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.

I recently created the internet marketing mind map, covering just about everything I know about online marketing.

I would love your feedback on the format, size, and content. Should I make more in depth mind maps for niche topics?

Update: Due to popular feedback I just Creative Commons licensed the internet marketing mind map, so you can download it, mix it, share it, and do what you like with it.

Having searched hundreds of times on google.ca and google.com.ph I see some subtle differences in how the top ranked global / US results are mixed into international results.

• High authority sites do not tend to rank as well internationally as they do in the US. Domain trust counts less. As an example, Matt Cutts recently posted about his favorite omron pedometer. He is right near the top on Google.com, but it a bit lower internationally.
• Low authority sites that were near the top of the global search results tend to rank a bit better internationally. My mom has a lower link authority weight loss blog and has also posted about her favorite omron pedometer, and ranks better internationally than she does in the US results.
• Exact match domains ("mykeyword.com" matches [mykeyword] and [my keyword]) seem to get a bit more love in international search results than in the US results.
• The domain love is even moreso if it is a local domain extension.
• Trusted local sites are aggressively mixed into the search results, especially for queries that would hint a local preference. In one local market I saw a local thin affiliate site ranking in the top 3 for a core mortgage term, and the site was only PageRank 2.

Yahoo search normally moves rather slowly with small changes, but I just saw some pretty big shifts in Yahoo rankings, including

• botching part of a sitewide 301 redirect that they had followed for months - now both sites rank, but each ranks well for some portion of the queries
• a bit more weight on domain names

What are you seeing?

Many financial and social markets are destroyed by short term opportunism. Because the web is virtually limitless, it is easy to make sales pitches that sound like everyone gains. But that is rarely, if ever, true. Every clean traffic source gets gamed. So do the dirty ones.

A recently launched blog Ponzi Scheme has more holes in it than swiss cheese. What kind of desperate people get in on the 5th tier of a Ponzi Scheme? Does it benefit your credibility to recommend low quality sites or have ads for your site seen on their sites? What type of readers do the low quality sites have, beyond the robotic community? No reason to link out to those sorts of sites, and you can probably use AdSense to buy ad space on their site for about 3 cents a click, if it even has that much value.

The reason many reciprocal link networks stink is that some webmasters marketed low quality sites they intended to get burned. Anything that has you trading with anonymous unknown parties has you trading your time, attention, and exposure with a spambot of some sort. Your site is better than that, and your time is worth more than that.

Many more programs will come out telling you how to get something for free, but if it is market exposure be leery. When I started on the web I did arbitrage on some smaller pay per click search engines and never paid me. Digging deeply for the deals has you focused on bargain hunting when your time would be better spent building value. The deal diggers keep getting made obsolete by increasingly efficient markets. The people creating real value keep making more money as the market gets more efficient.

What I have come to appreciate is that it is easier, cheaper, and more sustainable to associate with the people you want to be grouped with. If you want to link out to a bunch of other sites do it in your content, and hand select the content you reference. I have showed some projects to friends who asked "how the hell did you get X to be involved with this?" I simply asked them. Aim high, not low.