joi, 9 februarie 2012

6 Reasons You Need to Charge More

Posted: 08 Feb 2012 11:30 AM PST

man holding empty wallet I’m a reluctant Capitalist. I didn’t grow up with a lot of money (my dad was a country preacher, and my mom was a schoolteacher), and the transition from academia to building a start-up and then running my own consulting firm has been rocky at times. The one thing I still hear almost every week is “You need to charge more,” and I preach the same message to new SEOs even as I try to remember it. This post is a reminder to myself (and to you) of why what you charge matters, and why it’s not just about greed.

1. It’s Not All Billable

Almost every new consultant, freelancer, and even agency makes a critical math error. Pay attention, because this mistake could could haunt your business for years to come. It goes something like this:

I need to make $37,000 to pay the bills, and I’d like to make $50,000. A year is about 2000 work hours (50 weeks x 40 hours), so if I can just charge $25/hour, I’ll easily pay the bills and make my $50K goal.

I sincerely commend you for doing the math – it’s important to know what you need to pay the bills and to figure out what that means on a daily and hourly basis. Here’s the problem – in a 40-hour week, especially starting out, you’re going to spend half that week pounding the pavement (or more). You need to network, build your site/portfolio, blog, make phone calls, write proposals, and on and on. Once clients come in, you’ve got administrative work to do – somebody has to send the invoices, pay the taxes, and buy the toilet paper.

So, at best, only 20 hours of your week will be billable. Now, your $25/hour just netted you $25,000. You not only fell short of your $50K goal – you didn’t even pay your bills.

2. Delivery Kills Sales

But wait, it gets worse. That 20-hour billable week assumes that all of your pavement-pounding actually gets instant results. When it does finally pay off, what happens? You get a nice, juicy contract, pour all your time into delivering it, and then realize that you didn’t actually keep selling while you were doing the work. So, after you get that check, you go a month with no work at all while you rebuild your lead pipeline. Ultimately, you’ll be working a 20-hour billable week about every other week, especially for the first year or two. So, you’re averaging 10 hours per week and your $25/hour just netted you a $12,500 bottom line.

3. You Have New Costs

This one’s mostly for the freelancers and independent consultants. Revenue does not equal salary. Even being a consultant costs money – it’s not a high-overhead profession, but everything’s coming out of your pocket now. Some things that you didn’t think twice about when you were employed will suddenly seem shockingly expensive. Want to go to an industry tradeshow? With the full-conference pass, airfare, car, hotel, and meals, that’s about $2,000-3,000. Need a copy of Photoshop? You can’t just pop down to IT anymore – Adobe CS5.5 starts at $1,299. Suddenly your old boss doesn’t seem like such a cheapskate.

That doesn’t count the perks you’ve lost. You’ll hear all about the amazing tax breaks of self-employment from your friends who dream of self-employment but don’t actually have any idea what they’re talking about. Sure, you might be able to write off half your phone bill or a corner of your condo as office space, but meanwhile you’re paying both halves of your employment taxes, your own health insurance, and you’ve got no 401K. Even if you hit that $50K revenue goal, it’s probably more like a $40K salary. The $12,500 you barely squeezed out in the realistic scenario above is more like $10K, and that assumes you skip health insurance, which will run you roughly that entire amount.

4. You Set Your Value

People are funny – when we discount our prices, we expect the buyer will understand they’ve gotten a bargain. When we pay discount prices, we think we’ve walked away with something of less value. Let’s say you go to a fancy restaurant with a 50% Groupon – a month later, do you think “I should go back to that place, since I got such a great deal last time!” No, you think – “If I go back to that place, I’ll have to pay full price. That sucks!” My wife would rather die than go to Bed, Bath and Beyond without a coupon, and it’s entirely their fault for sending us 11 a day. They’ve set their value, and the message is “We don’t have any.”

What’s worse is that you send a broader message that that discount rate is your value to the market, and you even begin to believe it. Unless there’s an amazing opportunity and you’re 100% clear that this is a one-time deal, don’t even start. The legacy of discount pricing could haunt you forever.

