Forex and SEO…

Posted on 8 September 2011 by Arnaud Jeulin

SEO in the Forex Broker space

The FX space is competitive. Very competitive. Top brokers post earnings in the hundreds of millions per year and the total retail market volume is almost $5 trillion a month. FXCM and Forex.com alone spent more than $17 million on advertising in Q1. Publishers the better for it (FXstreet posted earnings of 515K a month) – there is a huge incentive to do well in the search engines’ organic results. This post looks at the SEO efforts of GFT Forex, Forex.com, FXCM and Oanda, four well known US forex brokers.

I rarely read an article about SEO and Forex, the last time I heard SEO and Forex in the same sentence was in a Blackhat SEO conference (they love forex because the affiliate programs are very lucrative for them). Bart Burggraaf shows the visible SEO strategy part of the biggest US forex brokers. Incomplete but interesting. As you probably know I changed the name of Mataf.net to forexticket and I opened a website per country (forexticket.co.uk, forexticket.fr, forexticket.jp…), I wanted to know if a multiple domain name could score better than a single domain in search engine result pages.

And… I will give you the result later :)

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Tracking Twitter Links in Analytics

Posted on 8 September 2011 by Arnaud Jeulin

Very interesting post about Twitter’s url shortener. I realised that twitter sends me less than 100 visitors per day with more than 12000 followers on the account @forex. It’s certainly because I’m not really active on twitter, all the update are automatic.

Twitter’s t.co link shortening service is game changing – here’s why

Yesterday the Distilled site received fewer direct visits than any Wednesday out of the last 6 months. What caused this dramatic drop in direct traffic? Did we screw something up? Was our site down or unavailable?

None of these things happened. What happened was Twitter rolled out their new t.co URL shortener. When I first heard that Twitter was doing this I must admit I didn’t really see what the big deal was and largely ignored the news. But let’s take a quick look at our analytics for the past month…

ee how t.co is showing up as one of our referrers? What this effectively does is provide Twitter as a referral source. Which is huge. This is game changing!

 

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Lifestyle Startups: Work to Live their Passion

Posted on 7 September 2011 by Arnaud Jeulin

Lifestyle Startups: Work to Live their Passion
On the California coast where I live, we see lifestyle entrepreneurs like surfers and divers who own small surf or dive shop or teach surfing and diving lessons to pay the bills so they can surf and dive some more.  A lifestyle entrepreneur is living the life they love, works for no one but themselves, while pursuing their personal passion. In Silicon Valley the equivalent is the journeyman coder or web designer who loves the technology, and takes coding and U/I jobs because it’s a passion.

A great article about startup and entrepreneurs. I define myself as “Lifestyle Startup“

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the end of the Euro

Posted on 31 May 2011 by Arnaud Jeulin

I wouldn’t bet on the Euro by Richard Branson

My Chief Executive Stephen Murphy sent me a note today predicting a major weakening of the dollar. He may well be right. But will people move their money to the Euro? I wouldn’t bet on the Euro unless Germany/France do the right thing, stop dithering and take decisive action once and for all to secure the long term future of Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

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Difference between adplanner and Google Analytics

Posted on 9 May 2011 by Arnaud Jeulin

Each month I follow the statistics of a selection of forex website. I use Google Adplanner. This tool gives an estimation of the number of visits.

I noticed a divergence between the estimation and the real numbers. With the following chart I wanted to measure the divergence.

I use the numbers of Mataf and Fxstreet. I don’t share my data but fxstreet does.

Since last year the spread between the real numbers and the estimation is growing month after month.The difference between real and estimate numbers grows even if we share our datas.

If I use the average spread to correct Adplanners’s numbers I have the following statistics (statistics without correction can be found here):

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Forex Global Statistics – March 2011

Posted on 27 April 2011 by Arnaud Jeulin

What’s new in the forex industry?

  • Forexpros continues to grow and seems to be now bigger than DailyFX
  • I don’t know if the numbers provided by google are correct but, for the global statistics, march was not as good as I expected.
  • My “real” numbers were 1.5 million visits, 985’000 unique visitors and 4.3 millions pageviews. The numbers given by Google Adplanner were 750’000 unique visitors, 1.2 million visits and 4.6 millions pageviews

Posted in forex industry, statistics | 4 Comments

Realistic Subscriber Numbers

Posted on 22 April 2011 by Arnaud Jeulin

Interesting post in Maoxian’s blog

Realistic Subscriber Numbers

I have said that I’d like to make $100,000 a year from my weekly newsletter. At $200 a subscriber that means I need 500 people willing to pay me. Assuming the same .77% conversion rate, I’d need 65,000 people to “register” first which means what in terms of traffic? We know from my pathetic stats that the website only gets 20,000 visitors a month with 10,000 uniques. I’d need at least ten times that number to find 500 subscribers. (200,000 visitors > 65,000 registered > 500 paid subscribers)

I experimented the same frustration at the beginning of Mataf

Posted in business model | 2 Comments

One step beyond

Posted on 14 April 2011 by Arnaud Jeulin

I have less visitors this month but some interesting numbers…

  • more than 10’000 followers on my twitter account
  • 2’000 traders who receive my alerts on their iPhone after only 6 months (via our fantastic application)
  • almost 25’000 newsletter subscribers
  • Mataf.net had almost 1 million unique visitors last month
Posted in statistics | 1 Comment

Banned from Iran

Posted on 5 April 2011 by Arnaud Jeulin

I received a bad news from a member of Mataf this morning. I’m banned from Iran :(

Posted in statistics | 4 Comments

A broker acquires a financial portal

Posted on 4 April 2011 by Arnaud Jeulin

This morning I learned that Saxo Bank will completly acquire the EuroInvestor portal. They pay a huge amount but I think this a very good move a broker can do now on Internet.

I keep in mind the acquisition of Boursorama by Fimatex (Société Générale) in France at the beginning of 2002. The price was very high : 44 millions Euro (x36 price-earnings – to compare with x32 for EuroInvestor).  This acquisition has helped Fimatex to grow faster (108’000 account in 2001 vs 677’000 account in 2010) and to become the leader in trading online in France.

After my short experience with Synthesis Bank (now Saxo Switzerland) in 2006 I was not far to change the business model of Mataf.net. I thought about the opportunity to become a forex broker. I had a strong forex portal and the skills to optimize the website to collect leads. The choice between forex broker and portal was not easy but I think I made the better choice a the right time… My motivation is to build something, not to make a ton of money.

Today I see 5 differents business in the forex market:

  • Social Networks (including forum). There are a lot of discussion about trading strategy, brokers… A serious broker has to hear the traders to know what they want and he has to work hard to offer them exactly what they want.
  • Forex Portals. This is the biggest crossroads for traders. They can find news, tools, charts, informations, formations…
  • Managed account. Most of them are IB.
  • Brokers. I think they are too much for the forex market.
  • Banks. They will acquire forex brokers because the forex market is ripe for biggest company.

If I had no limit my strategy would be:

  • recruite a team to discuss with traders in social networks. I would contact the owner of forums and networks to work with them (and not against them as many brokers do).
  • Turn my forex portal to a big news and tools provider. And I would optimize the conversion funnel to download my platform and to open account.
  • Offer the best and simplest trading platform.

This is a complete strategy: You perfectly know the forex traders, you can offer them what they want, you have a source of leads, and you have a good trading platform.
OK it’s not enought to be a broker… but it a very good start.

I think, and I hope, that Saxo will follow this line with the acquisition of EuroInvestor.

If I had enough money I would certainly acquire a broker to do the same thing :)

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