Web Traffic and Online Advertising

So, I've been talking to a lot of people lately (yes, real live humans) about web traffic, search engines, online advertising, internet marketing, internet retailers, link farms, and so on. It has become painfully obvious to me that almost nobody I talk with has ever heard of half the stuff I'm saying.

This leads me to this installment of the blog. Let's chat for a few moments about the internet.

If you have a website, what kind of traffic does it get? Do you even know? What would you consider "a lot" of traffic for a "normal" site?

How about if you own a small or medium sized traditional, brick & mortar business. What do you expect your website to do for you? Are you considering selling some product online? How do websites actually make money anyway?

In a word: traffic.

The #1 thing to think about online is how to bring in traffic, and the #1 way to accomplish that is to have timely, relevant content. I know, it's crazy, but nobody gives a rat's ass about your flash intro that takes 14 minutes to load on a dial-up modem that you paid some high-flying design studio 10k to create. They want some real, honest, accurate, useful information. Keep that in mind.

So, what good is traffic anyway? If 1,000,000 people visit your site, but don't buy anything, what good are they? Let me tell you, the answer is a whole lot. Let's take a look for a moment at a little internet startup you may have heard of, google.com.

google.com is a 3 billion dollar per year economic powerhouse. That's right, 3 billion, with a "b". Funny thing is, you have probably never paid a single red cent to use google. So, how in the sam hell can google generate 3 billion dollars in 2004 if the users (read visitors) don't have to pay anything to use their site?

In a word: advertising.

Online advertising, in particular pay-per-click advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry. Just like TV before it, and radio before that, there is no shortage of businesses out there willing to shuck out mega-ching to let the public know about their great product or service. How better to reach tens of millions of potential buyers than with ads tailored to the very things those people are searching for, exactly at the time they are looking for it? Bravo, google. You have changed the world forever.

So, to answer the question, what are 1,000,000 visitors worth if they never buy a single thing from you, the answer could be $500 - $5000, depending on the content your site is delivering. Best of all, these sort of numbers can actually be accomplished. Here's an interesting tidbit: NOT INCLUDING google, The word "poker" was searched for over 1,000,000 times in January of 2005 alone. If you were to draw 50% of those searches to a site, it is likely that you could easily earn $3000 per month. Remeber, that DOES NOT include the most powerful search engine in the world. A #1 ranked poker site probably can pull down 5x that amount, if NOBODY EVER BUYS anything or gambles at the site. Maybe next time, I'll get more specific on how all this online advertising stuff works, but the post is getting long, and the hour is growing late.

Where have all the good geeks gone?

For those who may not know, i work for a big company. My livlelyhood depends almost entirely on the fact that the overwhelming majority of people in IT at a big company are somewhere between incompetent and outright dangerous. In fact, entire careers, and by extension lives, are built upon this enormous, precarious scaffolding.

That said, as an organization, we continue spending tons of resources recruiting and hiring "quality" employees. i often wonder how so many people can work so hard at something for so long, and still have the result be almost a complete failure.

Is it the nature of software jobs that organizations are unable to locate qualified personnel?

Most professions have clear indicators of competence that can be quantified. For a carpenter, a room should be built square, the roof should not leak, and so on. For a printer, the copy should be aligned properly on the page, the ink coverage should be uniform and match a known sample.

Not so for the IT professional.

Fulfilling the documented business requiremets has almost no relationship to the quality of the software, design, maintainability or cost. These systemic quality aspects are virtually impossible to quantify in any meaningful way. Every system built is so different from the one before it that comparing any two systems is a lot like trying to compare the mass of a blue whale to the price of gasoline in the midwest.

What's the point? Are we doomed to hire lousy programmers and carry them around as dead weight until they retire?

i suggest a new approach. An approach employing the concepts of lean manufacturing and the well proven fact that great programmers are orders of magnitude more productive than mediocre programmers.

Keep on hiring, but start firing. Aggressively. Let go of the dead weight and backfill aggressively. Instead of viewing a project as requiring a ten person team, recognize that the project could be done better and faster if you had three talented developers. Now, still fund and staff for ten, but aggressively remove all but the top two on a regular basis. Cycle the bottom 80% out every four to six weeks. Eventually, after several cycles, you will find that you simply can't get it down to only 2 people. At this point, you have the optimal team to complete your project. Save the top, drop the rest, and drive through to completion.

Radical, yes. Heartless, perhaps. Pragmatic, maybe not. Effecive, definitely.

Think about it.

Enter the arena

For a while now, I have been publishing various articles related to web design and related topics on my company website (http://4wordsystems.com). I have come to realize that this type of content was extremely well suited to a blog. As a result, today we officially enter the blogsphere (with all the fanfare one can muster within the confines of their own mind).

Inspired by the great bloggers of our time, Hugh McLeod (http://cluetrain.com), Joel Spolsky (http://joelonsoftware.com) and Paul Graham (http://paulgraham.com), I endeavor to create content that is provocative, useful and sometimes controversial.

Welcome, reader. Enjoy.