5. Your Time Is Finite

We tend to price future work based on past work. On the surface, that makes perfect sense, but the problem is simple – the cost of 10 hours/week when you have nothing to do is a lot less than the cost of 10 hours/week when you’ve already got 40 hours booked. You only have so many hours in the day, and as you run out, they become more valuable. Think of your time like any marketable resource – with more scarcity comes higher prices.

Your time is like MegaBus. When the bus is empty, you may be able to charge $1 for a seat, but that last seat should fetch a premium price. People naturally want to book every available hour, but there’s an opportunity cost to being left with no time at all. Once the hours start to book, it’s time to raise your prices and protect your most non-renewable resource.

6. Cheap Attracts Cheap

Some people may take offense at this, but experience has taught me over and over (and by “taught” I mean “beat with a bat and left me for dead in the alley”) that the people who fight you over price will never stop fighting you. It’s easy to think that, since you gave them a discount and gave into all their demands, they’ll appreciate you more and manage their own expectations, but that’s never happened to me in almost 15 years of working with clients.

It’s almost never about the money – there are some people who just think vendors are meant to be beaten. If you win, they lose. Unfortunately, that means they’ll never see your relationship as win-win. Learn to recognize those clients during negotiation, and get out while you can.

There’s one exception – if you really want to help an organization and you know money is an issue for them, consider doing the work pro-bono. Scope a one-time project and donate your time. There’s nothing wrong with helping people. Where you go wrong is when you start letting other people define your value.

So, How Much Is “More”?

That’s the Million-dollar question, isn’t it? According to our SEO pricing survey last month, the most common hourly rate is between $76-$200 US. That’s quite a range. I think it comes back to that math in Reason #1. The trick is to do the math realistically. Be realistic about your costs and the number of hours really left in the day after sales and marketing are done (and you need to do sales and marketing every day, even when you’re working on deliverables). Maybe more importantly, decide what you want long-term and be careful about setting your value too low just to land a few clients. Today’s discount “just to pay the bills” could set your price for years to come.

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Using blekko's SEO Data to Evaluate Web Directories

Posted: 08 Feb 2012 06:10 AM PST

Posted by davidzimm

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

If you haven’t tried it out yet, blekko.com is a unique search engine. Along with allowing you to customize your own search results (or view results customized by one of its editors) it transparently provides a plethora of data showing why it ranks sites in the search results. The best part is, even if you aren’t trying to increase visits from blekko, their SEO data is very useful.

Getting blekko’s SEO data

It’s simple to get the SEO data from blekko. First you need a blekko account. Then all you have to do is type a URL into the search box, hit the spacebar, and add /seo (what they call a “slashtag”) at the end of your search string.

blekko seo slashtag

One of blekko's most distinctive pieces of data is “Host Rank”. This is not so much a ranking of websites but a measure of website authority- like Domain Authority or PageRank. Unlike these other metrics, Host Rank is on a linear scale rather than an exponential scale. Typically a linear scale is a little easier to wrap your brain around. For example, while you might be tempted to think that a website with a PageRank of 4 is only a little bit better than a PR 3 website, we need to remember that this is an exponential scale and the former has a significantly higher authority than the later. In other words the difference between a Host Rank 30 and 40 website is simply 10 points but the difference between websites with Domain Authority 30 and 40 is not 10 points, it is 10 to the power of X points (it is an exponential scale- what's the exponent? ask Mr. Fishkin). Host Rank also avoids a maximum value on its scale unlike the coveted PR 10 website (or comparatively strong DA 100 website).

comparing linear vs exponential values

There's much more to blekko besides another number to compare websites. The /seo slashtag also provides a nifty pie chart outlining what countries the links tend to come from. Although there is nothing wrong with a link from India, for example, if a website is based in the United States and the audience is primarily in the United States, the origin of the links can be indicative of some (shall we say) risky SEO techniques.

