When Mike Filsaime first mentioned Tweetglide, I signed up to his notification list but I wasn’t really that interested in the concept. I thought it had a few flaws in the business model he was proposing, and there were already enough Adobe Air Twitter applications on the market.

I am saying this as someone who even considered hiring some developers to make an app, or picking up a dying project and adding some viral life to it. There are ways to leverage the Twitter application market that will be attractive.

Before Mike really started selling information products, he had a huge amount of success with viral marketing applications many of which are still alive and generating revenue and traffic 4 years later.

See that second bar? Those are paid ads, though the more real tweets you post, the more ad credits you earn, but the amount you can earn is limited to 1 ad credit every 3 hours. That is there for a reason – advertising is meant to be valuable.

The aim is also to clean up the Twitter stream that is currently plagued with people promoting stuff, especially marketers. Permission to see an agreed amount of advertising is a much better alternative, and if Mike has got his math right, lots of people will see those adverts.

Advertising is relatively cheap depending on how many see your advert and click – too many factors to speculate on now – I know I have got a ton of advertising credits to use from paid upgrades – Tweetglide is something I willingly paid to upgrade just to check it out.

Serious reasons to use Tweetglide

Take a look at my Tweetglide blog – Andy Beard on Tweetglide

It doesn’t look very special at this time, very much like your normal Twitter page

However Tweetglide isn’t a black hole of link equity – no link condoms.

At the same time there is no enforced blogroll – just because I follow someone doesn’t make it an endorsement, whereas normally when I link from Twitter it is an endorsement – that strange parallel of Twitter I have never been comfortable with – it has sucked for too long.

Tweetglide also supports long length tweets over 140 characters – they need a little bit of improving, but if you just have something quick to say, it is useful.

SEO By Andy Beard

Well kind of….

Over the weekend I exchanged a lot of long emails with Mike over the SEO shortcomings – I can see his team have already picked up a lot of what I suggested in just the rushed 2 days before launch, and my hope is that they will implement the whole of my “12 point list” of major structural changes to the site.

There are a few more tweaks I could add to the list, and as the site settles down I will add those to the suggestions.

I am probably too modest about my achievements with SEO and large user generated content sites, but as of yesterday I am pretty sure I will now helped 2 sites reached the Alexa Top 500 from modest beginnings, and it would be great to make Tweetglide a hat-trick.

The roadmap Mike now has for Tweetglide will make the blogs valuable properties with a flat architecture ideal for deep indexing – this is important as a lot of the information within the extended 140+ Tweets would otherwise just disappear.

As a property for reputation management, Tweetglide is going to rock – if nurtured correctly I am quietly confident it can replace Twitter in my own SERPs.

Serious Flexibility

I just spent 5 minutes on some obvious customization that isn’t possible with your normal Twitter page, I am sure there are a bunch more possibilities.

So there is a bunch of javascript widgets, static links with anchor text or call to action.

I bet I can get an autoresponder in there no problem

Popups? Exitpops? No idea, but seems like fun.

I have no idea how secure this is… Blogger has somehow been able to allow all these things for years, for some reason WP.com can’t handle it, but you would think the team who created blogger, who now work on Twitter would be able to add a little more flexibility.

Tracking?

This says it all

Monetization?

I haven’t tried, but I bet all kinds of advertising widgets plus Google Adsense will work.

No Custom CSS

This is all new, I am sure lots more flexibility will come for custom designs

Big Negative

Whilst I have been assured this is going to be fixed soon, currently Mike has Viral Inviter on the back end. I know Mike has taken action to nudge the devleoper over the issues, and Norman dropped by and left a comment yesterday to go over viral inviter new features. I would suggest not using the tell-a-friend for now… Mike does have a large development team but this site is beta, going to be gaining a lot of attention, and any risk with a Gmail password is too much…

The rest of the site? Seriously much better than I expected, with a lot more long-term potential.

This is a referral link Andy Beard’s Referral Link and I think other links to the blog will count as that as well, and even search engine traffic. I did encourage Mike to make everything “coupon” based just like all the web2.0 startups but the links are referral links for now.

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I was meaning to get a post out on this most of last week but I was tied up helping lots of people big & small.

