Paid-Ads or SEO: Which One Gives Best Results?
Posted by Ahmad Barirani in 
In a previous article, I have labeled SEO as being a form of spam. Well, I found this interesting article from Forbes that lists the best marketing techniques that can be used today. It all looks like spamming is pretty effective way of generating sales! My opinion is that this is so because of the persuasive power of a promotional page that is encountered by someone who got to that page by using a search engine. This persuasive power comes from the fact that we are not trained to recognize found-through-searching pages as having promotional content!
When it comes to traditional advertising (like on TV), we all have developed reflexes to identify and avoid advertising as they are shown. We have this part of our brain that detects patterns and is capable of understanding that a certain object is aimed at promoting a certain product. For example, we have the reflex of muting the TV and do stuff during commercial breaks. However, we are not used to the idea that people can use search engines and inflirtrate keywords to advertise. This is because most of us still have not added this new pattern of advertising to our cognitive repertoire.
The SEO professional’s job is to exploit this potential to the max. That is, promotional stuff has to be disguised as real content. And it must be subtle in the way that people will not be able to detect that someone is promoting a product or service. When people see a paid ad (like Google AdWords), they understand that it is for generating sales. But when it is a blog page, it is as if the guy next door was so happy about using a product.
My conclusion is that compared to paid-ads, SEO ads value from a marketing point of view. That value is about not giving the impression that people are dealing with ads.
Microsoft-Yahoo Deal Good for Search Engine Market (and Bad for Google Monopoly)
According to the association of American marketers, the Microsoft-Yahoo deal is good for the search engine market. Even my deep disdain for Microsoft cannot stop me from agreeing with this statement! That is because of my deep disdain for any monopoly (which includes Microsoft’s monopoly of the desktop OS market). I believe that Google is conquering the Internet market at a dangerous speed. If no one stands on its way and does not represent a challenge to its domination, it will be bad news for the search engine market.
For all those who suffer from Microsoft’s careless attitude towards its customers, expect the same from Google if it becomes a monopoly. For all those who are angered by the slow pace of innovation in the desktop OS industry, the same thing will happen to the search engine market if Google owns 90% of the market. This is not the case because Google (or Microsoft) people are evil. It is only because it is in the nature of monopolies: they do not have any incentive to innovate and they can resort to price discrimination for better profit rates.
So when I read something like the open letter from American advertisers, I must be in favor of the arguments that it supports, because it makes a lot of sense if we think of it from a technology strategist point of view. Competition will force both players to offer better products and prices to their customers. So why be against it? Of course, we can go on and fantasize about a future where Google will own 100% of search engine market but that it would not stop it’s pace of innovation and that it would not start asking for money in exchange of search results.
Top Ten Ways to Make Money With Your Open Source Products
Gone are the days that some could label open source development as being communistic. Today, many firms make money with open source development. This is a survey of the top ten ways to make money with your open source products:
- Support: offer support around your open source product. Of course this is an easy one as most open source firms base their income on support.
- Sales: well, this is an easy one too. Not because the product is licensed under GPL that anybody can go on and play with its source code. We see more an more of these kind of products that are often sold as ‘Enterprise’ versions of the open source product.
- Extensions & plugins: Well, this is a good way to get money, especially from enterprise customers. Every software is always a couple of functions short of customers expectations. Extensions are a great way to overcome this unavoidable issue.
- Subscriptions: since most software products need maintenance, it might be a good idea to sell the product for free, but collect a subscription for updates.
- Consulting: well, this is for those who are not in the open source development team, but who offer customization services around open source products. You could also offer project management services for customers who are going to deploy your product. Also, Software as a service (SaaS) is a great example of how open source firms make money.
- Build yourself a reputation: a lot of programmers have gained notoriety by being lead developers or architects in open source projects. If you write good code, then going open source is a good opportunity to show off your talent.
- Publish a book: you’ve been building this amazing open source application? Then share your knowledge of the system by writing a book. This goes for those who have built extensions and plugins for open source platform.
- Give conferences: if you ever become a super start (or even a small star), people might actually want to pay to see and hear you. Conferences actually have something that books cannot offer: close contact with the guru.
- Advertising: well, you could actually get a lot of traffic to your website. Why not sell ads? Of course, you might not make a lot of money, but its not costing you anything to have a little extra from AdSense.
- Donations:If you do all or some of the above, why not ask for donations? I mean all those who use the software, but don’t pay on any of the above things still are gaining value from your product. Some of them might actually be conscious of this fact and give a donation.
All these ways of generating revenue are based on the fact that open source software ads a certain value that closed source software does not have. This added value gives a competitive advantage to the open source developer who can then sell byproducts of the knowledge that he has around the open source product. Of course, these are many other ways to make money with open source software. Let me know if there are some that I forgot.
Google Will Detect Malware From Your Website
Google has a commitment: provide the most relevant search results to the user. Of course, not redirecting the user to a website that has malware is a non-functional requirement to this commitment. Their new tool, Fetch, is thus in line with their commitment of providing relevant search results.
