Scoreboard Media Group, Internet Audience Development

I don’t know about y’all, but I’m sick and tired of this “make money online” ecosystem that is monopolizing the online marketing blogosphere.   I spent some time this weekend catching up on my feed reader and it felt like I was stuck in infomercial hell.  I took three showers afterwards, but I still feel dirty.

Listen, if we are to believe that 95% of all SEO’s are incompetent (a figure I don’t think I disagree with and I absolutely love Shoe baiting everyone with it), we also have to ask ourselves why so many of these “make money online” bloggers are making such short money.  People look at these guys like they are Warren Buffett and they probably aren’t even earning as much as Warren G.  Y’all need to think bigger.

What’s wrong with you people?  If a couple hundy grizzos a year makes you lose your damn mind, go sell insurance.  I have friends selling cars that make that.  I forget which tycoon said it, but I will paraphrase it, “If all you want to do with your life is make money, it really isn’t that hard to do.”  And if all you care about is the loot, then y’all need some bigger heroes than folks that make less than downmarket Realtors.

But, BP, they are doing it online.  Freaking online, yo!  Ok.  Just because something is happening online doesn’t mean it’s revolutionary.  It’s not 1995 anymore.  Just about everything has Internet touch.  There is nothing cool or revolutionary about online.  Well, except for porn.

If you are a truly disruptive online marketer or audience builder, you are adding seven figures a year to your net worth…and you aren’t blogging about it like a Sunday morning TV evangelist on crack.  You are thinking a lot bigger than distributing other businesses’ offers…you are buying your way into their game and adding another layer of margin.  You aren’t chasing the highest paying tiered affiliate scheme, you are looking at how money moves globally and positioning your audience and marketing skills ahead of it.  Find a $100 billion problem and solve that.  Build something with enterprise value and your liquidity event will have 2-3 more zeroes than the most famous of Adsense or affiliate checks.

For all the fun I have at his expense, Jason Calacanis is one of the few people that has figured this out.  I have no doubt that Mahalo will deliver liquidity to him.  With tens of thousands of hand-crafted landing pages (err, search results) and his ability to deliver audience, that business will work out.  Furthermore, because he understands the financial markets as well as he does whoring himself on the Internet, his exit on “making money online” will smoke the biggest e-book pimp.  All while the e-book pimp might be the stronger marketer and audience builder.  JC thinks big.

I’m going to say it for about the thousandth time…as it’s really the reason I started this blog…think bigger, people.  Don’t be afraid to go from SEO to CEO.  If you can deliver value to clients, you can deliver more to yourself.  I’m sure SEOmoz bills Yelp for some nice jack, but you can’t tell me that the talented folks at SEOmoz couldn’t build Yelp for themselves and make 100x or 1000x more (I really hope their VC’s bring this up at every board meeting or said VC’s limited partners need to find a new fund).

This is truly the Era of F U Money, my friends.  Stop wasting your time putting some of these hacks on a pedestal and think bigger.  I’m in the M&A trenches every day and I assure you that each one of you in that 5% of SEO’s or affiliate marketers that isn’t incompent…you guys have what it takes to take it to the house. 

Think bigger or one day your grandkids will ask you why you didn’t.  Think “f*ck you money“.

Ok, readers (and I’m assuming Jessica Alba is amongst you)…I have a lot less time to grind out the first 12 months of a site’s SEO lifecycle and a lot more time to leverage my business network into what you grinded out from Day One.  So, if any of you have sites you are trying to sell, shoot me an email at brian [at] scoreboard-media.com and give me the details. 

A few refining qualifications:

1)  First, go read Andy’s Guide to Building and Selling Expensive Virtual Real Estate.  Those of us who buy a lot of web real estate do not use Digital Point Forum casual metrics and Hagans does a great job of illustrating how real site deals are framed.

2)  I do not care about niches like [omaha basket weaving].  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  I’m looking for big, liquid markets with active CPA advertisers such as real estate, mortgages, insurance, travel, business media, tech media, etc.

3) I don’t want any crappy multi-hyphenated domain names. 

4)  Nothing newer than 2003 unless the marketplace didn’t evolve until 2003+.

If you have a truly big and valuable site outside of what I can afford, do not fret.  I have millions of dollars of checkbook empowerment from clients and others I advise.

I mentioned the concept of “defensible traffic” in an earlier post and a few people asked, “WTF is defensible traffic?”  I had completely forgotten about getting back to that, but then Todd discussed it a bit the other day.

So, what is defensible traffic?  Well, JazzcatSEO does a pretty good job of describing it:

Anybody with a basic knowledge of PPC and a bank account can buy traffic for their website. And if their account is big enough, they can steal your PPC traffic by paying more per click. Therefore, the only way you can defend that traffic is to pay more per click and cut into your ROI. Furthermore, if you’re using PPC for arbitrage, shifts in the PPC algorithms (meant to combat arbitrage) can completely destroy your ROI, thus eliminating your traffic’s usefulness completely.

