
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) interviewed for an hour on SEO & AdWords - epi0Bauqu
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/04/patrick-mckenzie-on-seo-adwords-for-bingo-card-creator.html
======
patio11
Thanks to Gabe for the interview and, in particular, for letting me write and
edit a transcript of it. I have always preferred reading to listening myself.

If you guys have any questions, feel free to ask.

~~~
thetrumanshow
What I'd like to know is what frame of mind allowed you to slog through that
for the last 4 years (losing money early-on). Did you believe in the idea?
Were you just constantly tinkering (mental auto-pilot)? Were you doing other
startup activities in addition? Did you sometimes take a break from the Bingo
Card Creator to try other things?

I find that even ideas that I believe strongly in, I eventually get distracted
and wind up doing other ideas... until distracted again. Rinse, repeat.

~~~
patio11
_losing money early-on_

The business put more money in my pocket than it took out since, hmm, about 30
days after I threw the doors open. (I think I know how you came to this
misconception, so sorry for the unclear phrasing in the interview: I had a few
hundred a month in sales from SEO/etc when I was burning $1 a day trying to
figure out how AdWords worked.)

 _Did you sometimes take a break from the Bingo Card Creator to try other
things?_

I put it on the backburner to focus on either the day job or on living rather
frequently.

As to the frame of mind, I always say that business is a lot like WoW. People
express huge skepticism that you could play WoW for 30 solid days of your life
and not feel bored out of your mind... but you don't get 30 days of /played
all at once. You smash a goblin here and complete a quest there and organize a
raid for your next weekend and maybe think about offing that dragon eventually
and then collect some mushrooms and kill the dragon and then... whoa, 30 days.

I passed the last four years on a thousand and one intellectually engrossing
mini-projects. They never got to the point where they'd lose my interest --
after all, if I just hold out until Saturday, I'll have A/B test results to
look at. If I just put in another hour, I'll have a new feature. If I just
write this email, I'll have a happy customer and maybe get another postcard
for my fridge. etc, etc.

The loot is a bit better than WoW's, too.

------
fondue
That was one of the best hours of my life I've spent all year. I've been
researching adwords and online advertising for about six months now and I've
learned more in that sixty minutes. Thank you!

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cperciva
Question for Patrick (or any other SEO experts, I suppose): You mention the
SEO benefits of exact domain name matching (easterbingocards.com for a query
for "easter bingo cards") -- is it also useful to have a partial match
(patrickseasterbingocards.com for the same query)?

Right now I have tarsnap.(com|net|org), and I'm wondering if I should consider
buying tarsnap<foo>.*, for appropriate values of <foo>, and just making them
redirect to tarsnap.com.

~~~
byrneseyeview
There is a similar "Gray hat" SEO strategy, which involves buying domain names
that include keywords you want, and then 301-redirecting them to your site--
without updating their whois information. I wouldn't do this kind of thing
unless you can devote a lot of attention to it.

You can create content-light pages like the ones Patrick does, for, e.g.,
encryptedbackupsonline.com--each page on the site would have another title
from the same keyword cluster, and each one would end with a call-to-action
like "Tarsnap offers [encrypted backups online] for security-conscious power
users." (Where the brackets indicate a hyperlink.

Bonus points for having a landing page on your own site that targets those
keywords.

(As is probably clear from the above, I do SEO. Patrick's advice is
_extremely_ good, so if you have the time, you'll probably do best by just
doing what he says. However, if you'd like to know what you might pay to
outsource that process to a third party, well, my email address is in the
profile.)

~~~
mcav
Do those shadow domains need to have anything link to them for them to be
useful?

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duck
I hadn't seen <http://tractionbook.com/> before... glad that I have now
though, looks like a lot of great interviews.

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prakash
Awesome! 2 of my favorite HN startups, both of them got the _"Make something
users want"_ part right.

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soitgoes
Very helpful. Thanks. Just wondering, why you decided on going with RoR and if
you considered any other frameworks such as Django?

~~~
patio11
It is what all the cool kids were using. No, seriously, there was that "try
Ruby right in your browser" site and I fell in love with the language in a
matter of minutes.

------
andrewtj
MP3 feed: <http://traction.blip.tv/rss/mp3/>

(Posted as I can't see it linked anywhere)

------
euroclydon
Can anyone please explain that scalable links stuff? I tried searching for it,
but I guess the term "scalable links" is very insider lingo.

~~~
patio11
Which part of it? Why you would want to get them, or why Google does not want
you to get them?

Links are the primary determinant of rankings in competitive searches.
(Competitive searches are high value ones with lots of savvy folks angling to
win, or ones where there are other players for the search term with built in
advantages: for example, [credit cards], [buy viagra online], or [facebook]
are competitive searches, [patio11], [elementary reading bingo cards] or [how
do i sort an array in ruby] are not.) Thus, you want links.

