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I am nearly complete with a couple big projects I was working on for the last couple months (site re-launch and another secret project), and wanted to try a fun viral blogging experiment. If you ever wanted to interview me, or wanted me to guest post for your blog now is your chance. You can choose the topic(s) and I will try my best to answer your interview questions or write a post for your site.

I only have four conditions

1. your blog must have a non-default theme
2. your blog must not be hosted on Wordpress.com, Typepad.com, or Blogger.com
3. your blog must be at least 6 months old
4. you must love publishing, marketing, SEO, and/or the Internet (or else) ;)

Comment below with your URL and the word "interview" or "guest post" and I will reply to the email associated with your account. First come first serve, and I am not sure how many of these I will do as it may get a little overwhelming if many people say yes. But it is all in the name of fun. :)

Michael Arrington, writing about how many blog networks are trying to raise capital, describes the natural state of linking on the web:

And now that the big guys in the Gang are being injected with capital, hiring tens of employees and expanding their businesses, they suddenly have a lot more to lose. Linking is never done just because. Rather, links are your political capital that must be expended appropriately. Don’t link at the right time and in two weeks when you’re pushing your own headline, you’ll wish you had. When you stop seeing other blogs as people you admire and want to discuss things with, and start to see them as your competitor, your brain shifts and you stop linking the way you had previously.

Luckily, the newbie bloggers are there to fill in the links when they’re needed. That’s why, if you are a mid-level blogger, you are likely courted by the bigger blogs looking to get your support. If you know what’s going on and are willing to play the game, you can see your blog rise very, very quickly. Choose the wrong blog, though, and you may find yourself alone and lonely in your forgotten blog.

Launch something new? You better beg at least a dozen people to help spread it if you are in a saturated market. Hopefully you just them some favors too! This fending for your own self interests + backscratching is the new reciprocal link. Depending on how selfish we get, bloggers could make the mainstream media irrelevant or just make ourselves irrelevant.

If you are new to blogs and feeds, I recommend watching this 4 minute video to understand how RSS feeds work, and then spend an hour trying out a feed reader or iGoogle to subscribe to a couple of your favorite blogs.

I had some RSS issues with iGoogle that I think are cleared up now. The upside is that rather than only offering full or partial feeds, we now offer both. You can subscribe to either feed using your favorite feed reader on our feeds page.

If you are a blogger, it only takes about 15 minutes to set up a feed page like mine, and if you get a few new subscribers each month, that creates a cumulative advantage over time. Don't forget to also link to your RSS feed page in the sidebar of your blog.

This 7 minute and 30 second video evangelizes blogging to new internet marketers. The reasons I am such a big fan of blogs are:

• they are easy to set up & update
• they offer many feedback channels
• it is easy to track how ideas spread through blogs
• it is easy to join the conversation
• there are many channels to spread ideas quickly
• blogs offer many ways to show social proof of value
• blog posts typically do not feel like ads, even if they are

I am not sure how well it came out. Please let me know what you think of the video. Did I talk too fast? Was it too information dense? Was I clear enough?

And if you have not yet seen The Blogger's Guide to SEO, please check it out.

Since Google largely tends to favor ranking informational websites over commercial websites, some authoritative blogs tend to rank for valuable queries based on posts they make in passing.

Even if you had no intent to monetize a post, it just became easier to monetize accidental rankings. If you use analytics to track your stats and notice that you start ranking for some good keywords you can use Triggit to embed links to merchant products directly in the text of your blog post.

Shoemoney created this quick video to show how Triggit works

Unlike the automated ad solutions like intellitxt or AdSense, these Triggit ads

• look like other regular links on the page (so they should get a high CTR)
• can easily be applied on a page by page level (so you do not have to clutter up every page to monetize the few pages that can make a lot of money)
• link to products recommended by the editor (to preserve editorial integrity)
• can link to merchants that pay via affiliate payout or CPC (offering multiple monetization models)
• allow you to keep your pages clean (and easy to link at) until they rank, then have you add monetization after you have a leading market position for related keywords

Triggit ads are easy to set up and should require little maintenance on the end user's side, but they are still a small start up, so if you start doing well with them make sure you remember which pages do well so you can keep monetizing the pages if the Triggit partnership stops working, and so you can track which pages you should try to monetize more aggressively and/or build links to.

As blended semi-editorial in content ad networks like these evolve, the distinction between optimization and spam blurs. And since Google has a similar product, it is going to be hard to view this in a negative light without looking hypocritical in the process. From Google's pay per action page:

Text links are hyperlinked brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher's page. Publishers can place them in line with other text to better blend the ad and promote your product.

For example, you might see the following text link embedded in a publisher's recommendatory text: "Widgets are fun! I encourage all my friends to Buy a high-quality widget today." (Mousing over the link will display "Ads by Google" to identify these as pay-per-action ads).

Though the maximum length of a text link is 90 characters, we've found that shorter links perform better because they allow the publisher use the link in more places on her/his site and in different context. The maximum length is 90 characters but less than 5 words is best. Even better, just use your brand name to offer maximum flexibility to the publisher.

The WSJ just published another article about making money from blogs, highlighting Darren Rowse's success (congrats buddy) and some small ad networks aimed at bloggers, like NetAudioAds. These ad networks pay bloggers crumbs:

Blog publishers get a 25% cut of the ad revenue. About 25,000 publishers have signed up so far, says Michael Knox, V2P's co-founder, and several large companies and 2008 presidential campaigns have expressed interest in becoming advertisers through the service. A site that gets 2,000 unique visitors per day with an advertiser paying $14 per 1,000 plays might earn $28 a day, or $196 a week.

