So, tommorrow I have an appointment to go over my taxes. I haven't started putting them all together yet, so I may not be blogging much today or tomorrow ;)

I make most of my profits from this site, but in many ways this site has thrust so much opportunity on me that it is mind boggling. In the past I wasted many great opportunities by lying to myself about what I am good at and where I should focus my efforts.

Recently I decided to expand my business and web presence significantly beyond this site, realizing that I can't do everything I want to if I do it all on my own, and that having a vested interest in many other ideas will help me learn. The main desire to expand comes from wanting a broader knowledge base and experience base. While I could do really well by just focusing on this site I think the stuff I will learn from getting a much more broad experience set will increase my understanding of the web, marketing, and business in general.

Here are some of the cookie jars I have put my hands in over the past few months (most cookie jars involve at least 1 friend partnering):

• buying a few old websites (been doing this on my own, though got some cool ideas from chatting with Jim Boykin and Stuntdubl)

• creating lots of content for them (hired one friend to make some content, hired another friend to fix broken links and write content, and partnered with a friend for some of the other content)
• starting 2 content networks (this is going unfortunately slow, largely due to resource limits, especially when compared to the instant ROI provided by the older more established sites)
• buying Threadwatch and then taking DaveN on as a partner
• trying to learn affiliate marketing a bit more aggressively (while he doesn't talk too much about it in public, Andy Hagans is a bad ass at it for being somewhat new to that market)
• partnering with a friend to try to make a social network (I think I have a good idea with this, and a good viral marketing idea)
• partnering with a friend to try to make another network (this one is just a bit out there. I would be a minority stake holder in it. Am chatting with the majority guy to try to make it pretty innovative, but they are being a bit more traditional than my uber idealistic - and perhaps a bit flawed for being a bit too idealistic - original idea.)
• hiring a programmer - I think it would be cool to have a full time programmer to make lots of random fun or good ideas. I am sure eventually as I get further into the affiliate stuff he will help come up with some cool content ideas.
• ownership stake in 3 companies (one of which may already be in the hurt locker, but the second and third could not be looking any brighter)
• that second company has more potential profit in its first month than I made in all of 2004, largely because I joined up with an absolutely kick ass partner
• the third company could be much larger than the second
• working on some rather large client projects

So hopefully I will post saturday...think I am going to turn IM and email off so I can start on taxes ;)

Outside of Danny Sullivan few people have probably read and wrote about SEO as much as I have the past couple years, but I think I am going to tune it back a bit.

I like reading the feed reader maybe once or twice a week, and just get bored / burned out if I do it much more frequently than that. I also find that trying to be the first with the news ends up meaning that I end up not reading as many books and it surely crosses beyond the point of diminishing returns.

I plan to post less often, but on average it should be better or less shitty, depending on how critical you are of my posts.

Lots0, one of my true mentors in this field, recently announced he is stopping publicly discussing SEO:

I wonder why some people think that they should receive premium service when they contact a "well known SEO" out of the blue and then ask for "FREE" advice and help.

Then, if you do give them "free" advice, then they always want to argue with you about your findings and how whatever you found can not be the problem (see above posts in this thread).

Time should have a price and a value on it. You can only help people so much before it starts to be at your own expense. Want an example?

I get pissed off when I know that people who were once friends write sales letters full of sleaze and lies to sell more bullshit, even if they are hurting the people buying their products. I have not thought of how I am going to change my sales letter yet, but it says this:

I have spent thousands of dollars developing free custom made SEO tools which are better than tools other people sell for $150 to $300 - saving you way more than the price of the book.

In SEO the tools are as important as the methodology. I hold nothing back. You get access to every SEO Tool I use and all my SEO tips and tricks.

Up until the middle of December that statement was entirely true. I spent well over $10,000 dollars creating tools that I give away. I get feature requests and lots of questions, but at least personally I can create better value for me if I don't make EVERYTHING entirely open. Some ideas just don't scale. Does that make me a bad person? No. It just means I may need to rewrite my sales letter. The only thing that is pure is ignorance.

While supporting open source and helping newbies get up to gear is cool, I am nothing but an asshole if I teach people how to make 6 or 7 figures a year and then consume all my time learning how to teach the topic without stocking away a large large nest egg myself.

I am not all about money per say, but I want it to not matter. If a sleazy company sues me I want to have enough money to be able to do nothing but laugh at them. Being as opinionated and honest as I am means that likely many sleazy or dishonest companies will end up suing me throughout the next couple years.

I may start selling SEO services to high end clients soon. I may also spend a bit more time working with friends on creating content sites. So far I have only completed two content related joint ventures, and the second one was so beautiful that it well paid beyond the losses created by the first one.

EGOL recently stated that SEO has limited value for most people:

SEO by itself is not worth a pile of beans. To have an effecive website you must have more, and that "more" is content, product, salesmanship, etc. SEO has zero value without these things.

I see SEO as a single course in a larger program such as "internet marketing". At present there are very few of these programs but the importance of them is enormous to many businesses.

