Mediaboss Marketing

In How to Find Profitable Keywords For Your Website, we discussed methods for researching and logging your keywords, determining the relative profitability per phrase and touched on the need to schedule your targeting to help produce a faster ROI.

The approach we used is to select long-term keywords but focus on complementary, long-tail phrases early on. The logic? It's easier to spend the money you're making than the money you're not so a path to faster ROI, even if it delays slightly the time frame for hitting maximum monthly revenue, is still desirable.

We ended the article last month touching on, but not getting into, the need to do some basic competitor research to prioritize your phrases. While we may know the profit-per-sale, this is only useful if we can also determine the estimated competition for the phrases we're looking at.

We also have to avoid analysis paralysis. With so much data available you could spend months looking into all the details of what's possible. Rather than put you through that, the goal is to help you make bulk decisions based on grouping data and making some educated assumptions.

Thus, you may not be right 100 percent of the time in all cases, but you'll have gained many hours/days/weeks of productivity so where you are right (the majority of the time) you'll win much bigger. Better to be top 3 for 10 phrases in 3 months and top 3 for 15 phrases in 7 months, especially given that you can now reinvest your profit in time and effort, and get those other 5 phrases faster.

Group your phrases further and cluster them by common attributes. By clustering keywords, I mean grouping the keywords into logical groups, such that the work towards one will positively impact the results of another. The profit example from the first article (linked to above) is a good one (done by instinct as opposed to intention) and so lets begin there.

We found in our research the following two phrases (the search volume is as reported by Google's AdWords Tool):

To fully understand the girth of data we'll be looking at, we'll have to imagine the full hierarchy of the site and all the products our mountain biking enthusiast has to deal with. In a simple form it would look like:

Home > Product Category > Product Sub-Category > Brand > Product > Accessories

Original post:
Keyword Clustering for Maximum Search Profitability

REDWOOD SHORES, CA--(Marketwire -04/18/12)- Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL - News)

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About Oracle Communications Only Oracle's software and systems span the communications industry technology landscape -- from carrier-grade servers, storage and IT infrastructure, to mission-critical business and operational support systems and service delivery platforms; from business intelligence applications and retail point-of-sale solutions to the Java platform running on more than three billion mobile and handheld devices. Oracle helps 100 of the world's top 100 service providers innovate and exploit new business models, build strong, profitable customer relationships, and streamline operations. For more information, visit http://www.oracle.com/us/industries/communications/index.html

About OracleOracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL - News), visit http://www.oracle.com.

About Oracle in IndustriesOracle industry solutions leverage the company's best-in-class portfolio of products to address complex business processes relevant to the communications industry, helping speed time to market, reduce costs, and gain a competitive edge.

TrademarkOracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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Oracle Delivers Its Most Advanced Service Fulfillment Suite for Communications Industry

I did something this month that I haven't done in years: I changed my browser home page.

The last time I made the switch, it was from Alta Vista to Google. Anyone remember Alta Vista? It had the cleanest, most simple, and speediest search interface. Then, pressured by a need to generate revenue, it morphed into a ponderous portal.

Google then took the #1 place in my heart for clean, simple, and fast. But this month, Google started giving me the creepies. Last week, Google's new privacy policy went into effect, driven by the company's need to monetize my on-line activity even more than it already has.

Now, on one hand, I can certainly understand why a company would want to consolidate 60 or 70 policies into one single policy - just for operational sanity, if nothing else.

But, on the other hand, the consolidation brings into focus the integration of data across Google's applications and by extension, the way that data records, reflects, and repackages for sale one's life.

With its new policy, Google makes no bones about using your data, my data, and our data to sell, sell, and sell. If you don't like it, says Google, then leave. Don't use our products.

And so, I'm not.

Or at least I'm trying not to. Turns out it's pretty hard to go cold turkey from Google simply because Google shows up, well, everywhere.

Honestly, I don't think for a second that Google cares about me, personally. It doesn't want to sell what I, Teresa Martin, see or do. But, it does care about me as a set of eyeballs in its collection and it wants to be sure I'm packaged with just the right mark-up for its advertiser customers.

