In this article we’ll look at the other side of the equation.  Should paid reviews be part of a professional writer’s repertoire, and if so, what should we understand about paid reviews before putting up our Paypal links and beginning to hawk our endorsements?  As before, let’s look at the questions one should be asking before getting started with paid reviews.

Six Questions Writers Should Ask Before Offering Paid Reviews

1. Does Your Blog Rely on Google?
   If your blog relies on Google, you may want to seriously consider whether paid reviews are right for you.  At the very least you’ll want to review our article on paid reviews and Google, and make sure your buyer understands that they’re buying a human endorsement and human click-throughs, not a page rank boost.  Even then, I would think twice.

   This issue came up for me recently.  Among the many web sites I have, one web site and blog has done more to support me than any other for the last five years.  The key to its success has been outstanding search engine placement for a group of profitable keywords.  Recently a gentleman contacted me from that blog to do a paid review for a client’s web site about Payday Loans.  To me the “no” answer was immediately obvious.  There was no way I was going to jeopardize a high-five-figure revenue stream for a $20 or $50 or even $500 review about a subject like that.  Not on that blog.  Hey, there’s an idea…

2. Can You Own (or “Rent”) A Blog Where Paid Reviews Are Appropriate?
   One solution to the conundrum above, of course, would have been to sell the prospect a review on another blog.  This could be either:
   1. A third party blog. Your client may have approached you with the idea of buying a paid review, but does the review have to go on your blog?  Can you take a paid review opportunity and convert it into a paid article placement opportunity?  Article placement is great way to upsell your writing by offering not just the writing itself, but a brokered placement on an appropriate site.   Some marketing specialists offer article placement as a core component of their services, and there’s no reason why writers should not exploit this opportunity as well.
   2. A blog you create for reviews and other content.  One of the opportunities I envision for my writing business is to create and promote at least one “general review” blog along the general lines of TechCrunch.  Part of this blog’s mission in life would be to host paid reviews, since it’s a place where miscellaneous reviews would be entirely relevant.  And that brings me to my next point.
3. What’s Your Blog About, Anyway?
   Even if you can solve “the Google problem” with paid articles by dutifully applying a nofollow tag to your links back to your client, does having a link to “Great New Web Site About Canadian Pharmaceuticals” dilute the brand message that you’d otherwise be establishing for your readers ?  Also, assuming you’re trying to optimize for “Freelance Writer” or the like, what’s the SEO effect of having your content start to be “about” (at the page level) Canadian pharmaceuticals or pay day loans?
4. How Much Does It Pay?
   If this list were in order of importance, the issue of payment would have been item #1.  We’re running a business here, after all.  If the pay day loan fellow above threw a million dollars at me, my next question would have been “How fast can I run to my keyboard?”  Bob Younce rightly brought up this point earlier in the article series.I admit that I have a lot more to learn in this area.  I have not yet reviewed the “big three” paid review services (links to them are here), but I suspect I’ll find that if there are places where the money is good, the trade off will be that the reviews may be somewhat compromising to the web properties I already own.  Also, as with most jobs (in writing and everywhere else), the extent to which a job pays well is inversely proportional to the number of people involved in finding you the job.  The flip side of that coin is always the time it would take to find the work on your own.
5. If I’m Brand New, Will the Writing Credits Help Me?
   If you’re new in your writing career, paid reviews may help to give you some credentials.
6. What’s My Writing “Career Track”?
   “Professional writing” is not a monolithic thing, and neither is “Internet writing”.  An oversimplified way to look at Internet writing is that there are “pro bloggers” on the one hand versus “freelancers” on the other.  The pro blogger group is a huge, diverse population consisting of twenty or thirty rock stars and about fifty million teenagers with electric guitars.  Paid reviews are almost always appropriate for this group, though interestingly enough one of the rock stars, TechCrunch, doesn’t do them.   The latter group, the freelancers, is considerably smaller and generally quite capable of hunting larger game than the paid review.  But remember:  even wolves don’t turn up their noses at a tasty mouse if it happens to walk right by.

Continuing our article series on paid reviews, in this segment we want to zero in on paid reviews from the advertiser’s point of view. Are paid reviews something you should be spending your limited ad budget on?

You may have heard that a paid review can help you achieve your online goals, but the chances are you heard that from someone selling paid reviews. That’s not to say these people are dishonest or that their reviews might not help, but at the very least you should know what questions to ask yourself before you spend your money.