What self respecting publisher takes only 25% of ad revenue to annoy all of their visitors with audio ads? And how do you keep up your momentum and pageviews if you annoy everyone who comes across your site? If the idea wasn't bad enough, the company behind this ad network is talking to the media to pump their product while

• a blogspot hate site ranks #1 for their official name
• their official site that does rank for their official name does not even use NetAudioAds in the page title
• they bid on AdWords their core brand name but they are not even bidding on alternate version of their name like Net Audio Ads

How do networks that offer advertising and marketing solutions for others do such a bad job marketing their own products?

Some marketers aggressively email spam people to promote their best ideas, thinking no harm could come from it. If you do not take the time to personalize emails and actually visit the sites you are emailing then you probably going to send someone like me an email, and there is a 5% chance I will blog about it. If I blog about it, I am probably not going to be talking up the product. ;)

DietsInReview.com recently launched their celebrity weight loss calculator. I was sent a bulk unpersonalized email containing the following tip

The tool is specifically un-branded so it can blend with your experience. All we ask is that you post the entire code which contains a link back to our site.

Their site has a great growth chart. They come up with great marketing ideas. They are clever with SEO. And they are too lazy to connect the pieces without untargeted email spamming. Silly. Spend $10 an hour hiring someone to send out the emails if you are too lazy to do it yourself.

If you are reactive to blog feedback (like they were here kimkinscontroversy.com/2007/09/25/kimkins-affiliate-spotlight-dietsinreviewcom/) then why not be proactive in creating meaningful relationships in the community? No point putting great ideas on churn and burn sites, and no point burning relationships with leading editorial voices in your market if you are creating a longterm site.

This is was a document about how optimizing a blog is largely a game of competing for attention, with tips on how to win attention and marketshare.

BTW, I am going to WebmasterWorld Las Vegas Pubcon next month. I think I am speaking on two or three different panels.

Some Things Only Spread Because Who is Behind Them

I recently created an Internet marketing mind map and published it on my tools subdomain with a link to it from tools.seobook.com, but nobody mentioned it. A few days later I blogged about it on SeoBook.com and dozens of webmasters linked to it. Same publisher, same content, drastically different results...because one channel has attention while the other does not.

The Flaw of Pull Marketing Advice

Much of the marketing advice offered on blogs assumes that you have a well read blog and can get away with great content spreading based on pull marketing, but when you publish a new site and write about ideas that others covered you don't get the credit you deserve until you build an attention asset. Which means you have to use push marketing until you get readers / subscribers / brand advocates.

Markets are not fair. People are more likely to link to familiar trusted channels then new channels. It can take years to build a significant readership. And if you wait for it to happen on its own it may never happen.

Ineffective Blogging

It is hard to be the regular news spot just by producing similar news to what is available on other channels. If you cover stories that are worth spreading, but are not dong much more than syndicating them, then even if your content is useful the reference links skip past you and on to the end story you wrote about. You might get a hat tip link here or there, but you are not going to get many if you have few readers. And those links are not going to be enough to pull readers away from market leading channels, to do so requires people talking about you. Your content has to amalgamate ideas from multiple sources or unique perspectives such that people are TALKING ABOUT YOU.

Owning an Idea

If you do not have enough leverage to own mainstream ideas then you need to own ideas on the edge or borrow the authority of someone or something else. The first person to crack an iPhone got lots of exposure. Announcing a new Google feature gets you exposure. Real in depth reviews of exciting new stuff gets you exposure. Every market has an Apple, a Google, or some relation to one of those companies.

The easiest way to get a community involved in your site is to ask them for involvement. Collect their feedback and aggregate it in a meaningful format. And interviewing a market leader is an easy way to leverage someone else's brand and gain attention. Getting community involvement is crucial because each trusted person who associates with you moves you that much further away from being irrelevant or potentially spammy. They make you worth paying attention to because they cared enough to participate.

If you get community participation it also protects your idea. It gets competitors called sleazy when they clone your idea and throw a few more marketing dollars at it.

What if you can't get anyone to participate? Desperate times require desperate measures! Wrap your message in a fictitious backdrop based on real world opinions. Want to reach out to financial bloggers? Notice they are talking about Alan Greenspan a bunch recently? Tell everyone why Alan Greenspan thinks Google is under-priced. Quote his principals and use them to justify Google at $2,400 per share.

With an ever increasing number of ways for people to share content and an ever increasing number of competing channels the easiest way to estimate the value of a blog post is to look at the people citing it. Citations lead to new readers and subscribers...and more citations. If your posts are well cited it does not take many posts to get thousands of subscribers.

With 12 days left to go in an auction the NorthxEast blog is up to $5,500. Their blog only has 33 posts, and is a blog about blogging, which is a topic that is notoriously hard to monetize. Typically freelance bloggers get paid anywhere from $5 to $50 a post. If this site goes for $10,000 then it will be a valuation of $300 a post. Where was that extra value created? It is in the number of inbound links and number of subscribers. Over 700 bloggers link at that site and it has a couple thousand subscribers.

If you paid a freelance writer $100 or $200 per page think of the type of quality content you could create. If you value your time at $20 an hour and take 8 hours to write a post and 2 hours marketing it think of the potential return from a link perspective. You can rent average quality links for $10 to $20 a month, increase your risk profile, and get links saying nothing about your company, or you could pour that same money into getting people talking about you. If you know your topic well writing is an easy and cheap form of marketing.

If a site can go from nothing to being worth ~ $10,000 on 33 blog posts, imagine what that link equity and subscriber base would do to your brand and search rankings. If that same effort was used to market a #12 ranking site, suddenly that site might be in the top 2 or 3 and see a 10x increase in traffic.

