Diorex

In the comments of my Affiliate Playbook post, I posted a link to SEO Blackhat’s list of 140 popular niches, by the looks of my outbound traffic, you guys were very intrigued by this.

Wanted to re-link to it for those who might not have seen it and follow-up with some comments about things to avoid or look for in a new niche.

Avoid -

Stuff to look for:

I am going to leave you with this thought, I have shared many times before. If you are picking a niche because you hear “so and so” is making a killing in it without regard for any of the above factors then you are setting yourself up for failure. You should be entering a niche because you have some sort of advantage or knowledge rather than because you are following the pack.

I am sure there are lots more things others can add to these lists based upon personal experience - feel free to share em.

Yahoo tries hard. So does the cheesy guy at the bar, does not mean either of them ever scores.

We recently ran the Yahoo Tune-Up that was available in one of our accounts. (SERoundtable talks a little about it here.)

This was a totally wasted effort, it was so off base that we just had a good laugh and moved on.

For instance:

This is obviously not ready for primetime and shows just how in touch Yahoo’s engineers, business managers and customer service people fail to even understand their own product.

Looking at GOOG stock after hours, it is once again at its all time highs of about $700 per share.

The metrics to me just do not make a ton of sense. It is trading at 54 times earnings and almost 20 times REVENUE, absolutely insane for a company thats growth curve has to slow and sooner rather than later.

Now I ask myself what major advertiser in this country or even the major economic countries is not yet advertising on Google. What company is going to come in and continue to push up CPC’s?

Absent continued quality score ‘adjustments’ how is this company going to drive further significant earning growth? Sure their is a little opportunity over seas that has not yet been exploited, but it is not like they have not yet launched in every major country. Some of its biggest spenders are financial and automotive companies that rely on availability of credit. These companies are in the midst of a huge mess and are probably not trying to figure out ways to raise their search engine exposure. A lot of major corporate spenders after years of too good to be true margins from search are starting to see that the CPC inflation has caught up ROI on search with other advertising mediums is starting to be more equalized. Throw in that search is a finite volume when compared to mass media or direct mail or even banner ads and that compunds the problem.

Google is trying to expand via acquisition, but more of them have turned into economics busts than revenue streams. Things like Grand Central, YouTube, Dodgeball, Orkut, Blogger and Dmarc just dont seem to be driving new revenue growth. Doubleclick is not looking like a sure bet to close. Yahoo and MSN are driving up the price of things like MySpace and Ask syndication deals, AOL is slowly crumbling, and publisher programs from YSM and MSN and Quigo are squeezing once lucrative Adsense margins.

They have failed to execute well on any of their offline initiatives, like radio, TV, print etc. Even so, the margins there are bound to be much much smaller than online revenues and thus the very attractive profit margins will not translate even if they can execute.

Google employees (the truly valuable ones who built the company) seem to be jumping ship on a regular basis leaving the company with a giant sucking sound at the top and middle layers of management and a whole lot of people who seem full of themselves just because they were employee number 7437 and are worth half a million in stock.

I am not saying this stock is not going to 800 or even 1000, much less sane things have happened in the stock market. I am just saying that the visible metrics and ancillary products don’t seem to be going at a pace to sustain the blistering growth that Wall Street expects.

As an ex-derivatives trader I know there are dozens of ways to short the stock while still limiting losses to the upside. The real trick is predicting the quarter when Google misses earning the first time and the air comes racing out of the bubble. I have not yet found the perfect trade, but I am thinking buying a near term out of the money call and combining that with a short of the stock. That way if I am right and it tumbles to $300-$400 range (a sensible valuation IMO) then I make out, but if it takes off or even stays relatively neutral, I am not risking significant amounts of money.

The actual trade will probably be significantly more complex like short a just out of the money call, then use that credit to buy 2 out of the money calls 50 or so points higher for even, plus sell the stock. LIke I said, I dont yet have the trade, but I am starting to look…

Hey, I have almost no friends on Xbox Live, because I never think to add cool people I play with as friends. Plus I suck so bad at most games that I never get asked to join any serious clans etc. Yet the most fun I ever have is playing co-op online with cool people.

I also like to see what games others are playing and what sucks. When I see a lot of people try a game and then get like 100 achievement points then move on to something else then that tells me it probably is not much fun.

So if you are an Xbox Live send me a friend request - Ill give ya one guess what my gamertag is.

Also post a comment here who you are so I know who is who.

Just some feedback on some recently played games….

Mass Effect - Hated it, starts slow as heck, I get stuck in the environment, saving is a pain, etc. All the reviews say get past the first few hours and it rocks… I am seriously having trouble doing that.