With the new policy, what I type in my Gmail account, what I do in Google docs, what I post in Google +, what I watch on YouTube, and what I add to Google Maps not to mention what I search for in the Google search engine combine to create a target profile sellable to the highest bidder.

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EYES AROUND: Big Data: The octopus that engulfs us all

If you have a questionable sense of humor with some disposable income to your name, here's something you can do: buy wrong website domains that totally look like the real thing. Like rnicrosoft.com for microsoft.com See what I did there? It's like wearing a fake Rolex but on the Internet.

Some peopl won't even notice the difference! M-named websites are the easiest to fool people with because of how the letters r and n look right next to each other. It works for rnacys.com, rnlb.com, rntv.com, rncdonalds.com and rnyspace.com (though you might not want to spoof that last one). In fact, some people think it's such a good idea to buy lookalike websites that they're marking up these Folex website prices by a ton, rnicrosoft.com is actually being sold by Sedo, a domain marketplace, for $4,668. If you want a good fake, it's gonna cost you.

What other fake imposter websites could you try to buy? Goog1e.com and App1e.com aren't available though you could steal E5PN.net for 10 bucks. Same with Turnblr.net and irndb.com. Y0utube.com and Arnazon.com are not for sale which goes to show how hard it is to get a good fake these days. That's why it's so fun to find a good one. Like Gizrnodo.com for 10 bucks a year. You didn't hear it from me. [SEDO via @mikko]

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Buying rnicrosoft.com and Other Fake Websites Is the Internet Equivalent of Wearing a Folex [Websites]

Over the weekend and this morning, Microsoft, working in conjunction with others, issued civil lawsuits to sinkhole numerous domains associated with the Zeus botnet. When I say "botnet", I use the term loosely because Zeus is not a botnet in the sense that Rustock or Waledac is (or was). Rather, Zeus is a tool kit that online criminals can buy that lets them create phishing pages, perform fast fluxing, host drive-by downloads in addition to spamming. It's more like infrastructure than a botnet, although it does have a large botnet under its control.

From The New York Times (also covered in PC World, the MMPC blog, Gary Warner's Blog, and The Official Microsoft Blog):

SEATTLE Microsoft employees, accompanied by United States marshals, raided two nondescript office buildings in Pennsylvania and Illinois on Friday, aiming to disrupt one of the most pernicious forms of online crime today botnets, or groups of computers that help harvest bank account passwords and other personal information from millions of other computers.

With a warrant in hand from a federal judge authorizing the sweep, the Microsoft lawyers and technical personnel gathered evidence and deactivated Web servers ostensibly used by criminals in a scheme to infect computers and steal personal data. At the same time, Microsoft seized control of hundreds of Web addresses that it says were used as part of the same scheme. ... On Friday, Microsoft was attacking its most complex target yet, known as the Zeus botnets. The creators of Zeus offer their botnet code for sale to others and, depending on the level of customer support and customization of the code that clients require, charge them $700 to $15,000 for the software, Microsoft said in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Brooklyn on March 19.

That, in turn, has resulted in many variants of Zeus botnets, making them harder to combat. Most of them are aimed at perpetrating various financial scams against online victims. Mr. Boscovich of Microsoft said he had a "high degree of confidence" that the unnamed culprits behind Zeus were in Eastern Europe.

Because of the financial fraud involved, Microsoft rallied support from two financial industry associations the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center and the National Automated Clearing House Association which were were co-plaintiffs in the case and filed court declarations endorsing Microsoft's sweep on Friday.

Similar to the Rustock takedown where Pfizer joined in the lawsuit, in this case the NACHA and FSISAC (see above for full acronym expansion) took part in the actions.

But not everyone thinks that Microsoft's actions actually fix the problem:

Jose Nazario, a senior security researcher at Arbor Networks, an Internet security firm, said that Microsoft's record against botnets had been a "mixed bag" and that some of its gains were only temporary. After an earlier action against a botnet known as Waledac, for example, the software behind it was modified slightly to create a new botnet.

"You can take out a botnet, but unless you take down the coders and put the clients behind bars, they're just going to go ahead and do this again," Mr. Nazario said.

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Microsoft Disrupts the Zeus Infrastructure