I also find the “co-hosted with” list at the bottom of the /seo page very interesting. Does this website have dedicated hosting? If not, that’s not necessarily bad thing but if it is co-hosted with some (shall we call them) questionable websites, that might be a neighborhood you wouldn’t want to be associated with.

Blekko’s data gets even more specific. You can also slashtag a URL with /domainlinks to find a list of inbound links (you can also access this from the right sidebar of the /seo page). Now this list of links most closely resembles the defunct Yahoo! SiteExplorer in that it provides a very long list of links that you have to manually filter through to be useful, but it does a good job giving you an indication of the source of this website’s link authority.

I also like to take a look through a websites /sitepages. This gives a list of all the pages on a website, as sorted by Host Rank. This is a great way of seeing how Host Rank (and presumably PageRank or even Domain Authority) flows throughout a website. Of course, the homepage of any website will always have the most authority- but does any authority flow to interior pages on the website?

Let’s get a little more concrete with this data. We can use blekko’s SEO data to evaluate a couple of web directories to see if we should submit our site to them. Starting with SEOmoz’s directory list, let’s take a couple of authoritative directories (as measured by Domain Authority) and a couple of low authority directories.

The Yahoo Directory

The Yahoo! Directory (Domain Authority 100): http://blekko.com/ws/dir.yahoo.com+/seo

Anyone with (shall we say) the means to afford $299 a year has probably submitted their website to the Yahoo! Directory. For a while Google’s Webmaster Guidelines even suggested it. Is it worth the cost? What will we get out of this listing? Let’s use blekko’s SEO data and find out.

/seo

With a Host Rank of 2,054.9 we clearly see this is a very authoritative website (at least in blekko’s mind). Although this number doesn’t mean much in itself, I bet it’s higher than your personal website.
Most of the links are from the United States (64%). Not to be so Amero-centric here but there’s nothing in the geographical distribution of the links that would make me concerned here. This is an international directory, after all.
The site is co-hosted with (wait for it) Yahoo!. Even though it’s been a while since I’ve used Yahoo!, that’s a neighborhood I wouldn’t mind being associated with.

/domainlinks

Websites actually link to the Yahoo! Directory (who knew) and these seem to be authoritative and clean. It seems like a legitimate and natural backlink profile to me.

/sitepages

Authority seems to flow very quickly into the directory listings and the Host Rank doesn’t seem to drop-off very fast. If your website falls into one of these top ranked categories you’d definitely want to be listed there.
One of the top-ten pages, according to blekko, is the list of newly submitted websites. FTW!

top pages on the yahoo directory

BBB Web Directory

The Better Business Bureau (Domain Authority 99): http://blekko.com/ws/bbb.org+/seo

Got a brick-and-mortar along with your website? Why not submit it to BBB.org?

/seo

This site, according to blekko, actually has more authority than the Yahoo! Directory. It has a Host Rank of 2,948.4. This is tempting!
It makes sense that 86% of the links come from the United States- this is for US-based businesses, that’s how it should be.
WOW! What a list of sites are co-hosted with the BBB! Well, it’s co-hosted with pearljam.com so it’s gotta be a good neighborhood! (By the way, did you see Pearl Jam 20? Highly recommended)

/domainlinks

Sites linking to the BBB seem to be very similar to the Yahoo! Directory and they are all from legitimate and authoritative websites. You wish you could have a backlink profile like this site!

/sitepages

Unfortunately the first business I found was on the 6^th page of blekko’s /sitepages results. Most of the authoritative pages are designed to get you to sign up or are content pages. Getting a listing on this directory won’t pass much authority to your site.
Clearly the authority of the homepage does not transfer well to listings. The first business listing has a Host Rank 1/100^th of the homepage. Sure, you might get some eyeballs from a BBB.org listing, but I wouldn’t count on it for link building efforts.

top pages in the BBB directory

Sporge Web Directory

Sporge (Domain Authority 33): http://blekko.com/ws/sporge.com+/seo

With a name like that, who wouldn’t want to be in this directory? (I’m not much for branding but I’d recommend a name-change in this case). Still, it might be worth something. Let’s see

/seo

The Host Rank of this website is 20.2. Now you start to see the value of a linear website ranking scale- the Yahoo! Directory is 100x more authoritative that this directory.
The geographical distribution of the backlinks is actually fairly similar to the BBB’s website. Nothing unusual here.
Also similar to the BBB, there is a massive amount of websites co-hosted with the Sporge directory. Most of them seem benign.