Guitar Hero 3 - I loved Guitar Hero 2, I bought it twice so me, my wife, and my au pair could play doubles. My 2 year old usually has one of these guitars in his hands when i come home hoping we can play - its great to play a game and have your kids right next to you playing along with an unplugged controller…GH3 lost me really early. It is a ton harder, I dont like the songs, the boss battles are stupid… I just gave up…

Call of Duty 4 - Loved it. great game. COD2 was pretty good, COD 3 I never even finished first scenario. COD 4 was awesome.

Rock Band - For all of the great reviews this has gotten, it stinks. The guitars buttons are sticky and end up screwing stuff up. The drums dont really work, you basically have to beat on them, I have tried to synchronize it to my TV and just cant get it to work. The play as a band feature is blah… It is a great idea, it is just not fun. I wish I had not opened the $180 box and instead had sold it for $500 on Ebay. Wonder what a used one would go for.

Anyway if you are on XboxLive add me to your friends.

Edit - Another reason to invite me to play and put up with my horrible skills is to pick my brain about what you are doing.

Gosh I get a variation of this question 2-3 times a week. Everything from what am I hiding to I must be making everything up to I am lots of different people… lots of strange theories.

Diorex is a totally made up word… (although it is an old brand of watch)

In my mind I pronounce it ‘Dee O Rex’ but it sounds really funny whenever I say it out loud.

It is not a latin word or any other languages but I guess since Rex means king a lot of people think it must mean something. Until recently, Google, Yahoo and a lot of people mistook it for the diet drug Diurex. I dont own the URL Diorex.com, but I would like to, but the guy parking it does not answer emails (I totally dont get that).

In fact Diorex is actually the made up word Xeroid spelled backwards. Xeroid was the name of a really old D&D character I made when I was a kid. I never really played D&D more than 2-3 times. I am guessing I was making a play on the brand Xerox, i really have no idea. A few years later when I started playing commodore 64 RPG’s I just ended up naming my character Xeroid. Naturally 10-15 years later when I started playing Ultima Online that was the name of my first character. When I screwed that up beyond belief and re-rolled I just reversed it and became Diorex - that character and ones in Asheron’s Call, Dark Age of Camelot, Everquest and World of Warcraft kind of stuck - heck I google myself (sounds kinky) a few nights back and read some old posts about me being accused of scamming some tradebot back in like 2002. The internet truly is an archive with a ton of data.

Of course when I started wanting an anonymous forum name, it seemed natural to use that as well. Then there is the fact that I very rarely have to come up with a unique username anywhere since almost nobody ever takes it (until now, I am sure some jerk will do it just for fun…). So when I opened a blog on a whim about a year ago, it only made sense for it to be as Diorex. I did not ever expect to have a few thousand page views a day or people questioning who I am. Heck it was probably even money I make it less than a week.

So who am I? Who do I work for? What verticals am I in? What is my Credit Score and Social Security number?

I don’t really care to share any of that. First off, the name of my company would totally give away our niche because our corporate website pretty much explains what we do… Same with my real name, I am on linkedin and other networking sites with my real name and my real position in my real company. I dont want to share my niche because we like making a lot of money without hundreds or thousands of people trying to compete with us. I often ask myself if Shoemoney would trade his notoriety for having ringtones be a lot less well known?

I am not blogging for notoriety. I actually started with the hope that I would just make a few good contacts, I have achieved that several times over, but no other expectations. I have totally stopped blogging at least twice. I go through phases where I update almost every day (like the last few weeks) and others where I dont even look at stats or comments for weeks at a time. In real life, I am a pretty shy guy who would never get up and share his opinions with hundreds of people, so this is very much out of character for me.

I don’t monetize this blog and have in fact turned down quite a few opportunities to do so, because I dont need the money and dont care to have to answer to people about what or why I blogged or did not blog something. I put in a few affiliate links on a few posts but have made less than $100 off of that, so I am not here for the money. I am just enjoying sharing my thoughts and as a result having some intelligent discussions with some of the people I have met as a result.

I know this is a totally dull post, but after maybe a dozen emails this month on this topic and about 30 search referrals with “Who is Diorex?” I figured I would answer the question as much as I am willing to do so. Plenty of people know my name and the niche we are in and I appreciate that they have respected my desire for privacy.

Sorry this was not as juicy or as informative as you probably would have liked, maybe next time I will try and post the Diorex Sex Tape or a picture of me with Elvis or something…

We have just recently started advertising in other countries, but seeing our competitors ad copies and landing pages has always been a hassle with having to change settings etc.

