Great Google juice tips from Michael Tippett

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Alexa has a rank of all the sites in the world. The New York Times is the 23rd biggest in the U.S.  What I wanted to show you is the search percentage. 

Even the New York Times that everyone knows gets half its traffic from Google.

There's another site called Compete dot com. I'm giving you a lot of market research stuff.  It's good to know your audience. [It’s] the only way you can learn about your audience.

Compete has some good demographics. These numbers give you relative measure. It's like that old line that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. This is kind of like that. If you log in you can get a demographic breakdown of who your audience is.

Search results are like playing the market: buy low; sell high.

Funding is always pretty slim and so we want to find a way, or think of ways, to make money, to generate income; some kind of revenue stream from the Internet.  Advertising and different things like that have been put out there—the affiliate programs, selling books.

Tippett: You have to be pretty big to make money in that. Depending on where you are and what kind of thing you're selling, even if you're selling luxury goods, you're going to get paid.

If you're amazing, you'll get $10 for every thousand impressions.  If you have a hundred page views, you get a thousand dollars. I wouldn't pin your hopes on advertising unless you're going out and getting a bazillion people to your website.

And the thing about affiliate programs—it’s the same sort of calculus. I could advertise to sell this book or put up an affiliate thing and get this. If you don't have a ton of traffic, it's difficult to get a ton of revenue. It's a good channel to find people who are interested in supporting you. 

Own the discussion

Tippett: The first thing is to own that discussion. If you own the discussion, people who are interested in supporting it will find you. You can always run campaigns and things, too.

If you're invisible on the Internet, people will say, “Do they really know what they're doing?”  It's part of doing business now. It's at the very least, a good way of establishing your credibility. 

Ruth: And then build into your site an easy donation button so that you click and donate. 

Tippett: You know how Facebook has had this big privacy kerfuffle? Three guys at MIT said they could build a Facebook that respects your privacy. They used this thing called Kickstart, which is a fund raising tool. You just plug into your website and in 24 hours they raised $100,000. They seemed trustworthy and enthusiastic. If you want to find out what people are talking about on Twitter, there's a great site called TweetMeme. These are the viral ideas people are tweeting about right now. 

How do you tie food security to recipes?  

Tippett: Think about the Huffington Post. I think Arianna Huffington is doing a great job. This is an amazing story about the BP oil disaster. She's giving voice to it. Then you've got some other serious stuff. Then you've got the most popular, 50-cent [stories]: loses a lot of weight, addictions that destroy your dreams, breast reduction surgery.

This is the stuff that drives their traffic. Then people see the other stories.

Tippett: The nice thing about this stuff, we do this, too. We curate. These are not stories that are breaking. The beauty of's their piece...we did this 50-cent story yesterday, btw. He's lost 60 pounds because he's playing a cancer patient in his next movie. Look at this: three paragraphs, they grab the photographs. It takes 10 minutes to do and we did that story yesterday. 

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