/domainlinks

Most of the links to Sporge.com come from other web directories. Could this site be part of a directory network. Is there any value of submitting to this directory as opposed to any of the others? If I submit to this directory, should I even bother to submit to any of the others linking to it?

/sitepages

The Host Rank ends very quickly, but there’s not much authority to this website to start with in the first place. At least what little it has is able to get to the directory listings easily.

The Brick Wall Web Directory

The Brick Wall (Domain Authority 22): http://blekko.com/ws/thebrickwall.com+/seo

This is the least-authoritative directory, according to SEOmoz’s list. Is it even worth the 10 minutes it would take to submit your website?

/seo

The Host Rank is a whopping 4.3. This is another good illustration of the value of a linear ranking for websites. If you only looked at the Domain Authority of this website (as compared to Sporge- why do I blush when I say that?) you might think, “hey, that’s not so bad,” but blekko doesn't think very highly of this directory.
The links to this site come from four “other countries.” I can’t seem to find that on my globe. This is a little fishy.
It’s co-hosted with a few other UK-based websites. Nothing seems too bad among these websites.

/domainlinks

There really isn’t a large number of links to this website. Where is it getting its authority (what little it does have)?
There it is! Many of the links to this directory are reciprocal.

/sitepages

This little directory doesn’t have much authority to share, but if it did it seems it would get to the directory listings fairly efficiently.

Now blekko’s search market share is (shall we say) still growing, but the data they provide can help you do SEO in other search engines too. As with any third-party tool, you wouldn’t want to rely on this data exclusively- obviously neither Google nor Bing are using this data to determine how they rank webpages- but this information can still be a big help to any SEO attempting to evaluate websites for potential authority and value.

Seth's Blog : Inaccurate labels and why we need them (and need to improve them)

Inaccurate labels and why we need them (and need to improve them)

If I tell you, "I'm going to the baseball game," it seems as though you're likely to understand what I mean.

Of course, you won't. When George Will goes to a baseball game, it's a religious experience. Me, I don't even like baseball. Or maybe it's my nephew's ball game (the playoffs), or maybe going to the game causes me to miss an important event, and on and on.

We label the experience with just two words, and two words can't possibly capture the emotions and circumstance surrounding an event.

The same thing is true with brands. If I tell you that a new business was funded by USV, that might mean something to you, or not. Or if someone asks you to pay extra for a brand you trust, that's stuck with you through thick and thin, that might be an easy sale. It certainly won't be if your experiences with that label/brand/company are negative ones.

As soon as we put a word on it, we've started to tell a story, a caricature, a version of the truth but not the whole truth.

The label removes us from reality. It takes us away from the actual experience. But do we have any choice?

How else can I get you started down the path to understanding me and my life and my schedule and my projects... labels are just about the best thing available to us.

A well-written book, then, is far more powerful than a blog post, because the book can take more time to get the labels right, to help you see what the author means. Five minutes of a movie is probably more powerful than five minutes reading a book because the tropes of a movie (the soundtrack, the lighting, the dialogue) are capable of delivering more accurate labels if the director is any good.

When there's a disagreement, it's almost always over the interpretation of labels. When you think your job title or your purchase order or your reservation means something because of how it's labeled, you'll end up in conflict if you're trying to work with someone who interprets those labels differently.

The key is in placing the blame where it belongs--on the labels, not on the individuals who are stuck. Get clear about the labels, clear about the promises and what they mean, and you're far more likely to generate satisfaction.

