Entries in 'hyperlinks' ↓

I’m in the process of setting up Kaplak Stream (working title), a project we (part) deliberately have been pretty silent about – at least in it’s deeper ramifications, even though we did touch upon the wider picture of feeds and aggregators recently, when I discussed Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody in a recent post.

Kaplak Stream is a network of websites, in fact, it is a network of Planet-like websites, each dedicated to a particular niche. Using automatically and semi-automatically fed RSS feeds as our vehicle, Kaplak Stream consiste of an ever-growing pile of niche websites, which all are part of our new WordPress MU install. These sites can be homegrown and consist of from just one to several articles, or they can be houses of RSS feeds, fed from our customers’ own sites and preferred services and related web sites of interest, which offer publicly accessible feeds.

The feeds from each subsite are then fed back into the main channel (the great “planet” site), as well as all the external sites, which tap whatever is interesting to them. We’ll also tap into the greater Kaplak Stream from the Kaplak Wiki, where pages will be fed relevant items based on categories and tags used.

Here’s an illustration of the feed traffic and link love created by Kaplak Stream :

What’s important is this network of niche sites help build context for the niche products offered by our customers. We aim to create very low-maintenance sites, which will help sell some of the “slim end of the long tail” products, we mean to help our customers sell.

These marginal products only sell the occasional copy, so each site cannot cost too much to maintain. This is where syndication comes into the picture. With syndicated sites, we can maintain rich contexts easily and we don’t need lots and lots of traffic for each site individually to pay the bills.

How does this help me sell my product?

So how do you sell with Kaplak Stream? You opt in for a site in the stream, free of charge, with a subject and RSS content of your own choosing. For now, your product must use an external affiliate program and a shopping cart provided by third party services. Products/widgets must also support a revenue sharing model, which shares revenue with publishers.

Each site is focused on one product or few related products only. The widgets for these can be placed at site-level in the sidebar. In this case, Kaplak will be an affiliate publisher of your product.

Alternatively, products may be sold at post-level, i.e. from widgets included in posts in a feed. For these sales, you (or anyone else responsible for the feed) will be the publisher. If unused, the sidebar will be utilized to sell another related product in the Kaplak household, if applicable, or house our usual ads and other stuff circulated among the sites. It’s also in this space we’ll begin to introduce our URLsale widgets when we get that far.

Once the site has been created, you can nurse it and cultivate it – or simply leave it alone and forget about it. Until it makes the occasional sale. A site can be a silent sleeper for years, until someone re-discovers it’s existance and makes a purchase. In Kaplak Stream, this is not a problem.

Only when your product makes a sale, do you earn a dime, which in turn is shared with the publisher. Making the sale is not the only benefit of using Kaplak Stream however. The greatest benefit may be the improved targeted visibility created by the linking activity in the stream. Feeds from Kaplak’s niche sites may easily be pulled back into niche sites everywhere, which adds context and value to these sites, to the advantage of their owners and communities. The links across the network and pingbacks in WordPress MU makes it easier to connect the dots between “separated” islands of niche contexts. Kaplak Stream could be the first step in our ‘making the world’s ends meet’.

As with everything we do, this project may be subject to change – any time. Much in the setup depends on further testing and development, particularly of the plugins we use.

A local department of a political party of which I am a member (never mind which party) had a discussion rolling some time ago concerning spam mail, which led our web editor Rasmus Larsen to ask a few questions concerning Kaplak :

Let’s say that I am organizing an independently financed political forum on the web, with a range of interesting articles by a mixed group of connected people – some writing small newspaper pieces, others longer dissertations. [...] The purpose is not to generate a profit, but 1) to create attention around the webforum as a supplier of meaningful political articles, and 2) to inspire and influence the activities of the target groups, as a kind of prolonged think tank activity.

If there’s an article which supply something innovative on integration policies, it needs to get out in some way to all relevant people who’re already occupied with the subject and are active online. It could be high profile debaters and thinkers, people within different political parties, which leads particular workgroups, certain students and researchers at universities etc.

Now I face these challenges :

• How do I get this article out to the target groups described here, without a firm grasp of who and where they are?
• How do I make sure, they won’t consider it spam or unimportant?
• How do I get it out to the target groups, which I haven’t even considered exists?

These questions hit the nail on a crucial challenge also for Kaplak : “Search” pre-conditions a pre-knowledge, a core of conscious information, which makes someone able to search for something. How do we reach the other someones, who are interested in what we do, without knowing who they are, and they not knowing who we are?

The answer is deceptively simple, yet incredibly hard work. The answer is hyperlinks. Most people don’t realize how important they are. A search engine, for instance, is really nothing but a very advanced index of hyperlinks and hyperlinked webpages. So to be visible for the someones who do search for you, if they know who you are or what your “product” is – let’s imagine you manage to get that information to them by some other means – you have to build a strong interlinked system of hyperlinks, pointing to your site from related sites, networks, communities, blogs etc., which will make search engines better pick up your site and rate it correctly and appropriately.

You can use special techniques often referred to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to optimize your visibility for people who search for you on the web. But your efforts will be most efficient, if 1) your target group know beforehand that you exist or already are looking for what you offer, or 2) you can define precisely or near precisely, who your target group is and what they will search for.

The bottom line is still, however, links, links, links. A well placed link in a good spot will direct the right kind of people to your product or message.

So what is ‘a good spot’? I’ll discuss this in a second.

Concerning the questions about how recipients won’t consider your message or product ’spam’, and how to reach groups you haven’t considered existed, I’d like to flip the questions around a bit. In other words, what will recipients consider spam? And how do you reach people, who haven’t even considered your existence?

To the first, clearly most people consider unsolicited mail spam. Information they seek out themselves, are motivated for and have accepted to receive is not spam. If you want your message out, you have to find a way to reach people where this is the case or seems to be the case. The second point has really the same answer. In order to reach people, who don’t know you exist, you have to create a situation, where they seek you out themselves. So how do you do this?

You find out what the good spots are. Get your hyperlinks to the places where you find people who are potentially interested in your message and won’t consider it irrelevant.

At first, this may seem like an impossible task, especially considering the enormous growth of the web. But if one reconsiders, there’s good reason to praise this further atomization of the internet. The growth of the number of sites in the world also means, that there’s a much greater variety and finer segmenting of target groups. If you can define them right and precisely enough, that is. Segments can be anything on the web which has an audience or some point of communication. They can be website communities, but need not be. They need even not be on the web – they could also be mailing lists, intranets or darknets, i.e. closed p2p networks. A segment can be as small as the group of friends around a Facebook profile, or as large as Barack Obamas following on Twitter.

To describe and predict segments like these are exceedingly and increasingly difficult to do from any central point of view (although any SEO will certainly try). This is why we need to utilize local forces and filters (by means of “peer production”), which will help decide for us, what kind of segments will find what pieces of information. Local peers have what we don’t : the expertise in knowing their communities and segments much more precisely than we do. Connecting with these mediators is how we find ‘the good spots’.

In a way, this is what is already happening now all over the internet. An atomization followed by more precise forms of segmenting and reaching audiences and markets. There are a lot of affiliate programs and products such as Google AdWords/AdSense which help mediators make these connections. But in Kaplak we don’t see really efficient solutions which helps the producers on the very slim end of the long tail, because these customers are not really the concern of most market players operating on the web.

What we propose at Kaplak is (among other things) to introduce a capital bonus (i.e. kaplak) to those peers who successfully connect a niche product with a niche market. This, supported by other tools, will help speed up the connecting of products with their markets in online niche contexts and generate larger margins for our customers – as well as for the mediators.