Here then are eight questions to ask yourself before you buy that paid review:

1. What do you expect to gain by buying a review?
   The more you’re looking to spend, the more time you should spend thinking about this. Are you buying sheer traffic and hoping to convert visitors to an immediate sale? Are you hoping to convert visitors to a subscription to your blog now and develop a client over time? Are you looking for links to give you a page rank boost and improve your position on the search engines? Are you hoping that a celebrity endorsement will help buyers accept your product?
2. Are you looking for incoming link love (a page rank boost)?
   If buying a review is a way of buying links, do you know for certain that you won’t run afoul of Google’s algorithm? We know that Google frowns on pages that contain paid reviews, and so, especially if you’re buying multiple reviews where Google can analyze the pattern of links pointing to you, do you know for certain that you won’t run afoul of the very algorithm you’re trying to game? Are you buying multiple reviews? Will your review appear on a site that sells multiple reviews? Either way, in my opinion there’s a decent chance that you won’t get the result you’re trying to gain.
3. What If you did this 100 times?
   Let’s say you have $2,000 to spend, and you can buy reviews for $20.00. That’s 100 reviews — not bad. However, will Google devalue a site that has 100 paid reviews pointing to it, and is that important to you? Now take the same $2,000, and let’s say you can buy about sixty blog pages on your corporate blog. Now you have sixty pages of blog pages optimized for long tail keywords related to your product. We know for a fact that Google doesn’t penalize unique content — it indexes it. Of course, if you’ve decided that search results aren’t a huge part of your business model, or if you’re only running a single review, you may not care about the issue of whether what you’re doing is sustainable over time. I think the best approach for most clients is the one that I myself practice here: when in doubt, produce unique content on your own web site. 70-90% of your activity and spending should be in this area.
4. Does it make sense for the reviewer to use my product?
   Making sure the reviewer is a potential user of your product increases the relevance of your review as well as its credibility. The reviewer may not be using your product yet, but does it at least make sense that he might? If someone’s blogging about brewing beer and I’m selling cool stainless steel beer taps, that’s a natural fit, and a review here might do me quite a lot of good, especially if the blogger is well known and likes my product.
5. Does it make sense for the reviewer’s readers to use my products?
   Even more important than the issue of whether the author might use my product is the issue of whether his readers might. To take the beer brewing case above, if the blogger’s target audience is home brewers and you’re selling 15,000 gallon commercial beer vats, then clearly you have a bit of a problem.
6. Will the reviewer disclose that the review is paid?
   Given the bad press that undisclosed reviews have received and Google’s suggestion that paid reviews be disclosed, I’d recommend that the answer should be yes. If the blogger is not disclosing that the review is paid, you should think about whether your reputation would be harmed if people learn that it was. If the answer is yes, make sure you ask for full disclosure.
7. How popular is the reviewer, relative to what he’s charging?
   All else being equal, I would go for the reviewer with the better cost per subscriber. Let’s take two bloggers I know. Both run good blogs that are very interesting to read. One blogger has approximately 21,000 readers and charges $500 per review. The other blogger has approximately 180 readers, and charges $25 for a review. Naturally you need a bigger budget for the first blogger, but your cost per subscriber reached is 2.38 cents versus 13.8 cents for the second blogger.
8. What else could you be doing with the budget?
   We’ve already talked about what would happen if you paid for a review 100 times over, and discussed some other marketing spends you could make such as blogging about your product. In my opinion it’s very hard to beat the benefit of keyword rich content that is keyed to your product or service. However, if you’re spending a smaller amount and just want to generate some immediate traffic, you might consider alternatives such as Google Adwords or Yahoo Pay-per-click advertising. The beauty of pay-per-click is that you have complete control over the keywords you bid on, and that the person searching for your product is searching for the very solution you provide. Someone who wants web analytics software may read Darren Rowse. He’s popular among webmasters, and webmasters often need web analytics software. Chances are, however, that you’d find a much higher proportion of buyers for “web analytics software” among people searching for that term specifically.

Ask yourself these eight questions, and you’ll be in a better position to spend your money wisely and get the best results for your advertising dollars.

Paid Reviews Series Articles

1. Introduction: Writer Boon or Devil’s Pact
2. Paid Reviews: Google’s Problem With Them and a Partial Solution
3. Eight Questions Advertisers Should Ask Before Buying a Paid Review