When you have scarcity you have price control. But the web makes most forms of scarcity a farce. That is why so many marketers place arbitrary limits on their offerings (like sales price ends today or we are only letting in x more customers), to make it seem as though their information is bound by some limits. Just about every idea worth selling is accessible for free if you spend enough time to sort through it all, and just about everything ends up bootlegged on eBay and Limewire.

If everything is available for free then how can we sell anything?

Is Anything Really Free?

The truth is nothing is free. The stuff that is pitched as free is usually an ad, or wrapped in ads. You don't know if someone is getting paid for their words, you don't know their qualifications or motives, and you don't know if they have philosophical interests setting their goals for how your opinions and worldviews should be shaped.

How Good Information Stays Hidden

Beyond that unknown ad / bias / other influence, the other problem with free information is that it is often hard to find the best parts.

• Some sectors of the web are entirely invisible. A friend has published a great blog for months now, which has 0 traction because without marketing nobody can find her site or subscribe to it.

• Sometimes garbage information is easily accessible because of high affiliate payout schemes, manipulative public relations budgets, authoritative websites cashing in publishing junk content, or because the self reinforcing nature of authority (especially on the web).
• As forums grow in popularity they become a sea of noise. How do you rate the best threads? How do you keep them separate from the noise and make them easy to find?
• Old blogs do the same as their information ages AND much of the information becomes inaccessible due to depth and breadth of information coupled with poor information architecture and comment systems that place great comments next to junk. It sometimes takes me a half hour to find stuff I posted, and I am a good searcher with a great memory.

The link graph solves part of this problem by making it easy to locate what is popular, but popularity and quality are not one and the same. Popularity is more aligned with brand strength, marketing budget, who came to market early, and who is controversial than it is with information quality.

Onsite vs Offsite Marketing Spend Mismatch

Given that many people are selling the same ideas and similar products, packaging and formatting are key to maintaining profit margins.

How much does Google make? We spend a near endless sum of money bring people to our sites, but how much do we spend on ensuring our sites are easy to use and convert well? Usually there is a big miss-match between onsite and offsite spending. If we optimize the on site experience we have a higher visitor value and can afford to pay more for advertising, thus gaining a larger marketshare or allowing us to raise our rates to filter out the low end of the market.

Optimizing On Site User Experience

Imagine if someone recommends my site to a friend. That friend comes to the homepage and immediately jumps into the latest post. Is that an optimal experience for people new to my brand? Most likely not. It was a good idea for building the authority and mindshare of this blog in 2003, but I have done that about as well as I can with this format, and most likely there is a better way to introduce people to this site.

For over a year my tools page was worthless from a usability perspective. It was imposing, unorganized, and cluttered. Pathetic on just about every level possible. Compare the old to the new. Which looks more appealing to you? Which is more intuitive to use? Which do you trust more?

The old version put everything on one page and used headers to separate topics, whereas the new version uses category pages to separate topics. The new version also offers a brief intro at the top of each category, and many of the tool category pages also have embedded videos that further explain why the topic is important and/or offer free tips about the topic.

I still need to place breadcrumb navigation on the individual tool pages, consolidate some of the tools, and clean up some of their formatting issues, but just fixing the top level is a start. It makes it easier to access everything else.

Why is is so Important to Make Your Site Easily Usable to New People?

I recently had a search engineer tell me that they bound my book up and made it required reading for their team (which felt cool to hear), but for every person like that (who has been in the industry for many years) there are 1,000+ people just entering the field who need much more guidance.

Navigation is a form of guidance. It can scare people away or help them convert. If my site's navigation assumes everyone else knows what I know or thinks about the web the ways I do, then what could I be justified selling them, and how can I justify selling them anything?

Profitability is at the Edges of the Customer Curve

Not only is there that 1,000 to 1 ratio mentioned in the above section, but new people are also more likely to spend money than people who already feel they know everything.

Who is more likely to buy my book? A person who has been doing SEO twice as long as I have, or a person using my keyword density analyzer? Many brand managers would like consumers to believe the former, but in most cases the latter is more likely. Most of the money for information products comes from people new to the field, with some amount coming on the backend if you sell high end services.

Content Selection vs Community Growth & User Participation

Not only are new people more likely to buy, but they are also far more likely to participate in a community. Many of my friends read this blog daily, but most of them rarely leave comments. Back when I was more naive about search my topic selection naturally drew many newer readers who felt more empathy with what I was writing about, and were more likely to comment, which made my site look much larger than it was. Now that I blog about many more abstract or higher level topics I get far fewer comments, in spite of increasing site traffic month over month and year over year.