On the other hand, a well-optimized site with carefully developed content, quality backlinks, good domain age, etc. that ranks well in the SERPs has a huge advantage over newer contenders in the same space. It’s much easier to maintain traffic from such a site, because anybody who want to compete with you in that space will have to develop a site with more relevant backlinks or better content, which is a lot more difficult than simply upping the bid on their PPC dashboard.

Actually, that’s a really good definition.

If you ever have to go raise money from investors, one of the first questions they will ask you is going to be about the defensibility of your revenue/brand/traffic/etc.  In the Lead Generation world, companies like Adteractive and Quinstreet generate a lot of leads from arbitraging search, email, and tapping into affiliates.  But none of that is really defensible. 

Each of those traffic acquisition sources is out of their control.  How much does it suck to be those guys when Google turns the knobs on Adwords Quality Scoring?  Or their top affiilates underperform…maybe because they found a more attractive offer from a competitor?  Or email laws change?

If you want to endure in the Widget Market, you have to treat it like war.  You can’t arbitrage battle for very long.  At the end of the day, you’re still losing blood.  In the history of warfare, the only way the winner has ever held that claim is by having boots on the ground.  You don’t own a people…or a market…with smart bombs.  You need lots of your combat boots on their dirt.

That’s defensible.  I don’t care how blackhat or whitehat you are in your methods to build that asset, just make sure it’s defensible.  Taking that thought up another notch, if your site is truly defensible, you could exist if search engines went out of business tomorrow.

In about twenty seconds, all the arbitragers are going to lose their minds.  But guess what?  You can host arbitraging on a defensible web property, too.  Guys like Intel and Nortel do it all the time (I’ll let you guys go do that discovery).  It’s not rocket science.

So, what are you doing to make your revenue defensible?

There’s a pop culture phenomenon these days where everybody wants to be something they perceive to be cooler.  Rappers want to be athletes.  Athletes want to be rappers.  Actors want to sing.  Singers want to act.  Ted Leonsis wants to be an SEO.  SEO’s want to have Ted Leonsis’s ATM card.  You get the point.

On this crazy money tree…err, Information Superhighway…we call the Interweb, the one thing that fascinates me the most is domaining.  Maybe it’s because I feel if I wasn’t playing Gran Turismo all throughout college, I would have gotten a crappy job to fund my mid-90’s domain name buying spree.  In my best estimation, I could have had about eleventy billion bucks in 2007 dollars had I gone on said shopping spree.  I suck. 

I own a crapload of domains these days, but not nearly the 100,000 or millions that the Professional Domaining Badasses own in their portfolios.  Monetized by type-in traffic and the sales of these names, it’s always the domain guys who ball out of control the most when I show up at these Internet Illuminati Retreats (don’t Google it, it doesn’t exist…allegedly).  Usually it’s a dozen guys with a Search background who might have hit seven figures, another dozen Russian Email Spammers who did seven figures, and then one or two domainers who did more than all of the Search and Email guys combined.  And guess who worked the least?  These domain guys literally sit on the beach all day whilst making millions.  Their idea of a daily task is to remember to take a few Advils in the early afternoon to drown out that headache they got from hearing the “ching ching ching ching ching ching” of web idiots clicking on their CPC’d landing pages.

I’ve had one domain I bought for $8 sell for five figures, but that’s it.  Nothing legendary, but surely enough to awake the degenerate gambler in me.  I’m batting .05% on domain names, yet I feel like a roided up Barry Bonds stepping up to a pinata.  Hell, I’m seriously thinking of buying barrybondspinataexplosion.com right now!

So, maybe the best New Year’s Resolution I made this year that I can share with you guys (and the legions of smokin’ hot chicks I’m convinced read this site religiously) is to try buy one domain name a day in 2007.  Each night before you go to sleep, think of everything that happened that day and then go try to own its future* (assuming it’s not a trademarked term, of course) on the web.

*If you get to an emerging technology .com domain name before me, email me and we’ll probably buy it.

It’s the end of an era.  A very profitable era.  Congratulations to the Google team who finally made it completely unworthwhile for me to buy cheap Adwords traffic and arbitrage it with lucrative Adsense inventory.  My strategy had weathered many a Quality Score and Smart Pricing update but now it’s about as dry as an 80 year old hooker.

Just about all my fishing spots are barren.   I can no longer count on 3x to 5x ROI on nickel and dime clicks.  I do find it somewhat suspicious, though, that my current minimum bids are almost spot on to my previous margin.  Anyways, as much as I knock Google for some of their horseshit, I am equally as willing to point out what they are doing right.

So, my traffic acquisitions equation changes.  I don’t have the time to do much more in the way of link building to build organic traffic to those sites.  Yahoo and MSN don’t have nearly the reach.  Most of the other content ad networks where I buy traffic suck.  Argh.  I think I’ll take some of the cash out of the Pushbutton Arbitrage Coffers and go buy some old ass sites with nice links and undermonetized ad inventory. 

Arbitraging is so 2006.  2007 is all about defensible traffic (see definition: defensible traffic). 

PS.  Good luck and Godspeed to the arbitragers who are still making it happen!