I took a peek at Google’s new Caffeine update for their search engine today.
Just for yucks, I started to type in “Mike Lee” because I’m always curious about how I rank amongst the gazillion Mike & Michael Lees out there. Imagine my surprise when I saw the second result in the auto-complete dropdown for both “mik” and “mike”:
Then I noticed the “remove” links to the right of each. Apparently, these results only show up for me, based on my previous search history. Awww. (Oddly enough, I’ve never actually typed in “mikeleeorg twitter” into Google Search. I wonder how they came up with that result.)
I’ve been thinking about one’s online reputation lately.
There are a lot of tools for businesses to manage their online reputations, but how about individuals? How about small-time bloggers, web designers & developers, and general netizens who don’t have access to marketing budgets, yet are concerned about their personal brand?
I made a list of my random social accounts recently, and was surprised to come up with 15. Making a list can be a good check to make sure you’re effectively managing your online reputation.
That is certainly true. Here are some more free ways to manage your personal online reputation.
How to See What Others Are Seeing
First, you need to find out what other people are seeing about you. What are potential employers seeing? Or potential dates? Or your parents?
Who hasn’t used Google (GOOG) to find themselves by now? It is so common that it’s even a verb – as in, “I Googled myself last night” (which kinda sounds dirty). Simply type your name, email address, user ID, or URL into Google and look at the results. If you have a common name (like me) or have very little published about yourself, you may not find yourself. If you have a fairly unique name and even a moderate online presence, it will all come pouring into your search results. Unfortunately, you can’t receive an RSS feed or email alert for these search results; you’ll have to perform a search every time you want to monitor your reputation.
Every time the Google search engine indexes a new occurrence of a particular line of text (say, your name, email address, user ID, or URL), Google Alerts will email you. It’s like Googling your own name every day, except having a service do it for you. Utterly efficient vanity.
This service will track what is written about you in the blogosphere. Google tends to cover some of the same info, but sometimes Technorati catches something that Google hasn’t gotten to yet. You can receive the search results as an RSS feed.
If you have a Twitter account, this may be especially useful. You will be able to monitor what others are saying about you in near real-time. Instant vanity gratification at its best. You can receive the search results as an RSS feed.
If you have a Facebook account, look through all of your photos. Your friends can tag you on their photos, which can sometimes lead to embarrassing snapshots that you may not want on your profile. Also look through your wall posts, fan pages, groups, apps, interests, and other profile info. This is what your potential dates, employers, and parents may see.
If you have a MySpace (NWS) account, look through your entire profile. It’s the same drill as Facebook: check your photos, friends’ comments, blog entries, interests, and other info from your profile.
If you have a LinkedIn account, look through your profile, recommendations to you, and recommendations you’ve written. Chances are, there isn’t much here that will be inappropriate, because of the nature of this social network. But it’s still a good place to check.
Do a search for your name on Flickr. Sometimes people will tag or title a photo with your name, especially if you attend lots of public events or have friends with eager cameras. Similar to Google Search, common names can turn up lots of other people before you find yourself.
YouTube is similar to Flickr in that other people can tag you if they’ve filmed you with their video camera. Hopefully it’s not some kind of scandalous video with night-vision and an interrupting phone call. Ahem.
This new service scours a bunch of search engines, including Google, Yahoo! (YHOO), MSN (MSFT), Technorati, Twitter Search, and many others. I haven’t found its results to be that comprehensive yet, even though it claims to pull from all of those sources. But it’s still a young service and hopefully will improve over time. You can receive the search results as an RSS feed.
Other Social Media Sites
If you have an account on another social media site, such as Delicious, Digg.com, last.fm, etc, create a list of them. Go through each one with a mindful eye towards potentially inappropriate content, just like I mentioned with Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn.
Your Own Site
Lastly and perhaps most importantly: your own site. Look through your site with the same critical eye as you did for the aforementioned social networks. For many people, if they manage to find your site, they will consider this a goldmine of information about you. Everything you publish is subject to their interpretation.
