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Using Twitter as an Effective Business Tool

Bob Angus — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 22:05:23 +0000

I have missed the Twitter train for long enough. One of my January objectives is to make Twitter an effective part of my suite of business tools. Until now, the extent of my tweets have been random oddities through my Facebook profile, like “Teaching my kid to appreciate the Ramones.” I want to use Twitter as a communication tool to add value to my business relationships and improve results through those connections.

I have bookmarked a ton of posts related to Twitter and how to it can be used to help develop business connections. Of those posts, I highly recommend reading Caroline Middlebrook’s Big Juicy Twitter Guide. In particular, Section 2 delves into the benefits that Twitter can deliver for your business.

It is well known that the more contact you make with a customer, the more likely you are to make a sale. These days it is much more ‘in vogue’ to sell by not selling, rather than doing the hard-push sales pitch. Twitter is a way of doing that. With Twitter you can chat to people in a friendly way and give them nudges and hints about what you’re doing in your world. Look at the benefits:

It reminds them that you exist

It shows them that you are human

It allows you to mention new offers immediately

It allows you to form a more casual relationship

Also, Dan Zarrella just did a guest post on Read/Write Web called 10 Ways Twitter Can Boost Your Social News Profile. More than just trying to boost the size of your connections (which is something that anyone can game), the article offers several valuable tips that increase the value of those relationships. The most important… Ask questions. While Dan focuses on asking questions as a form of “Twitter-jacking,” I see the questions as the core to relationship building. Find out what your customers and connections want by asking. Then give it to them.

There is much to learn about Twitter. If you have a post that you have found insightful or if you want to let me know what your favorite Ramones song is, give me a tweet.

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5 Tips to Negotiate with Domain Name Buyers for Higher Profits

Bob Angus — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 22:43:06 +0000

Are you selling a domain name? Did you put your domain portfolio up for sale through Moniker or post it on Sitepoint Marketplace? Do you have visions of big profits from flipping websites you have quickly built up? Great. Now, you need to be prepared to negotiate with buyers. Your negotiation skills help you get the price that you want or even higher. Plus, the buyer is happy with what they paid and are likely to do profitable business with you in the future.

Here are 5 tips that I have found invaluable when negotiating with domain name and website buyers.

1. The Low Ball Bid

Most deals start with the seller asking for a high price and the buyer offering an insanely low bid. Do not get offended or put off by a low ball offer. If somebody has made the effort to make a bid, then they are interested in your property.

The key is to identify one or more elements of your domain that the buyer values. For example, do they own a portfolio of other domains in your niche? If so, then you have something in common to build on. You can move forward with the negotiation by demonstrating your value, not just haggling price.

2. Moving Forward Based on Value

When you ask questions or research other properties owned by the buyer, you can identify what is important to them. This approach helps significantly during the negotiation or when you run into a roadblock. You have to ask how/what/why questions to diffuse any roadblocks and turn them around to increase the value to the buyer. This process is what salespeople call objection handling.

DomainerPro.com had a good example in his How to Negotiate Domain Name Prices post.

Countering Bluffs: I would add that you should learn to recognize and counter the most common bluffs that buyers use. If a buyer says, “I can’t go any higher,” don’t give in, and don’t call him a liar either. Instead counter with a reasoned argument like, “I understand what you’re saying, but this domain name will ultimately save you money by bringing you targeted leads. The extra money is worth it.”

3. Always Answer Questions

Potential buyers will always have questions about your domain. You will receive even more questions when you are selling an entire website. It is important that you answer these questions thoroughly and quickly. The buyer is asking for details so that they can better value what they are willing to pay. More likely than not, a detailed response from you will help increase the final selling price.

4. Always Answer Questions Honestly

Do not play games with buyers. If you think that you can maximize your selling price by lying and by sayging that your website is not an auto-generated, blackhat SEO quickie, then you are fooling yourself. Buyers know all the tricks and will bail on a deal if you try to snow them. It is okay to be honest. A quickie, no-effort website will not get top dollar, but then again it shouldn’t.

5. Build Relationships for the Future

If you are interested in making money online through a repeatable domain flipping process, then you need to establish and grow relationships. The more key, trusted connections that you have, the more profitable and repeatable you domaining business will be. Just like any business.

Do not burn bridges by weaseling over $100 or even $1000. A single solid relationship can help your business profit 10 or 20 times that. Keep providing value and sharing with your partners and they will return the favor in spades over the long run.

Do you have any other negotiation insights or stories that others can learn from?

