Known best for its eNom.com domain registry, eHow.com website with how-to articles, and YouTube how-to videos, Demand Media has an interesting business model. Instead of focusing on targeting consumers performing generic online searches, the company focuses on specifics. Or as it says in the IPO registration, “Our approach is driven by consumers’ desire to search for and discover increasingly specific information across the Internet.”

While having an interesting model, the company lost $22 million last year, and $6 million in the first 6 months of this year. For a low-cost business, these losses are hard to believe. The company has about 10,000 freelancers working writing and creating videos for them. They only pay writers about $15/article and the makers of videos about $30. Producing approximately 5,700 new items each day, the company sets a standard for freelancer productivity.

eHow.com and other how-to websites owned by Demand Media are reported to have approximately 86 million unique visitors each month, producing 550 million pageviews each month. Looking at those numbers, I can’t believe how a company like this is unprofitable. After reading an article on Tech Crunch, I learned a lot about where Demand Media was making money and where it wasn’t. Here are some quick facts about Demand Media’s profits:

- 44% of the company’s revenues are from its domain business, eNom.com.

- 45% of  the company’s revenues are from advertisers.

- 26% of the company’s revenues are from Google’s ad program, Google AdSense.

- 21% of the company’s revenues are from the eHow.com website.

After seeing this, I determined that the company is spending way to much money on its content creation for eHow.com. Let me break this down for you. Out of the 5,700 new articles and videos everyday, let’s say that 5,200 are articles and 500 are videos. That means Demand Media is spending about $78,000 on articles and $15,000 on videos each day. That accounts for approximately $33,480,000 in the company’s yearly expenses. Seeing that $33,480,000 in spending is only making up for 21% of the company’s revenue, I think the company should use some of its resources elsewhere.

With all of that being said, it’s still yet to come out where and how Demand Media has lost and is still losing money into this year. Would you invest in Demand Media if it goes public? What do you think of their business model? Submit your comments below.

Up until a year or so ago, I was always under the impression that as long as you get your message out to as many people as possible, you have succeeded in marketing. But when it really comes down to it, the way you advertise plays a big factor in your ROI. By this I mean, you may be able to get your businesses message out to the group you are trying to target, but if your business is sketchy enough to advertise in certain places, it’s certainly sketchy enough to scare the customer away from buying your product of service.

What do I avoid when I’m trying to advertise or market my business?

1. Avoid marketing in a completely unrelated niche.

2. Avoid making adult-only ads (if your not in the adult industry).

3. Avoid sending spam-like emails.

4. Avoid searching for websites in your niche and then submitting spam comments.

5. Avoid marketing to too many people (many of whom would not be interested in your niche).

Those are justa  few of the things to avoid in marketing. I’d love to hear what you have to say and what you would ad to that list. Is a law firm advertising on the top of taxi cabs sketchy? Submit your comments below!

What are you going to do with your day off? The person who is doing the most patriotic activity gets a free link for a year on DNUnderground.com. Submit your plans for Veterans Day below!

Customers – The people who purchase the item.

Consumers – The people who use the item.

In case you don’t understand the difference, here’s an example. Let’s say a parent is buying their son a car for his 16th birthday. The parents would be the customers because they’re the people doing the actual purchasing of the product. The son would be the consumer because he’s the person actually using the product.

Now how exactly does this effect marketing? Well, some companies only target consumers in marketing campaigns while others only target customers. It’s important to target both! If you only target your consumers you won’t grab the attention of the people who are actually purchasing the product, but if you only target your customers, they’re not the one’s using the product so why would they want it.

I’m sure I can name a million situations where this is true, and a million where it’s not. It’s just important to keep this concept of customers versus consumers in mind whenever launching a marketing campaign, online or offline. However, I would like to get your comments on this, so make sure to submit them below!

Happy friday and have a fun, safe weekend!

P.S. When commenting, if you click out of the comment box and it deletes what you have, just click on the box, then click edit > undo. This will bring back what you wrote.

There’s 5 essential basics that every advertisement should have.

The Header – Should be written in a serif font and attract the reader’s attention.

The Image – Something that goes along with your ad and would attract the reader’s attention.

The Copy – Where your selling message goes. What do you want the reader to do? This should be written in a sans-serif font.

The Slogan – Include your logo for branding and identity purposes.

The Signature – State where you are located (address, domain, etc.)