How to Control What Others Are Seeing
Next, you need to control what others find about you. While you can’t control every little thing, there are ways to steer the overall findings, and thus, your online reputation.
Get Your Own Website
The best defense is a good offense. If you create your own website, you could potentially appear high in search engine results for yourself. This will give you a way to explicitly control your online reputation. You don’t need to go all out and start a blog; even a one-pager with basic info will do.
Get Your Own Name On Social Media
Create social media accounts and get your own name before somebody else does. Although the risk of someone pretending to be you is low, you will at least have these online appearances under your control. Even if you don’t actively use those sites, put up a basic profile.
SEO Your Content
If you optimize your site for search engines, then your actively-controlled content will rank higher than other potentially embarrassing or outdated content. Since most people only look at the first page of search results, the further back you can push the bad stuff, the better. Creating various social media accounts can also help here, because they will appear in search results and push undesired content away.
As you go through your Facebook profile, remove any potentially inappropriate photos or info to clean up your profile. You can remove yourself from a photo by clicking the “Remove tag” link next to your name, though you cannot delete the image yourself – you will have to ask the owner of the photo to do it for you.
Again, the the same drill as Facebook: remove any potentially inappropriate photos, friends’ comments, blog entries, interests, and other info from your profile. Social networking is all fun and games, until someone loses a date or job from it.
Generally, you don’t have to worry too much about inappropriate content in LinkedIn, due to its professional nature. But a less-than-flattering recommendation could be bad. You can email the author and kindly ask for a rewrite if that’s the case.
Unfortunately, you cannot remove someone else’s photo, nor can you remove their tag mentioning your name. All you can do is email the owner and appeal to their kindness, generosity, and discretion. If negotiations get rough, consider buying them a premium Flickr account as a gift.
Similar to Flickr, you cannot remove someone else’s video or tag of your name on YouTube. You can try flagging the video, but that won’t remove it. The best way to do that is to email the owner directly.
Other Social Media Sites
If you have created a list of your accounts on other social media sites, go through each one and remove any potentially embarrassing content. Tedious but worth it.
Duct Tape Marketing also lists a ton of reputation management tools, though I didn’t find many of them to be worth the time needed to learn & use them. I know that the services I’ve listed here may already take the average person quite a while to do.
They are worth it though, especially in today’s connected world. You never know when a potential date, employer, friend, business partner, or family member might be doing some online snooping on you.
Has this ever happened to you? Someone looks you in the eye. Takes a deep breath. Then tells you how dynamic URLs are bad for SEO on Google (GOOG).
That’s happened to me a few times. Sometimes without the deep breath and a little less drama, but the message has been the same. So I just wanted to offer some clarification, straight from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog (emphasis theirs):
Myth: “Dynamic URLs cannot be crawled.”
Fact: We can crawl dynamic URLs and interpret the different parameters. We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. One recommendation is to avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static. It’s always advisable to use static content with static URLs as much as possible, but in cases where you decide to use dynamic content, you should give us the possibility to analyze your URL structure and not remove information by hiding parameters and making them look static.
Myth: “Dynamic URLs are okay if you use fewer than three parameters.”
Fact: There is no limit on the number of parameters, but a good rule of thumb would be to keep your URLs short (this applies to all URLs, whether static or dynamic). You may be able to remove some parameters which aren’t essential for Googlebot and offer your users a nice looking dynamic URL. If you are not able to figure out which parameters to remove, we’d advise you to serve us all the parameters in your dynamic URL and our system will figure out which ones do not matter. Hiding your parameters keeps us from analyzing your URLs properly and we won’t be able to recognize the parameters as such, which could cause a loss of valuable information.
John Mueller, a Googler, added this bit in the comments:
In general, we would prefer to see a “messy” dynamic URL instead of an incompletely or incorrectly implemented static-looking URL scheme.