Eventually the growing traffic trend will turn the other way unless I focus more on the beginner portion of the market, and help create more brand evangelists participating on and promoting this site.

Content Targeting & Conversion

It doesn't matter how much value you create or offer if the format is bad, or fails to display the value of the product. If the communication sucks so does the product. Then if you are unwilling to change you may get bitter as you watch inferior products outsell your product without realizing that you forgot to talk to your customers using their language.

A friend of mine showed me a listing service of his that focused the homepage on sellers with little to no communication for prospective consumers. What kind of seller is going to think that site is a legitimate listing service? Google has advertising programs in the footer of their homepage in a small text link. Both of those are extremes, but you have to figure out who your customers are and gather enough attention to be able to monetize it.

Information Format & Perceived Value

Others have resold the information in my ebook in other formats for over 5 times the price (some even asked for my latest copy before their launch, telling me about it). Good on them for formatting information in a way that allows them to deliver value. It does not matter who creates the most value. What matters is who is best at formatting it and sharing it in a way that makes people happy when they consume it. People are likely to gravitate toward channels that are positive because the market for something to believe in is infinite.

For most business owners how you structure your website and communicate with prospects day in and day out to gain their trust and attention is more important than your salesletter or product quality.

The one scarcity that will continue to grow scarcer as markets saturate is attention. If you have the attention of people at the beginning of the sales cycle likely you will have it at the other end as well, but you have to keep marketing to keep people talking about you and help your business grow.

After adding those Google Gadgets to the tool section of the site I appreciated how unorganized it was, so I re-organized it, created categories, and linked out to many useful marketing tools hosted elsewhere. Hopefully you find it more useful and more helpful now.

I recently came across a number of new and useful SEO tools. Some of them were emailed to me and others were from browsing around the web. Below is a roundup post citing some of them. Here is a free tool to search for DMOZ categories that are being actively maintained. Now someone just needs to cross reference that by the DMOZ extortion prices.

I recently installed the Xinu competitive research tool on my tools subdomain.

On DaveN's blog Rob recently mentioned many cool greasemonkey SEO scripts.

Tips on how to use a free open-source spam generator. (I have not tested this).

TrustMeter Wordpress plugin - shows where your pages rank for their page titles.

Joost also recently created a meta tag plugin for Wordpress.

oyoy.eu - lists a whole bunch of free SEO tools.

Much like Google created a onebox for music, Seth Godin noticed they are now aggressively pushing onebox results for book searches. With Universal search, these verticals not only hit the top of the results, but also backfill in the organic results.

I searched Google for college * grant and 15 of the top 30 results were from books.google.com! I couldn't reproduce a screenshot with 15 out of 30, but did get this one with 13 out of 30. Sure that is an obscure query, but how long until books show up more heavily for popular queries? It is almost worth setting up a quasi-publishing house to publish no name authors with Earth-moving tomes like:

• Texas Holdem Poker, Blackjack, and Other Easy & Legal Ways to Make a Living Online

• Forex Uncovered: Make Millions Trading Currency in Your Underwear
• Online Pornography Review: The Complete Picture Guide to the Hottest Adult Fetish, Genres, Niches, & Sub-niches
• Buy Viagra Online: Why is it so Cheap and Easy?
• Call Viva, the Las Vegas Stripper: the Best Deals in Travel, Hotels, Shows, Girls, Escorts, Coupons & More from a Girl Who Knows the Town

The seedier the industry the more value there is in having a book published, but can books contain affiliate links? ;)

If Google is willing to give 20% of a search result to books (carrying Google ads), 20% to video (carrying Google ads), 10% to news results, 10% to Wikipedia, 10% to .gov, and 10% to .edu then suddenly we are all fighting for crumbs. In a market like that, perhaps the top 1 or 2 players get a near monopoly advantage, and thus becoming a leading blog (or other leading editorial voice) makes even more sense than it does in the current marketplace.

I recently got asked if I wanted to make a post flaming a bunch of people for buying links for SEO from sites that obviously do not pass any link juice. I decided not to because there would be no value add to doing so and I would just be making many people angry.

