Ron Paul did something that no other presidential candidate has ever done in the history of the United States of America.

He raised Six Million Dollar in a single day. Holy Cow! And he did it all online, through his website TeaParty07.com. It was the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.

Because it was all done online, we can quickly and easily see how much traffic it takes to raise six million, if you have people politically motivated and emotionally charged, the way Ron Paul does.

There you have it. That was the traffic Ron Paul’s Tea Party website did on the day he raised Six Million Dollars.

As other online marketers know, the .04 Reach is a profitable spike to hit. As an interesting comparison, the Million Dollar Wiki did the same amount of traffic when John Chow posted on it a while back in August, but they only made about $7,000 (according to John Chow)

That’s right, with roughly the same amount of traffic, Ron Paul pulled in 5,993,000 more than MD Wiki.

Take Home Message:

Ron Paul is the King of Marketing, the King of Conversions,  and maybe on day he’ll be the King of Capitol Hill.

What was he selling? A new hope for America.
How much did he make? 6 Million.
Giving the White House to someone who wants to abolish the IRS? Priceless.

I plugged Ron Paul, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, and Mitt Romney into Alexa to see who is leading in the “internet poll”.

With the primaries around the corner, and the election just a block away, Ron Paul is the CLEAR winner in terms of Alexa traffic, by an enormous margin, and second to Obama.

I like to think that in 2007, the candidate best represented on the internet is the candidate that will win the election. Will it work out so simply? Well Ron Paul did raise 6 Million Dollar on December 16th, setting the record for the most money ever raised in a single day for a presidential candidate.

Time will tell.

The Gentlemen Songsters otherwise known as Richter Scales created an awesome video that was going viral. It was the “Here comes another bubble” video, and if you haven’t seen it yet, or if you just want to watch it again, here it is:

This video was truly going viral. Then the roof came crashing down. It was pulled due to a copyright violation by some photographer who took a photo that appeared in the video. Pretty lame. That photographer should be ashamed of themself, because that video was capturing people’s hearts and Richter Scales wasn’t making and money off it anyway.

That set aside, Richter Scales saw a nice spike from the video:

Not impressed? Well…

Take home message:

The Viral Video spike is inhibited by the fact that you can’t actually click the video through to the site. Everyone who hit RichterScales.com had to see their URL at the end of the video, and actually type it into the browser. I bet if they could simply click, that spike would be twice as high.

The second take home message:

When something goes VIRAL, everyone sees it. Make sure you have permission to use the images in that viral video you’re cooking up.

Recently I was on Alexa (I’m on there a lot) and I saw a damn ad for that beach bum who makes a ton of money from home. Come on, you’ve seen it before. His ad looks like this:

(no link)

I’m always amazed that these sites make money.  First of all, they all look the same. They all look like this:

They always use that big red type, highlight random crap in yellow, show pictures of people on the beach, show pictures of yachts, mansions, and/or bikini girls. You can have this wonderful life too, if you just enter your email address, and/or pay a little money, and learn the secrets!

Well, the only secret here is that they got your money. If you want to make the money they’re making, you need to do what they’re doing, create a website and show pictures of rich people, get their email only to sell it later, or sell some crappy product.

Well, the crux of this beach bum came today, when I saw a huge ad for the site on Alexa. That prompted me to check their actual traffic rank. I was a little surprised:

I can’t say I’m surprised but… wow. For one of those stupid scam sites this is certainly picking up a lot of traffic.

Take home message:

I don’t know what the take home message is here. There might not be one. How much much money this beach bum is making is anyone’s guess. How much traffic he’s getting? A lot.

BandwidthBlog.com (clever name, I know) has come out with a truly viral article. Somehow, he snagged photos of the office space of some top internet companies, including Skype, Jaiku, Twitter, and GigaOm.

This post shows these spy photos and talks a little bit about the companies. Nothing special right?

WRONG!

