BlackWaterOps

BlackWaterOps is proud to announce the Qanta Content Monetization Solution for Commission Junction / CJ.com Users.

The Qanta is not an AdNetwork, it is middle ware for your existing relationships with CJ.com.  While you may have relationships with a lot of affiliates from CJ, often you can’t spend the time to hand promote every one, or update pages with the latest links, or take down links which are no longer active.  Qanta solves this problem quickly easily and with minimal effort on your part.

The Beta version of Qanta works as a supplement to your existing ad programs, allowing you to better monetize traffic from search.  Say for example you have written about Peyton Manning, when a user from Google, Yahoo, Bing, or most other search engines arrives at your site an ad will display based on the search phrase that they arrived by.

Qanta By BlackWaterOps	Ugly ad by Chitika.com

In this example you would get an ad similar to the ad on the Left.  (Chitika.com ad provided to show the difference between us and your alternative)

If the user had arrived by a search for "Dating Peyton Manning" they might instead get an ad for a dating site if you have an active relationship via CJ.com for a dating site.

In all cases the user will get an ad from a partner in your network, that is relevant to their search. 

Because these ads are not contextual ads, they are compatible with Adsense, Microsoft Pubcenter and other contextual ads. These ads only show to your search traffic so they don’t appear to visitors who visit your site as a destination site, arrive by twitter, or facebook.

Qanta simply build ads for you on the fly, so you don’t have to set up any bank accounts, 1099s or provide us with much information at all.  Simply provide your CJ.com DeveloperKey, and your WebSite ID.  We will run our CJ ads 10% of the time picked at random as our "Commission".

Qanta is built on the Google AppEngine infrastructure, and as a result ads are served amazingly fast after an ad is built for the first time.

Integration with your site is easy requiring only a short 1 line of JavaScript to be added anywhere on your page.

Today we only offer a 300×250 ad block but more ad sizes are on the way shortly, for now we are verifying scalability, and tuning the relevance of products and want to provide a great experience on one offering before creating too many options to debug.

Features Coming in the very near future:

• Use your own CSS to customize the look of Ads
• Standard Ad Sizes (728×90, 160×600, 120×600, 250×250, 125×125)
• In Text Ads matching part numbers and manufacturer names on your web page to CJ affiliate Links for that product.
• Flash Ads
• Interactive ads
• Support for different products in each ad block on a page
• Synced Ad Blocks to allow all ad blocks of different sizes to show ads from the same provider

To Join the program contact Sales@blackwaterops.com

We will have self service sign up shortly, but for the initial beta we want to have some contact with our users.

My soon to be released book “Online Marketing Strategies Volume 1:Analytics, Strategies, and Terminology for Site Managers” is now available for pre-order at 50% off the cover price, or even better it is temporarily free to members of the BlackWaterOps “Professional Marketers” listserve.

This book is targeted towards anyone who manage online marketing campaigns.  This is not limited to SEO, and SEM, but deals with Reputation Management, Site construction, Affiliate Marketing and more.  Whether you are managing an online store, political campaign, charitable organization, online journalism site, or blog there are strategies for keeping on top of online marketing.

Clear explanations of common terms, tricks for finding the right people to work with you, and how to measure your success are included in this first Volume of Online Marketing Strategies.  This book won’t teach you how to be an SEO, or SEM but it will teach you the necessary metrics for measuring their success, and verifying that the analytics they are providing you are accurate.

Just the Book: $34.95

“Professional Marketers” is a community which offers feedback, advice, and potential insight to online marketing. Professional Marketers focuses on Optimizing your online marketing.  As a community member you get the benefit of being able to find out about industry trends, experiences and traps before the rest of the world.  Being part of a discussion in real time rather than when it is reported.  And you can do so in a small  close knit group of like minded professional.

Free Book + Subscription First Month $24.95

To help you understand how your site could improve its traffic over all (not just in search) Blackwater has released the Beta of its Site Health Calculator. It is a tool which we have used for sales pitches, site monitoring and just general scoping of the competition.

SEO is as much about knowing your size, and where you should rank organically as it is getting there. Blackwater will never tell a client who doesn’t make dog food that we can make them the top hit… (Though it is a space with less than stiff competition so we probably could beat Purina) because even if we did Google would likely “hand job” the results to put Purina back at number one.

http://www.blackwaterops.com/site-health/purina.com

Known Pages: 4229
Known Inlinks: 120033
Root Inlinks: 63185
Google Inlinks:
Google Indexed Pages: 1960
% of Internet users who visit site: 0.000044
Daily Page Views: 2904
Spam Likelihood:59%
Site Health: 96%
Desirability: 137%
Linkworthiness: 1%
Longevity 150%

Using several metrics we look at your traffic in terms of Views per Page, indexed vs unindexed pages, percent of pages getting traffic, and other metrics to assign your site values for Desirability, Linkworthiness, and Longevity of your content. Each of these scores can be 0-150% and we average those 3 Scores to get your current site health. While it is possible to get a 150% we rarely see a site excelling in all of these metrics.