Buying a blog is different than buying a website

Bob Angus — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 01:27:23 +0000

Earlier this year, I did a post on Flipping Website Real Estate for Profit. The market for buying and selling websites is even hotter today. The Sitepoint marketplace and Digital Point marketplace are flowing with buyers and sellers. Buying a website, building it up, and selling it for more is a business model that works. However, I am seeing more pure blogs in the mix. If you are thinking about buying a blog, be careful. The metrics you use and value that you place on them must be different than a standard website.

Hot Topic

I have read three poignant posts this week that have led me to write this post.

Devlounge – The Dangers of Buying a Blog: David gets right to the point – expect to lose approximately 33% of the current traffic right away. Unique visitors are not eyeballs, they are readers. You have to value why those readers are visiting the site and if that readership can be maintained.

Portfolio.com – What’s Drudge Worth? – by way of ProBlogger.Net: Duff estimates that The Drudge Report should be valued between $10-20 million based on eyeballs, ad sales, and his mom’s opinion. However, he goes on to say that it is worth zilch if you cannot lock Matt Drudge into a long-term writing contract. I could not agree more.

Dosh Dosh – Building an Online Empire: Of the 16 website types Maki mentions that you can buy/sell, none of them were a pure blog. He lists a product review blog, but that type of site is more dependent on the product than the author.

There are many more helpful articles if you do a Google search. Or I also recommend reading related forum posts on WickedFire, Sitepoint or Digital Point.

The Metrics

Before buying a blog or any website, you need to know the following metrics:

Unique visits per month
Page views per month
Feed subscriptions
Posts per month
Monthly Revenue
Google PageRank
Alexa rank
Date established

Of course, you should ask for the trends and seasonality of these metrics. A snapshot in time or peaks can look great, but they can be pumped up and a single number does not tell the whole story.

Beside statistics, you should also have a clear understanding of the intellectual and technical property you are acquiring. You are not buying a domain. You are buying a website and everything that goes with it, including posts, comments, media, databases, customized themes, etc.

Recommendations

There is no cookie-cutter, rule of thumb for valuation, like $10 per post or 10x monthly revenues. Here is a swag bid estimate calculation that I use:

Your valuation calculation should start by defining a financial benchmark. Estimate the monthly profit (preferred) or revenue per thousand unique visits or subscriber that you are achieving for your current blog properties.
Then use that value and apply it to the same measure for the blog in question… less 50%. Remember David said 33%. I go more conservative when making financial estimations.
Finally, my bid would be approximately 12 months of that estimated profit or 6 months of the estimated revenue. That is my personal valuation rule based on my desire to be rolling full speed with a site within a year.

For example, let’s say your current blogs make $2 profit per thousand unique visits per month and the potential purchase has 20k uniques per month. Then I would expect to make $20 per month ($2 x 20 x 50%). My bid would be in the range of $200-250 (or $20 x 12).

In addition to making a good quantitative decision, you should also be prepared with an action plan to minimize readership erosion and to increase your ramp to profitability. Specifically, make sure you line up engaging writers and content to hit the ground running and get your promotional methods implemented.

Now I am off to see if there is anything on Sitepoint or Digital Point that catches my eye!

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Updating bobangus.com

Bob Angus — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 03:26:50 +0000

Welcome to the new bobangus.com! It’s time to step up with my blog, much like my new personal fitness challenge. I am going to be doing some major updates to this site over the next few weeks. That does not mean I am doing a total redesign or changing the fundamental objective of bobangus.com. I will be taking a new, aggressive approach to creating valuable content and improving the site through some well-known best practices.

Rather than just jumping in and making these changes, I always like to have a plan. Here is a summary of my action plan for improving this site…

The Goal: This site will not be yet another affiliate marketing blog or search marketing blog or blogging blog.

The Action Plan:

(More) content is king – Simply put, I need to post more and provide more valuable, actionable material for you. I participate in the most dynamic industry, internet marketing, and I learn something new or have key lessons reinforced every day. I have to share that experience. More importantly, I have to share it in a way that helps you to take action.
Grow traffic – I have to follow the fundamental, well-known steps that all successful bloggers practice to drive traffic. Darren Rowse’s Problogger.net and other sites dedicated to blogging have been a fantastic source for ideas and guidance.
Track and learn – For the longest time, I did not have any website analytics tools on this site. The data that is contained in Google Analytics and other tools is invaluable, because I can learn and adjust based on that information. I have installed the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin for Wordpress to easily enable the Google’s free site analytics.
Keep trying new stuff – I want this site to be a sandbox. I will be constantly trying out new technologies, ideas and fun stuff. Of course, too much experimentation and cluttering in the main posting area is disruptive. Therefore, I am building a new page called Bob’s Sandbox. Check it out.