Today while walking through a mall to buy a penguin suit I noticed a guy wearing a backpack that had a pole above it with a LCD making weird noises pitching some marketing junk at me. In a world that saturated with marketing, offering value and speaking openly is one of the cheapest and fastest ways to gain authority.

Blogs are not good for every site, and they are not good for every person, but writing one opens you up to a wide array of links and that would otherwise likely remain unavailable. Blogging also helps you visualize what ideas are spreading, why they are spreading, who is important to know to help spread ideas, and how they were marketed to spread. If you know what ideas are spreading, why they are spreading, and who is spreading them then it gets much easier to create ideas that spread and ensure they spread.

An SEO older than dirt by the name of Bob Massa recently started an seo blog. Peter DaVanzo also started a new blog on link building, and Teeceo started a blog on programming and SEO.

If you have sites you have not looked at in years you might be missing out on a lot of profit. After drafting a post about things that will hurt your Google rankings I talked to my mom. Her site does not make as much as I think it should given it's age, so I looked for common SEO errors.

Value Blogging is In

Brian Clark recently highlighted that while valuable blogs continue to gain traction, the bloggers who were only popular because they were early are seeing diminished traffic and are fading in relevancy.

The type of people who subscribe to sites are also the type of people who write about that topic. If you have built up trust and a following your ideas spread faster than the competition. It builds on itself to the point where you can sell out in 8 minutes or 2 minutes. Selling out gives the perception of scarcity and creates more demand. Viral free marketing creating more free marketing...that is as good as it gets.

In many cases the quality of the idea does not matter as much as who said it. If a no name person launched Truemors would it have become popular enough to where I would have just linked to it as an example? If a no name site with no following, little traction, and no marketing budget does something great how will it spread?

As long as Google allows webmasters to report spam and report paid links, few will question how much webspam Google sponsors. As long as they are the lead corporate sponsor of Stop Badware few will think of their Toolbar as spam.

Some of the A list bloggers who trashed paid reviews, are talking up the virtues of conversational marketing, forgetting what they just wrote. The hard part of being a well known blogger is that as one gains exposure, influence, experience, friends, enemies, and a large archives it is easy to appear hypocritical. This is especially true on a rapidly changing network, where successful people change with the network, and advertising techniques that were once unethical are mainstream a year or two later.

This is at least the second time that I was mentioned in the mainstream media where journalists read blog comments to look for sources to cite.

If you see a hot story spreading don't be afraid to jump on it, especially if you have specific details related to the story, or your view is counter to the popular view. Journalists want sources, numbers, and to appear unbiased.

I generally get mostly positive feedback here, but sometimes I stir stuff a bit and get negative feedback. Over the last year nearly half of my negative feedback has came from the IP address 24.208.220.xx. The funny thing is, no positive comments come from that IP address, and nearly every comment they leave has a different name signed to it.

• John was worried about me having a Trojan in some software. So worried, in fact, that he also left another comment on the same post under the name Matthew.

• Mark claimed SEO for Firefox violated Firefox's trademark.
  

If you wanted to enter a new market one of the easiest ways to get ready to enter it is to start a blog or editorial content site about the topic.

Many people are promoting a meme on why they blog and why you should blog. I thought I would cover it from the other angle.

What are the downsides of running a popular blog and selling an information product?

I could accurately be described as an amateur domainer wanting to know more of that market. My favorite blog on the domaining market is Frank Schilling's blog. There are so many good posts that it is hard to highlight any of them. He writes about a wide range of topics including the domains he didn't buy (and their prices), how relevant domain names affect PPC arbitrage, and his underlying philosophy on business.

Blog Indexing Question: My ranking for my core keyword went up, but most of my site was recently put in Google's Supplemental Index, and I saw my income and traffic drop sharply. I have not built any links recently or made any changes to my site. How can I fix this and get my site top rankings again?

I have cut back on my reading quite a bit due to moving, getting a cool girlfriend, taking time to actually live, working on too many projects, and getting more email than I can handle, but there are a bunch of great SEO blogs out there that deserve more exposure.

We launched ReviewMe today. And reviews are coming in, including one from Tech Crunch. Yippie.

We are giving away $25,000 to help speed along the user adoption and quickly learn from reviews.

My friend Daniel recently announced that he was going to give away a $1,000 scholarship to bloggers from our scholarship website. I think it is the first ever college scholarship for bloggers.

Dave Taylor recently spoke about blogging at Affiliate Summit. Dave posted the video online here. It is a nice introduction to blogging for those who want to understand the benefits of blogging and how it can help improve their businesses.

In April I mentioned that I wanted to create some sort of a social network. I left that description intentionally broad such as to not tip my hand too much. But the idea was a social ad network.

I had a good idea, but hate the idea of having employees and running a company. I want to be able to travel and explore the world, so the idea required a partner. ;)

Occasionally websites get really good comments, but if you get much exposure it is going to take a while to clean up all the overt spam attempts that exposure brings, especially if your topic is SEO...many people are attracted to SEO because they want to make money without doing any real work or creating any real value. I think that is part of why I liked it off the start.

And if you don't keep it clean, the next thing you know people who have made decent comments on your blog devolve comments to the me too level and sign their name as #1 rated Viagra mortgage poker coupon. I just went back and deleted about 30 comments from a person who cleverly hit me up today with about 10 coupon comment spams. Thanks buddy!

SEOMoz ... obviously most everyone here probably already reads that, but I like the mixed personalities of the various authors of their blog (other than MM), and it was fun hanging out with everyone from there tonight :)

Dreamhost...what other company of that scale (other than Victoria's Secret, Hanes, or Fruit of the Loom) can get away with showing underwear on their site, or attack a perceived weakness and describe it in a way that makes you want to trust them and buy more? And how quality are the pics in this post?

