Kirk Ouimet

“We see ourselves in terms of yesterday and today. Our Heavenly Father sees us in terms of forever. Although we might settle for less, Heavenly Father won’t, for He sees us as the glorious beings we are capable of becoming.”

- Joseph B. Wirthlin

• When you walk into a room where you will be conducting/teaching/leading smile and introduce yourself to as many people in the room as possible. Be sure to get people’s names and repeat them back to them so you won’t forget.
• Ask for people to share some news from their life at the beginning of the meeting to facilitate openness and sharing from the beginning.
• Acknowledge the presence of any other authorities in the room.
• Stress/emphasize the value of everyone’s involvement in the meeting.
• Reward comments with candy if appropriate.
• Be confident with your body language and in everything you say. Nobody likes to listen to someone who isn’t sure themselves.
• Use names as much as possible. If you don’t know them, ask.
• When people are commenting maintain eye contact with them.
• Show excitement when a good comment or point is raised.
• If someone is reading from some type of source material ask them about a portition of what they read immediately after they finish. e.g., “Tell me how you feel about [section of text].”
• When a topic is covered sufficiently/beat to death say “Let’s move on to [new discussion topic].”
• Ask questions to specific people in addition to asking the group in whole.

Sacrifice is giving up something good for something better.

“A religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation; for, from the first existence of man, the faith necessary unto the enjoyment of life and salvation never could be obtained without the sacrifice of all earthly things.” - Joseph Smith

Found this site last week when researching SEO. The SEO Mini Book covers some important search engine optimization topics, such as:

• How search engines work
• Keywords
• Links
• Metatags
• Content
• Paid submissions

This free online book is a great starting point for anyone who wants a concise introduction to SEO.

dnScoop allows you to get a feel for how much your domain name is worth based on some statistics that the site scrapes from other sites, such as Alexa, Yahoo! SiteExplorer, and Google PageRank. I don’t know how valid the estimates are, but at least it’s fun to speculate.

A couple of days ago I received an e-mail from an individual who wanted to buy one of my websites. I have built websites for clients at predetermined rates in the past, but I have never sold one of my personal web projects. The site that the person wants to purchase from me is located at:

http://www.yougetsignal.com/ (~5,000 visits a day, of which ~600 visits come from organic Google traffic)

YouGetSignal is a collection of AJAX web tools I wrote for fun throughout this last school year. I am currently monetizing it through Google AdSense and donations.

I searched the Internet for some kind of magic formula that would help me appraise the worth of my site. After searching for several hours and finding a ton of different opinions, I decided to contact the Brigham Young University’s Center for eBusiness to ask for some advice on appraising a website. Dr. Stephen Liddle, the director of the program, responded with a very insightful e-mail:

Valuations got crazy during the dot-com bubble, and then they crashed too far. They’ve stabilized a bit since then. In the bubble era, people made the argument that old formulas for valuation went away. Everything was new and needed to be measured differently. Well, the same old rules still likely apply. As the basis of value, you need to understand business fundamentals: what is the revenue potential for this property? You may or may not currently be maximizing the potential revenue stream (you probably aren’t – probably nobody is truly “maximizing” their potential). So basing the value on your current revenue for the site is likely not quite the right thing to do, but it’s the easiest number to start with. “I’m making $X/year now, so you need to pay me $X * Y to buy it from me.” (Where Y is a standard multiple you’d use for any business – online or offline.) At least that would establish a floor for the valuation. The next thing you could do is estimate potential revenue if you were to apply best practices to the property. How many of the visitors are loyal visitors? What would it take to engender more loyalty? Are you getting affiliate revenue as you refer visitors to other e-commerce sites? Etc. Here’s an interesting blog post along with links to further resources:

http://www.stuntdubl.com/2006/02/20/website-valuation/

That doesn’t answer all your questions, but it’s a place to start. What it comes down to is that you have to negotiate. The first person to state a number typically loses a negotiation. Have they made an offer for you to counter? If not, ask them for an offer. Then you can see whether it’s worth a lot of your time and effort or only a little to justify your estimate of the site’s value. In the end, the value is whatever both parties agree it is.