Now it’s time to make it happen.

Linkbaiting and Freebaiting

Bob Angus — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 23:37:38 +0000

Viral marketing is now a cornerstone of most brand campaigns and is a line item in every marketing budget. In the blogsphere, viral marketing in the form of linkbaiting is often sighted as the primary method to driving traffic to a blog. If done well, linkbaiting is second only to great content in growing readers.

Today, there are a few excellent posts that provide the details of what linkbaiting is and deliver actionable steps to leverage this viral method.

Darren Rowse at ProBlogger.Net provided a laundry list of his posts on linkbaiting best practices. He also links to several other prominent SEO blogs on their approaches. Here is the link to the post:

What is Linkbait?

Darren started his post by referencing Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz) and his post on Yahoo Publisher Network. Here is the link to that post:

Leveraging Linkbait

Lastly, I checked out a post from Dosh Dosh on a twist to linkbaiting called freebaiting. The concept of freebaiting makes me a little squeamish. Much like advertisers questioning lead quality from incentive-based affiliates, I was initially skeptical that freebaiting would just drive traffic, but not readers. However, it is too easy to throw the baby out with the bath water here – as it is with incentive affiliates too. Freebaiting can provide a powerful viral vortex to your content or services. If you do it in such a way that you provide real value with your free offer, then you can grow regular readers of your blog. Here is the link to the post:

Want Traffic & Backlinks? Try Freebaiting

Driving Traffic and Building Readership

Bob Angus — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 05:35:16 +0000

There are many how to blog resources available. There is just as much information on how to market your blog. Two posts that I recently read and studied thoroughly stood out to me. Interestingly, these posts came from the SEO crowd where there is a great deal of community and sharing, with the intentions of helping everyone get results.

First, Rand at SEOmoz had a popular post back in August 2006 titled “21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic.” All 21 tactics are directly actionable steps any blogger can utilize. One critical learning that I will spend time on is to pay attention to my analytics. Not only should one know where readers are coming from, you can learn what posts your readers really enjoy and when they are most frequently reading those posts. The resulting lesson is to write more of what your readers want and to never miss posting on your busiest time of the week.

Second, ProBlogger.Net had a guest blogger all last week – Tony Hung. In his post “How to Market Your Blog in 2007,” Tony lists 41 ways to kickstart the marketing of a blog. I am going to be busy implementing almost all of these great action items too. One incredible idea is to publish your own original research. Don’t simply be the 217th blog to post on a major news story. Come up with an engaging question or hypothesis, research the topic thoroughly, and then publish the findings.

Wait. I didn’t mention link baiting, social bookmarking, actively posting comments on other blogs and forums, or joining a blog carnival. That is because those items are simple, must-do steps that have a single focus – drive traffic. Those tactics do not build readership. What is very clear from Rand and Tony’s posts is that to succeed you need to work hard and focus on your readers. You are blogging to build readership by engaging them with great content, not by being traffic guru.

To me, you are not an impression, a clickthrough, or a potential click on an AdSense ad. You are reading this post right now. I hope that you enjoy what I write about and comeback often.

Here are the links to the aforementioned posts:
21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic by Rand on SEOmoz
How to Market Your Blog in 2007 by Tony on ProBlogger.Net

Flipping Website Real Estate for Profit

Bob Angus — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 05:49:31 +0000

You’ve heard of flipping a house as a profit strategy in the real estate market, right? First, you buy a fixer-upper house for a dirt cheap, below market price. Second, you spend some time and money sprucing up the home. New paint, replace carpets, mow the lawn, etc. Then, you put the shiny new gem back on the market and sell it for a sweet profit. Well, the same strategy works when you invest in website real estate.

Way back in August, Super Affiliate Marketing Blog had a great post on flipping web real estate. Jon details three key redesign elements to turning a low traffic dud into a website worth buying. First, the design…

Is it too crappy to look at? Do you need to change it around? Chances are pretty good that you will need to make some alterations. Whether you should redo the whole thing is again, up to your taste and budget. Remember, you already spent $500 on this, and your goal is $3k, so you don’t want to go overboard with unnecessary beautification operations.