Dave Davis over at RedFly just released a really cool new firefox extension.

The extension lets you do a Google search then right click on the page and specify what countries or regions or zip codes or even IP address you would like to do the search from.

For those of you doing anything overseas, it is well worth you checking out.

Great work Dave, it should be installed on a few dozen computers in our office in the near future!

If you have not already read it, this is a follow-up to my original post about trying to get pages with no content to rank. Check that out first…

I tried 2 products
1. Domain Name Ager
2. Domain Embarking

Neither of my test domains ranks well at all…
Fort Worth Divorces ranked for about a week as high as the 8th page, but has since fallen to like 18th for the totally non-competitive term Fort Worth Divorces, where no other website has those words in the URL or in the Title, much less both, I should be able to rank for this pretty easily in my opinion. The other domain I tried with no links is still sitting in Google purgatory and does not even rank for its name…

My other test North Las Vegas Condo is no better off, my finger got tired before I found it for the search term North Las Vegas Condo, although to be fair, I was getting an absolute ton of results for Las Vegas Condo which is probably fairly well optimized, but what do i know. (about SEO - nothing)

One of my other throw away domains (out of 3 total) - Lewisville Mortgages which I had used Domain Embarking for has surprised the heck out of me. By my searching it ranks 4th in Google for the term Lewisville Mortgages, it also is ranking 2nd page in Yahoo for that term and in Google for Lewisville Mortgage. This with almost zero effort. (3-5 minutes to setup the URL and point the DNS)

I have subsequently started the sales process for this domain and have been offered what I think is a nice payout for something that was worth nothing 3 weeks ago.

I have subsequently started embarking a few other domains to see how they do. I suspect that these ranking may be temporary, but for the effort involved I will take it. The pages are ugly as sin and good luck getting a click, but I was after ranking.

For those interested in ranking without unique content (or effort) I would suggest trying DomainEmbarking.com. No idea how this will do long term.

(yes these links are affiliates, sue me, I made almost $30 off the last post about this…that wont even buy me 1/2 the bottle of wine I was drinking while making this post…)

Paul at uberaffiliate posted his earnings today. Good start!

I hate checks like this…and Shoemoney’s and MArkus at PLentyoffish.

I personally know no less than 20 people/groups doing what Paul showed or more every month (some weekly some even daily!) from solely affiliate/lead gen type stuff. Cashing the check takes 10 minutes (these checks dont go into the ATM… the tellers gets to see them…you may even let people cut in line at the bank so you get to make your deposit at the hot teller…) earning them takes considerably more time…

The difference between good (most of the readers of these blogs) and great (where Paul is) and blow your freaking mind (where a few people I know are) is dedication to testing.

He probably lost $5k or more just to fine tune these accounts. He does not just throw a million keywords against the wall, he actually thinks things through and has a strategy.

People who achieve this are not doing so by the seat of their pants. They invested in infrastructure and programmers and design people and relationship building and most of all focus - I dont know a single successful super affiliate that is making 50-100k+ at IBM and doing this on the side - I cant say that I even know any that started as a part-timer.

Some got laid off, some dropped out of college, some stumbled into it while working on something else (me). None are idiots, none are not amongst the brightest people you have ever met, every single one of them works their butt off.

Some are one man shops, some are teams, some are Inc 500 companies destined to go public. The scale is different with each, but the bottom line with all of them is that they are not just dipping their toe in and seeing if they can make it work.

This is not Amway or Excel or some other Pyramid scheme marketing scam that we “hope” to get rich at. These people work damn hard. Paul is probably the most professional 19 year old I have met since I was 19 and he was 2!

Bottom line…checks like these are bad for the business, it draws a ton of new people in with the promise of riches which they believe to be real, it jacks up bids, it clogs blogs/forums with useless newbies posting how they figured out a way to earn $43.85 each day on zip submits or some such - To make Wicked Fire Jon happy, this kind of stuff probably makes ebook marketers a mint as those shysters sell the ’secret’ to the sheep.

Statements like these are also invaluable for those who are close to breaking through, they show people to persevere and encourage people to take chances (google should send him a commission check, they will make 10x the revenue he posted off his post) and some of those will work out and eventually post their own checks, repeating the entire cycle. I suspect a small part of Paul’s success was saying if that guy in Nebraska can make that much then imagine what I can do…

Stop freaking sitting around… dont look up in 5 years and realize if you had just done something back in the glory days, you could have made yourself $20 million.