SEO should help you get to your peak or a little above of where you should be organically, which is why Blackwater doesn’t JUST do SEO. By improving your user experience helping with Press/Public Relations, and helping you manage your marketing dollars we can build buzz which will increase your traffic both through search and referral traffic.

This week during the course of some discussions I was told “We do the same things eBay, and Amazon do” and I was too polite to say what I was thinking, but here’s why any SEO who tells you to do those things is not your friend.

In addition to eBay and Amazon being destination sites, not Search Landing sites by design, there are a lot of reasons you don’t want to be like them, at least not in the eyes of Google.

Starting with eBay as an example. Ebay is the largest Auto Auction Company in the United States on or offline. So you’ d think that if you did a quick search for Car Auction, Car Auction Online, Auto Auction, or some variant of that Ebay would be towards the top of results.

You’d be wrong.

http://www.blackwaterops.com/site-health/ebay.com

Known Pages: 230126702
Known Inlinks: 131748167
Root Inlinks: 25670473
Google Inlinks: 1120
Google Indexed Pages: 108000000
% of Internet users who visit site: 0.43491
Daily Page Views: 28704060
Spam Likelihood:14%
Site Health: 38%
Desirability: 24%
Linkworthiness: 69%
Longevity 22%

Because of the Link Scheme used by e-bay’s affiliate program detects to Google as Paid Links, eBay pretty much only ranks for searches for items which are an rare and only found in ebay’s auctions, user profiles which are unique to eBay, and searches which include the word eBay.

Amazon used to have these same problems with their affiliate program, but 3 years ago they sat down with Google to discuss how to undo that. The result was a change in their link scheme.

http://www.blackwaterops.com/site-health/amazon.com

Known Pages: 477186698
Known Inlinks: 342864639
Root Inlinks: 101787104
Google Inlinks: 6090
Google Indexed Pages: 107000000
% of Internet users who visit site: 0.20609
Daily Page Views: 13601940
Spam Likelihood:3%
Site Health: 62%
Desirability: 5%
Linkworthiness: 55%
Longevity 126%

One of the primary changes they made was converting most affiliates to using iframes for linking to them. This drastically decreased the number of duplicate links to their site. They also changed the onsite link structure to use Amazon.com/SOMEPRODUCTNAME/dp/AMAZONID where as links from outside Amazon go to Amazon.com/gp/product/AMAZONID?SOMSTRINGS

As to SEOing like Amazon… Anyone who has ever done a view source on Amazon’s pages would never consider doing this. Amazon has 60 of more lines of white space before the <html> tag, embeds their style sheets in every page, and doesn’t specify a document type. All basics of SEO best practices.

Feel free to play with this tool… It’s beta so it crashes every so often, or fails to parse results it is scraping from data sources and includes junk on the page… but it works 95% of the time with pretty good likelihood.

Spam likelihood is still being tweaked if you are below 75% you are likely safe. Sites that do a lot of Domain redirects may have a false positive like VE3d.com , Disney.com, and a few others.

Enjoy,

Brandon Wirtz

CEO BlackWaterOPs.com

510-992-6548

As the result of conversation with prospective clients over the last few days I am making a change to BlackwaterOps new client policy (in the past there was not much of a formal policy).

BlackwaterOps will be putting in to all future client policies that we will discontinue servicing the client if they participate directly or engage a third party in any of the following practices:

Have an E-Mail policy that Violates the Can Spam Laws, is not with an approved e-mail partner, or obfuscates the domain the e-mail was sent from.

Engages in buying links.

Engages in Selling links.

Uses DMCA Takedown notices as a method of SEO, Counter SEO, or for any reason other than an actual DMCA violation they are prepared to take up in court.

Uses an Affiliate Program Partner that allows any of the above by its members.

After talking with lots of people at CES I realized how much misinformation there was about SEO, SEM and social media.  So I decided that it was time to put my services out there.  If you need a Mercenary to help you with the types of Special OPtimizations it takes to get your web site to succeed then you have come to the right place.

I may be the Greatest Living American, but I’m also a gun for hire.  My team of specialists can help you rank for the terms you are most targeting, lower your ad costs, and get the blogosphere talking about you.

BlackWaterOps.com can also help you create Press Releases that get traditional media talking, build viral campaigns that have real legs, and help you get paired with events that will put your product in shots with Celebs, getting you the buzz of the Paparazzi’s and the buzz to be in demand.