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10KaYear

Mar 11 2015

Links, Hucksters, and What’s Next

Ever feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of marketing, communications, and social media…stuff? Join the club, bub. Here’s some advice.Yesterday, I was minding my business here on the Internet, making things happen, when I received an email that told me I had a new comment on one of my sites. It was interesting in that it was an obvious cut-and-paste job: some of the text was verbatim from other emails I had received for the better part of the past year. And it got me thinking that I should probably write about this subject…so, let’s talk about Links, Hucksters, and What’s Next.

Links

The “Links” I’m talking about are the ones offered by the spammers that try to comment on blogs. If you don’t run a blog, here’s a quick example of how those spam comments usually look:

I ԁdo trust all the concepts you’ve introdսced on your post.
They are really convincіng annd can definitely work.
Νonetheless, the posts are tօo brief fоr novices.
Maay just you please prolong them a bit from neҳt time?
Thank yoս forr the post.

And they’re trying to get me to link to some site and then they’ll get the positive Google mojo that everyone who is in the SEO business says you really need to be successful. (If you use a service such as Akismet, you won’t have to worry about actually seeing 99% of these emails; they’ll go straight into your blog’s spam folder.)

Because of the age of this site – we’ve been at it for awhile and have a page rank of 2/10; nothing to write home about, granted, but better than 0/10, which the vast majority of sites receive – we are popular with the spamsters, who want the “authority” we can give them by sending a link their way. And, because of the hucksters in the SEO Consultant industry, the offshore linkbots like to send these sorts of emails our way. All the time.

Hucksters

Much has been made of hucksters in a variety of online industries: Social Media Gurus who will sell you a bill of goods but never deliver; SEO Consultants who will promise you the moon and a zillion backlinks; and general ne’er-do-wells who claim that their way is the way to riches.

But I can tell you from watching these industries for the last…what…9 years?…that there is a maxim that rings true:

The things that take the most effort have the most payoff.

Any tactic that someone tries to sell you – “Buy backlinks for cheap!” – isn’t bound to payoff and can actually get you penalized by Google. The value is in not just the hustle, but the tactics that take time and are in line with a sound strategy.

What’s Next?

Before we get to the takeaway from this article, a promotional announcement: we at Area 224 have launched three sites that we’re spending a great deal of time on. But we’re not expecting immediate success – and you shouldn’t be expecting immediate success from any of the garbage the hucksters are peddling.

Metasip.coA couple years ago, we created Metasip as a “Yelp for Alcohol.” We’re still working on that site – and let me tell you…it takes time, energy, and some sound thinking. At around the same time 10KaYear was born – and the whole premise of that site is that sound personal finance doesn’t happen overnight.

Our latest development is Metakitchen – an offshoot of Metasip and less of a rating site, more of a hub for food and beverage bloggers. That’s going to take some time and some actual work: we’re not planning on getting thousands of bloggers on the site immediately, and we’re not planning on thousands of food brands wanting access to those bloggers. It’s a slow burn.

This is one reason we have blogged less and less here at HQ, at least on this site – but we’re blogging more and more over at the other sites.

Links, Hucksters, and What’s Next

Now, the takeaway: Links take time. Hucksters are to be avoided. What’s Next?

Metakitchen.coIt’s time for the actual hard work, those things that take effort but will bring us the eventual payoff. We’re not after a get rich quick scheme here: but with a little sound planning and an even sounder strategy, we’re aiming for a pretty good result. And you should consider the same: don’t take shortcuts, don’t assume that the easy way is going to be the right way, and…

Don’t be afraid of a little hard work.

Written by Dave · Categorized: blogging, SEO · Tagged: 10KaYear, metakitchen, metasip

Sep 06 2014

Does Facebook Advertising Work?

Hi, Gentle Readers. We’re busy working on a couple other sites here at HQ. And, on one of them, we dig deep – really deep – on the “Should I Advertise on Facebook?” question. This originally appeared over at 10Kayear.com. We thought it might be more a propos for the readership here, so we’re sharing.

We’ve told you that we’re striving for radical transparency here – we want to show you what works and what doesn’t. And one of the things we’ve had asked of us countless times: Does Facebook Advertising Work?

Time, then, to go Behind the Curtain on Facebook Likes. Specifically, if you were to do a campaign, and do one with a limited budget, what are the expectations? And can you actually get anything other than just Facebook Likes?