Mike Hill is the only guy I know that teaches this stuff, but you will find Value Trojans all over the place when you realise the simplicity and powerful concept behind it.

I also mentioned when I offered my bonus for Stompernet that I had plans to add some kind of Value Trojan to this site.

Value Trojans First and foremost are about offering insane value

Mike goes into incredible detail in his free promotional videos for his launch of sales tsunami and normally charges $25000/day to teach this stuff as a consultant, so it is well worth taking a look.

For anyone wary about giving out their email address, Mike isn’t a prolific email marketer (at least in the IM space) so you won’t be bombarded with tons of affiliate offers joining his list.

You will get immediate access to his training on Value Trojans – there is enough information to actually go out and take action immediately as one of his consulting clients did.

Important Webinar Monday Oct 26t at 6PM pacific time

I am rushing this post a little as Mike also has a webinar starting in just 3 hours where he will be providing a “cliffnotes” version of his entire course and there is a chance to win the whole course on 18 DVDs.

A lot of what Mike does is consulting CPA, and teaching people how to run their own CPA offers, so this will be very high signal, low noise information that will be of immense value to anyone doing any form of direct response marketing.

Update

Mike has decided to provide a webinar reply at a more friendly UK time

Value Trojans & Free Training Webinar (Wednesday 10/28/09 10:45 PST)

The last one was packed full on information, and I am hoping to work out some way to grab a recording for private reference.

Disclosure

Kevin Spence was a little concerned about affiliate link use

This is exactly the sort of post that makes it difficult for me to trust anything that internet marketers say. I like your blog Andy, but can anybody recommend services/products without throwing affiliate links all over the place?

I often do link to stuff without affiliate links

But here is the crunch

I have watched Mike’s videos 3 times, and have a copy saved on my HD – I think the concept and some of the subtle nuances are that good. I watched the videos when he had his first launch and even had the opportunity to promote this then as an affiliate, but I chose not to because he linked to a product I wasn’t happy with promoting – he didn’t even use an affiliate link for that. He didn’t link to earn money, just for clarification. Mike isn’t teaching how to make money promoting CPA offers, but the nuts and bolts of running your own. It is advanced sometimes geeky stuff.

If I am encouraging someone to buy something, I either offer my own bonuses, or do something crazy – link to other people offering bonuses instead even though I know that that is throwing money away.

In fact in the last 4 or 5 months I have actually driven more sales for other people offering bonuses than sales I have made myself

Mike’s content rocks if you want to create your own CPA offers, and I could either use affiliate links or not – whether someone buys through an affiliate link or not they will pay the same price.

If someone buys something and I get credited for an affiliate sale… great, if they don’t buy, still great but I hope people at least watch the videos for free as they rock.

I normally blatantly disclose but this was posted in a rush, I didn’t even set up tracking links – but the link itself says “affiliate.html” – better disclosure than all the masked links on twitter. Talking of Twitter, every tweet I published about this was to this post, not a direct affiliate link.

I normally spend a lot more time on the articles, I have/had plans for 2 articles covering Mike’s product, with some in-depth examples/case studies, but in many ways that effort is wasted on my audience as they rarely buy anything anyway.

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If you have been following the theme of Jeff Walkers Product Launch Manager launch, a large chunk of it is that online marketers often have far more knowledge than they think they do – they just have to go out there and sell it.

So my bonus is along those lines and will reveal a lot more of my long term plans, which I even hinted at long ago in a comment on Jeff Walker’s blog when he first launched PLF over 3 years ago.

Best Existing Solution By Far

The other day I felt compelled to write about Quansite because it is the closest service to what I want to achieve.

If you are looking for a perfect “no tech” solution for small product launches, I honestly don’t think there is anything that can beat it.

For bigger launches you might start running into resource problems – you can upgrade to a bigger package (they offer semi-dedicated) but that is a long-term commitment just to cover peak traffic.

Off-loading media files to a CDN is only a partial solution.

Running Your Own Dedicated Servers

I have heard that on some of the biggest launches they run up to 10 dedicated servers in a cluster, though Stompernet squeak through on just 4 beasts. From a reliable service provider you are still looking at possibly $2000+/month for the hardware, plus you have to have the server jockeys to run them.

Then you need some kind of media hosting, as even 4 beefy servers won’t be able to stream videos to 100s of visitors, let alone 1000s.