Most banners and advertisements are missing at least 2 of these 5 essential steps to making an advertisement. While I understand a 125×125 banner probably can’t fit in each of those 5 steps, a 120×600 banner or 160×600 banner should be able to.

Even forgetting the serif font and sans-serif font part can detract attention from your advertisement as the whole idea of the serif title is to attract attention and the idea of the sans-serif copy is to make it easy for the reader to read.

Big companies are forgetting these 5 steps, the very basics of marketing and advertising. In my opinion – it’s nonsense! I’d like to hear your opinion though, so make sure to comment below.

One of the most important things that I have always failed to learn from in the past up until now is to NEVER launch a website prematurely. Make sure everything is in working order, and looks good. Every viewer you get to your site is just as important as the next. Generally speaking, you hope to get that viewer to return to your website at some point. When a user goes onto a website, see’s it is maufunctioning, ugly, or unprofessional, chances are you won’t get that visitor to come back to your website anytime soon. The next time he comes across it, that visitor will figure that they have been to the website before, it’s not a good website, and he/she doesn’t want to waist their time going back.

Another thing that I have learned is to always have a marketing plan. Whether your marketing plan is to not market your website at all, or your marketing plan is to advertise with every search engine on the web, it makes no difference. It’s important to have a FLEXIBLE marketing plan too. If your website is unexpectedly getting thousands of organic hits a day all of the sudden, then maybe you’ll want to do a little less marketing. Or if you planned on getting organic traffic, and don’t get any, you may want to do more marketing. Just leave room for changes based on what you see.

One of the important things about launching a new website is gettting enough visitors to your website to make some good money, and hopefully have some returning visitors, as I talked about before. Promotions, contests, and other things of that sort are great for opening websites. Visitors like it, and will  most likely return to see A) if they won, or B) what the site is all about. You want to make the customer’s experience the absolute best it can be.

Link exchanges are another thing that work great for opening sites. Email a bunch of different industry-related websites, post a few threads on the different forums, and you will have plenty of people waiting to do a link exchange with you. Not only to link exchanges get you a little bit more of potential traffic from other peoples sites, but it also gives you exposure, and more importantly gives you links to get a page rank. Page ranks are very important because the higher your page rank, the higher your website is ranked in Google, relatively speaking. Google likes your website more than it does lower page rank sites. Chances are you’ll get more organic traffic if you can get yourself a high page rank. Backlinks are one of the main things Google considers when considering your website’s page rank.

One of the things a site must do is evaluate their different sources of income, and how they can expand their sources of income. Lets say a websites primary goal is to make money off of Google AdSense. Well, that website should also consider adding ads from Commission Junction, ClickBank, Blogvertiser, etc. The more sources of income a website has, the more a website can potentially make. Make sure not to overload the website with ads and sources of income, but have enough to make some profit easily off of the website. In my opinion, Google AdSense, and any PPC publishers (Bidvertiser is also very popular) are the best way to go for ads on your website. People aren’t paying what they used to for adspace with the economy at rock bottom like it is these days. So Google AdSense is definitely one of my favorite recession-proof tools for income.

Anyways, I would love to hear your opinion about my tips, as well as hear some of your tips for launching a website the right way. I hope you all enjoyed the article. Sorry it was lengthy.

1) Try to create a new website with a totally unique concept that hasn’t been done before.

2) Stick with what they know, and the different types of websites that normally provide a solid income.

Those are the most likely the two biggest things a business must evaluate. For option number 1, the risk you take is not knowing any types of statistics, or numbers, that can help you figure out whether that concept will be successful. For option number 2, your risk is simply, competition. So each has their own risks involved in it.

Trying something new normally will either prove itself to be a complete success or total fail. There are exceptions, but that is how trying new concepts normally goes. Right now, I am trying to develop my first website that is a totally unique concept you won’t find anywhere else on the web. I haven’t seen the results yet, but I will certainly share them to viewers. Also, another big issue I have now experienced, and most experience when creating a new concept is expenses. It tends to be a lot more expensive because if it’s a new concept, it normally needs a lot of customization to the website, and also to create a website that is fully functional.