79 percent quick memeThat’s actually a complex question, and the answers depend on a few factors – not just how much you’re spending on Facebook. For instance:

  1. Do you have content that you can point people to, or are you still building your audience?
  2. Is there a quid pro quo – well, as much of a quid pro quo as is allowed with this new “Like Gate” stuff going on? (Learn more over at Tabfoundry – from the ever-cool Francisco at Social Mouths.)
  3. And what does your content strategy look like in the days and weeks to come?

Again, we don’t have all the answers. But here are a couple experiments from the “test and learn” school of Facebook Marketing.

Experiment A: Metasip “Boost Post” Campaign

If you don’t know about our Metasip site, (1) where have you BEEN? and (2) you can learn more over at Metasip.co – where we’d love it if you signed up for the email list. Seriously, we’d love that.

Put simply, we’re building a tool that is “Yelp for Alcoholic Beverages.” We’ve had some success early on, at least with getting content out there and rating things in a variety of categories. (We know – there are countless wine apps, and a beer thing called Untappd, and there are whisky (and whiskey) and spirits sites and blogs and everything else. Our aim is a little of that, but a whole lot of ratings. Stay tuned.)

Without a doubt, our most successful post – to the tune of 300 visits on a Thursday in July and 600 visits the next day – was one about Buying Booze at Costco. So we thought we’d use the “Boost Post” capability and see what that would get us. Here are the results:

Metasip Boost Post Campaign
Metasip Boost Post Campaign

You’ll see that…well…$20 may not have been the best use of dollars here.

If you want to slice and dice the numbers to score a few metrics to make yourself happy, you COULD say that your paid reach divided by your budget meant a “CPM” – or “Cost Per Thousand” in the ad world – of $13.31.

Careful, Young Jedi. Using that sort of calculation this early in the game, and when you’re not dealing with a large budget, is actually a little dangerous, we think. There’s just simply not enough to go on – and, in the fullness of time, you will have a much better picture of your TRUE Marketing Cost. But we digress…

Those 57 “Actions” did not yield ONE additional email subscriber. They DID give us ONE additional Page Like, so our numbers are…a little better. Again, it’s early.

However…we didn’t set this up as a “like” campaign, we set it up to “Boost This Post.” So we did drive traffic to the page as a result – if you want to use Facebook’s “Reach” numbers (1502) and consider the actual link clicks as a “Conversion” (14), we got a conversion rate of 0.9% – less than 1/10 of one percent.

Before you ask – we micro-targeted who we were reaching out to. US-only, and those who are already interested in alcohol brands.

Stay tuned for further developments on this front.

Experiment B: 10KaYear Like Campaign

I think I liked this one best, specifically because of one number in the photo below:

Facebook Like Campaign
The 10KaYear FB Like Campaign

In case you missed it, we circled that number. It’s the Avg. Cost Per Page Like.

We were tracking this the whole time – as you’ll see up there, we ran a ten-day, $100 campaign – and that number was pretty consistent, not moving much above 60 cents, nor below 50. It netted out pretty well – and, while not in “big brand” spend territory, we think it gives us a nice little benchmark for future campaigns.

 ALSO: Do not overlook mobile. At ALL. Of the traffic referred to our site by Facebook in the past 30 days, 79% of it was mobile.

Experiment C: 10KaYear Boost Post Campaign

This one was earlier in the month of August, and we decided to share it because there’s an opportunity to learn something from it. Right?

FB Boost Post
FB Boost Post Campaign for 10KaYear

As you see, “actions” appeared lower than Experiment A above, but we’re actually going to have to study the numbers from that first experiment…they don’t add up.

Our big takeaway here is the CPM number. Math tells us that it’s $8.56 as a CPM figure ($40 divided by 4672 to give you the cost per, then multiplied by 1000 to give you the CPM).

$8.56 CPM is nothing to sneeze at. Right?

Behind the Curtain on Facebook Likes: the Takeaways…

If you’re here for Personal Financial Advice – which this site does some of – you’re starting to catch on a theme: “Track Everything.”

And if you’re here for Business Launch Advice – which this post and the “Behind the Curtain” page are both meant to help with – you might catch on a theme: “Track Everything.”

Another theme for both: “Test and Learn.”