• Email to a friend •

Meet singles in your town for hook ups.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I_MVo-cDBtph8xGS-em6EYuFbVYiB7Dyytr-49RtL9o/edit

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miercuri, 8 februarie 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Will Le Pen Be on the Ballot Against Sarkozy and Hollande? Does it Matter?
Bernanke Finally Says Something That Seems to Make Sense "8.3% Unemployment Understates Labor Weakness"; Critique of Bernanke's 2014 Pledge; Perfectly Useless Projections
Spotlight China: Electricity Consumption Drops Sharply; Central Bank Vows Housing Support; Oil Imports From Iran Fall Again; Asia Real-Estate Bull Turns Bearish

Will Le Pen Be on the Ballot Against Sarkozy and Hollande? Does it Matter?

Posted: 08 Feb 2012 04:30 PM PST

Not many people realize this but in spite of polling anywhere between 16% and 22% in recent election polls, Marine Le Pen might not be included on the French presidential ballot. The reason is Le Pen needs 500 signatures by elected official supporting her campaign. Le Pen says she only has 350.

I had been aware of this for some time but figured she could scrape up 500 signatures from a pool of 47,000 or so bureaucrats eligible to sign. Perhaps not.

Please consider Le Pen attacks all sides over 'pathetic' poll

Far-right Front National leader Marine Le Pen slammed a poll in a Sunday newspaper that asked people how they would vote if she was not on the ballot paper.

The prospect could be a reality if Le Pen fails to get 500 elected officials to sponsor her candidacy.

Under French law, any presidential candidate needs 500 signatures from elected representatives in at least 30 different departments across the country or in France's overseas territories.

Le Pen told RTL radio on Thursday that she was still 150 short of the target number and risked being excluded from the vote on April 22nd.

A Sunday newspaper, Journal du Dimanche, published an opinion poll at the weekend showing that the fortunes of current president Nicolas Sarkozy improve markedly without Le Pen in the picture.

In that case, Sarkozy and his Socialist rival François Hollande would each get 33 percent of the vote.

Current polls give the president around 24 percent compared to Hollande's 30 percent. Le Pen is just behind on around 20 percent, threatening to overtake the president and secure a place in the final two-way runoff on May 6th.

Le Pen told a meeting in Toulouse on Sunday that the scenario in the poll was "the dream of the political class."

"If I'm not there will you vote for Nicolas Sarkozy, for François Hollande?" she said, as the audience booed and whistled.

"There is your response to their pathetic opinion polls and pathetic manipulations," she said.

Does it Matter?

The answer is not straight forward. It depends on the meaning of "matter".

Le Pen was not going to win. If she is off the ballot, More first-round votes will go to Nicolas Sarkozy than François Hollande.

However, in the second round of voting (recall French elections are two-stage with the top two candidates competing in a runoff), Polls show Hollande beating Sarkozy by 58% to 42% margin. Even if she bumped off Sarkozy, she would not win. Nor will Sarkozy win.

Thus from a candidate point of view, one might say it does not matter.

However, the process is certainly a defeat of democracy. Nothing is served by a process of keeping her off the ballot. Indeed, if she is as bad as Sarkozy claims, then voters should recognize that as well.

The 36,000 mayors and 11,000 other bureaucrats eligible to vote have to do so publicly. Le Pen has a challenge into the French Supreme Court on the secret ballot issue. That case will be heard on February 22 as noted by Reuters in French far right say big parties muzzling democracy.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Bernanke Finally Says Something That Seems to Make Sense "8.3% Unemployment Understates Labor Weakness"; Critique of Bernanke's 2014 Pledge; Perfectly Useless Projections

Posted: 08 Feb 2012 10:19 AM PST

I nearly always disagree with Bernanke on monetary and fiscal policy. Specifically, the Fed ought not have a monetary policy for the simple reason the Fed should not exist.

Indeed, the Bernanke Fed and the Greenspan Fed have both proven beyond a shadow of a doubt they do not know what they are doing, where the economy is headed, or anything else of relevance in setting monetary policy.

However, on rare occasions, Bernanke can say a few snippets that seem to make complete sense. For example, Bernanke Says 8.3% Unemployment Understates Labor Weakness.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said the 8.3 percent rate of unemployment in January understates weakness in the U.S. labor market.

