On-Line Business Owners: Are You Really Ready for Success?

Ewwwww ... My Blog EXPLODED!!! 

EXPLODE!!!!, in boldface with multiple exclamation points, is a word commonly used by those on the shady side of the business of promoting things. Their spam emails tell you they can "Make your on-line business EXPLODE!!!" Or they promise to EXPLODE!!! your website traffic, sales, profits, or maybe even that undersized part of your male anatomy.

What they don't tell you is that it is not always a good idea to EXPLODE!!! traffic or business.
It sounds strange, but businesses can fail because they succeeded, but didn't plan how to handle the success.

Reconstruction of the Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot
If it had exploded as planned.

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Why "Affiliate" Marketing Sucks!

Affiliate marketing must sound fabulous to a business - pay a small commission and you multiply your web presence by hundreds or thousands of pages, all pointing back to your site and your products. Instead of a tiny hook with bait, you have a bloody trawler net. There's no way customers can escape your reach.

To the affiliates, it must sound like a great deal too. Just put up a web page, using content provided by the merchant, sit back and watch the commissions roll in.

To the would-be buyer, however, it sucks! It just plain sucks! Here's my latest experience with on-line shopping and affiliate marketing. I needed a part for my truck - nothing big, just a new knob for the AC control switch.

Can I find a knob for the AC switch using Google? No! There were hordes of affiliate sites clogging the search engines, each claiming to have the part I need, but they seldom even had a link to a site that perhaps might have had what I needed. The affiliates prevented me from getting to the site they are affiliated with by their sheer numbers.

It's like wading through a mob of aggressive panhandlers near the Berkeley BART station ... all of them saying "ME! ME! CLICK ME DAMMIT!"

Let's not even talk about the "AdSense optimized" sites that had all the keywords I was looking for, but no products, just more ads. Many of them may be ex-AdSense sites by now, because I took URLs and hope Google will kick butt.

Frustrated by the clogs of affiliates, all selling the same knobs - I do not want a skull on my AC switch knob, really I don't, nor does a blue glow-in-the-dark Iron Cross appeal to me - I finally searched Froogle for: AC switch knob chevy

I found one! Just ONE parts dealer, no affiliates, no swarming click-begging affiliates, and the seller didn't pay a commission to anyone. I'll definitely be using Froogle instead of Google from now on.

Sod off, you annoying affiliates!

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Getting Web Traffic: Take the Road Less Traveled

Another blogger commented: How many of you have or know someone who has looked up the recent world cup soccer scores or the latest American Idol gossip? Now think of how many people you know who have looked up the Latin name for the potato beetle? Right. So if your site is about rare insects, you have your work cut out for you to get a high ranking in the search engine.

Although it "sounds right", that blogs or web sites writing about the most popular topics would have the highest ranking, I think he's dead wrong.

Look at the numbers:

• about 53,700,000 results for "World Cup" Soccer Scores
  
• about 262,000 results for "potato beetle"

If you try to get high search engine rankings and traffic by writing about soccer scores, celebrities, and other "hot" topics, it's like trying to get attention in a crowded stadium. There are too many hands in the air, too many people yelling and screaming trying to attract traffic. Your soccer site, unless you are Ronaldo, is going to be down in the weeds in the search results. If you are trying to attract traffic, you'll have a tiny crumb of a very large pie.

On the other hand, a tightly focused site about how to keep Leptinotarsa decemlineata and its relatives from taking over your home garden has a chance of making it to the top three pages. If I wanted to invade that niche, I'd create something useful to the general public, with good pictures and maybe a bit of humor. It would follow good coding practices for the search algorithms, of course.

I'd have almost no competition at all for a page with the specific keywords "kill potato beetles" ... that's what most gardeners want to do to them. I hear the ads for insecticides pay pretty well too.

Leptinotarsa decemlineata ... the Colorado potato beetle.
Photo from the USDA photo archive.

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