Sticking with the basics is something I have done before. I built a PTC (paid-to-click) website, which is a relatively new concept, but there are a good number of PTC websites out there, including many big ones. I made it, promoted it, got many users, and made a lot of money. I ended up selling the site for an undisclosed amount after I figured out it was too time consuming, but I got a very nice return. So sticking with the basics can really pay off. But there are plenty of PTC websites for example that completely fail. I think if you are going to stick with the basics and build a website that isn’t a new concept, you need to know how to market it correctly. You need to also be willing to of course put some good money into that marketing. It’s important because you have competition, who you want to beat out.

Anyways, what do you guys think will make you bigger bucks in a general sense, new concepts or sticking with the basics? Please comment below, I think it would be interesting to see what everyone has to say based off and on personal experiences.

Cutts gets these emails so often, he has came up with a standard response to copy and paste into his reply emails.

Unfortunately there’s not much I can do. The page you pointed out is not spam, and pretty much the only removals (at least in the U.S., which is what I know about) that we do for legal reasons are if a court orders us. We typically say that if person A doesn’t like a webpage B, only removing page B out of Google’s search results doesn’t do any good because webpage B is still there (e.g. it can be found by going to it directly or through other search engines). In that sense, the presence of that page in Google’s index is just reflecting the fact that the page exists on the wider web.

The best actions for you from our perspective can be one of a couple options. Either contact whoever put up webpage B and convince them to modify or to take the page down. Or if the page is doing something against the law, get a court to agree with you and force webpage B to be removed or changed. We really don’t want to be taking sides in a he-said/she-said dispute, so that’s why we typically say “Get the page fixed, changed, or removed on the web and then Google will update our index with those changes the next time that we crawl that page.” Our policies outside the U.S. might be different; I’m not as familiar with how legal stuff works outside the U.S.

If you are familiar with Ron James, the owner of the NamePros forums, he once had a thread on DNForum made about him telling lies about him, as well as disclosing a lot of personal information about him, such has his name, his wife’s name, his address, etc. He got lucky because DNForum found and closed the thread, as well as made sure they deleted the content in it. But had DNForum left the content up, Google would have came along, indexed the thread, and people would google Ron James and find all of this made up boloney about him.

P.S. For anyone who wants to comment, I fixed the comment system. I finally figured out why no one was commenting So I would love to hear your comments!

Yahoo Finance reports that Adam Cohen, a partner of Rosetta’s consumer goods and retail practice told media, “These results support what we’re seeing in our day-to-day client work, which is that we’ve reached a tipping point with Facebook among retailers. Social media sites continue to be an important source of community connection, and savvy retailers are reaping the benefits of Facebook’s rapid extension into new demographics, such as Gen-X and seniors.”

Adam Cohen also makes sure to get across the point that retailers and businesses shouldn’t just put up a page onto social networking websites such as Facebook. He quotes, “An effective Facebook presence requires that you carefully consider what your customers are looking for, what you would like to communicate, and what role a fan page should play in your overall online strategy. If you take all of these into account, it can be effective in building customer loyalty.”

Anyways, the point I am trying to get across to you is that social networking can be effective, and has been proven to work with larger businesses. I know I am a member on Twitter (Username: Asmro), and I get traffic from there on daily basis. Social networking really works well if you work hard at it, and do it right. Please feel free to comment about social networking and your experiences.

The real issue with top sites is it provides you with a significant amount of inconsistent traffic. Basically, you submit your link to all of these top sites, and post their link on your website, and for about a few days the top sites will give you a couple hundred visitors a day for a few days depending on how many top sites you submit your proxy to.  After a few days, the traffic starts to shoot back on down.

A more effective way to promote with top sites is submitting to a couple every day. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of them out there. If you submit your proxy to a couple every day then you will see consistent traffic for a longer period of time.

Once you run out of top sites to submit to though, your traffic will fall right back on down. And thats why people say it is an non-effective method.

Now my opinion and response to that argument is that with all that traffic you were getting from those top sites, chances are at least 10% of those visitors will return to your proxy and use it again, so you are not totally loosing all of your traffic. Also, once you are done submitting to top sites, and you have run out of top sites to submit to, that is when you move onto another promotional method. Sometimes you need to use multiple promotional methods to get consistent traffic.

So when I am asked the question whether top sites are effective or not, I strongly believe they are. My opinion can be summed up into 3 words which are, “TRAFFIC IS TRAFFIC”. Why do we market websites through things like top sites? In order to get traffic. And these top sites do provide good amounts of traffic. I would love to hear your opinions and comments on top sites, which you can submit in the comment form below!