Silent Bob Speaks...a bit crass for some no doubt, but that is clearly part of the appeal.

I recently have been given about 1/2 dozen books on blogging. I hope and mean to read some of them soon.

This guy wanted to be seen bad enough, so I may as well feature him

this webmaster doesnt want to help you.....
i have a good website where you may find coupons for google, yahoo, MSN, looksmart, but this webmaster delete my messages all the time....
i wont give up, i will post my messages again and again....

A few of my friends offered me some solid hate over my annoying advert post, so I changed the layout of SEO Book.com's homepage.

A few people asked me how to customize MovableType to add advertising posts on the individual archives, category pages, and main pages in MovableType powered blogs.

MovableType is fairly easy to customize, but you have to customize the different templates differently. I have been a bit slow to getting around to doing this, so sorry on that.

Opening Tips:

• The day I changed the format of my blog to include the advertising post inline my income tripled. That is a huge deal if you participate in keyword markets where you pay per click. It may make many keywords that were once prohibitively expensive become affordable.

• If you are unsure how to do something ask at the MovableType forums.
• If you are changing a template make a file called something like templatename-old and save a copy of the old template before making any changes.
• Each template that you want to change will require customizations.
• My template is a bit hacked up from a normal install, so the code to change your layout 1 for 1, but this post aims to show the general idea of how to change your templates.
• I do not sell MT customization services. I can offer general ideas, but I am not a template or code expert on any level.

Ever since I started doing some of the Q&A posts I started making many of my other blog posts unnecissarily long just because I got used to it.

I felt I was doing a bit too much rambling. I was right. Not 1 but 2 friends today told me that they wanted to read what I was writing but did not because it was too long and packed too many ideas into the posts.

Short snappy posts focused on 1 topic work well if you actually want people to read them. Seth is a master at this.

Here are the problems with rambling:

• too long and nobody reads it

• the added content dilutes the value of each point (to readers and search engines)
• wastes content by making 1 post instead of 5 hyper targetedc posts
• if too many ideas are in one post it is hard for you to reference your earlier content
• it is hard for others to reference

If you are going to be longwinded make sure it is so focused, topically relevant and interesting that it becomes the industry standard for that topic. Elsewise you are best off writing quick posts.

I wrote this more as a reminder to myself, but if you ramble and want people to read it hopefully this helps you too. Feel free to call me out if I am not following my own advice ;)

Feedback Loops:

Most searches occur at the main search sites and portals (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, etc.), but some people also search for temporal information, looking to find what is hot right now, or seeing how ideas spread. Not everyone can afford WebFountain, but we can all track what people are searching for or how stories are spreading using:

Feed Readers :
Subscribe to your favorite channels (or topical RSS feeds from news sites)

• Bloglines
• Google Toolbar Buttons
• Firefox Sage
• FeedDemon
• Google Reader
• My Yahoo!
• Pluck
• AmphetaDesk
• Rojo
• Findory

Blog Search:
search for recent news posted on blogs

• Google Blog Search related RSS feeds
• Feedster
• Daypop
• Technorati blog finder
• Ice Rocket
• Yahoo! News (with blogs) RSS
• Sphere

Blog Buzz Index:
search for stories rapidly propagating through blogs

• BlogPulse
• PubSub
• Technorati popular news popular books
• Daypop top 40
• Bloglines top links site readers public profiles related feeds
• BlogDex
• Findory
• Start.com
• Memerandum Tech
• Blogniscient
• Blogmarks
• Ice Rocket brand A vs brand B
• Topix.net Blogs

General Buzz & Search Volume:

• Buzzingo
• Yahoo! Buzz Index overall
• Lycos 50
• Google Zeitgeist
• Google Suggest
• Google Keyword Tool - shows 12 month historical trends!
• Overture Search Turm Suggestion tool View Bid Tool
• my keyword research tool - like Overture's, but it cross references many of the ideas on this page - like tagging, etc.
• Amazon best sellers
• TrendWatching

Product Feedback:

• eBay Reviews
• Become.com shopping search
• Yahoo! Shopping
• Clickbank ordered by purchase volume & price
• Amazon feedback
• Google Groups
• forums (see Boardtracker)
• general search

News Search:

• Akamai net usage index - check general search volumes
• Google News RSS
• Yahoo! News (with blogs) RSS
• Topix (with blogs) RSS
• Gixo
• NYT most emailed articles
• Wikipedia most edited talk pages (controvercial stuff)
• Newsmap (just plain cool)
• Newsingo
• Findory

Test Ad Accounts & Test Media:

• Google AdWords
• Yahoo! Search Marketing
• write press releases and submit them cheaply to see how much buzz & news search volume their is around a topic, using sites like PR Web or PR Leap
• post on a topic
• see if it spreads
• check referrer data
• Sometimes stories emerge out of the comments. The Save Jeeves meme that spread originated around the time the person who created that story commented on my post about Jeeves getting axed.
• Don't forget to have friends tag your story on Del.ico.us and submit it to Digg.

Tagging:
Some are busy tagging what information they think is useful.

• Delicious - personal bookmark manager.
• Wink - tag search
• Flickr - image tagging hottest tags
• Tag Cloud - shows graphic version of hot tags
• Furl
• Technorati Tags
• Digg Top Stories
• Reddit
• Ning
• Squidoo
• My Yahoo!
• Google Search History (you can't see what others are tagging, but I bet it eventually will influence the search results - Google is already allowing people to share feeds they read)
• more tagging sites come out daily...lots of others exist, like Edgio, StumbleUpon, Shadows, Kaboodle, etc etc etc
• also look at the stuff listed in Google Base...there may or may not be much competition there, and Google Base is going to be huge.

