Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

For those that aren't really familiar with Hitwise , they're a data collection agency. Through relationships with ISP's, they track user behavior. Then, they turn around and sell the information back to us webmasters. I got an account approved for my 2007 budget (not an easy task, let me tell you) and started poking around in there today. My first impression is that this is really amazing data. For starters, I've taken most of our top competitors and found all of the phrases that are driving traffic to their sites. For those of you doing your own sites, how useful would that be? I'm able to see if there are phrases that would make sense to target ourselves that our competitors are using. Secondly, once I've found a cool phrase, I can see what websites get what percentage of the traffic for that phrase. This is really cool for benchmarking how well we're doing for a given term. While this data is cool, it's also incomplete. For example, Amazon hasn't ...

As I was browsing Wal-Mart.com for a monitor today, I noticed they had one for less than most of the other online sites I usually check out. I decided that since this wasn't an "Online Only" listing that I'd head over and pick one up. I didn't have much trouble finding it in the store (they don't have much selection, so it's easy to spot it), then I went to the checkout. I was grabbing the one below: I wasn't thinking about it much as I approached the register, but when the lady scanned the box and it came up as $192, I wasn't pleased. $22.12 extra just for shopping in the store? That's not right. That's an extra 13%, plus I'll have to pay more in sales tax. For now, Wal-Mart is on that list that begins with the letter "S" once again. Not that they ever stray much from that list, but I've got another reason. Too bad my hometown doesn't have much else to choose from. I'll have to venture out after work one of these ...

My ego got a boost at SES this time (not that it really needed that - ego's don't sell products) when I was called a "True SEO RockStar" by an SEO RockStar . It's rather nice getting noticed by some of the people in the industry, and really validates what I do on a daily basis. Some other take-aways from SES so far. There is a lot of money in domain brokering. I heard about a .net domain that a guy bought for $149k. He also has a domain that is related to our space that he scored that has had multiple offers that he's rejected thrown at him. Podcasting isn't just for playing with any more. It's a real medium that even some nuts-and-bolt sellers are using to increase sales. Very few online businesses can do $1M/month in sales. According to a source, even the Nike.com's of the world fall short of that mark, making what I'm doing at ToolBarn even more impressive. I guess what people have been saying for years is true - the Internet creates a level...

We have an affiliate that just started creating some content, which we encourage. However, they started bidding against us on Overture and getting quite a few sales from that. While it isn't a problem them getting sales, when it's sales that we would have gotten already (same keywords on Overture) it raises a question with me about the real value of this affiliate. The other question I have is this: would they be seeing enough traffic for it to pay off? Granted, these keywords are mostly under 20 cents per click, but even a 20% conversion rate means they need to make almost $1.00 per sale (if people are following their links in the first place). They don't rank in any of the 3 major search engines, so we aren't competing in that market yet, but they originally copied most of our homepage as their homepage and now they're paying for traffic that we normally buy. Sure, we can afford to get the #1 position back from them, but the real question is why should I have to b...