New Digg Profiles and Updated Site Policies

I just got an e-mail from Digg in my inbox, which I’m sure all Digg users recieved, outlining a few changes. While seemingly small changes related to more advanced profiles and alterations to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy… these changes could mean increased opportunities for Internet Marketers - especially those who are trying to “game” digg.

A few of the keys to this update, in my opinion are:

It’s time to come up with a game plan on how to best take advantage of these digg changes. Maybe it’s not worth any increased effort… but it’d be nice to find out.

Here is the exact e-mail I recieved:

Lots of new changes coming to Digg! We’re excited to introduce you to the new Digg Profiles. With over fifty new features, we’ve completely revamped our profiles from the ground up - making it easy for you to share your favorite Digg stories with friends. If you’d like to see them in action, visit Digg or get a walk through of some of the new features in this video.

Because Digg enables people to share information with one another, the policies for how you use Digg and how we treat your privacy on Digg are very important to us. As part of this release, we have updated our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, which we encourage you to check out. Some highlights to note:

The best way to learn more about these changes is to try out Digg Profiles for yourself. Visit Digg.com, login, and click the Profile button at the top of any page on the site.

Cheers,
The Digg Crew

Local Directory Progress

I’ve been working on my local city directory for about the past two weeks. It combines two popular Content Management Systems.

In the root directory of the site is Wordpress, which will act as an article directory, event calender, photo directory, etc for the city. It will have some of the flashier, more fun, introspective look at things to do in the area and hits/tips from an insider’s perspective. The left hand sidebar add features with various widgets and the right hand sidebar will be one large text widget.

In this text widget I will feature an alphabetical list of text links that lead directly to categories in the other CMS I am using - PHPMyDirectory. My first experience with this directory has been a bit difficult as there are a lot of ins and outs of working with it but, it’s a lot like learning Wordpress for the first time. Luckily, I found a friend on the support forums and we’ve been helping each other out with various tasks over the last few weeks. (Shout outs Cindy!)

The most difficult part of this whole endeavor (thus far, fingers crossed) has been matching my Wordpress Theme and PHPMyDirectory Template to create a seamless integration. I don’t want users to feel like they’ve navigated from one site to another. And, I’m really really really close… for the most part I’m making simple style changes on each to improve their looks. I also got a tool from KrazyJosh on WickedFire forums which can scrape a specific category from a city on YellowPages.com and put all the information into a neat and tidy CSV for easy uploading. Creating the listings is going to be SOOO much easier now.

I’m excited because I have another great domain sitting on the shelf ready for a local directory. I also have 2 other domains waiting for national “niche” industry guides so the success of this directory could mean some really big things down the road.

Something I’m going to look into is using direct mail for promotion. Since I already have the contact information for thousands of businesses who I’m putting into this directory for free… why not send them a letter to let them know. And while I’m at it, tell them how they can upgrade their listings. Not only will it drive traffic to the site but it SHOULD lead to advertising sales, return links and a bit of buzz too. That is… if the letter is well written, intriguing and persuasive. That’s what I consider a strength so I’m eager to get to that step.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be researching the costs of direct mail promotion so you can look forward to a post on that. There are positives and a negatives with what I plan to do. First of all it can be expensive to purchase lists but I’ve got the companies in CSV form already so my list is free. Secondly, it’s targeted because I’m telling these companies they have ALREADY gotten something for free. I’m pretty sure most of them reading the letter will check out the site. The downfall is that since I’m not purchasing the list I don’t have a name/contact info… that means a smaller percentage of people will OPEN the envelope if it’s from someone they don’t know or care about.  Fortunately, I’ve got a pretty killer domain name and if I print nice looking envelopes emblazoned with my domain name in large letters… I’m pretty sure they’ll give it a peek.

This is a project I’m pretty darn excited to work on… as usual… I just wish I had more time. My girlfriend is headed to Las Vegas this week (newly un-single as of about a month ago) so it’s a great excuse to do TONS and TONS of work.

The Zip Submit Network

Every once and awhile I see something big hit the news and I’ll rush to register a domain name to make a little coin off my currency. Two times over the past several months I registered a domain for the pure purpose of generating zip submit leads.

I first learned the concept of meshing these “current events” and zip submits from the owner of Copeac - Mike. The idea is to take advantage of a keyword that is likely getting a ton of searches with little competition. You filter this traffic to a landing page that is an online “poll”. Or at least it seems to be.