"It is very important to look not just at the unemployment rate, which reflects only people who are actively seeking work," Bernanke said today in response to questions at a hearing before the Senate Budget Committee in Washington. "There are also a lot of people who are either out of the labor force because they don't think they can find work" or in part- time jobs.

"The 8.3 percent no doubt understates the weakness of the labor market in some broad sense," Bernanke said today, while noting that some job indicators are improving.

Fed officials last month estimated that the world's largest economy will grow 2.2 percent to 2.7 percent this year, according to the central tendency estimate, while the unemployment rate will average 8.2 percent to 8.5 percent in the fourth quarter.

Disagreements Already

I agree with most of the above analysis, but the more Bernanke or the Fed talks, the quicker a disagreement is bound to arise. The problem above is the Fed's growth projection. The Fed could be right, I just highly doubt it.

Let's put it this way, Bernanke has been seriously wrong so many times on economic projections that perhaps by accident he finally gets one correct.

"8.3% Unemployment Understates Labor Weakness"

Some things are so obvious even Bernanke seems to understand. His labor weakness statement is one of them.

I said similar things on Monday, with far more details and reasons, in Fewer Nonfarm Employees Now Than December 2000; Unemployment Rate: Some Things Still Don't Add Up; Obamanomics?

Please click on link for a series of charts showing just how weak the recovery has been and just how understated the unemployment rate is.

Critique of Bernanke's Pledge to Hold Rates to Zero Through 2014

The strange thing here is that although Bernanke seems to understand the likeliness of further economic weakness, most analysts and writers are tooting the horns of an economic recovery, while chastising Bernanke for promising to hold rates low until 2014, as if the decline in unemployment rate is meaningful.

I disagree with the Fed's rate decision for a different fundamental reason: a bunch of academics chasing their tails cannot effectively set interest rates (only the market can). That simple fact has been proven is spades.

Analysis of Bernanke's "Labor Weakness" Statements

Unfortunately, Bernanke's statements offer surprising little economic insight.

For example, please consider the Fed's estimate that the "unemployment rate will average 8.2 percent to 8.5 percent in the fourth quarter".

Perfectly Useless Projection

Let's assume Bernanke is correct. Is that a meaningful projection?

The short answer is the projection, even if totally accurate, is perfectly useless. Let's analyze "why? in light of Bernanke's estimate that it takes 125,000 jobs a month to keep up with demographics (birthrate plus immigration).

Three Cases In Which Unemployment Rate Stays Flat

Is the Fed projecting 125,000 per month in line with expected demographics?
Is the Fed expecting 200,000 jobs a month with a rising participation rate that holds the unemployment rate steady?
Is the Fed expecting 50,000 jobs a month with a falling participation rate that holds the unemployment rate steady?

It would be more useful (assuming there is any use to Bernanke's statements which is certainly debatable) to know just what he is thinking because those three scenarios are vastly different in terms of economic significance, even though they all project the same 8.2 percent to 8.5 percent unemployment rate prediction.

In other words, the Fed's projection, even if accurate, is totally useless, not that anyone should be paying any attention to what he says in the first place.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Spotlight China: Electricity Consumption Drops Sharply; Central Bank Vows Housing Support; Oil Imports From Iran Fall Again; Asia Real-Estate Bull Turns Bearish

Posted: 08 Feb 2012 12:54 AM PST

Inquiring minds are tired of the spotlight on Greece (believe me I am as sick as anyone of Groundhog Day).

Given the world will not end when Greece defaults, whether in March of this year or next, let's turn our attention to a country far more significant.

Chinese Electricity Consumption Fell Massively In January

Business Insider reports Chinese Electricity Consumption Fell Massively In January, And The Chinese New Year Doesn't Explain It

Ultra-brief note here from Nomura's Zhiwei Zhang :

According to the China Securities Journal, China's electricity consumption in January fell by 7.5%. We estimate this may be the first decline since 2002 (excluding the financial crisis period in 2008-09), indicating industrial production may have slowed sharply in January.

