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Selasa, 15 Mei 2012

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Diposkan oleh Money Online di 14:13

Make Money Online

Posted: 15 May 2012 10:06 AM PDT

Having looked at all of the different text-based content types that can have an impact on the tangible value of a web-page, it is time to look at how it is that some of the more sophisticated content types can have a major impact on the worth of a website. Specifically, it is important to have a valuation framework in place for determining the worth of images, videos, and animated functionality on a page.

While all of these content-types provide a great deal of tangible value to a web-page in the way that they increase its complexity and ability to engage incoming traffic, it is important to remember that search engines still do not have sophisticated mechanisms in place for breaking down media-based content into keyword indexes. Because of this caveat, we must be careful to differentiate between the tangible value of media content, and the intangible benefits that come with it.

The first step to valuing images or videos as content is to determine whether it is value-adding or value enhancing. This can be determined by asking ourselves if the media serves as the focal point of the given page, or if it is secondary to a greater article. For example, an article with an embedded within it is still an article. It simply has an image embedded to support the quality of the article. This would be as opposed to a page that consists of one large image (such as an info-graphic) that acts as the main focal-point of the page, and draws a majority of the user's attention.

In this latter situation, the image would be of much greater worth than the embedded image, simply because of the way in which it serves as a much more valuable contributing factor to the worth of the overall asset. However, because the larger image itself will only be indexed on the basis of its title, alternative text, and caption tags, it is important to remember that the value of this media will be restricted by its contextual relevance. Essentially, the search engines will barely notice it for what it's worth unless we can make sure that there is some sort of text on the page that is referencing the kind of information it is communicating.

Similarly to the issue of the image not being properly recognized by search engines for its true informational worth, videos are arguably undervalued by search engines. While videos are certainly recognized as improving the quality of the content being provided, they are not necessarily weighted for the kind of information that is being communicated within them, because there is no way to as of yet break down and analyze what is going on within the media itself.

As such, it is important for us to have structured in some sort of contextually relevant text to explain what is going on in the video. Ever notice how it is that music videos on video sites include the full lyrics of the song in the description box? This is exactly what they are trying to accomplish. With that in mind, the next article will describe how it is that we can measure the worth of a piece of rich-media in accordance to its contexts on the page itself.

Minggu, 13 Mei 2012

Make Money Online

Diposkan oleh Money Online di 14:03

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Valuing Social Media Content

Posted: 12 May 2012 08:48 PM PDT

When valuing content in a modern website, it is become increasingly important to understand what kind of benefits are given to the asset through its social integration. Ignoring then the sheer power of viral traffic, the worth of social media integration can generally be broken down into two main components: content value and technical value. In continuing the theme of examining the value of content on a web asset, this section will discuss the value of social media through the content it creates.

The first two aspects of social media that create value for an asset as a form of content are similar in the way that they are short strings of text that are relevant to contexts of the page itself. While comments and tweets both differ in application, it is important to recognize their similarities. Essentially, a tweet is a short comment that appears off-page and links in, and a comment is tweet that occurs on page. By simplifying these two forms of content, we can price them at the same general point, with perhaps a slight premium placed on the external tweet to accommodate the potential for viral value.

While the general cost of a tweet can be literally thousands of dollars, the tangible value of such a tweet is anchored in its viral worth (something we will cover later on). As a raw piece of content, the value of a tweet is usually around $0.18-0.25. From there, we can then extrapolate the value to understand how it is that a much more complex Facebook comment could be worth as much as $3-6, and then a full blow shared link on a social media platform, including a comment, would be anywhere from $5-12, depending on the contextual quality of the comment and page surrounding it.

The last thing to take into consideration when valuing Social Media as a content source is its ability to perpetuate its value. Because of the way in which a piece of social content allows other users to comment and share from within the thread itself, a single tweet has the capability of becoming an entire discussion, and a comment has the potential to lead to additional sharing.