As we keep these Side Hustles of ours moving forward, we’re keen to keep learning from these types of tests. And we haven’t even begun that “ENGAGEMENT” process that all the marketing gurus talk about. Get people on board with your cause, then get them to do something with you – talk, share, ask questions, build communities. ENGAGE.

The takeaways: None of this happens overnight. Immediate results are for the extremely lucky. You do have to spend a little to build an audience. And you need an engagement strategy, a content marketing strategy, and a communications strategy behind it all. AND DON’T IGNORE MOBILE.

More to come on the rest of that down the road.

Written by Dave · Categorized: Facebook · Tagged: 10KaYear, Facebook Advertising

Aug 01 2013

How to Find an Extra $10,000

So we wrote another book!

How to Find an Extra 10000First, a little background for y’all. Earlier this year, we whipped up a site called “10KaYear,” with the goal of sharing money-saving and money-earning tips, big and small, that can help put an extra $10,000 in your pockets each year.

Well, thanks to gremlins, hackers, and whatnot, the site disappeared. But the content didn’t. So we decided to “bookify” it. (That’s a word.)

How to Find an Extra $10,000: A Stealth Guide to More Money, Better Health, and Living the Lifestyle You’ve Imagined

Okay, the title is a mouthful – but that’s what happens in this Google, Amazon, Keyword-friendly world we live in. And yes, we did just link to the book on Amazon.

We took our posts from10KaYear, refreshed some of the content, and broke it down into four categories:

  • Basics
  • Personal Finance
  • Saving & Investing
  • Unconventional Methods

It’s written in the snappy style you’ve come to expect from these “pages” on the Area 224 site, and it’s not just a little old e-book whipped up overnight – word count is in the five figures! Your investment is $7.00 (different price in places like the UK, Germany, and Brazil). I think it’s actually less in Canada.

We think you’ll enjoy it – and, if you’re an Amazon Prime member, you can borrow the book for free. Cool, eh?

Written by Dave · Categorized: Books · Tagged: $10, 000, 10KaYear, ten grand

Feb 08 2013

A Quick Hello From 10KaYear

The busier we get, the less we blog. Unless we are launching a blog. Then, the less we blog…here.

Announcing a new site: 10KaYear.com!

10KaYear
Clever little logo, no?

So Dave from Area 224 has been on a variety of breaks lately. Either it’s contract work, or other work, or launching yet another project.

And that was part of the inspiration for the new site – what if some of the things I’ve learned over the past (oh my goodness…) 7 years can be distilled into something you can put to good use?

Okay, that wasn’t all of the inspiration…

In the beginning of 2012, we partnered with a couple friends on the launch of NewFrugality.com – and that continues to go pretty well, thanks. But the tone over there is quite a bit different from what we’re envisioning for 10KaYear. For instance:

Find an Extra $10,000?

That might push the envelope just a little bit – or not far enough. At Area 224, we have focused on working with businesses that are a little bigger than just a mom and pop. And it’s a B2B-focused business we have – strategic communications advisors to emerging brands was our tagline before, and that’s pretty much true today. So if you’re the Area 224 client, $10,000 probably doesn’t seem like a lot of money.

But what if you’re everyone else?

  • Solopreneurs – the people who work by themselves, maybe occasionally tapping a colleague on the shoulders?
  • Small businesses that are doing six-figures but may never find themselves doing seven-figures?
  • And – this is probably the biggest group that will benefit from 10KaYear – the family, the single Mom or Dad, the retirees, the unemployed, the underemployed.

This is the money-saving and business advice site for everyone else.

Just a few days in, we think what we’ve talked about already is a good preview of what we’ll talk about in the days to come:

The Publishing Business Model – heck, everybody says they want to write a book, but does it really make sense? AND, the social media gurus who appear to always be launching their own book – can you replicate their “success?” 

Finding Money in the Couch Cushions – we don’t really think that you can find $10,000 in your couch. But…well, we think we’ve got some cool tips in that post.

“Congratulations, Your Loan Has Been Extinguished” – it happens to some homeowners and it could happen to you. Really.

So there you have it…

Now you know a little about the absence from regular blogging here, and the tone and tenor of the 10KaYear.com site.

We’d love to have you “pay” us a visit. (Get it? It’s about money? I used the word “pay!”)

See you there.

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Written by Dave · Categorized: blogging · Tagged: 10KaYear

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