You shouldn’t start changing what works for you now. Just because Google says things are fine when using dynamic URLs, it may not be fine in your case. When I told two of my developers about this Google post, they asked me what they should do. I said, keep developing using rewrites on pages you want Google think are static. If you want Google to know that certain pages are dynamic, like filtering products based on colors or size, then maybe in those cases I would leave the dynamic URLs. Again, it really depends on your situation and the site at hand.
So there you have it:
If you’ve already rewritten your URLs, keep them as is.
If you haven’t yet, dynamic URLs are fine.
Static URLs can sometimes have a slightly higher CTR.
If you don’t know how to rewrite your dynamic URLs into static ones, don’t, because a poorly rewritten static URL is worse than a dynamic URL.
If you can remove some of the unnecessary parameters from your URL, then do so; if not, don’t worry about it.
If you are using WordPress, their custom permalinks feature generally rewrites URLs just fine.
No direct guidance has been given about other CMS systems, but I would assume that the more popular ones are fine.
First, you need to know how to write online. Since reading an article on a computer monitor is different than reading it on paper, online reading behaviors differ significantly.
Second, you need to know to optimize your articles for search engines. Also known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), this means getting your articles to show up high on a search engine’s results.
Now for a list of must-read articles and resources:
Now for some Friday fun. Can’t find a good domain name? Think all the good domain names are taken? Well, you’re wrong, according to the NYC- and LA-based sketch comedy group Quiet Library.
How would you like to make $115,000 a month? I sure would. That’s how much Sourcetool.com was making off of Google AdSense ads.
And that, apparently, caught the eye – and ire – of Google (GOOG).
Joe Nocera of the NY Times wrote about Sourcetool.com’s dilemma last Friday in his article, “Stuck in Google’s Doghouse“. In short, Sourcetool.com was making $653,000/month in revenue by spending $500,000/month on Google AdWords. That means bidding on sponsored search keywords for about $0.05 – $0.06 a pop to bring traffic to their site, then getting around $0.10 each time someone clicked on an ad. Though Sourcetool.com is adamant that what they’re doing isn’t ad arbitrage, their business model essentially is.
Then Google made some changes to their AdWords algorithm, resulting in an increase of Sourcetool.com’s minimum bid requirements to $1, and in some cases: $5 or $10. The reason given was that Sourcetool.com’s landing pages were not high-enough in quality – they weren’t sufficiently “googly”, in Google-speak. Even after numerous phone calls, rebuttals, and changes to their landing pages, the minimum bid requirement remained. Google’s stance is that their algorithm has spoken. Sourcetool.com’s stance is that something unfair is going on, since Google has made exceptions to others before, including to one of Sourcetool.com’s competitors.
Whatever the case, this basically killed Sourcetool.com’s business model.
Let’s instead talk about Sourcetool.com. Here’s a business that had figured out a way to generate nearly $1.4M a year with a single web property. Not bad!
However, 100% of that revenue was dependent on one source – Google. (Or, more specifically, Google AdWords to bring in traffic, Google AdSense to monetize that traffic.) There’s a strong inherent risk in that. They are at the mercy of one source, and should that source change its policies, go under, or simply turn its back on them, then they’re screwed. And that’s exactly what happened. They got screwed.
To be fair, there are lots of small businesses that rely on one source for their customers and revenue, be it a single product or service, or a single online marketplace like Amazon (AMZN) or Ebay (EBAY).
You know the cliche “don’t put all your eggs in one basket?” When that basket breaks, you’ve lost all your eggs. That’s what will happen if you have only one customer or revenue source. When it breaks, you’ve lost all your customers and all your revenue.
Product Diversification
Although it’s not as relevant to Sourcetool.com, I’m going to touch on product diversification first. In today’s economy, product-line diversification is essential for business stability – just as portfolio diversity is essential for investment stability. Even large corporations realize this. The Walt Disney Company (DIS) is famous for diversifying from cartoons to movies to amusement parks. Apple (AAPL) went from personal computers to mp3 players to mobile phones. And Starbucks (SBUX) sells everything from espressos to board games to CDs.
