Don't Believe Everything You See on the Net
Posted On: 2007-07-16
... but sometimes the figures just don't lie.
Well that was an interesting weekend and one that I thoroughly enjoyed. Over the last few weeks we've been dealing with, and assessing, some local issues that have the potential to affect our mainstream business. Now and again I've talked about them here and in lots of ways what I've been saying has really been me, just thinking out aloud.
Over the weekend though we spent some time away from our computers ... and the town ... and took a realistic look at some of the projects we have in the works and the way outside influences could have an effect on them.
If you've been following my past ramblings here you'll know that one of the things that we've been looking at has been local search and last week I mentioned the way some big movers and shakers have been slowly moving into that vertical. On the weekend we saw another big company make a move into local search and this one is spending a lot of money to get people interested in what they're offering.
So on Sunday we looked at the competition, we looked at the hype you'll see around search engine boards about local search and we looked at the figures that we see in our stats and the figures that Google discloses in their search stats and decided that we'll leave local search to the big end of town. They have the money to burn to attract people - and to educate them to start looking online for local businesses - and instead of competing with them we'll look at ways of feeding off them.
That was a hard decision to make because of all that hype that's going on out there but when you really looked at the real figures it was clear to see what the truth really was.
That little lesson also has an application here in adult and ironically I saw that application over on GFY today. Someone was bragging about the money he was making by selling porn through SEO and he even posted a snapshot of his stats. It was interesting and it really did look like he was making some great wads of cash and I'm sure it had a lot of people fired up to rush out and attack the search engines.
If they have been fired up by his stats I sure hope they come back and check that thread some more because now there are cooler heads in there dissecting his stats more carefully and his figures are definitely questionable. But not only are his figures questionable but the way he claims to have done it is questionable too.
This is a guy who hasn't been around all that long and yet he's claiming to be making a lot of money from SEO. That would be nice if things could happen that quickly but marketing adult related products via SEO is a highly competitive field and there are some very talented people already working their nuts off in that area.
The 'law' of SEO is that if you're not in the top four on a search engine results page then the amount of traffic you're going to get will be minimal and you can bet those top four places for any term are not going to be grabbed by a newcomer.
Of course he could be targeting some of the more obscure terms and making money that way but there's a 'problem' in doing that too. The obscure terms are obscure because not many people search for them and so your traffic numbers - and by extension your sales numbers - are going to be less than what you might make if you were targeting those top terms.
So don't believe everything you see on the Net. There are lots of people out there who are prepared to make outlandish claims simply because they think that making those claims will make them look important; perhaps they don't realize that when their claims are weighed up against the facts all they end up doing is looking rather silly.
Steve and I also decided on the weekend to look seriously at shedding some of the domains in our portfolio. It was a hard decision to make because one of those domains had been the core of our business for a lot of years but there are times when it's important to take some major steps forward and not be held back by the past.
So we went to leapfish.com - a site that will give you an automatic valuation a domain name - to see what our domains might be worth. When we added up the figures leapfish.com produced the total came to around $78,000.
At that point we took a cold shower and decided that I should write this column.