They don't have any more answers here at the moment, except they say that if you're thinking it has something to do with the New Year, then you are incorrect.

For now it's just one of those things that make you go hmm...

China Pressures Iran On Oil Prices

China has stepped up the pressure on Iran in the face of Europe's oil embargo. Business World reports China's Oil Imports From Iran Reduced Again

China will reduce its crude oil imports from Iran for a third month, sources said today, as the two remain divided over payment and price terms, although they plan to meet again for talks as early as this week.

China is the top buyer of Iranian oil and also the fastest expanding major oil importer, putting it in a strong position to negotiate for better terms after it more than halved imports for both January and February.

The reductions for March-loading supplies will be largely the same, if not deeper, than the previous two months, industry officials with direct knowledge of the supply situation told Reuters.

China, which buys around 20 percent of Iran's total crude exports, cut its January and February purchases by about 285,000 bpd, just over one half of the total average daily amount it imported in 2011.

China Central Bank Vows Housing Support

In a sure sign that property prices in China are crashing faster than the Chinese government wants, China Central Bank Vows Housing Support

China's central bank pledged support for first-home buyers as a crackdown on real-estate speculation threatens to trigger a property slump in the world's second- biggest economy.

Officials will increase support for construction of affordable housing and ensure that "loan demand from first-home families" is met, the People's Bank of China said on its website yesterday evening.

Policy makers aim to limit public discontent by making housing more affordable, with Vice Premier Li Keqiang, a possible contender to be the next premier, describing the distribution of low-cost homes as a key test of government credibility. At the same time, the ruling Communist Party aims to avoid the economic "hard landing" that Fitch Ratings said yesterday is a key global risk.

"The government doesn't want to see home transactions slide too fast -- that may hurt economic growth," said Lu Ting, a Hong Kong-based economist at Bank of America Corp.

Too Late to Prevent a Hard Landing

Given the massive size of China's property bubble, it's far too late to prevent a crash landing. The only way to prevent crashes is to not let bubbles get so big in the first place.

Asia Real-Estate Bull Turns Bearish

MarketWatch reports Asia Real-Estate Bull Turns Bearish

Asia's gradually cooling property markets aren't the great buys they once were, according to one expert in the region, who says better bargains can be found in the depressed markets in the West.

Tim Murphy, the Hong Kong-based chief executive officer of property advisory group IP Global, says he's telling his clients to look more towards New York and San Francisco for deals, although London also ranks well in terms of rental yield in some projects.

Back home in Asia, the only market he likes is Malaysia, where average prices in its big cities are about one-tenth of those in Hong Kong, while its commodity-backed economy should outperform its export-dependent regional rivals.

What's changed? Murphy says the ongoing debate in Asia during the current soft patch is being driven by inflation concerns that were absent during previous periods of economic weakness.

Specifically, he sees a "role reversal" from the regional crisis that unfolded in 1997, as fresh barriers to foreign investment and speculative activity are now enacted across many parts of Asia, while hard-hit cities in the West are offering tax breaks and other concessions as incentives to invest.

Today, governments around the region, and particularly in China, are wary that too much liquidity could stoke a U.S.-style housing bubble and inflict long-term damage upon the economy, he said.

"Singapore and Hong Kong are two of the freest economies in the world, yet you pay more in stamp duties [real-estate transaction taxes] now than you would in London, because they are very worried about the markets continuing to overheat," Murphy said.

Infomercial for Property-Advisory Firm IP Global

As much as I agree with the headline message, I have to comment the same message could have and should have been said years ago. Given the illiquid nature of real estate, one cannot sell on a dime when the market turns.

"We see what's happening as a great chance for Asians to buy overseas at the moment," Murphy said, adding that in December he opened an office in Shanghai to tap the growing interest among China's newly wealthy for overseas homes.

Given the entire two-page article was about Murphy and his firm, I have to ask "Was that an news story by MarketWatch or an infomercial for Tim Murphy?"