Most of the “Gurus” currently use Amazon S3 or Cloudfront

United States Edge Locations Data Transfer

$0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out $0.120 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out $0.100 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out $0.090 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out $0.080 per GB – next 250 TB / month data transfer out $0.070 per GB – next 250 TB / month data transfer out $0.060 per GB – next 250 TB / month data transfer out $0.050 per GB – data transfer out / month over 1,000 TB Requests

$0.010 per 10,000 GET requests

I am not going to knock Amazon, as before they came around a few years ago, CDN bandwidth might have set you back 5x as much, but then nowhere near as many people were publishing videos… it was costly.

Even so lets look at a typical (small) product launch

100 MB video per person 20,000 visitors ================== 2000 GB of data

Not a lot … around $400

But some larger product launches have

500 MB video per person (I am not talking browser killing Stompernet sales pages) 100,000 visitors ================== 50,000 GB of data

A little bit more … around $6500

Just imagine how much one of the really big launches costs, and then the cost of data delivery for the actual content to members who quite rightly want to consume what they purchased.

Or you could look at a sales page

10 MB Video – Very short low quality 500 visitors per day 5GB per day 150 GB/month ============ 1800 GB per year

You are still looking at close to $400 for bandwidth /year

If you do insist on using Amazon S3, do at least use something like Media Stream Guard (not aff) from my friend Craig. So many gurus leave their Amazon content insecure.

Alternative CDNs

SimpleCDN – I have been monitoring them for the last year, and they have changed their offer maybe 5 times, effectively wiping out whatever investment clients have already made in setup time. If you were a very heavy user, maybe you would have still had significant cost savings, but the feature sets have been changing drastically.

Rackspace with their Cloudfiles at $0.22 are actually a contender as the playback is probably better than Amazon.

NetDNA – recently quite popular among many bloggers using WordPress and bandwidth pricing can reach very respectable levels offering a price advantage over Amazon – the negative is that most of their “Edges” are in the USA with just one in Europe.

Edgecast – competitive in volume, fast & reasonably full featured. Notable connectivity in Asia

Highwinds – various resellers strong in both US & Europe – Asia promised.

VPS.net – A reseller of Highwinds and also cloud based VPS – were previously reselling Edgecast but there were problems with flexibility.

With most of these CDNs it is possible to get bandwith cost down to below $0.06/GB – possibly a little cheaper with some negotiation and very high volume.

You would have to be running the equivalent of 20 large product launches with Amazon Cloudfront to achieve these pricing levels, and before you reach that level there is some margin for eith cost saving or profit.

Flash Players

You can always take the free option of using a GPL player such as Flowplayer, though they also have a premium option

JW Player has some viral and data benefits that would require a liitle custom programming to get working on other players, but at the same time are not in themselves perfect. I have seen slightly better implementation, but none that I would consider ideal. The licensing for commercial use isn’t too expensive.

Transparent Player – I haven’t checked out version 3 which was recently launched yet (and it is not even mentioned on the sales page last time I looked), but with the unlimited use plan it is a very viable contender

EZS3 provide players in addition to making it easier to work with Amazon obscuring data, usable on unlimited sites. I have seen this used by Frank Kern.

This isn’t meant to be a conclusive list, I know a ton of other options, both with and without available source code for custom modifications. Boy do I want to do some modifications.

Best Current Solution

I am laying my bets on VPS.net for some serious clustered high-availability hosting and also providing primary CDN, with some alternative backups.

With players the field is open

Why No Video Streaming With Own Players?

I can imagine people running huge launches who are extremely well monetized can afford some of the more expensive solutions, because they are then in a position to negotiate, but that isn’t suitable for most. For some reason even people supposedly running 8 figure businesses have problems keeping servers running smoothly.

Jeff Walker is using Ooyala – I haven’t quite worked out the pricing, but it will be more than just a CDN. Brightcove despite the free trial is not cheap Viddler – if you don’t have their ads then commercial use even as an Enterprise client will cost you $1500 for 4TB of data or 0.375/GB = 5x as much as VSP.net in much smaller volume.

There are many other options with the price range typically $0.30 to $1 per GB.

What I Really Want To Do?