Which, of course, begs the question – can there be too much diversification? Yes, if it goes beyond your core competencies and brand. But that’s another discussion.
Channel Diversification
Now let’s touch on marketplace or channel diversification. You can look at Google as a kind of distribution channel for Sourcetool.com – it was the primary way for them to acquire customers. No Google, no customers. That’s a pretty simple and scary formula.
The reality of the situation is that Google directs the majority of web traffic nowadays, so most any web-related business needs to work with Google to some extent. But fortunately, there are alternatives.
According to the article, Sourcetool.com was only using Google AdWords to generate traffic. I’m sure that wasn’t the only method, but for the sake of this discussion, let’s assume it was. Here are some other methods:
Using the direct URL method means massively branding your URL so your customers know it and can type it into a web browser manually. It’s probably the most costly method, but lots of start-ups with strong brand recognition do this – such as Flickr.com, YouTube.com, and PayPal.com. Same goes for large corporations like Pepsi.com, BankOfAmerica.com, and NYTimes.com. (Sure makes having a .com domain name pretty important, huh?)
It’s certainly not easy to diversify your online channels, but relying on one 100% can be disastrous. Say you relied on Google for 80% of your traffic, Yahoo for 15% and MSN for 5%. You’d still have 20% of your traffic if your relationship with Google changed. That’s better than 0%, right?
And as a bonus, for ecommerce retailers out there, Amazon and Ebay aren’t your only channels. The list above also applies to you, as well as these online shopping comparison engines & marketplaces:
Now let’s touch upon revenue diversification. Sourcetool.com’s only source of revenue is Google AdSense. Though their current problem is more about customer acquisition via a single channel, it wouldn’t hurt to diversify their revenue streams too, especially if Google were to kick them out of AdSense.
Fortunately for business owners, AdSense isn’t the only ad network in town. There are dozens of others, though none seem to do content matching as well as AdSense right now. Since I’ve listed a bunch of them in my entry about blogging for cash, I won’t repeat them here.
There are also affiliate programs, which work like sales commissions. If you help a retailer sell an item, they’ll pay you a percentage of the sale. Some savvy affiliate marketers are able to make six-figure checks doing this. You’ll also find a number of affiliate programs on my list.
Along with the ads model are sponsorships. Sourcetool.com could try to get sponsorships from various retailers to earn extra income. That would change the nature of their directory though, as they tout themselves as a free directory right now.
There’s also the subscription model, though I’m not sure what kind of premium content Sourcetool.com could offer.
In Conclusion
Relying on a single source of customers or income from a single product or service is an inherently dangerous business model. If that source goes away, so does your business. To solve that, you need to diversify.
If you’re relying solely on Google AdWords for traffic, consider diversifying. Try Yahoo. Try MSN. Try social media marketing. Diversify your customer acquisition methods.
Same goes for your revenue sources. If Google AdSense is your only income generator, consider diversifying. Try another ad network. Try an affiliate program. Try subscription models. Diversify your revenue sources.
Good luck! And remember – diversify diversify diversify!
There was a time when I had six maxed-out credit cards. Frightening, huh? It was during the dot-com days, when I thought I’d make millions like everyone else – then be able to pay back those cards easily. Alas, that was not to be, leaving me with six maxed-out credit cards.
After that, I put myself on a very strict, very rigorous debt payment plan. And in three to four years, I worked it all off. I paid off all of my credit cards. Now, I pay out each balance full every month; no more carrying balances over!
While setting up my plan, I had looked into debt consolidation programs. Ultimately, I didn’t do that, but I know at least one friend who did.
If you’re not someone who’s anal about record keeping and paying your bills, then a debt consolidation program could help you. The advantages include having one easy location to pay all your bills. The disadvantages include having to put up collateral, such as your home, and potentially paying more in the long run if you stretch out this new loan for a very long period of time. They are generally helpful if you have a lot of credit card debt though, since the consolidated loan they offer can have a lower interest rate than any of your credit cards.
