BlackWaterOps » Services

Client Paid Us With Rubber Sale

Brandon Wirtz — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 07:13:21 +0000

Dear BlackWaterOps Customer,

Some of you may know me, but many of you don’t. I’m Charlize, one of the Account Managers at BlackWaterOps. I am contacting you because we have a HUGE discount on services this week, because a client canceled a project, and so we have people who if I don’t find work for will get paid to sit around and play Xbox for the week.

Here is the deal, we have reduced the price of our services as much as 75%. But you have to make payment on the services by the end of the month. We have 250 hours of services to sell, they are first come first serve. And “First” is determined by money paid, not calling dibs. You don’t have to use the services this month but they do have to be used by the 3^rd week of Q2.

Brandon has authorized that if you want more hours than 50 hours, regardless of if we still have those hours, you can purchase those at the pricing below. If you are looking at purchasing more than 1000 hours you can have those at 10% off of this pricing.

In the past when we have had these, “Client Paid Us With Rubber” sales the hours have gone fast, so if you are interested contact me by email, or call us 866-400-4536 right away.

Note to Resellers: These hours are available for resale but cannot be applied to your already purchased quota’s only to your overages.

Charlize Kang
BlackWaterOps.com:
Account Manager

Work: 510-992-6548
Toll Free: 866-400-4536

CharlizeK at Blackwaterops dot com

Hourly Consulting $300/hr List $75/hr Your Cost :

For small projects or a quick consult, hourly consulting is ideal. Billed in 30 Minute increments for phone calls, or 15 minute increments for email. Local (60 mile radius) in person consults don’t require additional travel costs for consults of 3 hours or more.

Project Consulting $225/hr List $60/hr Your Cost :

Support, updates, project management and other parts of projects that are dependent on the client for the amount of time they will take are billed as Project consulting. Billed in 30 Minute increments for phone calls, or 15 minute increments for email. Local (60 mile radius) in person consults don’t require additional travel costs for consults of 3 hours or more. A client can also qualify for this billing rate if they purchase more than 20 hours of consulting a month.

Single Page Non-Template Optimization $600 List $200 Your Cost :

Optimization of a single HTML page. Work is performed on a single HTML file, and its image, and CSS elements. Ideal for Landing Pages and HTML created with web design software.

Single Template Optimization $1500 List $500 Your Cost :

Optimization of the output HTML. Work is performed on the output HTML from a template in dJango, PHP, ASP, or other supported language, along with its image, and CSS elements. Ideal for templates on Content pages of a site.

Non-HTML Page Elements Optimization $3500 List $1500 Your Cost :

Optimization of the non-HTML Elements of a page. Optimizing the loading of JS, compression and optimization of JS, CSS, SWF, Images, and other elements of an HTML Page.

Web Site Basics Audit $1500 List $500 Your Cost :

Identification of the “low hanging fruit” which can be quickly changed to improve your site’s performance in search. This includes auditing the analytics from Google, Yahoo, and Bing, verifying DNS records, Cache Headers, Robots.txt, Sitemaps and more to ensure they are set properly.

Web Site Audit Keyword Density Audit $1500 List $500 Your Cost :

Verification that your website content matches the keywords which you are attempting to rank for. Through the use of our tools we will audit the most common words on your site and make template suggestions to better align those with the category and keywords you wish to rank in.

Search Target Audit $1500 List $500 Your Cost :

Using your existing search results statistics we will find alternate search phrases for which you should be able to rank, so that content can be created for these neighboring and related searches.

Access to Copy Creation/Blog Tools $79.95/User/month List $50/User/Month Your Cost :

BlackWater BlogTools, allows you to check your copy against a set of rules to ensure that is will score will in the Search and AdWords buys. It also suggests words to include in copy and checks which words are in the copy.

Access to Copy Creation/Blog PRO Tools $4,500/month List $3,500 Your Cost :

ProTools does all of the things BlogTools Does, but also provides Search Volume data, and CPC data for the terms you are trying to rank for, allowing you to tune your copy and search target based on cost and reach. This license is for up to 75 users.