Track Individual Stories and Conversations & Trends of a Blog:

• Bloglines who cited this post
• Technorati links pointing at a URL
• Blogpulse Conversation Tracker
• Technorati and Blogpulse also allow you to track how hot a word or phrase is in the blogosphere over a period of time.
  • Technorati "Aaron Wall"
  • Blogpulse "Aaron Wall"
• Pubsub allows you to create a feed for a brand or product name or issue.
• CoComment - allows you to track comments

Bloggers typically cite the original source OR the person who does the most complete follow up.

Blog Trends:
See if a blog is gaining or losing marketshare and compare blogs to one another

• Blogpulse profile trend
• Pubsub inlinks
• Kinja mentions
• Alexa

Overall Most Popular Blogs and Stories:

• Feedster top 500
• Technorati popular blogs
• Del.icio.us Popular Tag Search
• Rojo today

Did I miss anything? Am sure I did. Please comment below.

Here are earlier stories from this series:

• Why Bloggers Hate SEOs
• Why SEOs Should Love Bloggers
• Dynamic Sites and Social Feedback
• Controlling Data and Helping Consumers Make it Smarter
• Small vs Big and Voice in Brand
• Syndication and How News Spreads

Matt kicked our asses in the recent best SEO blog vote.

If we work out ways to spam his index hard enough maybe he won't have time to make any posts. ;)

If he beats us again I start investing into creating a wide variety of automated content / site generator software :)

Thanks to everyone who voted for me.

Debra has a blog

A friend of mine mentioned how the noise level in SEO forums has gone from around 95% to about 99%. I think it is largely due to a shift from content optimization to content creation (and remember that this is a site selling a book on optimization, so me saying this is not in any way to my benefit).

Here is why there is a large shift from optimization to creation

• The ease which content can be published: It took me less than 2 hours to teach my mom Blogger, Bloglines, rss, xml, etc. She now blogs every day.

• the ease in which content can be commented on and improved in quality
• the casual nature in which links flow toward real content
• the massive increase in the number of channels and quantity of information makes us more inclined to look for topical guides to navigate the information space
• the ease with which content can be monetized has greatly increased. AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, Chitika, new Amazon Product Previews, affiliate programs, link selling, direct ads, donations, (soon enough Google Wallet for microcontent), etc.
• contextual ad programs teach the content publishers to blend links, which has the net effect of...
  • short term increase in revenues for small publishers

  • until users trust links less
  • at which point in time users will be forced to go back to primary trusted sources (ie: one of the few names they trust in the field or a general search engine like Google)
• it is getting increasingly expensive to find quality link inventory that works in Google to promote non content sites, and margins are slimming for many of those creating sites in hyper competitive fields
• the algorithms are getting harder for people new to the field to manipulate
• around half of all search queries are unique. most hollow spam sites focus on the top bits whereas natural published information easily captures the longer queries / tail of search
• duplicate content filters are aggressively killing off many product catalog and empty shell affiliate sites
• as more real / useful content is created those duplicate content and link filtering algorithms will only get better
• general purpose ecommerce site owners will have the following options:
  • watching search referrals decrease until their AdWords spends increases

  • thickening up their sites to offer far more than a product catalog
  • switching to publishing content sites
• and the market dynamics for Google follow popular human behavior, even for branded terms or keyword spaces primarily created by single individuals
  • the term SEO Book had 0 advertisers and about 0 search volume when I launched this site

  • this site got fairly popular
  • SEO Book is now one of my most expensive keyword phrases

As long as it is original, topical, and structured in a non wild card replace fashion content picks up search traffic and helps build an audience.

I am not trying to say that optimization is in any way dead, just that the optimization process places far more weight on content volume and social integration than it did a year or two ago.

The efficiencies Google are adding to the market will kill off many unbranded or inefficient businesses. One of my clients has an empty shell product site and does no follow up marketing with the buyers. I can't help but think that there needs to be some major changes in that business or in 3 to 6 months we won't be able to compete on the algorithmic or ppc front without me being very aggressive.

Greg says Oh my God, I’ve Become a Blogger. A great thing for webmasters and search in general, IMHO.

Greg asks:

But now comes the hard part. How do you go about creating a blog about search marketing that is truly unique?

Anyone ever notice that the black hat SEO blogs typicially have both higher content quality and more original content than the typical white hat SEO blogs? Apparently, Gordon Hotchkiss has yet to get the memo.

via Oilman

Blog Goodies...a blog about blogging.

I was posting too much blog stuff here and started to felt like it was drowning out the other stuff, so it now has it's own channel.

My first semi original useful post on my blog about blogging is about socially conscious automated blog content generation

I have not been reading my feeds in a while, so I figured the launch of the Google Feed Reader would be a great excuse to start again :)

Unlike Nick, I waited a few days to avoid the user rush and associated launch problems, and found the Google feed reader rather useful. There are a few things I think that would make it better:

• allow you to move the pieces like they do on the Google customizable home page

• allow you to add in links or widgets near posts, for example a link to Google blog search for citations of a post
• as Gary Price mentioned...they may as well have search on there. If local & maps are one and the same then blog readers and blog search should be one and the same, at least from a search company
• for viral marketing I think they should also let you chose to make pieces or all of your subscriptions private or public, and maybe later also let you determine who you would want to share your subscriptions with...ie: social cirles like with My Yahoo!
• make the feed reader quick tour / FAQ section still easy to find without requiring people to log out

Although I have not used it much, I like their filters and labels concept better than folders, because many information streams can be classified in a variety of ways.

As noise continues to increase, those who are already well established and those who understand ways to create ideas that spread will continue to gain market share as people (and scripts) recycle content, create keyword driftnets, and search engines fight it off.