I want to provide hosting for product launches for FREE, including all the bandwidth, high-capacity clustered servers, built in membership software, and many other advanced features.

Is there such an expression “Fat Pipe Sales Funnel” ?

That is only part of the equation, the service has to make money and cover quite considerable costs, but that is where “value add” comes in with all kinds of network effects that add up to more than enough to cover costs and then some. After all WordPress.com can offer something similar and they are really under-monetized.

Leverage :)

Pipe Dreams?

One focused goal for 4 years will eventually happen but in hindsight I probably should have just concentrated on clogging up the interwebs with small niche sites, or building a huge list, but something held me back. I would almost certainly have the resources to build this project from cashflow now. Even the paid link battles from 2007 were very much a part of the “sounding out” process on possibilities.

I have avoided masterminds – they would have persuaded me to pursue more attainable goals.

Product Launch Manager Bonus “Can Be Delivered Now”

CDN = “Content Delivery Network: or alternatively “Can be Delivered Now”

There are tons of huge bonuses being offered by other affiliates for Product Launch Manager, because it is a great product but also the affiliate payout is… generous to say the least.

The wonderful thing about the course is that it will massively boost the number of people running product launches in all walks of industry, but at the same time boost demand for higher performance hosting with significant commercial advantages, so it finally makes my long-term goals infinitely more attractive as an investment opportunity.

Just providing one core component might be enough “proof of concept” to tip the investment balance, and just the benefit of having one major “breaking point” of product launches crossed off, the technical side of preventing launches crashing to a standstill because of server meltdown is probably the most targeted bonus you will hear about today… well other than pure consulting offers from people who have run launches.

My Offer

I will provide a preconfigured CDN platform where you can just ftp files or they can be pulled using Rsync, along with origin pull to the CDN along with $1000 of bandwidth at cost – the bandwidth will be available as and when you need it and will not expire if not used on a month-month basis like many subscriptions. Most likely it will be through VPS.net, but I will shop around and provide additional fallback

I will also provide additional remote consulting for both the CDN and other launch issues to the best of my ability. I am a “jack of all trades” and can talk both geek and marketing. I am not going to place silly limits on time – your success is my success. As and when I scale, I will be able to provide additional human resources to fill my shoes.

When other components become available you will have the option to use them – I have my server techs sorted out now to manage the clusters and VPS.net is ideal to scale this kind of platform, in many ways more than Amazon EC2 and other cloud options because of the nature of product launches.

Until such time as I have the backend monetization and “leverage” to offer all the hosting for free, additional bandwidth and any server use will be at cost – not inflated cost… real cost. For the CDN it will be something like $0.06/GB at current exchange rates and pricing.

If you want to set up your own VPS servers or clusters I can also offer nodes at competitive rates as I will end up with 100s of nodes, and point you in the direction of people who could manage them for you.

I hope you will consider my offer – the PLM offer isn’t cheap, but will be attractive to existing PLF owners, and maybe a few others.

Alternatively go with the big $$$ packages. You know the game – all those leads you send to the big launches that didn’t convert (but which you presold) will now be offered the exact same package (or very similar) as a bonus, with no commission for the original affiliate despite doing a significant chunk of the selling.

Making crashed servers on product launches a thing of the past

I have a cure for respecting the value provided by smaller affiliates in the sales process as well…

Warning: This article contains lots of really useful information that will probably help people but also contains a few affiliate links – not every link is an affiliate link, and not every link should be considered an endorsement

p.s. I know my server crashes occasionally – I personally suck as configuring linux servers, which is why last week I hired a great team to do this stuff for me.

When the sales letter goes live, <<< USE THIS LINK >>> – hopefully the previous links will still lead to some of the more descriptive videos.

Tags: Amazon Cloudfront, amazon s3, Brightcove, Edgecast, EZS3, Highwinds, jeff walker, JW Player, Media Stream Guard, NetDNA, Ooyala, product launch formula, Product Launch Manager, Product Launch Manager Bonus, Rackspace Cloudfiles, SimpleCDN, Transparent Player, VPS.NetRelated posts

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One of the smartest SEOs I know who doesn’t run some kind of paid membership site now does

Whilst also blogging together on Collective Thoughts (ok so I have been slacking a little) we also have a chat group on Skype that has been running for 2 years.