AdWords Management $2,500 Set Up 15% of Gross Purchases List $500 setup 7% of Gross Purchases Your Cost:

Using our in house tools we can generate deeper keyword searches, and better ad targets that anyone could by hand, we can also analyze the performance of results better than a human alone could. Combining our experience with the tools and metrics often results in ad buys that are 30% lower CPC, and have a higher overall conversion rate, often doubling the impact of your ad dollar.

MiniCDN Services $750 Setup $500/month List $200 setup $200/month Your Cost

MiniCDN services allows for the acceleration of small websites using Google’s AppEngine. $500 per month buys up to 100 Gigabytes of transfer. Mini CDN is designed to be a very fast very easy to manage CDN.

BlackWater SEO Support On Demand

Brandon Wirtz — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 22:40:56 +0000

If you are an IT or Marketing professional who is able to navigate simple SEO and SEM concerns, but occasionally need support in a pinch, BlackWaterOps now offers SEO on demand through Keen.com. While we aren’t super excited about being listed next to psychics, Keen offers us the ability to give you easy on demand SEO and SEM support. Simply contact us through Keen and you will be billed by the minute for your consult. No retainer, no invoicing, just fast easy results, from a trusted SEO expert.

Visit our Keen Page now!

BlackWater BlackFriday Traffic Builder Special

Brandon Wirtz — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 20:44:56 +0000

BlackWater Ops is offering at 66% discount on it’s Traffic Builder Service. Traffic Builder is an amazing service for sites young and old, we deliver 50,000 visitors a month to your site for $3,000.

Unlike other services that use junk traffic and pop-ups we use traffic purchased from top tier ad providers like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. All traffic is from the US, and all traffic is targeted to the specific landing page of your choosing (with in the limitations of Google’s standards for landing pages).

How can we offer this at such a great price? We’re going to lose money because we figure once you have this much traffic you will want more. It’s the Crack Dealer model, but it works for them so why not use it for other things as well.

Note this is a subscription, you can keep the service for up to a year at this price. This offer is good through December 3rd.

BlackWater This Or That A/B Testing Solution

Brandon Wirtz — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 22:28:53 +0000

BlackWaterOps is proud to announce it’s A/B Test solution, based on the blazing fast Google AppEngine infrastructure. The problem with most A/B Test solutions are that they are difficult to implement and add significant slow down to your site, which can skew the results.

The BlackWater Solution allows for easy A/B Testing with only 4 lines of code change on your original page, and supports a huge selection of rules for determining if you want to serve version A or Version B, or for that matter over 1000 possible versions of the page, and because it is built using Google Appengine it adds less than 200ms to the render time of most webpages.

Integration with Google Analytics, and other Analytics solutions allows auditing and tracking to be simple, and doesn’t require your team to learn a new software.

Lastly, unlike many competing products “This or That” is compatible with Secure sites running HTTPS.

To get started with “This or That” contact us today! 510-992-6548 or Sales@Blackwaterops.com

BlackWaterOps Introduces Site Accelerator Services

Brandon Wirtz — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 07:09:16 +0000

Your website’s performance has a drastic impact on your conversion rate:

A one second delay in page load time drives a 7% loss in conversions. -Aberdeen
Each 100ms in reduced load time at Amazon dropped conversion rate by 1%.
Yahoo reports that a 400ms in reduced loading time increased traffic increased by 9%.

You could upgrade your server, but likely that isn’t the limiting factor. Different types of content require different types of serving. BlackWaterOps will work with you to create a delivery strategy that matches your needs. In most cases we can get your site to under 2 seconds of load time, and not require any significant increase the difficulty of managing your content.

We then work with you to improve your page construction to optimize page size, HTTP requests, and compatibility. The result is a page that loads faster, puts less load on your servers, SEO’s better, and converts better.