I have had the chance to speak at an internet marketing MBA class, and SEO was nothing more than part of a larger course. Could it be extended? Sure. But the reality is that as search technology advances, it will get better at displaying various versions of exceptionally popular or exceptionally unpopular opinions in the results. Most people will not need to learn what will eventually become the uber complex SEO field. It will become far easier to directly manipulate people rather than trying to manipulate the algorithms.

Over at Gapingvoid Hugh recently posted tell the truth and the brand builds itself and in that spirit I thought I would post why I perhaps have overinvested so much into SEO. When I first started SEO I was:

• nearly bankrupt

• unemployed
• told that I deserved to be a failure for life by the largest US employer, which even ripped up some of my work records
• spiritually empty

After a while I got another real job, and while I liked my boss and many of the co workers there I realized that the way I am programmed means that whatever I did I was going to do far beyond what most people would consider normal, and that eventually overworking myself was going to lead to an early death due to wreckless living.

Having said all that, SEO was (and perhaps still is) my escape from all of that. But it does not make sense for me to hold onto something for too long.

If I wanted to paint a more accurate picture of reality blogging has probably made me more money than being an SEO has. I still plan on regularly updating my ebook and posting to this site, but would love to shift more toward posting what I find interesting when I feel like looking instead of trying to catch almost everything and read ALL the news.

Need an example of why knowing SEO may not be as important as some of the other things we pick up along the way?

NickW ran what was my favorite SEO site. While he did he frequently posted about how bad the blogpuppy fucktwits were. He later launched another site about blogging and sold his original site. If you look at the growth of Performancing I would guess that it will probably end up being far more successful than Threadwatch was for him because there are far more bloggers than SEOs, blogging is far more viral, and they will be easier to monetize than some of the members of ThreadWatch are.

I am going to launch a few free open source beginer level SEO tools soon. I also am going to start answering many questions I get via email publicly so that I create value for myself when I answer email questions. I am not certain if I should make a separate answers feed for that or if it should be part of the original SEO Book feed.

While some of the readers will tell you that they don't want certain things sometimes the things that are quickly rejected grow to be the most popular, so answering SEO questions right in the main feed may not be adding any noise to the SEO Book brand.

Wishing you a happy-safe-warm-fun new year full of friendship and joy,
Aaron

neato...this bloggie is 2 years old today.

So recently I have been getting phone calls from someone saying they used to work with xyz-firm but are no longer associated, along with copies of cease and desist letters they sent to xyz-firm.

When the person contacted me, telling me they were trying to help me, I told them that if there is anything they felt they could do to help me they may as well make it public. It does no good to give me half information or one perspective of a murky story that I can pass along as hearsay.

I also have been getting investigative comments about how that person and their business is associated with xyz-firm. Although the most recent one I deleted because it is off topic. I may have to look and see if there are any others that need deleted.

Taking a longer glance at the whole situation this stuff may be at least a bit of a waste of time. Ultimately there is no way to be a clearing house of information about who you can't trust and why you can't trust them. Scammers and scam systems constantly evolve to find the shortest distance between you and your money.

We all make mistakes and we all learn. I once hired an SEO firm who told me to use hidden text and other shoddy techniques (copy your home page and change the filename to these words and cross link them back and forth with invisible small text using these words in the link text). At that point I asked that person what would stop me from automating it and doing it over and over or writing a program to do it. They did not reply. At the time the company that provided shoddy services to me was ranked in paid listings and organic search results for competitive phrases.

I think when you hire people to do technical stuff in nature you should ask questions or want to know why. Things change over time and sometimes people do things because it has always been that way. As you become more successful it is even easier to get away with doing things the way you used to and living by them, even if others would see different results trying to do the same thing. And it is harder to hold the passion in a topic and think of unique and useful things to say that have not yet been said, so we all recycle.

Sometimes I don't even agree with things I said in the past. And I think it should be that way. While sometimes I am a bit more thickheaded than I would like to view myself as being, I should learn from my mistakes. If you keep learning you make more and different mistakes, but hopefully better ones.

I think the aim in saying that xyz or yqp are deceptive might be a useful public service if it is true, but ultimately it makes little sense for me to try to keep up with zpw or whatever other fictitious companies come out. If consumers are lazy and do not investigate they deserve to waste their money as I once did. Maybe ritually burning x dollars is part of the learning process.

I don't think the aim should be why you can't trust others so much as why you hopefully can trust me. I think Andrew Goodman once said something about that in SEW forums...about the value of having a voice when most people try to hide.

When you are new and nameless there is little to no reason to avoid risk - after all you have got little to lose. Some of the stuff I did in the past I probably would not do today. And some of the stuff I do today I am certain I wouldn't do tomorrow.

Sorta started to make this post the other day and forgot to save it. I just wanted to say thanks again to Danny, Ian, and everyone else who has helped me with this lawsuit stuff. I have been getting a crash course in public relations.

Danny recently posted about the support Ian offered via SMA-NA, and how SEMPO decided they wanted to steer clear of it. ThreadWatch also recently commented on SEMPO's tone & position.

In related news, Red Herring posted an article about the legal challenges of blogging.