People are obsessed with internet companies! We’ve developed a sick fascination! When someone has “spy photos” that offer a look inside these companies that are ever present in the backs of our minds, people love it!

This is precisely why it was voted to Digg’s front page. Very well done.

Of course, viral blog posts are often not very stick, as illustrated below:

That was one hell of a spike, but the blog isn’t looking too heavily trafficked now.

Take home message:

Writing a viral post, targeted for Digg, is easy enough. It’s a simple formula, just plug in the variables and BAM.  What’s NOT easy, is creating a phenomenon in which people are virally subscribing/returning to your blog. No one has figured that out yet.

This all started the other day. I was on a site, PinoyBlogero.com. I don’t know how I found it exactly, but the word “Pinoy” stuck in my mind. I looked to the title of the site to find out what Pinoy means, but all it gave me was “A Pinoy Blogger focusing on the Pinoy Blogosphere and blogging.” I still didn’t know what Pinoy meant, but little by little, over the next few days, I’ve begun seeing it everywhere. Random things too like a Pinoy Cooking Blog or a Pinoy surfing site.The crux came today when I stumbled upon the PinoyRichJerk.com, a pinoy spoof of course of the ever famous Rich Jerk, a.k.a. the brilliant marketer Kelly Felix.

That was it, I had to hit wikipedia. Turns out, a Pinoy is someone from the Philippines. Fascinating! Keep an eye on plenty of up and coming Pinoy websites, soon to be heavily trafficked!

In the one month since Entrecard launched, they signed up over 600 blogs that now run the widget, including some really huge blogs like Problogger.net.

Most bloggers would think to let their readers know if free advertising was available on their blog. John Chow, Shoemoney, Tyler Cruz, and nearly everyone else who added Entrecard to their blog informed their readers of what it was, how it works, and how their audience can use it to get free 125×125 advertising on their blog.

One blogger though is strangely quiet on Entrecard. Darren Rowse of Problogger.net has said absolutely nothing about Entrecard, even though the widget is installed on the front page of his blog, and even as Entrecard’s rank closes in on the kill:

The most peculiar thing…

The most peculiar thing is this. Darren Rowse is supposedly a trusted source for information in the blogosphere. I’ve posted about this here and here. Why then, would he plug the pyramid-scheme-that-doesn’t-work, otherwise known as Blogrush, in no less than four posts:

Find New Readers for your Blog
Tips for Using Blogrush to Generate Traffic for your Blog
What are your Blogrush Stats like?
Blogrush Launches Phase 2: First Impressions

The fact is everyone knows Blogrush doesn’t work. Reports are abound on the internet. The basic argument is that it doesnt send traffic, though one blogger goes so far as to point out 14 grievances she has with it, in 14 Reasons why you should remove your Blogrush Scam Widget ASAP.

Now here’s where it gets really interesting:

Back to Darren Rowse, aka Problogger. So he is supposedly a trusted source of information on the net. However, he dedicates 4 posts on his blog to Blogrush, a widget service that didn’t work well for anyone at the top, and doesn’t write a single post about Entrecard, the free advertising available on his blog.

Reports are all over the internet of the traffic Entrecard is bringing the everyday blogger.

Now I would think that if an awesome widget that allows bloggers to exchange 125’s for free was spreading like wildfire across the internet, a widget he has on his blog, a widget that truly is bringing tons of traffic to bloggers everywhere, he would say something about it.

Why the silence?

Why would he talk so much about Blogrush, a service that doesn’t work, and not a word about Entrecard, a service that is working phenomenally and taking the blogosphere by storm? I can’t help but wonder if the posts about Blogrush were financially motivated.

John Chow, the notorious blogger behind JohnChow.com bought my advertising space on Entrecard. Check it out:

I have to say overall I’ve been very impressed with the traffic Entrecard has brought this blog. As you can see from my stats above, just from being listed on Entrecard I have received 187 clicks to my site, and via ads I’ve bought with Entrecard credits, I’ve received a total of 435 clicks.

Thanks Entrecard! 