We have seen pages that take 15 seconds reduced 1.8, with no change to the look of the page, and WITH OUT reducing the quality of the images.

You don’t have to do things, like use iframes, or Ajax to speed up your page. Don’t sacrifice the usability or the ease of management of your site for speed. Let us help show you what is possible.

Pricing starts at $1,500. So call now. 1.866.400.4536

BlackWater Blogtools SEO Writer

Brandon Wirtz — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:36:42 +0000

When you are writing a post it is important to not only write for SEO, but to answer the questions your audience is looking for. Sometimes it can be hard to know what things are important to your audience, but we can help.

The BlackWaterOps SEO Writer Tool will not only analyze the text of your post so you can make sure that you have text that follows the core rules of SEO writing, in terms of keyword frequency, sentence length, and relevant supporting keywords, but it will tell you what you need to do to improve your text, and what potential words you should include in your post to help answer common searches.

For example, let’s say you wanted to write about “Pirates vs Ninjas” You’d enter “Pirates vs Ninjas” in the Keyword Phrase box, and your text in the box below.

Press the “SEO Post” button and you will get information about how well your post is written for SEO.

In addition to your SEO score you will get a list of keywords which you might include in your post, and a list of words which you already have included.

Not all of these will always be relevant to what you want to write about, but they are things related to the topic that people are searching. You can use this information several ways. If you already have written a post and are looking for a follow up, use the tool to find additional topics to write about. If you are writing a post you may find that the most common searches contain things you didn’t think would be important, like “dodgeball” in the Pirates vs Ninjas example.

Ready to try it out for your self? There is a 1 day free trial, and there are daily and monthly rates so you can either use it for a quick project, or ongoing. So try the SEO Writer Tool Now!

Improve any Website’s Performance through Google AppEngine Cloud Computing

Brandon Wirtz — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 07:25:12 +0000

You hear people talk about moving their content and applications ino “the cloud” but it has never been simple. Cloud Computing has required you to re-write your applications, often fighting through differences in API’s and limitations, often seemingly arbitrary.

BlackwaterOps has taken the work out of moving to the cloud.

The premiere version of the BlackwaterOps Content Accelerator doesn’t “port” your applications, it proxies them so that you can take the bandwidth, and CPU load off of your server. Because Google AppEngine has Points of Presence (PoPs) all over the world your content will load faster, and more reliably.

Unlike using S3 for hosting Images which requires you to upload your images manually to Amazon, Blackwater Content Accelerator automatically offloads your images to the cloud when they are requested. This allows your existing CMS solution such as Movable Type, WordPress, Joomla, Media Wiki, to benefit from cloud hosting.

What really sets BlackwaterOps Content Accelerator apart is that you can off load large portions of the traffic to your servers with only 2 lines of code in your .htaccess file if you are on Apache, and it is no more than 4 lines on most other servers.

This is the single easiest way to dip your toe in the Cloud waters. To get an understanding in a safe easy to use environment of uptime, reliability, and scalability of cloud apps, and the price associated with them.

For $799 and about 30 minutes you can reduce the load on your server, and drastically increase the number of users you can serve. Often also speeding up the load time of your pages. Or opt to have us do the install, and you will be able to “upgrade” your site to run in the cloud in less than 5 minutes.

The BlackWater GAE Content Accelerator is licensed per domain. You will be provided with instructions for installation and a customized version of the GoogleApp for your domain. You can launch on an AppSpot.com domain and then use GoogleApps to map to a subdomain of your primary domain. At this time you need one App Id Per Domain.

Content Delivery is billed by Google. We are typically seeing the price of delivery at about $.15 a gig, but your price may vary based on size of your images. Up to 30 Gigabytes a month are delivered by Google for free (1 gigabyte a day), which is enough for many small sites. Large sites can often cut their bandwith costs by 60% when compared to CDN delivery from Akamai, LimeLight, or others. Unlike other CDN’s you only pay for what you use, and there is not an increased price for “overages”. We have tested Content Accelerator up to 500 served images a second. Higher rates can be achieved but require an override from Google.