Most methods of actively acquiring links are extraordinarily labor intensive:
they boil down to sending emails to folks asking for them to link to you,
possibly with a sweetener to the deal (such as money, content, a reciprocal
link, etc etc). Google likes this state of affairs, because as long as links
are hard to get, then the number of links you have is a good proxy for either
quality or prodigious effort expended in ranking. Either works for Google --
it makes spam less cost-effective than buying AdWords ads, and there might be
gains to the user experience, too. (A less jaded individual might flip that
sentence.)

If you're on a campaign to get links, ideally you'd want that to scale out of
proportion to the time invested, for the same reason you want users, sales,
etc etc to scale out of proportion to the time invested. Google wants exactly
the opposite, for the above reason. Accordingly, virtually any tactic which
repeatedly results in scalable link generation will eventually be discounted,
regardless of whether it improves the user experience or conforms with
Google's guidelines, which they enforce in an arbitrary and capricious
fashion.

One example of this is widgets, which do result in scalable link acquisition.
See the video for what I think of them.

~~~
euroclydon
Thank you Patrick for the explanation. I'm trying to think of the ways in
which a widget can create a link on a site where it's installed. I'm thinking:

1) Javascript, buy making a GET back to the widget server, and then inserting
the link into the DOM of the widget host page.

2) Iframe.

3) Flash or something like that.

What am I missing? Can't Google easily ignore a part of a page that's
generated by Javascript (their bot doesn't process it anyhow, right), and also
ignore Iframes or Flash?

~~~
patio11
Copy this magic spell to put my widget in your page:

<iframe ... > <a href = <http://www.example.com> >Anchor Text Here</a>

Empirically, most people do not strip the link.

~~~
jacquesm
You can add my 'empirical' confirmation of your datapoint. We did the same
thing with a webcam-in-a-frame using the webcam component, the link was left
in-tact in almost all cases.

------
asimjalis
Thanks for the interview, Patrick. I am also curious about what led you to
switch from the Java Swing app to the web app. If you could do it over again
would you start with the desktop app and move to the web or start with the
web?

~~~
patio11
I have a blog post titled "Why I Am Done Making Desktop Apps" and it answers
this at length:

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/09/05/desktop-aps-versus-
web-a...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/09/05/desktop-aps-versus-web-apps/)

Short version: web kicks desktop's booty from perspective of developer in
conversion rates, support burden, maintainability, and ability to extract
data. My next app will be a web app, no question. (If it were a do-over, would
I be knocked back to my programming competences as of mid-2006? Because that
was Java desktop apps, only -- I couldn't write Ruby and couldn't even _spell_
SQL at that point.)

------
shafqat
Patrick - is Google Analytics or Google Conversion Tracker able to track
conversions that may occur across many sessions/days apart.

For example, tracking the conversion from landing page to registered user is
easy. But what about the conversion from registered user to paying user. That
conversion might occur a week later. Do you know if that is tracked, or does
google only count a conversion within the same session.

------
vaksel
good interview, but the format just looks weird to me. i.e. when the guest
isn't talking, you are just watching someone listening.

With both people on the screen, you can change focus between each person, as
they speak.

------
zackattack
well you got me to sign up for mixpanel.

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steinhoffel
This is all mildly interesting and nice, but honestly $30K _projected_ for
this year is nothing. And that number shows to me more limitations of this
particular method of SEO & AdWords than anything else, i.e. it is not a way to
build company.

My first crappy product made $8K a year in profit 0 advertisement. My second
made $72K a year no advertisement no SEO. My third product is making over
$500k a year (not projected) no advertisement no SEO.

~~~
patio11
By that logic, doesn't your lack of success with no advertisement or SEO on
the first product prove your second and third products don't exist?

~~~
steinhoffel
I don't know what are you talking about... Sorry.

~~~
axod
If you take your first experience: "My first crappy product made $8K a year in
profit 0 advertisement" You might draw the conclusion that '0 advertising is
no way to build a company'. In which case you'd have never bothered trying the
others.

Adwords and SEO are extremely valuable and profitable when done well. Bear in
mind that Bingo Card Creation is a relatively small niche. There are people
doing finance related things with adwords who make millions.

~~~
PG-13
That's not really true. You would be encouraged if you made 8K off a crappy
product with no advertising. You would think that making money is easy and
that you could do much better with a less crappy product. True or not, that's
how I'd read that statement and feel about that situation (which is actually
pretty similar to my actual situation).

~~~
axod
OP "This is all mildly interesting and nice, but honestly $30K projected for
this year is nothing."

I was suggesting that if the OP applied his own logic...

Personally I think making any amount of money is cool and something to build
on.