This means that each individual piece of social content that is created by a website should therefore be valued as a fixed asset, with the ability to scale independently from the asset itself. We can then determine the ability of this content to scale by measuring its potential for gaining attention, and pricing accordingly within an acceptable price range. Remember, even though every single piece of social content that we acquire has the potential to become a major driver of traffic to our page on its own, we need to remember that we are building a portfolio through these acquisitions, and that the majority of them will simply exist by themselves.

As always, contextual relevance is the major differentiator for these sorts of situations. A contextually relevant social media platform has the potential to have a greater impact than one that is not, and is therefore worth more on its own.

Senin, 07 Mei 2012

Make Money Online

Diposkan oleh Money Online di 14:05

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Valuing User Created Content

Posted: 07 May 2012 10:43 AM PDT

While adding content manually as an explicit article entry is still a successful practice for building up an asset's integrity, truly effective websites have been able to scale their content base by providing more of a platform than a depository.

By adding venues for user-based contributions, a website is able to build up its content-base without any explicit effort or cost. This has been taken to the point at which there exist some extremely successful sites that simply have users contribute all of the content that is indexed on the site. Because of the difference in the way which a content-platform creates asset-value in comparison to a traditional article-based website, it is important that we valuate these sites in a way that recognizes their fixed-asset value, and ability to scale.

In general, we can simplify user-contributed content into three main categories. While basic comments have been covered as a content type in the basic valuation article on this page, we can expand on that topic to illustrate how it is that incremental comments add value to a single piece of content. They can be seen as the content-based dividends of a page in the way that they demonstrate the ability of a given piece of content to scale. As comments are added, there is more content on the page to be indexed, and therefore a greater organic traffic implication to the page.

As such, the volume of comments that a given page receives, as well as the rate at which these comments will be added, should be used as the benchmark or discounting the value of the asset. A page that receives a great volume of comments very quickly should have a higher net present value than one that receives many comments over a longer period of time.

Alternatively, a page that receives only a few comments immediately can be seen as being an opportunity for growth, because it suggests that the content is of high-quality, but lacking an exposure base. Because of the popularity of the content, it stands to reason that there is growth-potential in the asset, so long as we are able to increase the content's exposure to its target audience.

The last thing to take into consideration when looking at comments from a valuation perspective is their ability to re-engage users. While a stream of comments from unique visitors is valuable to a page, repeat comments from the same users should be viewed as exponentially more valuable than one-time comments. Essentially, if a person is returning to the page with the explicit interests of perpetuating a discussion, they are increasing the value of both the asset page itself, as well as their worth as a customer in the way that they are further engaged than just a simple visitor.

As such, it is always a good practice to do a few database (or spreadsheet) inquiries into how many of the visitors are commenting more than once throughout the content base, and whether or not they are engaging in discussions, or simply posting non-contributing comments. From there, we can index for relevance and determine the worth of the content in accordance to a discounting multiple that reflects the true value of the chatter that surrounds a given piece of content as a platform, as opposed to just another article.

Sabtu, 05 Mei 2012

Make Money Online

Diposkan oleh Money Online di 14:06

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Valuing Content Through Page Rank

Posted: 04 May 2012 04:27 PM PDT

Having looked at how existing content creates value, it is important to recognize how it is that off-page content can serve to exponentially increase the value of the fundamental keyword anchors that are created by on-page content.

By linking in contextually relevant content to on-page articles we are able to achieve a benefit of scale, in that many links can be directed inbound to a single page. The net result is that the on-page content will improve in quality in the eyes of the search engines, and therefore produce a greater amount of organic traffic. The way we do this is by understanding how it is that the Page Rank metric (from Google of course) helps us to value the net benefit of inbound links and their on-page contextual anchoring)

In general, SEO professionals have been able to ball-park the comparative values of different page ranks into a basic PR table. This table illustrates the kind of scale that search engines use to value a PR1 link in comparison to a PR2. In general, this table is summarized as follows:

While this chart serves only as a mathematical demonstration of the comparative values, it provides a useful tool for understanding the difference between each incremental page rank. This essentially means that a single inbound link from a PR10 website is worth almost 10 million times more than a link from a PR1 site. That being said, this does not necessarily mean that the PR10 link is worth $10 million dollars, it simply suggests that the time and effort value of the link is extremely high, to the point at which procuring them could be seen as a competitive advantage.