The BlackWater GAE Content Accelerator v1 includes all bug fixes as they are released.

Item Type

Please allow 48 hours to receive your software as we have to modify it for your domain. We will contact you for details to complete your order.

Due to limitations of Google AppEngine, Dynamic Images must be smaller than 1meg to be accelerated. Up to 3000 Static files can be uploaded for even faster performance

China Market Expertise

Brandon Wirtz — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 23:23:57 +0000

Christine Lu is a Top China Expert when it comes to how to take an American business to China. Converting your business to work in the Chinese economy and market is not just a matter of translating your existing ad copy to Mandarin and Cantonese, it takes an understanding of the culture, politics, and business models of China to achieve Success.

Success in China is not just a function of having the best product, but is also about having the right relationships to get your product in the market. It is also about having the understanding of how meetings, politics, and sales channels work in China.

Christine Lu brings experience of being born in Taiwan, but having grown up in Los Angeles. Her years in China working with her parents China based clothing brand gave her the experience needed to become Home Shopping Network’s head of marketing for TVSN.

Christine is currently advising companies such as M1NT Shanghai and Go Green Initiative, the world’s largest environmental education program reaching over 2 million kids worldwide.

I’m this girl with a highly functional form of self-diagnosed adult ADD standing at the intersection of east and west. In particular, where China business intersects the world is where you’ll find me hanging out these days.

Follow me on Twitter: @christinelu

Christine Lu is the Top China Expert, if for no other reason than she understands there is no one approach to business in China that will work for all business, and that the little things like “do the Chinese use that type of product” or “is your logo offensive for some reason” or “to be competitive you have to be 80% cheaper” are all balls that need to be juggled, and so you can’t get an hour of someone’s time and have all the answers, you have to engage, research and test potential strategies.

That said if you would like to schedule a call with Christine Lu, you can book a 2 hour conference call or face to face with her through BlackwaterOps for $1,000.

A typical call involves getting background on your company, your strategy, and then Christine providing insight in to opportunities and pitfalls related to your business strategy in China.

Following the call Christine will provide a potential plan of how her team can help you go to market in China, and potential relationships she can help you leverage to make your entry easier and better received.

Moving from an Old Domain to a New One

Brandon Wirtz — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:49:02 +0000

Think you have read up on 301’s and how to do a Domain Name change with out losing your rank in the search engine?

Ready to make the move? For sure?

Have you checked that the new domain doesn’t have penalties attached to it? Are you sure you sure?

Got your 301 redirects set up correctly? Are you sure?

Google has an official “Step list” for making the move, which Matt Cutts wrote.

Test the move process by moving the contents of one directory or subdomain first. Then use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect those pages on your old site to your new site. This tells Google and other search engines that your site has permanently moved.

Once this is complete, check to see that the pages on your new site are appearing in Google’s search results. When you’re satisfied that the move is working correctly, you can move your entire site. Don’t do a blanket redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it’s not a good user experience. A page-to-page redirect (where each page on the old site gets redirected to the corresponding page on the new site) is more work, but gives your users a consistent and transparent experience. If there won’t be a 1:1 match between pages on your old and new site, try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content.

If you’re changing your domain because of site rebranding or redesign, you might want to think about doing this in two phases: first, move your site; and second, launch your redesign. This manages the amount of change your users see at any stage in the process, and can make the process seem smoother. Keeping the variables to a minimum also makes it easier to troubleshoot unexpected behavior.

Check both external and internal links to pages on your site. Ideally, you should contact the webmaster of each site that links to yours and ask them to update the links to point to the page on your new domain. If this isn’t practical, make sure that all pages with incoming links are redirected to your new site. You should also check internal links within your old site, and update them to point to your new domain. Once your content is in place on your new server, use a link checker like Xenu to make sure you don’t have broken legacy links on your site. This is especially important if your original content included absolute links (like www.example.com/cooking/recipes/chocolatecake.html) instead of relative links (like …/recipes/chocolatecake.html).