For a while, due to a variety of factors, I was pretty stressed out and have been a bit lazy with my reading. To me the best blogs are not usually determined by what they write, but by how much they read and how well the distill information. When stressed and / or busy I usually only read about 5 or 6 blogs. The blogs in that group rarely change because their authors read so much and have unique perspectives.

I have been posting a bit much about blogs of late. I am half tempted to sell my soul and create a separate blog about blogging. Already got a name and a logo...just would need to set up the site and know when to post what where.

I have a bunch more SEO tool ideas (like the one mentioned in last post), but my friend Mike is crazy busy at school, and I don't think I can convince him to drop out just yet. We just increased his site profitability 15 fold yesterday, but I am not certain if that helps or hurts me longterm...I think I need to find another programmer for when Mike is too busy. If you are well skilled at PHP and are looking for some flow shoot me an email. Also if you hired a great programmer who has some free time and would not mind recommending them I am all ears.

So I recently was interviewed by a semi local newspaper reporter about the lawsuit. I was dog tired when I did the interview (like up over a day straight), and some of my quotes were clipped a bit, so they came out less than stellar...and I screwed up some of the PR tips I had been given. :(

Ian has helped me a good bit with the lawsuit, and the reporter wanted to get some other opinions on the case. I referred her to Ian & SMA-NA. My quotes did not sound good, but then I read how Ian seemed to reference Greg Jarboe about the importance of free speech on blogs. I was like...hmmm?

So I asked Ian about it, and he said that he never refered her to Greg. I think he is a bit upset with the way his quote sounds, if fact, upset enough to post on it.

He is wondering why Greg Jarboe, the spokesman for SEMPO, apparently cares:

I didn't see SEMPO standing up for anyone earlier. So it's not an issue until they come knocking on your own door? Come on. That's just not right.

when SEMPO clearly doesn't:

It is the policy of SEMPO not to comment on any legal cases pending, particularly those that do not directly involve our organization. This matter in particular will be decided under existing case law relating to freedom of speech, libel/slander, and contract law. There is no compelling reason for a nonprofit group with a mission of education and ... - Greg Jarboe

I can't believe that Greg can be a PR guru and still think he can get away with that two sides of the coin technique...especially in such a small industry.

"I have a blog, and I call them like I see them," said Mr. Jarboe. "I like to think it's my First Amendment right."

So do I Greg. So do I.

So Nandini launched her blog network recently, with 46 channels launched all at once. She is a friend of mine, and I want to see her do well, which is a large part of the reason I was disappointed in her launching so many channels at once.

At ThreadWatch they noticed one of the posts on one of her blogs was verbatim plagiarism. There are a ton of lazy writers, and that problem is far more common than most people would think. Nandini probably had nothing to do directly with that copied post, but she is going to be treated as though she did since it is her network.

That is part of the reason to start slow and small...so you can learn from what feedback you get, and so that you can build trust with your writers and audience.

If I were her I would probably scale back the project to a few channels...get them going good...and then extend out. She is selling herself short overseeing that many channels at once, especially with limited history and reputation on the blog creation front.

Some people will probably continue to ride Nandini pretty hard over that post, but it is common all over the web...she just needs to scale down...build a system...and then build back up, that or hire more people to watch over the writers, but the whole blog channel thing is a game of margins...it's best if you can develop a trusting relationship directly with each author.

A big problem on the web is trying to do too much too quick. Most content projects start off slow and small and work their way up to being great.

It may be good to have a variety of sites to be able to learn from, but it is best to have a few channels that are great, which you can collect feedback from, and then learn how to make the next channels better from what you learned off the first ones.

Generally she has been rather receptive to the rather harsh criticism some bloggers have given her, so on that front it may help her still end up doing OK out of the deal. Her network has decent link popularity for being less than a week old.

So Weblogs Inc. just cashed out. Cool for them. Am sure they made some sweet cash, but most of that cash probably will not be seen by the average blogger in their network.

So what does the average blogger get out of the deal? Probably a little more pay and a lot more restrictions.

Sure AOL wanted to buy them, but that is because Weblogs Inc. had first mover advantage. AOL might be for sale, and even if they are not, they still are looking to become once again relevant. This was a small investment if it convinces a few people that they are relevant.

The first company who buys a blog network gets all the surrounding buzz & media coverage. The raw linkage data surrounding that network and that story probably has millions of dollars of value. To a company worth around $80 billion a $20 million dollar spend (or so) is not much.

Over time what will AOL do with the various channels? Some channels will be exceptionally profitable, while others lose money. Will AOL do like About.com once did and chop the channels that lack profitablility? Will new policies cause ego conflicts and bloggers to leave?

Most people who create blog networks are not going to be able to cash out big by selling. The reason for purchasing Weblogs Inc. was due more to market timing than being a blog network.

Some people can try to go big, but I am not so sure scale beats quality. I think John Battelle's idea of keeping the advertising network separate to the publisher is huge. The only reason you need to lock a person in is if you are afraid you do not offer enough value to keep them.

Think of how many times Jason Calcanis crowed on about how much money they were making and how they never advertised. All of those channels & around 100+ bloggers and they were doing about $2,000 dollars a day in AdSense.

Consider that Darrin Rowse has only a few partners and is making over a $1,000 a day in AdSense and Chitika earnings. On a per blogger basis that is WAY more profit.

Nandini just launched a blog network, and bloggers are riding her hard (but at least she is hopefully getting a few links out of all that hate they are spewing her way).

I understand the idea of having a few sites to diversify your revenue stream, but longterm I think most blogs are going to have to stand on their own. Sure a few random gaming blogs may be able to make great profit riding on the backs of popular blogs in a network, but most of the blogs themselves are going to need to be citation worthy.