Dave knows his stuff (like really knows his stuff), and if your primary interest is SEO, I can’t think of a better place to hang out and share secrets.

I absolutely refused to promote this as an affiliate as it is something we have chatted about in the Collective Thoughts group for so long, plus in various launch consultations I encouraged Dave not to open the affiliate program immediately anyway… make it more of an “internal launch”.

Dave also rustled up a limited discount for a few lucky readers

Note: Dave wanted to ensure this is affordable for anyone who wants to join – a bit like a virtual “PubCon” with an emphasis on sharing knowledge that wouldn’t be wise to share in public, especially with search engine representitives snooping around. A bastion of “sage” knowledge rather than a warchest of tools – (though there are some nice tools available as bonuses)

Find out more about the SEO Dojo and just read the testimonials

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Would ranking for these terms bring SEOmoz additional traffic and take traffic away from affiliates? Would that be a benefit to the long-term SEOmoz brand?

Tom Critchlow of Distilled has quite a disturbing post today for affiliates on the SEOmoz blog, encouraging brands to rank for their own coupon codes.

The suggestion is that brands should try to rank for their own voucher codes and take that traffic away from affiliate coupon sites. Unfortunately in some cases that might be biting the hand that feeds you.

Many of the sites that offer various forms of vouchers & coupons are brand evangelists, and the page on their site which offers regular updated coupons to their audience also acts as a conduit to product reviews, in much the same way as product reviews would link to the most recent coupon codes. If affiliates are smart, they also have access to coupons from competing products and brands.

Whilst you can stamp out the traffic pure coupon sites receive by ranking for your own brand… and that could quite easily make a visible “net gain” to justify SEO jobs, the negative effect is hard to quantify.

Lets take Tom’s example to extremes and rank for as many terms used by affiliates as possible.

[brand] review

[brand] sucks/scam/

[brand] vs

[brand] compared

[brand] cheap

[brand] coupon/discount/bonus/rebate/voucher/promo

These are all bread and butter terms for affiliates, but if you cut off all the terms affiliates can rank for, many affiliates will just write about your competitors instead.

This also happens frequently in reverse when vendors don’t supply affiliates with coupons, affiliates will rank for your “[brand] coupon” and offer an alternative product instead.

By promoting the existence of coupons to your primary user base, that increases the traffic for the search term, which makes it more lucrative for affiliates to rank for the term. Also a higher percentage of your existing client base will search for coupon codes for every transaction. It is much easier to do this on the internet than brick & mortar stores where the coupons might have ended up with the junk mail, or simply forgotten.

Many online brands have been created or significantly enhanced by strong affiliate partners, and coupons often are provided to ensure affiliates get the sale and to add urgency/increase conversion rate.

There is a danger that some advice that might seem obvious could backfire and be very difficult to repair.

In his article Tom mentioned Argos, who I found ranking much higher than stated with their current “voucher” page, however they were also targeting the term via PPC. UK search for Argos Voucher Personalization off The problem with their PPC listing? It doesn’t link to a vouchers page. Argos are however a store that makes vouchers extremely prominent, displaying them in a section on their home page “This Week’s Highlights”

Of course SEOMoz itself doesn’t rank highly for any of the terms highlighted, maybe that is a “Headsmacking Tip” too (they have an affiliate program)

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You didn’t think I would leave it at just my expert perspective on the Technorati changes did you?

As with my previous post I want to make clear that it is somewhat of a dilemma writing about Technorati, as I provide some infrequent consultation to Blogcatalog in some ways one of their competitors.

However as well as providing an expert’s overview of Technorati I have always been an avid user, so this is Technorati from a purely user’s perspective.

Technorati Favorites Are Gone

The Technorati Top 100 by number of favorites has gone, along with all the interfaces for managing and reading favorites.

Technorati Blog Reactions Are Gone

You used to be able to use Technorati to monitor a story, following links to related posts.

Technorati no longer has a page containing a large snippet of your content along with the related links to that content.

As a user of Technorati that is a major loss, and it was this relationship between posts that used to make technorati a core component of the WordPress interface.

This is a feature competition with Google has finally killed, but Google’s Blogsearch currently sucks, picking up comments even with nofollow, sidebar links etc. Monitoring links through Google is time consuming because of the noise.

