Well worth 5 minutes of your time:

thanks Fi for the vid

Show me the money £££

I’ve been looking at ‘web 2.0′ sites and ideas surrounding how they can possibly make any money. This interesting project has loads of nice ideas and in late July some of these are going to get built!

Social Innovation Camp

Some of my thinking on this:

Just looking at this list: http://scotland.sicamp.org/?page_id=47

Nearly all of these ideas are based around exchanges, but as ever with this kind of thing its going to be critical mass that gets them off the ground.

So I reckon the basis of a great web 2.0 marketing architecture is:

- Site is of use to a niche group of the web searching public. You have to start niche since there is too much competition for anything mass market.

- Get mass decentralised participation (wiki’s) so it self generates. More is more whe you think about the long tail and the easy by which you can find stuff on teh most obscure subject.

- Organise your site so engines can get in and comprehensively index.  Search engines typically account for about 50-60% of a well built site’s free traffic and they are critical to the word of mouth effect on the internet.

- Make the content very ‘linkable’ so the engines and ‘connectors/mavens’ (bloggers etc) give these sites authority. Linkable is another word for socially acceptable on the internet. The more social standing you have, the more prominence you will gain.

- Make sure the meme behind the idea is very strong. If you can put it into 6 words, great! The simpler, the more useful, the greater chance it has of spreading

- Build the site so its in the self interest of the user to pass it on.  The clever thing hotmail, gmail, various IM’s, user reviews on Amazon, facebook apps, facebook, linkedin, any social network site has, is more people is more for me.

- Low barrier to participation, high barrier to exit. So its easy to get started with and hard to leave. Think web hosting, email accounts, photo upload sites facebook. In fact anything where you get a ton ov value, where you invest a lot of time, where its reall hassle to move on.

Then you have a good chance of reaching critical mass and thus making the site worthy of taking revenue as a middleman. Obviously people don’t readily pay for information, but if the site offers enough utility, then there is a space for charging:

- To advertise if the exposure is great enough, but craigslist shows us that there are only certain things that are chargable (cars, jobs, property) I think the caveat is that people will pay if they are sure they will get  a sale, otherwise they just go where the risk is lowest i.e. a free site

- To pay for the utility a site offers, like flickr pro. The catch is that you really have to offer something exceptional.

- If your informaiton can make individuals a profit, then its also chargable. Webmasterworld.com / expertsexchange  /ft.com / wallstjournal.

- When you reach critical mass and you are the only real choice…you can charge, but only enough to make users not go somewhere else / or where you stifle usage and so kill off the critical mass.

Since ad revenues have tanked and probably will continue to do so for a long time (or ever), there is no point in depending on ad revenue for income. Besides, until ads are really relevant, they just fall into the old school disruptive model of marketing. And thats really not web 2.0   

I’ve been on a cool trip to San Jose SES where i got to meet some really cool people and meet some suppliers I now plan to work with.

Below are a few pictures from the trip!

[flickr]set:72157606972365819[/flickr]

Wikipedia:

Online, the use of the em measurement has become more common; with the development of Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS), the W3C best practices recommendations within HTML and online markup now call for web pages to be based on scalable designs, using a relative unit of measurement (such as the em measurement), rather than a fixed one such as pixels (“px”) or points.

the EM calculator gives you the EM to pixel comparison

On the fly tool (add in a URL and go) HERE

Download old verisons of internet explorer HERE ( I found this link on About.com and downlaoded the software, so its safe)

And make sure you go HERE for instructions on how to run both internet explorer ie6 & ie7 together

By the way, in case you get upset and scream privacy ! ! ! bear in mind companies like hitwise, comscore and nielson net ratings, sell this data for an absurd amount of money to businesses so they can work out ‘user site pathways’.

I hav’nt tried this tool yet, but I will (not here) but on a big’ish commercial site I work on. My understanding where users have been before my site, I can then either target them from an SEO point of view i.e. rank where they do, or get some advertising on these sites

The tool in question is Spyjax

The footprint is the keywords they rank for.

So ive been looking through SEOBook.com and in this post, I found:

? SEODigger.com (find the keywords competitors rank on)

urltrends.com?  (get a handle on how competitor site are building links etc over time)

Having looked at several sites, SEODigger looks really useful. Why? because it means I can pick off certain targets and keywords I hadn’t thought of before. Interestingly, if i run the info through my copy of TheDowser, which uses yahoo search volume data and through google adwords keyword finder, i can get my head around the search volumes and relative competitiveness of certain keywords.

The main point is that when you come across a very aggressive competitor who you know has a ton of SEO resource, by using SEODigger, you can see their footprint very easily. Assuming they are in the same space as you, you can be fairly sure those keywords are worth money.

Once you have a target, its easier to hit it !

As you may know form your stats, you will see that about 1/2 of all internet explorer users are still on the totally CSS non-compliant internet explorer 6 – whjich makes for BIG headaches !

Anyway I have found this cool site : http://websitetips.com/tools/ full of browser compatibility tools

the one I have used is http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/ which covers all the more ‘modern’ verison of IE

a. the links are clean:
You roll your mouse pointer over the links in question and see of the link address is the same as the advertised destination. (If you look at the bottom left corner of firefox, you will see the link address) If its not, then its not a ‘clean’ link.

b. they have ‘nofollow’
This is a tag which means ‘search engines don’t go here’ – the problem is that on default firefox, unless you do ‘view source’ and trawl through the code, you won’t see the offending tag…bummer

Aside: I’m a big firefox fan, in fact most of the power user community seem to rave about it and for good reason!
Why? because you can do neat tricks like this….
Spot that nofollow tag fast !

(for XP users with firefox 2.0)
go here: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\res\html.css ( or where you have put your firefox install)

and open it with whatever editor you uee (wordpad does nicely)

and add this at the bottom of the page

a[rel="nofollow"]
{
background-color: red !important;
color: white !important;
text-decoration: none !important;
}

Save and restart firefox and youre done !

Thanks to http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-01-19-n34.html for the css and the basic inspiration on this.

Well you can here : Hooglesat2

See on the menu on the left.

This toolkit is by no means a finished list, I’m always finding new tools to work with the help my search engine optimization and search engine promotional work.

I have catalogued each of the tools by the type of job I need to do, that’s why some tools overlap with different types of task. The odd thing about these tools are that they are most often free despite their great usefullness. There are web sites that stand out, one of them is www.webconfs.com which has a great selection of SEO and SEP web tools.

On balance I think the most useful combination is the key word density cloud and the global and sense tester mixed with the clusty keyword cloud tool. This is because it helps you determine the correct theme for the web page that you’re working on and if you want to be seen by search engines correct theme is very important .

Adsense tool: http://www.acmetech.com/

Clusty Keyword Cloud: http://cloud.clusty.com/

Keyword Cloud: http://www.webconfs.com/