To prevent confusion, it’s best to make sure you retain control of your old site domain for at least 180 days.

Add your new site to your Webmaster Tools account, and verify your ownership of it. Then create and submit a Sitemap listing the URLs on your new site. This tells Google that your content is now available on your new site, and that we should go and crawl it.

Finally, keep both your new and old site verified in Webmaster Tools, and review crawl errors regularly to make sure that the 301s from the old site are working properly, and that the new site isn’t showing unwanted 404 errors.

If you follow these directions, and don’t have any domain penalties your domain "*SHOULD* go smoothly, but what Matt doesn’t tell you is the time line, or how to check that each step was done correctly.

BlackwaterOps can help you make the move, and verify that each step is going smoothly. Yes you can do this yourself, but be aware that if you mess it up, there is no “redo” if this goes horribly wrong, so if your site is small, follow Matt’s advice, if your business depends on it get help from a professional.

The Analogy I like to use, is that I am more than capable of doing my on brake shoe replacements, but if I screw it up bad things will happen so I pay the money to a pro, so that nothing goes wrong.

Service Packages for Small Business and Start-ups

Brandon Wirtz — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 19:40:29 +0000

In addition to our customized service, BlackWaterOps is now offering service bundles. These services are ideal for companies looking for simple solutions for basic SEO and SEM.

While many of our customers have thousands of pages to their website which require deep analysis to figure out where they can get the most return on their investment in SEO and SEM, Small Business and Start up customers often have small sites that we can easily assess what work is to be performed and begin. Hence we are happy to announce our Small Business and Start-up packages.

Ad Pack: $1,500 You can’t rank #1 for every keyword you might want to get traffic for. This is why Google Adwords make sense for businesses of all sizes. We can help you create: Ad copy that will get only well qualified leads; Landing pages that will lower your Cost per Click; and track which keywords give you the best return on investment. Monthly budgets vary after the initial spend.

Get Ranked Pack: $1,000 Get your new domain listed in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Most domains have to wait months to get listed in Google, and Yahoo. We will get your site in to the index much of the time the same day, but certainly within 5 days. Yahoo will generally take a week, and MSN can take up to a month. This package meant for professionally designed sites which have had some amount of SEO consulting done during their creation. Our team will analyze your site, make suggestions to improve its overall quality score, and help make sure when Google indexes your site that you will score well for many of the terms you are looking to capture. This service includes configuration of several analytics tools.

Out Rank Pack: $4,500 Our team will work with you to figure out what keywords your competitors rank for, and work with your to take the necessary steps to be on the same page as they are for many of those keyword searches. This is not a comprehensive SEO Package, but it is suitable for Small business competing in local markets. This package includes all of the services from the Ad Pack and Get Ranked Pack.

Getting Serious Pack: $30,000 Our Team will take your existing Website up to 30 pages, and re-work it to score as high as possible with Google. Adding additional text copy where necessary, creating additional inbound links to increase the sites over all rank. We will also set up accounts for your business in over 30 social media services which can be used to drive links and visibility to your site.

Thrive Pack: $100,000: This package includes all of the services of the getting serious pack, includes a blog post per week about the happenings in your industry on your “corporate” blog, includes a “Girl in Corporate Tee” video for inbound links and marketing on 12 Video sites, Adwords services and Press Release services to boost the buzz of your corporate brand. This package is recommended for companies looking to launch new products, rebrand their existing company, or companies changing markets.

VC and Entrepreneur Pack: $2500 Using our metric tools we can predict the size of a market based on current consumer demand. We can also predict the cost of customer acquisition at various price and market points. Because of the way the online ad auctions work we can tell you the price differences between buying 10 leads a day, and buying 10,000 so you can forecast your costs and your potential for growth. We will also give you data on the scope of the competition, their online traffic, and their current ad spends. This is a great package for those looking to invest in a market, or start a new business.