Technorati Comments

You can now leave friendly comments on the profiles of the blogs you love, all through JS Kit (which means the blog owner has no way to moderate, just link Google Sidewiki)

Here is one I left on the Techcrunch profile pointing this out earlier

Technorati Articles

You can now write full articles to post on Technorati such as this one (chosen at random)

I think you are meant to reach these articles through the Technorati “People” navigation which isn’t currently working, but there are links to related articles at the bottom of Directory pages.

Technorati Directory

Top blogs in a small collection of topics plus the global “headline” Technorati top 1000

Humans are going to have difficulty navigating through more than a few pages, let alone search engines

You are really going to have to use blog based tags to find blogs similar to your own. Make sure you set them correctly for your own blogs.

Overall

Many of the features that were broken no longer exist, and the idea of reactions going away forever is sad. Hopefully it is a feature that will return. I am not sure whether commenting will enhance the site – I know that contact systems on Mybloglog and Blogcatalog are prone to spam which a site owner can moderate. I can’t understand why they use JS-Kit.

Update

Technorati have now posted a list of changes from their perspective highlighting things like the ranked directories (though they have always had ranked tags)

There are even some slightly more technical features I didn’t spot as missing, but will eventually come back

What’s gone for now? With six years of history behind us, we have also discovered what’s important and not important in our offerings. As such, some things will go away permanently, and others will return later with enhanced utility that reflects the new features of the site. Here’s what’s coming back shortly after launch:

* Technorati Charts and API: both will be returning later * Widgets – For those sites with widgets on their sites, there’s no need to worry. Some widgets will continue to serve as they have in the past, and some that utilized legacy Technorati technology will either change slightly or temporarily disappear without any affect on web pages. Technorati will be developing some exciting new widgets that match the new features in the site. * s.technorati.com is still there, but it’s moved to the main site at Technorati.com/search * Watchlists are gone * Some (but not all) RSS feeds.

They really should remove the noindex/nofollow from their blog header

Update

It seems Technorati are now crawling a lot fewer blogs now – it will be interested to find out an exact number.

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I am always in 2 minds to write anything about Technorati but ultimately the changes to the site today are extremely significant, and I had to balance that against my ability to offer suitable commentary.

This post covers the more technical changes to Technorati – I have also now posted about the changes to Technorati from a users perspective

1. Since I started advising Blogcatalog a little in private, writing about Technorati, Mybloglog or any other blog directory or search engine in some ways would be like writing about the competition. Celebrating the great things a competitor does would probably be acceptable, whereas writing something negative would be “dissing the competition”
2. This blog has always had in-depth coverage of blog search, blog social networks and blog related SEO, especially in regards to things like the benefits of semantic markup and tagging. Not writing something would leave a huge whole in my content and a disservice to my audience.

My choice is to write something, but understand that some might look on what I write as being a little biased. In my own mind I am a Technorati fan, so hopefully that will temper my reactions to some features.

I need to qualify the title of this post – I have spent countless days over the last 2-3 years studying changes the user interface, plus the internal and external SEO factors of all the large blogging platforms, social networks and search engines. Whilst my email exchanges with Blogcatalog are extremely infrequent, I am constantly monitoring for changes.

Technorati Relaunched Site

I first read about the upcoming Technorati changes on Venture Beat in an interview with Richard Jalichandra 10 days ago, and Richard also made the announcement on his blog. There is an announcement on the Technorati blog as well – by the date of the post (8th Oct) they might have been almost ready to go live a week ago, but pulled the plug due to a hitch.

Techcrunch have coverage today and Technorati have also received an additional round of funding (well technically an extension of a previous round).

New Technorati Home Page

Technorati Rankings Changed

Technorati have a new ratings system which is based on factors I haven’t worked out yet – I am sure there is a lot of Twitter data in there as people don’t link very often these days in many niches, especially the SEO community (hint) They are probably also pulling in 3rd party traffic data.

Techcrunch mention:-

Now they are focusing much more on recent data within the last month and giving blogs an authority rank between 1 – 1,000. Scoring factors include posting frequency, context, linking behavior and “other inputs.”

It will be interesting how ranking tables such as Adage Power 150 or the Top IM Blogs include this data going forward.