With these link values in mind, we can then proceed to use a back-link indexing tool to determine what kind of value off-site content is creating for the page. By discounting the value of these inbound links in accordance to a weighted average of their relative value, and then taking into account the value of the keywords that they are referencing into the site, we are then able to determine a tangible value for the value created by the inbound links.

Ideally, we can then identify value-opportunities by looking at the cost-benefit break even of procuring hundreds of cheap links from off-site content, or focusing on developing high-quality links from guest-posts in order to boost page-rank efficiency.

Senin, 30 April 2012

Make Money Online

Diposkan oleh Money Online di 14:09

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Valuating Website Assets

Posted: 30 Apr 2012 11:52 AM PDT

The tangible value of a website stems almost entirely from its content, functionality, and design. These aspects of a site are what drives, engages, and converts visitors respectively. By investing in all of these areas, a property owner is building up the ability of the site to generate cash, and therefore building up the fundamental value of their asset as a whole. With quality then in mind, we are able to build a valuation framework for valuing exactly how much the actual assets of a property are worth, and what kind of value they create for a purchaser.

Content

A common saying in the web properties business is that "Content is King". This saying stems from the fundamental assumption that organic search engine traffic, which has been indirectly generated by carefully engineered content, is the most cost effective mechanism for an asset to generate revenues. Through its consistency and ability to be quantified, organic traffic represents an extremely tangible aspect of fundamental valuation.

This in turn provides us with an outlet for determining the value of the content on our page itself, because of the way in which it directly contributes to the accumulation of organic traffic. Through the analysis of keyword values, the complexity of the content being created, and the sheer volume and velocity of the content being published, we are able to come up with a reliable valuation model for the content present on a website.

1. Valuing Different Kinds of Content

The trick to valuing content from a fundamental perspective is to first determine the cost of how much we would need to spend to actually accumulate the sheer volume and quality of the content that we are seeing both on and off page. In general, we can do this by looking at the costs associated with purchasing this content from professionals, and then comparing this cost to the value of the inbound links that are supporting the page rank.

Ideally, we want to be able to justify the value of the page rank through the cost of procuring the traffic. While there is then some room for discounting the costs in accordance to their ability to create long-term value, we still want to make sure that there is some accountability in the content's ability to support the tangible value of the page's PR.

In general, we can break content types down into a few key categories, all of which having reasonably distinct characteristics. While I'm not going to go into the nuances about what differentiates an article from a blog post, I will focus on what makes sales copy worth more than a review article, and why it is that these higher quality content types still need to be discounted due to their high risk.

When looking at this list, it suddenly becomes apparent how it is that the complexity of a piece of content is a major contributing factor to the cost of the content itself. Sales copy is notorious for this, due to its sophisticated styling. Alternatively, informational resources tend to be expensive due to the amount of research that the author will need to put into the piece. This is in comparison to a short-form content-type such as a blog comment or a post, which will generally be intellectually non-intensive, but required in high volume.

For example, hiring out a series of Twitter-tweets will generally require a particular level of supervision to ensure that the platform is properly being engaged. Once all the appropriate individuals have been re-tweeted, tagged, and referenced throughout a conversation, it is possible for a tweet campaign to reach as many words as an entire blog post, simply because of the way in which the campaign managed to engage its audience.

Understanding that the value of the content being produced will represent the fundamental cost-side value of the asset being measured, we need to then evaluate whether or not we will be able to perpetuate traffic (and therefore cash flows) with the information present. This is done by evaluating the value of the page rank, which is supported by inbound links and references.