But: beware of predatory lenders, who typically approach desperate customers and deceptively convince them to agree to unfair – and even abusive – loan terms.
One such program, Debt Free 24, just applied for a paid review. Since I’ve looked into debt consolidation programs before, I figured I’d give these guys a once-over too.
Visual Design
Being a website review, I of course can’t help but look at its visual design – its layout, its use of text, its usability. I do this because it’s really important. All too often, I’ll hear a random user back out of a site because it “doesn’t look safe” or “looks like it could be a scam.” What they’re really saying is, “this visual design sucks.”
Debt Free 24′s design doesn’t totally suck. But it doesn’t look as professional as I’d want a financial services firm to look. And since the debt consolidation industry is fraught with scam artists, it’s easy to point at a poorly-done design and guess that they’re a scam. (Of course, a slick design doesn’t mean a firm isn’t a scam.)
There’s lots of text. Way more than the average reader will want to read. It’s probably for SEO purposes though. What really bothers me about it is that it’s all full-justified – meaning the words are lined up at both the left and right sides of the paragraph.
Notice how the words from my paragraphs are lined up on the left, but aren’t lined up neatly on the right? That, in typesetting-speak, is known as ragged-right. Generally, it’s easier to read paragraphs on computer screens that are ragged-right than full-justified. Only in print does full-justification look nice. The designer probably thought, “Hey, let’s align this text with full-justification, ‘cuz newspapers and books do it!” without any knowledge of computer usability. ‘Tis the mark of an amateur designer.
To the designer’s credit, there is a clear call-to-action and clear navigation. I know how to sign up for a debt consolidation program. That’s way more important than the alignment of the text. Kudos! Users ought to be funneling into the sales flow nicely.
The Service
To sign up for this service, you need to fill out an online form with information such as:
How much credit card debt do you have?
Current payment status on your credit cards?
Other unsecured debt?
How much secured debt do you have?
After supplying that, along with your contact info (address, email, and phone number), you’re told that:
By submitting your request, you are granting permission for up to $product.maxNumberOfSales of our Premier Partners to contact you either by phone or email even if you are on the Do Not Call Registry.
Wait, how many Premier Partners? $product.maxNumberOfSales? Oops, looks like someone’s code is peeking out!
Once you get past the unsecured (http, not https) form submission and buggy code, one of their Debt Repayment Representatives will contact you to set up a debt consolidation program. After interviewing you about your financial situation, the representative will contact all of your outstanding creditors (credit card companies, loan companies, mortgage companies, etc) to negotiate a potentially lower interest rate for you. Then Debt Free 24 will combine your debt, so you only have to pay one creditor – Debt Free 24 – and not hassle with multiple bills.
They don’t indicate whether they offer secured loans (where you have to offer up collateral) or unsecured loans (where it’s determined by your credit rating), however.
Articles
Under the section, “News Updates,” Debt Free 24 has a number of articles about debt management and personal finance. The articles don’t look terribly helpful, so I suspect they serve SEO purposes. Unfortunately for them, they haven’t done much in-page search engine optimization. These articles could be helping them a lot more than they are right now.
My Suggestions
Hire a professional web designer and give the site an overhaul. Make it look more professional , usable, and trustworthy. Although the current design isn’t the worst I’ve seen – it’s probably even doing it’s job well-enough for their target audience – it could be a lot better. Is the ROI of redesigning the site worth the extra sales conversions? Well, since I’m going to recommend rewriting some of the code, they might as well update the design too.
Hire an SEO-knowledgeable web developer to rewrite the code to be more SEO-friendly. From page titles to URLs to headings, there’s lots of basic SEO stuff they could do. Hell, a simple pass through Website Grader could help wonderfully. Also, make sure this developer doesn’t leave any open bugs on any key pages, such as the sign-up form.
Consider re-writing the copy a bit. Or at least, shorten it. I’d love to see more information on the About Us page, for instance. If it’s owned by one guy in a basement somewhere, he probably doesn’t want to reveal that – because if it’s true, no one’s going to want to use his site. But a vague About Us page doesn’t fill me with warm fuzzy trustworthiness either.