PS. Now that John Chow is buying my ad space, maybe someone else would like to?

I came across an interesting mystery today.

You would think that traffic to retailers would remain high throughout Christmas. Let’s face it, a lot of people haven’t bought a single gift yet, and haven’t even THOUGHT about what gifts they’re going to buy yet.  Let’s also face the fact that procrastination is a growing trend in our society.

You would think…

Yes, you would think that traffic to retailers remains high throughout December. However, that is not the case. What we actually see is a very sharp drop in traffic to all major retailers. In order, here is the traffic graph for Amazon, Wal Mart, and Target:

Amazon:

So my first thought was OK, everyone who was going to use Amazon for their X-Mas shopping was a member of the “I’m too good to go to a store, and by the way I’m not lazy, I’m going to get all my shopping out of the way right now online” group. I thought perhaps it was a trend of internet shopping, a relation between people being proactive about their shopping and a behavior pattern for using the internet.

Boy was I wrong. When I dug deeper, I found that traffic to retail sites was also down:

Wal Mart and Target:

So, now I thought “This is strange, why is their traffic down. Certainly people are logging on to their websites to see what sales there are, and going to them. And certainly these people still have plenty of shopping left to do”.

Something wasn’t adding up.

If online retailer traffic was down, brick-and-mortar retailer traffic should be up. The answer, however, was that it was. I was right all along.

Wal Mart and Target are online retailers!

Then it hit me. “Wait a second, Wal Mart and Target ARE online retailers!” See, all the things I can buy in their store, I can buy online at their sites:

So what’s really going on?

I assumed that Wal Mart and Target were brick and mortar businesses, primarily, and that their website traffic would be for people looking to key in on deals available in-store. However, what I found out was that Walmart.com and Target.com are online retailers primarily, and so their traffic drops just like amazons, just like buy.com, and just like all the other internet retailers.

Take home message:

People doing their shopping online are like Ninjas. They wait until exactly the day after thanksgiving. Their shopping is quick, without mercy, and instantaneous. And then they rest. The peak to online retailers does NOT continue through December, so if you just got your affiliate store up and running, sorry, you’re out of luck.

However, if we could measure traffic to brick-and-mortar stores, I bet as the traffic to internet retailers subsides, parking lots start to fill up.

Do you use Alexa? Or do you use their alter-ego competitor coming of age, Compete.com? Or do you use both?

Compete.com has this to say about their traffic vs. Alexa’s traffic:

According to them, they had more traffic than Alexa in September. However, its impossible to see what Alexa has to say about this, because if Alexa measured their own rank it would be #1, even though they clearly are not he most trafficked site on the net.

But lets see how closely Compete and Alexa match up:

The Big Three (Shoe, Chow, and Pro)

Any reader of this blog knows I love to talk about Shoemoney, John Chow, and Problogger. They work well with Alexa, because almost their entire audience has the Alexa toolbar installed to boost the rankings of their own ventures. So here’s what Alexa says about the rankings of the “top three”:

We can see they pretty much stay together, except that Problogger, illustrated in gold, pulls out way ahead everytime the blogosphere is in a state of Chaos and needs a credible source for real information. Also note that all three are currently in a nosedive at present. A full year low for all three of them.

Here’s what compete says about the same three sites:

So this shows us that Shoemoney has about 50,000 readers more than Chow, and Chow has about 50,000 readers more than Problogger. The problem with this analysis is that its (sorry compete) complete garbage. Their readership is pretty much the same, but I’m willing to give compete more time to proliferate the internet to get more accurate analytics.

The one annoying thing about Compete

is that their data is a month old. The right hand of the chart should end in November. Most people want up to date info. Let’s look at the same time period on the Alexa graph:

This is exactly the OPPOSITE of what Compete.com shows, with Shoe on top, and Problogger on the bottom.

Take home message

Compete may need some time to grow. I trust Alexa’s judgement better than Compete’s here, and Alexa says compete is wrong.