The landing page basically allows the user to vote on their “opinion” and win a fabulous prize such as a $500 Visa Gift card. No matter what they vote for they are taken to the exact same place - the affiliate offer. You landing page is designed to look exactly like the affiliate offer they are taken to and they feel comfortable to simply fill in their zip and keep clicking. Seamless integration should maximize your conversion rate and therefore profit.

A Working Example

Last week there was breaking news about OJ Simpson and his alledged “robbery” of sports collectible items in a Las Vegas hotel. I thought, “WOW this thing is going to EXPLODE and it was only announced an hour ago!” So I rushed to dotster to see what type of domain I could grab.

I considered a few dot coms but realize I spend way too much on useless domains and all I needed was keywords in the domain. So what did I choose?

Introducing www.OJSimpsonSteals.info - haha yeah I know pretty funny… but I thought it had some huge potential with the proper PPC campaign behind it. In the two screenshots below you’ll see my landing page and the actual affiliate page. I think I did a pretty darn good job keeping the pages next to identical.

My landing page:

oj simpson stealing

Affiliate Offer:

OJ Simpson Affiliate Offer

I probably should have made that bottom stripe the same color with the gradient… oh well.  If you scroll down on my landing page you’ll see I posted the article that was on Yahoo… it’s way below the fold though so people don’t get distracted and actually do anything besides vote.

So I set up a PPC campaign with the following 4 main keywords:

oj
oj simpson
o.j.
o.j. simpson

In another column I made a list of all the other words I could possibly associate with the event. Things like: steal, robbery, las vegas, casino, sports memorabilia, heist, stolen, etc…  Then, using the tool, I created a list of every combination of the 4 main keywords and the describing words. I copy and pasted into adwords with an ad group for regular, quotes and brackets and let it rip!

Now zip submits are ALL about the math. Here is what I figured:

Going by these numbers, suppose we are able to generate 1,000 clicks over the course of a day and we’ve spent $50 for this traffic. If 10% of these visitors actually fill out the zip submit that’s 100 leads. At $1.50 a lead that’s $150 revenue. That means we’ve made $100 profit a day… NOT BAD!

Unfortunately, the math didn’t quite work out that way. I was playing with CPC amounts and instead of paying .05 per click I was paying .10 per click. By the time I realized this I had accrued 100 clicks for $10 and essentially broken even. I went back to change my CPC bids but the minimum had been raised to at LEAST 10 cents in some cases up to .50 cents and a dollar… I was simply priced out of a profit margin. The only way the campaign would be profitable would be to increase the conversion rate or decrease the CPC.

Increasing the conversion rate isn’t where the dough is here… the two pages match close enough. So how can I reduce my CPC? First of all my Quality Score probably sucks for a number of reasons. It’s a one page site - how about a privacy policy, terms & conditions, contact us and other bs pages to make it seem more official to google?  That would certainly do some good. What about finding cheaper sources of traffic… I haven’t even TRIED Adcenter, Yahoo Search marketing or even 3rd tier engines. Duh.

Hmmmm. It hadn’t taken me too long to get this campaign off the ground but I was dealing with a BRAND NEW domain that google absolutely did not trust with no incoming links very few pages and pretty much only hijacked content.  Then I got to thinking.

What if I had ONE site DEDICATED to zip submits and I added a couple new campaigns every week. Within one year I could potentially have 100+ zip submit campaigns running concurrently at mydomainname.com/keyword-title-here. I could put a list of every single offer in the footer along with a privacy policy and all that jazz to interlink the entire site and make it a little lovlier for the search engines. Who knows, maybe even add a blog in the folder doing RSS Autoposts to make it seem like new content gets added all the time. Whatever.

Alright Mr. Zip Submits… you’re going to have to take a back seat for a little while until I clear some of this other stuff off my plate. I’ve done 3 campaigns for zip submits and all 3 have broken even and paid for their domain. To take it to the next level I’m going to have to put in some solid work every week. But… I think this could be a winning concept. I just hope by the time I get back around to it zip submits haven’t become extinct. In the meantime, I’ll be searching for an adequate domain name!

Let’s Play A Game…

Called how many days in a row can I make at least one post? Leave your guess as a comment and the winner will get $20 (via paypal). The contest will begin when I make my next post and, at that time, no more entries will be recieved.

I have a bunch of reasons for doing this but summarizing the main two:

Cmon now… first things first.

QUESTION: HOW MANY CONSECUTIVE DAYS (STARTING WITH THE NEXT POST) WILL I MAKE A POST?

YOUR ANSWER: ?????

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