Then, Jon drills down on steps #2 and #3 – usability and monetization. Mixed in with these steps, he gives invaluable guidance that can give you the edge to maximize your ROI. For example, focus on generating statistics like unique impressions, page rank on Google and Alexa, and some basic contextual advertising revenue. Then, provide a mini business plan with current site metrics and future projections in your “for sale” message. Help make it simple for a buyer to pay top dollar.

Also, it is vital that there is an active marketplace to buy and sell web real estate. Of course, the real differentiator that maximizes your overall profits is to understand the potential buyer and don’t burn bridges…

Remember, that even though you are selling a property that doesn’t really interest you much in holding onto, you are selling it to someone who finds it as a good deal or investment, so you must treat it with respect, because this property may be someone’s baby sometime soon…

… put some contextual ads onto it if you like, get the stats program working again, collect as much real data as possible on the current situation of the site, and then make projections of 3, 6, 10 and 12 months. Base those numbers ONLY on the current situation of the site. If you just go off and make numbers up, they won’t buy anything else from you ever again, and you may also sabotage your reputation on your first deal, which can suck.

Here is the link to the full post. The marketplace and profits are there for you. Check out Biz MP for developed websites or The Domain Name Aftermarket by GoDaddy for just domains.

5 steps to maximize domain parking revenue

Bob Angus — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 06:06:19 +0000

The result you are shooting for from your domain name parking activity is revenue. That is it. You can’t – and should never even want to – do PPC arbitrage. Plus, the only investment expense is the annual domain name fee itself. Most domain parking services are free. So optimizing for ROI is a really simple equation. Just focus on the top line – revenue.

Here are five basic steps to drive your domain name parking revenue:

Select a high traffic domain name
Use a .com TLD
Optimize keywords
Use multiple landing pages
Don’t take a flat rate

Select a high traffic domain name
Domain parking revenue is first and foremost about type-in traffic. Therefore, the best way to get any sizable traffic is to choose a domain name based on keywords or phrases that someone is likely to just type in, rather than do a keyword search on a search engine.

What works best? First, think like someone doing a keyword search. You can use common keyword selection tools to come up with ideas, identify common misspells, and estimate the potential success of your domain. Second, single word and short phrase domains get the highest type-in traffic. Based on those two criteria, my ultimatetoilets.com domain is doomed if I stick with domain parking.

Use a .com TLD
The TLD (top level domain) also has a significant impact on traffic. Domains ending in .com receive the most type-in traffic by a wide margin. Someone looking for Bob Angus is significantly more likely to type in bobangus.com than bobangus.net or the “personal” bobangus.name. The only extra consideration would be country-specific TLDs like .co.uk or the new .mobi TLD for mobile sites.

Optimize keywords
Take advantage of your keyword research again by providing a list of relevant keywords to your domain parking service. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about what they may have been looking for when typing in your domain. By presenting information that visitors want upfront, you reduce the number of clicks before clicking on an ad. This leads to greater conversion rates… and more revenue.

For services like Domain Sponsor, these keywords define your high-level advertisement categories and help further with the automatic optimization process. Until I put in keywords for ultimatebathroom.com, the automatic category selections displayed were all poker and gambling-related items. What do you think my conversion rate was for that? Zilch.

Use multiple landing pages
Cycling multiple landing pages and even custom ones helps you test what works and feeds the advertisement optimization engine. Some domain parking landing pages are completely lame. Assume that visitors are internet savvy. They recognize a link farm or lame site right away and quickly move on without clicking one of your ads. Similar to keywords, you can use a landing page design that shows you care why the visitor is on your site and that you are trying to add value.

Don’t take a flat rate
Your revenues come from pay-per-click advertisements. Just like Google Adsense, you should get paid more for ads presented based on popular keywords. Mortgage-related ads pay out more than ads for potpourri candles. Don’t accept a flat PPC fee from you domain parking service. Make sure that you are getting paid based on a percentage of the total advertising revenue.

Once you get these basics down, the next step is start buying a ton of domain names. And don’t fall into the “all the good domains are taken” mindset. With a little effort, you can capture some significant income.

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Welcome to bobangus.com

Bob Angus — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 06:20:27 +0000

bobangus.com is the home for the network of community sites managed by Bob Angus. The site provides the latest news, opinions and results of the technology innovations, marketing programs, and business models that are applied on the network.

More specifically, I love everything about web business models, the latest marketing programs and new web development technologies. But what I love the most is results. So I’ll be sharing the details of what’s really working well, what’s not driving results, and why.
I also want to here your feedback on what is working for you and what you think of the network of community sites. Go to the Network Directory and check out a site that interests you!