Just wanted to let everyone know that I will be speaking at SES London this year. I am on a panel entitled ‘Automating Twitter’ with Fantomaster, Pierre, Tracy Falke and Moderated by Cindy Krum.

Looking forward to it!

Like many people I do a lot of research online for fun and profit, things like: -

Finding potential blogs to approach for guest posts
Finding possible targets to approach for link buys
Analysing the link profile of competitors for reports and proposals

That all sounds like a lot of work doesn’t it?
That doesn’t really fit with my plan to move down to a 4 day week does it?

OK so this is the sort of task I would normally outsource to one of my team on oDesk but due to the time it would take and the need to have someone who knows what to do this can get expensive.

Now instead of using a host of toolbars and procedures and training to get the team up to speed on the data gathering side of the task I have swapped out to use the excellent and brilliantly simple Quix by the man with the free but increasingly valuable cartoon, Yoast.

In basic terms Quix is a simple bookmarklet that you drag onto your Firefox toolbar that when clicked allows you to enter simple commands that bring back great results.

With Quix you can do things like: -

Check the whois for the current page
Check Yahoo Site explorer for the links to the current site
Do a simple SEO check across the site

Now currently this is all in procedures and screencasts for each type of task and requires the outsourcer to go get toolbars etc to make things quick.

With Quix I have got the procedures document down to one page for simple research and any new members of the team can get started in minutes rather than hours.

At $2 an hour for this type of research and Quix being free its a great combo.

Watch the video and get started!

An introduction to Quix from Joost de Valk on Vimeo.

I took a lot of flak when I posted the question “Should I go to ThinkVisibility” a few weeks back, most of it good natured banter.

I have bought my ticket….

The truth is I was ALWAYS going and heres why: -

I am not naturally a ‘conference person’
Many people love the conference circuit and love speaking and meeting other conference attendees. Personally I would rather get on with working hard to achieve my goals. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy socialising and meeting new people.

ThinkVis for me is what Search conferences should really be about. Good content partnered with a genuinely inclusive social gathering both during and after the event and an event thats at a size where you can meet most people.

It is almost the antidote to the suit wearing corporate conference…

I wouldn’t miss the opportunity to share some time with people like Al, Dom, Shaun, Jay, Tim, Kieron and Chris.

Great people, great conversation, real value.

So if you have been to a search conference before and felt lost and lonely after paying a huge ticket price why not join me at ThinkVis this year and try the future?

If I was you I would act now as the amazing £99 ticket price ends tomorrow…

For anyone who used to make mass content sites and knows a lot about the issues involved in that task the rising profile of Demand Studios is an interesting one.

So is this business model a mountain too high for everyone else to climb? Endulge me here in my normal thought process…

Here is a few articles to get you started: -

http://thenetsetter.com/blog/business-models/quality-vs-quantity-approaches-to-web-publishing/

Here the creator of the Envato network discusses the plans of Demand Studios to scale up their content manufacturing

http://www.demandstudios.com/publishers/content/

And on their own site they talk about their workflow of: -

Pass search predictions to their algo
Run that through their ad revenue algo
Output a title
Have an outsourced army of content creators produce content to suit
Profit

Now sitting abusing the non-free wifi at my local soft play centre with Laura (I wasn’t paying the price they wanted so….) I cant help but start to work my way through the mechanics of this business model…

Article cost $15 (thats pretty high imo)
Copy Editor $1 per article (are you joking?)
Site overhead $1 per article (estimate)

So each article has to get a return of $18 to be in profit…
Hmmmmm

Now comes the fun part
If we assume a return of: -
17p per click
CTR of 2%
We need 5500 people to visit that article to get a return
Assuming they have a safety buffer of 1 in 3 articles that doesn’t pay back
We need 7500 people ish really to be safe

And we assume that they want a payback in 6 months max they need 42 visitors a day to that one article

Well thats possible with decent domains to start with and if that title choosing algo is reliable

Bear in mind that if it is the return per click will be far higher that my low assumption.

Interesting stuff….

Think Visibility was a fantastic experience last September and the same team have announced the next date.

Its March 13th 2010 and so I now have to make my mind up whether to attend again..

So shall I?

Comment abuse welcome…
I already know the opinions of certain people