In the last 3 days about 3 or 4 friends compared good marketing and branding with the Ipod. How does that related to SEO? Peter Da Vanzo recently posted about his Ipod:
When I was considering buying a music player, some music-gadget obsessed friends offered a wealth of well-meaning advice. “Noâ€, they said, “don’t get an Ipod because it can’t do xyz, unlike the XRX2000 (or whatever), which can do so much more! More stuff! Oh, and the Ipod is overpricedâ€. Those weren’t the exact words, but that was the jist.
They were probably right, but the problem is: I don’t care.
I knew that if I bought anything else, I’d always think “yeah, but it’s not an Ipodâ€.
The other day in an IM Andy Hagans also mentioned his Ipod
I buy Ipods regularly even though I know they're not better. For 3 times the price of the competition. Because I 'trust' them somehow.
How does all this relate to marketing? If you want to do well long-term you have to sell your product or service as a non commodity. The more your product / service / business is sold as a piece of art or something to be thought as being worth paying more for the more you have to move away from just being approved on a rational level and the more you have to have a strong appeal on an emotional level.
The link profile of this site is far less than perfect, but a large part of the heavy anchor text focus on the phrase SEO Book is because I wanted to create a strong brand. If my inbound anchor text were mixed better this site could probably get a ton more traffic, but traffic without a strong branding element has much less value, especially when you sell an ebook for about 4 times the price that most physical books sell for.
Just like selling products, you also have to sell being link worthy if you want to integrate SEO into your market plan. It is hard to do that just by emulating what already exists. To get big rewards you have to create something that is conceptually different, such that you are memorable and evoke an emotional response. If you manage to do that and occasionally target different customers and different traffic streams than your competition by focusing on adding value to their experience it is hard to fail.
The reasons that legitimate content works so well are
- most markets usually take a while to react to quality content
- because of that delay, it typically takes spending months or years over-investing before seeing any type of return on the effort required to create something unique and useful that will stand the test of time
- most people looking to make a quick buck are all fighting for the same shallow traffic sources and are not willing to spend the time to deeply research their topic or emotionally invest in their content enough for it to pay off
Not every page is going to win awards or have a net positive return for the effort that went into it, but as you build a variety of legitimate useful original pages over time the site authority starts to build on itself and eventually you snowball toward the top.