Regardless, anyone who bought in China in the last couple years and has not sold yet is now likely trapped.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
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Damn Cool Pics

At the Heart of Valentines Day [Infographic]

Posted: 08 Feb 2012 12:52 PM PST

It is true that many of the traditions surrounding Valentine's Day and similar holidays worldwide are directly linked to consumer industries scheming up ways to build business. And it's clear from the US spending statistics that silly as some people may find it, Valentine's Day is no laughing matter when it comes to the flower and candy industries. However, it's interesting to see different ways this looks across the globe, and to explore some of the deeper legend and history behind it.

Overall, I think giving is a good thing, as long as you keep it within reason, and don't get too caught up in the consumer hype surrounding holidays like this. Check out this infographic to learn a little bit more about just how complex the construction of Valentine's Day really is.

Click on Image to Enlarge.

Source: frugaldad

Why the iPad, Flash, Adobe Products and User Agent Detection Really Do Matter Graywolf's SEO Blog

Why the iPad, Flash, Adobe Products and User Agent Detection Really Do Matter

Posted: 08 Feb 2012 10:09 AM PST

Being the owner of a Macbook Pro, iPhone, and iPad, you might consider me an Apple Fanboy. I can tell you I’ve been involved in web development long enough to tell you that the current state of usability on the web is nearing the low point: when, in the late 90′s, browsers had no standardization and we had to design different sites for Netscape and Internet Explorer. The current situation comes mostly from designing sites that don’t render properly or at all on mobile devices like a mobile phone, tablet, or iOS device.

Before you cast me aside as being on the bleeding edge of technology and that I don’t really register as being statistically significant, I’ll share three links with you:

In most cases, people aren’t going to share or link to you if your website doesn’t work on their platform of choice…

Recently, I was trying to fix my dishwasher (listen, I cook a lot and dirty a lot dishes…knowing how to do some basic repairs myself saves me a little cash now then). About every 8-10 months, the part of the dishwasher that is supposed to grind up the food that doesn’t get pre-rinsed gets clogged and needs be cleaned. I’ve bookmarked the site with the video for my model in Evernote because I use it so often. However, because the site was using a proprietary flash video player, when I clicked the link, I only got the audio podcast not the video showing me assembly/disassembly (screen shots below).

Laptop Version

iPad Version

Not a problem. I figured I’d head on over to Sears, get a link to the product manual, and do it the long way. Turns out ManageMyLife.com does such a bad job of user detection that they think I don’t have the Adobe Reader installed and can’t view the PDF for my model number.

Laptop Version

iPad Version

Great. So I had a hard time getting a video on how to fix my dishwasher and viewing the PDF for the instruction manual on my iPad. I had to go upstairs and use my laptop. Boo hoo on me for having first world problems, right? What we really have here is a case of bad site design and usability for not designing in a site that fails gracefully when it gets user agent detection wrong. As a marketer and SEO, these things matter and they are going to matter more in the future …

First World Problems

In most cases, people aren’t going to share or link to you if your website doesn’t work on their platform of choice. They aren’t going to share your link on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other social network, and if they do it will be the way I did: to make fun of you or use you as an example of a McFail. Search engines are getting smarter. They are using lots of signals to determine which sites rank. These days, usability and engagement are two key signals and, as Google gets better at measuring them more accurately, they’ll play an even more prominent role.

So what should site owners do in these cases:

Avoid using proprietary audio/video/pdf viewers and players. If you need to for advertising reasons, build a more bulletproof system of user agent detection and fail gracefully into a condition that allows users to still get the content.
Don’t let the same content exist on a mobile subdomain (link) and normal domain (link) as this only leads to trouble when content gets shared across mobile devices and laptops (looks squarely in the direction of Facebook and Youtube). Use one URL improve your user agent detection if you need to do so, but try to design a system that is user agent agnostic.
The number and kind of devices that people are going to use is only going to increase in the coming years. This is a problem that you will have to deal with sooner or later. If you design systems that are flexible and embrace these platforms, you will have an easier time building links, getting content shared, and improving the on site signals and metrics that the search engines are using.

photo credit: Shutterstock/Jaroslav74

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