Technorati Tag Pages

This is now approaching the nuts and bolts of Technorati

Lets first of all take a look at the tag page for SEO

The first immediate impression is that this is only a single page of results, there is no pagination and there is a comment box at the bottom of the page provided by JS Kit. That has just bumped the JS Kit installed based by several million pages. Technorati last had around 30 million indexed pages, though I am sure that will soon change.

If you look at your Google toolbar, Search Status or other SEO plugin, you might notice a TBPR (Toolbar Page Rank) for this page of 2. You would think with all the millions of times Technorati have no doubt been linked to for this term by people using Technorati as a default tag space (rel=”tag”) that it would be more than that – Google does seem to be discounting those links and has been for some time.

Almost all of the results are around 150 in the new Technorati Authority scale, and there are no recent SEO posts listed such as Powazek slamming SEO in general, and Danny Sullivan responding… twice. For those wondering, I nofollowed Powazek because I don’t trust the source. Ranking for stuff due to the benefits of WordPress theme publishing really doesn’t count as SEO.

There is a short article at the top of the page from Blog Critics that has some great links for Michael Grey and SEOmoz.

The least obvious factor is that the tag pages no longer seem to be made up of editorially assigned tags from blog publishers, but is based upon a content search and possible relevance based upon keyword density. I suspect technorati are now using something like Sphinx to power their tag pages. They won’t be the first, and I am not saying this is the wrong approach, but it is a significant change that Technorati, effectively the king of rel=”tag” doesn’t really use it much any more.

As evidence there was a listing to this page virtualdownload.net/?p=59834 – it was not specifically tagged SEO, just used the term a lot promoting what seems to be a warez download.

No SEO tag used (click for more)

Technorati Search

If you just type in a search for a particular topic in Technorati now, it defaults to a search of Blogs on the topic, not recent content.

Rankings Based Upon Old technorati Authority?

I have a funny feeling these rankings are based upon the old Technorati scales in some way as can be seen in the numbers on the left hand side – it is not exactly the same, but there is a lot of similarity in the results.

The default blog post search again seems to to be keyword density based, so if you want to rank for SEO on Technorati, just mention SEO a lot.

If you then refine your search based upon high authority, the results actually seem pretty good, lots of web designers saying SEO is a load of crock, plus Danny defending SEO.

Then you delve into the results and discover:-

• Just a snippet from the lead developer of Tumblr – a crap result
• A paid post on Venture Beat that doesn’t use nofollows – a smart SEO company would actually want those links nofollowed, so I don’t feel like I am snitching.
• Regurgitated Powazek
• More regurgitated Powazek on Boing Boing

I don’t trust those results either, all nofollowed

What is wrong with SEO is search engine reliance on website authority to give meanings to results – these results are in my opinion crap, but search engines have to somehow unravel how bad quality all those referring sites are, as they are not topical authorities and just joining in on a web designer circle jerk. It will take a little time for Google to work that out, and I doubt the “fresh” result for Derek’s post will remain long on the front page of Google.

It should be noted that a large chunk of Derek Powazek’s “good code” has probably just been scrapped by Technorati.

I think the new Technorati shows some promise in its scaled down capacity – it is pretty and fairly functional though a number of the new components need a little work. I hope a chunk of Technorati’s new funding will be invested in hiring an SEO expert.

Disclaimer: I am not an SEO consultant – you can’t hire me on an hourly rate and those I advise almost always benefited from free advise long before there was any kind material compensation. I just study things intensely and rip them apart. I certainly couldn’t create many of the great web applications I write about without a lot of help from great web developers.

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This is in many ways one of the most painful blog posts I could write, because it is about a service that is the closest anyone has come in 4 years to the “software as a service platform” I would like to create.

The business model is totally different but the front end seems to have many of the features and attention to detail that I would require, and to be honest much of what I want to achieve on the backend & network effect isn’t necessary for many business users.

If what I want to create is a lion, Quansite is a tiger – different animals, different prey – both killers and could probably co-exist.

Quansite is a WordPress based blogging platform for business, but calling it that is really doing it a bit of a disservice.

It is the kind of system that will take a huge bite out of the business of high-priced website development shops targeting small business, because so much is done for you.