I just don't see how the networks can provide enough value to be worth giving up all your content for, at least not if you care about your topic and want to work on the web full time.

disclaimer: When I launch a blog network I will erase this post ;)

Lawsuits without specifics are without merit, says judge:

DOVER, Del. - In a decision hailed by free-speech advocates, the Delaware Supreme Court on Wednesday reversed a lower court decision requiring an Internet service provider to disclose the identity of an anonymous blogger who targeted a local elected official.

In a 34-page opinion, the justices said a Superior Court judge should have required Smyrna town councilman Patrick Cahill to make a stronger case that he and his wife, Julia, had been defamed before ordering Comcast Cable Communications to disclose the identities of four anonymous posters to a blog site operated by Independent Newspapers Inc., publisher of the Delaware State News.

Those following my recent history know this is probably a good thing for me, and for bloggers in general.

Save the comments. Save the blogs :)

It looks like the bully lawsuits against blogs are soon to be a thing of the past.

Hat tip to the cool cat whose name is Matt and link love for his search engine marketing site.

Well a while ago Danny Sullivan made a post about comment spammers being the dirty sleezy scumbags that they are.

When comment spam was new and limited most of the people who were doing it were somewhat intelligent and did not hit too many live blogs. Since then people have got dumb about how they do it, hitting even blogs ran by search engineers.

I guess I understand working your way around the system or doing what you have to do to compete (I manually added a few spam links to some sites when I was first learning the web & SEO and did not understand some of the broader implications of what I was doing) but eventually as you learn and as techniques lose their value the solution is to move on to doing other things.

Some people are still holding on to comment spam and it is annoying. Some of them are going so far as to register domains like drive.to or shop.at to where if you block the domains it prevents people from writing some common phrases.

And then you got Google caching random .xml documents you do not remember ever creating chuck full of spam. Of course the fine people at MovableType do not care about comment spam when you buy a license, upgrade the software, or pay for an install. No, that is your problem for chosing to use MovableType in the first place.

I would love to see MovableType write an open letter of apoligize to anyone who ever paid for a license to use their swiss holed software in which using requires a ton of operator intervention.

If you are selling thousands of licenses of your software and it has holes in it then you ought to take the time to discuss the issue with people to do a legitimate job to fix the problems. And you ought to apoligize to anyone who paid for the nightmare you put them though with MT. I mean some of this stuff has still been uncovered fairly recently, and your company long ago had VC funding.

How long does it take to plug the holes & make a useful software product?

FAQ page live. Service to come soon.

Notice how Google lifts the embargo prior to making the service active so they can get a double dose of PR.

from John

SEW also recently mentioned a news / blog clustering site by the name of Memeorandum

My SEO pal Jim Boykin, of We Build Pages, just started an SEO blog.

Already he is talking about not needing links (never EVER thought I would hear Jim say that), and flink.

Whatever happened to flink? Sorta funny that Google got ahead by processing links better and now they do anything and everything possible to run away & hide their ball.

I was talking to NFFC at SEO Roadshow and he said for a long time AltaVista was king. Everyone was using it, and then overnight NOBODY searched at AltaVista. Some stated that AltaVista went so far that they took out many pages which had a blue line in them, while others questioned their paid inclusion relevancy. Search engines are screwed when they care more about how sites got to the top than the quality of the results. Just a few steps down that path and it can't be undone.

Google is sitting at $312 a share with an 87 billion dollar market cap just prior to their secondary public offering. It will be interesting to see if they learn from the mistakes AltaVista made. Recently hiring Louis Monier, AltaVista's founder, surely must help. Matt Cutts just admited that occassionally relevancy does improve when they remove some of the scoring factors. Bring back the flink!

Missing for a while, it looks like he is now back.

blogging at Marketing Pilgrim

so says NickW

Shak lands and blogs. Should be a fun cultural journey, although in China it is unsafe to assume anything.

It pays to read the news

As Corporate America wades into the burgeoning world of Internet Web logs, companies are being warned they could face legal hazards when employees are let loose in the free-wheeling blogosphere.

Hmm.

But lawyers see possible legal pitfalls for companies looking to join the blogging phenomenon. What, for instance, would happen if someone at a publicly traded company unwittingly divulged confidential financial information or a trademark secret on one of these Web diaries?

Hmm.

"There's very, very little case law at this point," said Paul Arne, co-chairman of the technology group at law firm Morris Manning & Martin LLP.

Who said I wasn't cutting edge ;)

Once again Jason Calcanis talks about that which he is clueless about.

Another funny for the bloggers, a person running a mortgage refinancing blog whines about Google talking with search spammers. Perhaps Google sees more value in the knowledge of the spammers than the content of mortgage refinance blogs? And really you got to hand it to the best search spammers, because most of them have a true interest in search.

I guess that bloggers think the approved spam business model is to follow the template:
[snippets of others content] * [expensive topic (even if you have no interest in the topic and limited knowledge about the topic) ] * [wrapped in AdSense] = $,$$$,$$$.$$.

Bloggers think that cutting Google in on their profits by selling ads through Google will make them untouchable, but at SES I was recently told by one exceptionally large AdSense earner (multi million dollars per yer) that they sorely and sadly discovered otherwise. A real shame, because I was looking for writers for my Viagra and Phentermine blogs for the AdSense-Search-Spam-Blog.com network.

On a related note, Feedster recently created a list of 500 top blogs, which is no doubt a good link building technique (since most of the top blogs have a wide readership and goodl link popularity). Funny to see they are already adding erata to appease bloggers egos.

