The John T Reed School of Hate Marketing
When I reviewed one of John T Reed's books I stated that his view of SEO was a bit simplistic. He believed that you would just rank for anything you wrote about, but the reason why he ranked for everything under the sun is that he published many scam and scammers review articles.
Making it Easy to Love a Hated Topic:
If your website is in a sketchy field, one of the easiest ways to gain authority is to knock down things that are far sketchier than your own business model. If you review things that are easy to hate which rip off a lot of people it is easy for people to link at that. Then that authority and link equity spreads around your site to your other pages.
The core of your site should be based on servicing your customers as best you can, but if you need a bit of a bump in terms of link equity and you are in a sketchy field you might be able to get those links by reviewing things that people are generally biased against.
How far Should I Push it?
The thing you have to be careful with is to not be too hypocritical when you do those reviews, or else a large part of the market might not take to it too well.
If what you are doing costs you significant credibility and support from within your community you are not going to rank well if the algorithms become more community oriented, plus when people search for you they won't find others saying nice things about you, which makes it hard to charge a premium for your products and services.
Emotions = Links:
People link because of emotions. If you can tap curiosity, laughter, happiness, hate, or rage you can get more link equity than you know what to do with.
Comments
I just found your links on John T. Reed. I already posted on the other one. I would disagree with the term "hate marketing." A better example of hate marketing would be the recent e-Book Crusade.
It is ironic because I just posted about Reed's guru rating link in response to the recent e-Book Crusade website as a good example of how to go after and expose the e-Book charlatans and Internet Marketing scammers instead of what the e-Book crusader wanted to do: post the verbatim publications of others for download free of charge - which is lazy and unethical (if not illegal). Reed's guru reviews are 100% ethical, and I find them valuable and informative because he put tons of research into them and talks a lot about the facts in the book as well as the real stories behind some of these gurus. He also openly challenges anybody to send him any information that would prove him wrong.
A lot of the impetus behind Reed's guru reviews is because he gets bombarded with questions about all the different books, programs, and real estate personalities.
His guru rating links are a great marketing tool. I bought his real estate books in large part because of them. They work because a) he knows the subject, the laws, and the market backwards and forwards and has years and years of experience. b) he doesn't hide his disdain for the gurus and their books, but his opinion is almost lost in the amazing amount of objective and factual content that his research into the reviewed materials produces. c) he offers his unvarnished truth and a wealth of valuable content in his own books, newsletter, and website.
Very true! A good example of this is paypalsucks.com
paypalsucks.com is a site which ranks 3rd result in google for the keyword "paypal." Basically every paypal employee knows of paypalsucks.com
paypalsucks.com is something which definitely hurts paypal.
The reason why paypalsucks.com ranks so well is because many people feel a lot of emotion i.e. hate towards paypal since this company has ripped a lot of people off (myself included).
As a matter of fact I have linked to paypalsucks.com in my diretory, for this very. reason. I can definitely relate to what you are saying, Aaron!
People definitely like to hate things and read negative reviews. If you did a really good job of writing of a blog full of list type articles you could create some really easy link bait. Sensationalist stuff works extremely well on social media sites. If I was going to open up a payday loan site or debt consolidation, some industry full of sketchy characters I may mold a online marketing strategy around that.
Hi Aaron,
The following bullet point from your linked to post (i.e. your review of Mr. Reed's book) interest me greatly. I suspect you've likely elaborated on these topics before...if so, can you point to some of your material that best elaborate (maybe with an example), please? I know you are very busy...and I hope you have time to reply...but either way thank you very, very much for sharing as you do.
Your bullet point:
"He fails to mention pay per click marketing at all, which is huge for how to book publishing, and may even prove useful to find the right topics to write on or how much demand there is for a topic BEFORE you even write the first word. If he is recommending that search drives the bulk of your sales surely he should mention how to research market volume?"
Very interesting post and that has been a topic of many meetings for us.
As Solomon mentioned about Debt Consolidation, we are in that exact field (kind of) Credit Repair.
It has a horrible, horrible reputation. We work our rears off to be ethical, honest and keep our business practices as transparent as possible.
There is one credit repair company that is just ruining the industry and they are huge. We've made the decision to never point out their unscrupulous ways, but man I wish somebody would.
Peoples views on this topic will be interesting.
I can agree with Marcs sentiments. I'm a website developer that is trying to do 'the right thing', i.e. build usable accessible websites to W3C standards, and the web design industry is full of folk with a copy of Dreamweaver who churn out hard to maintain table based non-semantic sites. Now it would be easy to start pointing fingers, and use these negative articles as linkbait, but what would be the impression of a site full of vitriolic bile? This approach will get the links and ranking, but what can you do with it? Surely Aarons approach to SEO is about getting the right traffic? Visitors who are motivated to use your services, not just bitter folk wanting a 'yeah, me too' kind of rant? One positively motivated visitor is worth a heap of negative visitors?
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