If you ever have doubts about your website, why not take a look at it from Googlebot’s eyes. This can specially be useful if your website has been cloacked. Of course, this cloacking takes part when a page is fetched by the bot. It is only then that hacker code will link another page. Otherwise, everything looks normal from the website owner’s perspective.
I'm clean...
The good thing with this new application is that it gives detail about the malware and the portion of the site that has been attacked. This is a great help when it comes to getting rid of malware from your website. So overall, this tool is not just useful for webmasters. It is goes further and increases security on the Internet and aims for better search experience for all.
Using Partial Views with ASP.NET MVC AJAX
One thing I struggled to figure-out when I moved to ASP.NET MVC was how to work with its AJAX model. I was used to work with UpdatePanels and the Ajax Community Tookit that are event-based WebForms controls. Especially for someone who was used to deal with the rich set of controls from Ajax Community Toolkit, it was hard to have nothing more than basically two Ajax function: Ajax.ActionLink() and Ajax.BeginForm(). Well believe it or not, ASP.NET MVC Ajax model ended-up working quite well for me, as the secret lies in Partial Views. That makes a lot of sense since Ajax is all about updating part of a web page. The only hard thing was that I had to get used to ASP.NET MVC’s paradigm shift from event-based WebForms.
So this is typically the way I work. First, I create a partial view and add the Ajax code in it:
<%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<MyNamespace.MyModel>" %> <%= Html.Encode(Model.ValueToDisplay) %> <%= Ajax.ActionLink("ActionText", "ActionName", new { id = Model.id, controller = "ControllerID" }, new AjaxOptions { UpdateTargetId = Model.id.ToString() })%>
Now, the trick is that this PartialView is placed in a HTML div that’s id is equal to Model.id, which should make the page look like this:
<%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<MyNamespace.MyModel>" %> <div id="<%= Model.id %>"> <% Html.RenderPartial("ThePartialViewAbove", Model); %> </div>
The Controller Action should look like this:
public PartialViewResult Edit(string id) { MyModel cmt; // Put data query code here for cmt return PartialView("ThePartialViewAbove", cmt); }
Now, what happens is that when the Edit action is called (i.e. when the Ajax.ActionLink is clicked), the Model.id div is refreshed with the content of ThePartialViewAbove, which is based on updated data in Edit action. Wow, that’s easy. I love it.
Switching From WebForms to ASP.NET MVC: Is it Worth it?
There are a lot of good stuff about the new ASP.NET MVC framework, but a question remains for developers who have invested heavily in developing applications and skills on WebForms: is it worth switching to ASP.NET MVC? For those who are interested in technical differences between both platforms, you can refer to the this article. What I will concentrate on here is productivity gain. At least for me, there was a real gain, although I had to deal with the little hassles of this new framework.And lets not forget, there are much more rich controls available for WebForms than ASP.NET MVC.
Well, to tell you the truth, relearning ASP.NET MVC wasn’t hard at all. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to create a Controller (right-click on project’s ‘Controller’ folder and click on ‘Create Controller…’ menu option) and to associate a View to an Action (simply call View() function and right-click on it and then select ‘Add View…’ menu option).
What I enjoyed more than anything was LINQ integration with Views. That’s partly because I really hated dealing with Data Controls like the Repeater or ListView. I mean they are great for plugging DataSources to them, but when it comes to customizing, they are nightmare. With LINQ and their IEnumerable objects, you have real power in your hands when it comes to have fast custom things on the View. What I really enjoy is code like the following:
<% foreach(SomeClass obj in Model) { %> <% = Html.Encode(Model.SomeAttribute) %> <% } %>
My feeling is that this kind of stuff gives great freedom to the developer which can lead to real time-saving also.
Aslo, ASP.NET MVC is much closer to HTML, so some of those send back/post back issues are not there anymore. I guess this is something else ASP.NET MVC developers don’t have to deal with.
Forget About Traffic: Bounce Rate is Key To AdSense Revenue
I find a lot of blog articles that advise getting traffic for better AdSense revenue. To my opinion, bounce rate is a better indicator of AdSense revenue. Of course, if a good bounce rate is backed up by traffic, then nobody would complain. But lets imagine a website that gets 10k pageviews a day with a bounce rate of 100%. Is this site likely to have any AdSense revenue? Most likely not because people, well, bounce back and don’t click on anything!
Well, this brings me to another metric that is greatly correlated with AdSense revenue: pageviews per visitor. This is of course very related to the bounce rate, but higher is better. When a website has high pageviews per user, it is most likely to succeed in making money by doing some AdSense camouflage, because the more people are surfing the site, the more likely they are going to click on an ad.
But lets make this clear, having high bounce rate will equal low pageviews. High bounce rate is an indication that something is wrong with the site’s content or design, which repulses visitors from interacting with the website. If bounce rate is low, it most likely means that the website has good content and design.
This reality brings us to the conclusion that nothing is better than good content, design and usability. Lets all call these things user experience. Good user experience equals good AdSense revenue!