One of the tracks at the Omniture Summit today focused on leveraging user generated content (UGC) to help accomplish a site’s goals. Focusing on UGC is a wise move considering some of these latest trends:

• Online spend is increasing
• More money is being allocated to social networking

Marketers will embrace social networking sites. The average social networker:

• Is 20 something with an opinion
• Is registered on several social networking sites
• Is heavily involved with friends and groups online
• Spends money and tells others what they purchase

Advertisers want:

• Credibility: UGC leads to viral campaigns based on referrals
• Targeting: UGC leads to niche social networking sites
• Frequency: UGC leads to high repeat visitation
  • Traditionally if you were lucky you would get 5-10 repeat visits from a user per month
  • Now, over 50% of adults engaged in social networks return at least once a day

All of the above trends show that UGC is something worth investigating. Some important metrics used to track UGC include:

• Number of registrations
• Number of message posts
• Number of message posts per visit
• Number of comments
• Number of ratings
• Number of ratings per visit

A valuable strategy for a web marketer is to use the above metrics to find and promote high value content. High value content includes both popular content and influential content. Popular content can be found by looking at raw page views. Influential content can be found by looking at the actions of users after they view UGC. Quality content can be promoted by making it a big deal:

• Put the most commented content on the front page
• Put the most viewed content on the front page

Omniture’s SiteCatalyst v14 has a really cool feature where you can have your site interface with the analytics API and dynamically use site statistical data to identify content that is making an impact. You can then have your site use that data to automatically promote high value UGC to the front page.

This summer I’m going to implement the things I learned today on my own site, Social Wallpapering.

I was lucky to have the opportunity today to attend the Omniture Summit hosted in the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah. The Omniture Summit is an annual event where online marketers get together from around the world to network with other professionals and learn more about their trade.

Seth Godin, a marketing guru, presented to over 2,000 people on a few abstract marketing concepts. Seth made some points about marketing that I feel are worth noting:

• Past forms of marketing, which were previously tried and true, are no longer performing
• Being a huge company with tons of money doesn’t mean people are going to want to visit your website
• Marketing isn’t just about dumping money into AdWords, it’s about building a product or idea worth talking about to begin with
• Good ideas spread. Successful marketing is all about being remarkable, or in other words, having people value your idea enough to make a remark about it
• The best marketing is marketing done by customers who believe in you and want to talk about to their associates

Seth’s presentation was stellar. For more information on his ideas and books, see his website.

Almost all popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) increase a web site’s rank based on the number of links pointing towards the web site. In an attempt to falsely inflate a web site’s popularity, an individual may generate hundreds or even thousands of dummy web sites containing little to no content except for links pointing towards a specific domain name. One method that search engines use to detect this type of miscreant behavior is to see if these inter-linking web sites are hosted on the same IP address or IP address range. If the web sites are in the same IP address range, it is highly likely that they are operated by the same individual. Search engines devalue links from web sites pointing to other web sites hosted on the same IP address range.

Conversely, search engines value links from web sites hosted on different IP addresses. An effective search engine optimizer would go further than hosting inter-linking web sites on different IP addresses. They would host the web sites on completely different class C network addresses. They would make sure that all of their domains were registered with different registrars under different names. They would not use the same template on more than one web site. They would erase all traces that their sites are operated by the same individual. They would go through all of this trouble with one goal in mind - to game the search engines in order to bring in more organic traffic.

For most web sites, having a dedicated unique IP address will have little to no effect on search engine rankings. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, stated:

“If you are an average webmaster and just running a few sites, I wouldn’t worry about them being on the same IP address and I definitely wouldn’t worry about them being on the same server. That’s something that everybody does.”

To see other web sites hosted on your server, use this tool.

The current leader in the web analytics industry, Omniture, recently promoted a web analytics competition at Brigham Young University. I participated in the competition and had the opportunity to compete at Omniture’s office building located in Orem, Utah. I had a really enjoyable time, and was able familiarize myself with SiteCatalyst, Omniture’s flagship product. I’ve been using Google Analytics for the past couple of years on my sites, and I have been very impressed with SiteCatalyst. I learned that SiteCatalyst is far more customizable than Google Analytics and allows for the creation of much more extensive reports.

The idea for the competition was simple. Omniture gave everyone access to one of their current client’s web analytics data. Our job was to analyze the data and present our findings and recommendations to a panel of judges. The client this year was backcountryoutlet.com, and our team’s strategy was to focus on these three key performance indicators (KPIs) for e-commerce stores:

1. Yield (Revenue / Visits)
2. Conversion (Orders / Visits)
3. Order Size (Revenue / Orders)

During our analysis we quickly learned that the readily available data in SiteCatalyst was useful, but insufficient to draw any in depth conclusions. Given enough time to create custom reports and create calculated metrics, a web analyst can find some really cool correlations with a web site’s design and the KPIs mentioned above.

One of my favorite experiences from the competition was the chance I had to meet with a product manager at Omniture during lunch. Our team talked with the product manager about Omniture’s other upcoming products, including Discover and Search Center. We also discussed the process of choosing and bidding for good keywords using AdWords and other CPC advertising venues.

My experience in the competition has led me to ask myself how I could use what I learned about web analytics to further monetize my existing sites. Also, being able to see all of the web traffic data for a large online retailer has instilled in me the desire to start my own e-commerce store. We’ll see what I can do this summer!