Alex Pooley's Blog

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Site Relaunch

In my last post I mentioned that Google had turned off the traffic flow to my site via their search engine. Well, I’ve done some tinkering and my 200,000 page site is now a massive 3.3 MILLION pages! Kapow!

The first incarnation of the site relied on Google navigating the site via Sitemaps. Each page on the site was a hanging node, and the only way to move between pages was to perform a search with a form post. I suspect that Google recently changed some policy regarding sitemaps, and so they stopped acknowledging pages in the sitemap. But I’m only guessing, I really have no idea. Either way, I’ve dramatically improved navigation around the site with standard links, and will keep an eye on the stats to see if my traffic grows.

Google Video Ads

Anyway, while plastering ads on my site I ended up stumbling across Google’s video with ads. Ooh la la, these things are nice! When setting up an ad, Google offer various sizes and colour themes. Smaller sizes provide video thumbnails that expand in to a player when clicked, and larger sized ads include a player with embedded thumbnails. Here’s a screen shot of a ’skinny’ ad I’ve placed on my site…

As you can see, the ad unit makes a nice addition to an otherwise dull page. Unfortunately, clicking on a thumbnail opens the player, which expands the ad unit size, which makes it harder to integrate with page layout. The next screenshot shows you what happens if you click on a thumbnail - note the horizontal page scroll!

On my site I have a search page. Due to the nature of a search page, there isn’t really much else to display other than search results. So what I’ve done is included a large ad unit on this page to soak up the remaining real estate.

Technical Junk

In case you’re interested, the new site runs on Ruby On Rails. The previous version of the site was simply a huge set of static web pages that were simply pre-processed and placed on shared hosting at Dreamhost. I originally pre-rendered the site because the complexity of the site is in cobbling all the data together, and I “just” wanted an easy way to render the data. I found the pre-processing approach was way too inflexible for updating the site, despite it’s clear deployment benefits.

In Summary…

I’m not sure if any of these updates will actually result in increased traffic flow. Surely with 3.3 million pages Google will simply have no choice but to send traffic my way. I’m going to sit on this for a bit to see what happens, then I may try my hand at a press release.

This site actually goes against guidelines 3 and 4 that I set out in my last post.

Perhaps I will prove myself wrong. We will see…

There’s a standard sales letter formula named AIDA.

1. Grab Attention
2. Generate Interest
3. Create Desire
4. Make a call to Action

I enjoy checking out my “real world” junk mail these days and often come across AIDA. Here’s a letter I received today from Foxtel (Australian cable TV provider) that uses the AIDA format. I’ve preceded each use of AIDA with red headings. In fact, if you follow the bold parts of the letter, it’s pretty clear.

I find it interesting that even the big boys with wads of cash are still sticking close to the fundamentals. They haven’t sold me, but I guess we can surmise that the AIDA format still works.

I’m subscribed to a few mailing lists. These lists I’m a member of are the Internet equivalent of infomercials. You know the ones with the overly enthusiastic presenter with the over the top marketing strategy… “I’m going to suck up this cup of rice with my 1500 Watt cyclonic vacuum cleaner. Look at how easy it is!” I bet you roll your eyes when you see that sort of crap right? The mailing lists are a bit more intellectual but still in the same vein. The reason you see this sort of stuff is because it works. Sad, but true.

One of the lists was plugging a recent promotion - Day Job Killer. As you can already tell, the marketing is a bit over the top. But, there’s nothing over the top about this…

Day Job Killer pulled in as many max page views in 2 weeks, as TechCrunch has built up over about 18 months. Apparently DJK sold 5,000 copies at $77 each in the first day. Not a bad result.

This is the result of old school marketing, Internet 1995 style. In contrast, Web2.0 is fun, and technically exciting. The problem with Web2.0 is that the emphasis is on the technology, and not on the business.

Here’s a negative article from a developer who has read DJK.

Here’s more reviews from people with questionable credibility linking to DJK with an affiliate ID. You could only affiliate with DJK if you had purchased the book.

Guilty, As Charged
Day Job Killer What’s All The Fuss About?
Day Job Killer is now LIVE! Act fast…

Is DJK the real deal? I don’t know.