So onto the review. Their site, called BuyMMOAccounts.com, isn’t exactly what I’d call professional-looking. Kind of 1980s, if you ask me. The value proposition is simple enough: you can buy and sell your WoW account, though they certainly push buying an account as opposed to selling one. Let’s pick it apart, shall we?
Text
I see lots of annoying marketese. That’s bad. Many users are turned off by what appears to be a pushy or sketchy sales pitch. The frequent use of bolding, text color changes, and text size changes all reek of this.
There’s also way too much text. Most readers aren’t going to read any of this. The use of gratuitous text has SEO benefits, though. There’s lots of keyword-rich paragraphs here. I can’t knock them for that. Unfortunately, it looks like someone with Microsoft FrontPage marked this page up and believed that every other paragraph needs to scream for attention, making none of the paragraphs very readable or enticing.
Usability
I don’t see a clear focal point. Sure, my eye is attracted to all the elves, gnomes, and orcs scattered everywhere. But there is no clear call to action. I have to hunt around to find out how I can buy a WoW account. That’s bad. Don’t make me work to pay you.
Now how do you sell an account? By happening to see the link buried in a paragraph below the fold in the middle of the page somewhere (or on the graphical link in the left column). I can understand that. They’re trying to minimize sales and emphasize sales. And perhaps, with the keywords they’re targeting, they’re not trying to increase their supply of accounts. Perhaps they already have a vast supply being created by players overseas and just want to profit by selling them. Fair enuff.
But at least make the buying process easier. That’s why users are on the site, right?
One last nitpick. The homepage has a line of text that looks like a link, but isn’t. The line: “When purchasing an account from us you can be assured that” is blue and underlined. But it’s not a link. Bad bad bad.
Trust and Security
The site isn’t shy about it’s 100% guarantee, though it’s delivery doesn’t fill me with trust. I’m hit with more marketese that looks more like the site is trying to scam me than reassure me. I’m sure that’s not their intent, but that’s what’s happening.
To their benefit, there is a live chat option and a couple of toll-free phone numbers. That’s cool. If their users don’t want to deal with a sketchy-looking site, they can deal with a live person. However, do people who use virtual worlds want that kind of hassle? Wouldn’t they prefer virtual help over real live help? I don’t know; just a guess. I also wonder how much these support options cost BuyMMOAccounts.com. A well-designed site could actually cut down on these support costs.
They also list credentials from VeriSign, McAfee, and RatePoint. I’m not sure how much security that actually means, but the average user may not question it as much as I am.
My Suggestions
Okay, enough of the harsh criticism. I ripped into these guys good. Now it’s time to play nice. Here’s what I’d suggest, listed in order of importance:
Hire a professional web designer and give the site an overhaul. Make it look more professional, usable, and trustworthy. A good designer will know how to drive more sales and reduce support costs. A good design can do all that.
Hire a writer to rewrite the content. It’s possible to keep it keyword-rich without appearing like untrustworthy marketese. This will aid in SEO and drive more sales & conversions.
Hire a professional web developer to rewrite the HTML & CSS to use web standard code (which is more SEO-friendly), add a sitemap.xml file, a robots.txt file, and all those other SEO goodies.
Suggestions #1 and #2 are more important because they’ll increase sales. It looks like BuyMMOAccounts.com already ranks pretty high in search engines, especially for the keywords they purchased in this review. With these suggestions, I believe they’d be able to convert more visitors into buyers, thus increasing their overall revenues.
Has this ever happened to you? Someone looks you in the eye. Takes a deep breath. Then tells you how dynamic URLs are bad for SEO on Google (
There was a time when I had six maxed-out credit cards. Frightening, huh? It was during the dot-com days, when I thought I’d make millions like everyone else – then be able to pay back those cards easily. Alas, that was not to be, leaving me with six maxed-out credit cards.
It’s amazing how many different ways there are to make money, isn’t it? One is in buying and selling 