Google software engineer Matt Cutts recently started a blog. I thought I had the scoop since I just talked to him, but it looks like others have already mentioned it.

I think I am also going to be able to do an interview of Matt pretty soon :)

I usually get about 1 to 1.5 hours of email a day, so I can only imagine how much he gets. Cool to see he has comments enabled, but his blog would be a bad one to comment spam ;)

Wonder how long it will take them to get their site back up. Or how much money Jason Calcanis will complain they lost.

They had a bunch of eggs in one basket with all those subdomains they were using.

Fuxz Ownz You!

fuxz0r@gmail.com

I was about to make a joking post on my blog, but I spoke to a friend who helped me see past the short termism of my idea.

My friend said that many of the better voices in the SEO space

• get a second opinion, and

• write it then wait at least a few hours before submitting some controvercial type stuff

It is easy to post things that you will know will get links because they are controvercial, but as you do things like:

• offend more people, or

• throw out random semi correct link bait (see the title of this post - although the post title was hosed the conversation was dead on)

it becomes harder to build a sustainable business model & get referenced by the most important channels.

Many blogs work well because they are strongly filtered. Many do well because they are not. Many do well because they are highly opinionated. Many do well because they are not. If a site is an individually ran profit generating venture sometimes it is hard to strike balance, especially if the writer writes in a highly opinionated manner.

I would give away my ebook and create another business model if I didn't think that would lead to eventual marginalization (which at this point I think it could). In some hyper cometitive fields you need a variety of the following to compete:

• the right friends;

• a packet of money;
• insaine amounts of knowledge;
• incredible credibility;
• a great voice;
• the ability to scour, find, & sort new information

Not long ago I was bad off and knew nothing about the web, but thanks to friends like the one I spoke to tonight I am still doing well enough to get by as I establish better credibility and learn more about writing, filtering, and search.

"Blogs will save democracy." - random blogger

While there are many blogs about blogging, and in general the concept is overhyped, blogs do present a solid marketing opportunity.

Gaining unrequested links usually takes a good bit of effort. You have to be one of the leading resources in your field, you have to provide something that others do not, you have to give others a reason to want to link to you. Some people try to buy their way in, but of course that eventually backfires.

With blogs you can just whinge on about whatever, and so long as it is usually on topic some people will read it. Sometimes the smallest things, like mentioning a 20 pound AdWords coupon can get you multiple free links from other regularly updated channels, and the attention of people who read those channels.

If you are looking for resources to cite you can use a tool to look at topical trackbacks (which also point links your way) and help get you noticed by some of the leaders of your community. Of course you can go too far and be labeled a spammer so you want to use some caution / restraint.

Some systems, like PubSub, also show you how citation data / linkage profiles change over time. If someone is linking at a competing channel then you can ask them to link to yours, or reference them, or make a useful comment on their site which is likely to get them to click through to your site.

Some bloggers also tag their content. Some have suggested using tagging systems for keyword research, but tagging is sloppy, narrow, and somewhat self reinforcing IMHO.

To me the real value of tagging is in linking opportunities and attention markets.

You can tag your content to work yourself into the tagged channels. Some people track certain terms, so you can almost guarantee they will read what you write if you tag it with the terms they track.

Of course, if tagging systems get too popular they will get heavily spammed. Technorati tags: blog, blogs, marketing, link-building, blog-spam, scoble, msn etc etc etc

For link building you can find people who are tagging things that interest you, make a good personalized proposal, offering something they are interested in, and get the link :)

Stuntdubl has a list of social bookmarking tools here.

A while ago Christoph Cemper shot me an email about his post about ______.

Personal experience and a wide variety of friends have helped me conclude that most hosts are garbage, so a bad host in and of itself is not a big story. ________, on the other hand allegedly sent out an email offering affiliates a $100 bonus for knocking Cemper's site out of the top 10 rankings.

They could have contacted Christoph directly and tried to fix their problems, or they also could have reranked the search results a bit more discretely. What is even worse about how they sent out that email is that one of their affiliates posted it to the page which talks negatively about their service, which shows how they aim to slience it. Talk about not breeding trust in a service!

Christopher could also build a ton of links from almost anyone burned by a bad __________ hosting experiece by creating an image button and asking them to use it to link to his page about them.

Any time you use shady techiques to manipulate the search results (which most all SEOs - including me - are guilty of), and also use mass communication tools to do so (most smart SEOs do not do that unless they are creating crash and burn sites) you raise your risk profile and the chances that your technique will backfire.

Update: ServerPronto has been harrassing me with phone calls, likely about this post. After weeks of waking me up on the phone they still call and call. For doing that I think they are _________. I took their name out of this post, so hopefully that will be enough for them to leave me alone.

Genius:
Ed Shull, of US Web, is a self proclaimed marketing genius. I am not. As an online marketer I do follow links though...

Following the Links:
It all gets a bit circular, but Nick W points at Gray Wolf and Gray Hat News, who points at Blog Herald, who points at Boston.com's story about bloggers taking cash for endorsements.

There are some blog shill posts from around October, but news of this shill technique started to spread about a month ago. While it was going on for about a half year, it only took about a month from discovery to major news media coverage.

Are you a Link Hound? I thought you were.

My buddies Andy Hagans and Patrick Gavin have decided to launch a link building blog, by the name of... Link Building Blog. It's in my feedreader on my daily must visits list.

What is up with Google indexing all the TypePad comment redirects. Clearly the robots.txt file says Google should not be indexing those.

Is ignoring the robots.txt file an accident, or a normal feature at Google?

I have a rather small blog, with about 1,000 posts on it. Google is showing 5,000 pages from my site in it's index. Some of my normal pages are already not being cached because Google is indexing my site less aggressivley due to s