I spent the weekend with 2 old friends… One who made a ton of money in the 1.0 and the other who is still talking about how he could have made money if only… One lives in the present and does really cool stuff, the other the past and is bitter as hell… Don’t be that Guy!

To follow-up on a recent post about domain and error page exclusion ability, we think we have a possible workaround that will enable us to bid on content, domain ads and error ads separately.

We have enough evidence to suggest that the conversion rate on these items are vastly different, and also are susceptible to fraud on different levels as well. As part of our philosophy we always want to bid on the lowest common denominator whenever possible. Match types are in different campaigns, almost all keywords are in their own adgroup etc.

We just put this live so I cannot guarantee that it works, and in fact am sure that Google’s screwy content system is likely to mess it up in some way, but in theory this will work.

We start with adwords editor and copy and paste the enitre content account into a spreadsheet. We then alter the URLs (that is our tracking mechanism) and upload the account twice into campaigns called error ads and domain ads. At this point we have 3 identical campaigns with same bids, ad copy etc.

We then turn off domain and error ads in the original campaign so that it is now content only. In the domain group we turn off error ads so that it is content and Domain ads. Similarly we turn off domain ads in the error ads group leaving it with just Error ads and content.

At this stage we need to eliminate the possibility of content ads showing in the 2 new adgroups. The way we accomplish this is by running a performance placement report and then negative matching every domain that shows up in both the error and domain groups.

This leaves us with 3 campaigns, one that is content only, another that is Domain ads only and a 3rd that is Error ads only. I can now adjust bids and monitor performance for each type of ad and bid according to the return I am seeing from these different tranches of content.

LIke I said it just went live and is not fully battle tested, but on paper it should work.

So early this week, we noticed on a few of our most profitable terms that our impression volume went through the roof. Like 10x the average daily volume and 8x the highest daily volume in the last 6 months.

On these keywords our clicks went up by approximately 50% of previous levels and our sales volume did not move one iota. Meaning that on 1/3 of our clicks we were getting zero conversion!

So we call up our friendly Yahoo account rep. Who is in an ‘important meeting’ but breaks away to say “fluctuations can and will occur” then says she will look into it. 6 hours later (after we have essentially turned off our account because cost per sale is higher than our total revenue) she dashes off a quick one line email to the tune of “I am having our click quality team (just try and get any of your account reps to say the word fraud, honestly try) look into the matter and they will have an answer within 5-10 days, but our click detection algorithms are the best in the business (another good one, that is like being the best looking girl at the over 300 pound Weight Watcher session).”

Whoa…I was not even terribly concerned with the fraud, I will take the refund, but I just wanted to alert them to the problem of someone figuring out a way of their best in class system.

The next morning we call Yahoo again and get sent directly to voice mail, we then go to her manager who will “call you back as soon as possible”. Finally come late afternoon we call the standard 888-Yahoo-SM phone number and finally speak to someone on our 3rd call who apologizes profusely and goes and gets the manager to call back. The 2nd person we spoke with actually said “that is not my problem” the 1st person said she would get it fixed in 15 minutes and call us back, an hour later the extension she gave us is a dialtone and noone has even heard of her. (Seems like the penalty for trying to help someone out at Yahoo is pretty severe).

So I finally get the manager on the phone. He of course apologizes and says this is not how customer service is supposed to work and that this will be used as a training example, blah blah. Yet he actually says that 5-10 days our rep quoted us is probably the low end of the scale and that with the holiday coming up next week that we probably will not hear anything until afterwards.

He then goes so far as to say, it is funny none of the other ”major” accounts in your vertical have noticed anything. I am tempted to explain why, but decide it does not matter and is not worth the efffort.

The bottom line is that he is totally unable to help us. He is apologetic, but really does not seem to care.

So we are left to our own devices. We ended up putting their Yahoo analytics on a single high volume keyword to track referrers. We accidentally forgot to properly install the conversion pixel, because that is none of their business. Less than an hour later, we had a single referrer that had more than double the volume from Yahoo itself, without so much as a click through on that page.

That does not seem like something that should have actually been rocket science for Yahoo to figure out. 10x impressions was the first start, how hard is it to isolate impression volume by IP and flag suspicious volume, especially when an advertiser brings your attention to it.

So based upon our experience with Yahoo who did not think there was a problem, we decided not to alert them to the non-problem url, we figure in a few days the ‘major players’ who don’t monitor their account nearly as closely as we do will see the decrease in conversion and raise bloody hell. Our result was almost immediate, conversion rate recovered and impressions fell back to normal levels. Problem solved, except for the problem.