Quansite Marketing Pro

There are a couple of WordPress themes I know of which can claim drag and drop, but they are not designed for creating sales pages & one-time offers, or “touch of a button” squeeze page creation.

Quansite Optimization

A lot of these features many might claim “I know a plugin that does that” but they are buggy or unsupported. Or you would have to pay for them, and purchased plugins you have to update by ftp etc. If you like tinkering with things, fair enough, but it isn’t efficient use of your time as a business owner.

Quansite New Media

Quansite is by @coachdeb and @jpmicek – they know social media backwards – the real thing, and can teach it.

When everyone else anything to do with social media consulting was on a mass “follow everyone” drive, Coach Deb just kept on doing what she had always done, maintaining relationships. Here is me, writing a blog post possibly about my most serious competitor, and I am doing it because of the relationship I have built with Coach Deb over the last year.

I don’t know the specifics of the modules, in some ways the video and audio “blasters” seem very similar to Traffic Geyser and could be some kind of white label – they are limited by credits for all but the highest level packages.

Quansite Backend

Trying to translate from “marketing speak” into more geeky terms, it seems like they might have a CDN integrated… looking at their own site this is through SimpleCDN, though I don’t know if it is their S3Plus service, or as a Highwinds reseller. I can’t quite work out “server ring” – some kind of clustering maybe using memcached but don’t count on that.

Solid backups and security – I know geeks can do this stuff, but webdev shops charge small businesses $X’000 for this stuff.

I am not going to spy on my competitors friend’s proprietary stuff, though to be honest it is so tempting just to abandon goals and get on with just using technology to make money – I could make a lot of money just using Quansite.

Take a look, they have for a limited time an introductory offer for all the main packages of just $9.97 for the first month

It is still shared hosting, even on their most expensive plans, but I doubt the servers will be oversold and all sites are using a CDN which makes a huge difference, especially if they are also doing some decent caching.

I am not going to review it in-depth for a number of reasons

1. I haven’t seen anything that would stop me spending less than $10 to check it out for myself
2. It wouldn’t be right for me to pay the $10 just to snoop with no intention of staying around – I still have my unfulfilled plans (who knows they may never happen)
3. They have been running this platform for a while now under the brand i360 and I have never seen any critical reviews
4. How could anyone say anything bad about @coachdeb? The training is probably worth more than she is charging for the whole package.

I have no idea if every aspect is as optimized as I might want it to be, but I am sure it fulfils the 80:20 rule

I am not sure what additional limitations that places on things like design.

Warning: This is a NO TECH solution – you don’t even get FTP access, they say there is no need.

For anyone who isn’t a geek, that is actually a good thing, they can concentrate on marketing and making money.

Disclosure: I should just tell you to read my disclosure policy but I have included affiliate links in this post.

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Earlier today I was watching a video for Jeff Walker newest product… yeah a new product, not just a relaunch of Product Launch Formula and I was struck by one small factoid within the first of many new (free) instructional videos.

Whilst consulting with Tony Robbins (yes THE Tony Robbins) who you would think would have all the fundamentals of online marketing totally mastered, there was a surprising revelation.

I am a customer of Jeff’s, I purchased his Product Launch Formula some time ago, and he keeps on updating it and giving updates to all his existing customers. This is a new product and from what I hear Jeff will be doing a special offer for existing customers. There is a fair chance this will be a high ticket course… 50 people paid $25000 to attend Jeff’s exclusive training on leveraging and scaling product launches in new directions.

The thing is, Jeff’s also well known for giving away great content in the build up to any product launch, in fact a lot of the strategies can be learnt just paying very close attention to his own launches. I have over 3 years of emails from Jeff archived, and a number of his launch videos on my HD, including all the ones he used to promote his $25000 exclusive conference.

Yes I am using affiliate links in this post, it is a great way to gauge interest in different products as I get some kind of click through data and occasionally some email subscription data as well. Clicking through and signing up for the free info doesn’t prevent you purchasing through someone else’s link at a later date, if someone is offering a better bonus than me.

p.s. I can be a slick commenter – I managed to get the first comment in on Jeff’s launch blog with a note about why this is about the only blog covering SEO that doesn’t offer some kind of consulting. p.p.s how well do you find Jeff’s video streams from where you live in the world?

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