If you are trying to build a profitable and sustainable brand it is much easier to talk about how smart people are rather than how dumb we are. When you are negative it cuts directly into your sales. Not only does it lower your immediate sales (you can see it in the conversion rate numbers), but it also sacrifices a portion of your authority and credibility (future distribution and sales), while drawing a cynical following that is unlikely to buy much of anything (beyond a good conspiracy theory, at least). As an added bonus, if you get too many cynical people in your community they will also prevent others from wanting to join it. Perceived success or failure becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

When I posted about some of the hand editing Google does, even though that is good information for SEOs to be aware of, it caused my sales to drop because some people thought the goal was a personal vendetta:

I have been reading your blog for about 6 months now, and there has been a major step change in your post's tone. They have gone from useful idea driven content to rants about Google. Be careful the blog isn't twisted in to your personal vendetta as I'm sure you will see a big change in your audience as a result.

The reason there was a step change in what I posted about was because my experience had a step change. Knowing Google wiped away 10,000+ organic backlinks to one of your sites would probably change your perspective as well, especially if you literally had built 10,000+ clean links.

I kept pounding away at the important and non-consistent issues I felt about Google as I thought it through (manual editing coupled with a lack of respect for copyright, and how that game hurts many sites by holding back their true potential by helping them become addicted to Google). I believe in principals enough to kill my income in the process. Naive or smart? Depends on the goal I guess.

It is pretty hard to improve Google's SEO policies from a single SEO blog, or think that posting a personal vendetta will do much other than hurt your sales, but if you think something is unjust and mention it then maybe people with more authority start talking about it, and eventually what you do not like has a chance to change.

At the SES organic listing forum Danny Sullivan said

Your pain is well understood and shared by many people. It's frustrating. We've waited many years for this but they're focused on video copyright theft right now. All those issues on YouTube now are applicable to webpages. Aaron Wall had a good rant where he poked at Google and said they don't care about copyright. The good news is that a lot more people are being vocal about duplicate content, so maybe we'll get better tools in the future to verify the original source of the information.

So that is a start, but perhaps my formatting could have been a bit better to have a stronger impact.

There are many ways to deliver a message. Take John Andrews's Understanding the Google... the post is great. It offers a significant amount of well structured great advice, but due to the negative tone of it, it probably isn't going to spread too far:

Is Google 'right' in it's approach to the web? Is Google 'just' in it's delivery of the carrot and the stick? Is Google 'fair' in the way it operates? None of that matters to the search marketer/SEO. If these attacks are funded as diversions to keep Google busy or otherwise threaten it's dominance, I understand. But if you're interested in ranking well in Google, this is all nonsense. You need to get to know Google, and listen to what Google says. You don't need to agree, and please, stop whining.

Who wants to spread the message Google owns the web, and if you don't like the way they do it you can go f*ck yourself? Not many, I am guessing. And even if that was not the intent of his post, some people will view it that way because of the structure.

For as many people as there are that hate Digg and social media crap, why does this manifesto video only show links from a couple dozen real sites?

Does spreading a hate message sell? Not likely. All it does is give people more fuel to spread hate messages about you when you slip up, especially as you get more popular, and when your philosophies ever change, which they will as you get more exposure.

It is too easy to get lost in a fight of fighting for the sake of fighting. Even if you are right, it really doesn't matter if you express it in a way that cuts your income in half and has you focused on flames instead of product features.

Even companies like Apple can't keep secrets or prevent their latest gadgets from getting hacked. If your market is competitive (and if it is worth being in, it probably is) there is (or will soon be) someone who talks about every day as though the sun is a bit brighter than the last. It is hard to compete with that unless you can format messages in a similar packaging.

When everyone recycles each other's content it all comes down to who has the best analogies and biggest hopes. Who believes in an idea enough to get others to believe in them enough to spread their view of the world (or at least their view of their market)? Build people up and they will be proud to syndicate your message.

Look at Frank Schilling in the domain market, or Seth Godin on marketing. Compare those to the tone of Threadwatch. Threadwatch could build buzz, but could it ever sell anything?

If a message has positive hooks it is much more likely to spread quickly. In 3 years Tal Ben-Shahar's Harvard course on positive psychology went from 8 students to over 900 students, largely due to word of mouth marketing.

It is much easier to spread stories, build a brand, and sell stuff if you are talking up positive things. It is much harder to do so if you are too crass and/or too cynical. Ultimately you still have to be comfortable with what you are doing, but there is a noticeable tax on honesty unless it is well structured or generally positive in nature.

I hope this post didn't sound too stupid, and please send in love or hate using the form below. ;)