The Fog of War - Great DVD

A couple friends recently mentioned The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. It is a great DVD from the perspective of a former Secretary of Defense, about the errors he made and the lessons he learned in his life.

It is mind boggling to hear about all the fire bombing in Japan, how serious the Cuban missile crisis was, and that the Vietnam war lasted so long due to a lack of empathy. So much has been smudged away from the school books. The DVD concludes a killer quote derived from T. S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploring, and at the end of our exploration we will return to where we started, and know the place for the first time.

What You Can Learn from Comment Spam

I just deleted about 10,000 comment spams from a blog. What could one learn from going through all that spam?

High Value Keyword Net:

Comment spam ads (outside of porn) are typically the same topics advertised on the Yahoo! homepage and on About.com's brand sponsored content sections.

Spammers who spam others blogs are generally focused on profit and results oriented. Many of them do dumb stuff, but some of them will leave a competitive research trail worth looking at, complete with the TYPES of keywords that are profitabe (pornography, perscription brands, gambling, things associated with finance) and important keyword modifiers.

How to Leave Feedback:

Given the results orientated nature of spam, it is unsurprising that many comment spammers leave comments that are generic, non-personalized, and flattering. If you want people to respond to you the flattering angle is probably effective, but message personalization is also key.

The Cost of Free Content:

if you let others litter your site with spam it is easy for others to think you don't believe in your own product. As one person stated on the blog with spammy comments:

Take notice of the spam here on the blog, they don’t care about this site and they don’t care about paying their customers.

Why wouldnt search engines eventually do the same? Sure spam is free content, but if it puts you in a bad linguistic neighborhood what is the cost?

This Content is an Automated Personalized Ad Optimized to Rank for You & Exploit Your Personality Flaws - Enjoy!

Are you lonely, broke, ugly, overweight, tired, depressed, stressed, or looking for the best incest bestiality porn online today?

Featured offer: Click here for an online blissful excursion leading to eternal consumer driven happiness.

Machines optimized for market efficiency and profit don't have ethics, and do not promote businesses that do. How much we will allow ourselves to trust personalization and quality scores?

"They knew they were being lied to, but if lies were consistent enough they defined themselves as a credible alternative to the truth. Emotion ruled almost everything, and lies were driven by emotions that were familiar and supportive, while the truth came with hard edges that cut and bruised. They preferred lies and mood music...." - J G Ballard, Kingdom Come

Using Co-branding to Overcome Barriers to Market Entry

If you are new to an oversaturated market or want to reach an audience that normally ignores you, the easiest way to do so is to co-brand something they DO care about. Want examples? How to optimize your WORDPRESS BLOG and seo for FIREFOX come to mind.

In many markets the top ranked site is determined by popular opinion OUTSIDE their niche market.

Turning a Hobby Into a Passive Income Stream

As ads and content continue to blend eventually there will be some type of blowback where websites that are driven by passion will keep taking marketshare from sites that lack passion. If you have a hobby the odd are you are passionate, spending a lot of time on it, and may also be spending a lot of money on it. Why not align work and play?

If you turn your hobbies into businesses at the very least you get a tax write off, but on the upside you might create a sustainable profitable business model.

Pop Ups as a Sign of Market Opportunity

If the top competing sites are monetized by feeds from third tier search engines and / or off topic pop ups you can probably buy targeted ads on their sites cheap. You don't need to rank if they already are, and if the ad buy helps you rank that is a bonus.

Many market leaders were just early to the market, and do not realize the potential they are wasting monetizing with antiquated marketing that is both cheap and poorly targeted.

Google is the Biggest Web Spammer

Andrew Goodman recently posted about SEO industry reputation woes, but the real reason for the problem is the self serving agenda of search engines. Don't underestimate the marketing of the search engines, which outside of their own link buying and selling, generally like to hint at this equation SEO = spam.

People spam everything though - media creating biased news, misquoting interviewees, blending ads in content, ads as content, free votes driving communities, deceptive article titles, spinning numbers from small sample sets, bogus posturing formated as research studies, etc.

Look at how much Google had to clean their PPC ads. Yet we don't associate PPC service providers as people pushing thin content arbitrage sites, fraudulent search engine submission services, and off target cookie stuffing offer spams. Should we?

If spam is hosted by Google, ranked by Google, and displays Google ads, then why the need for outsourcing that fault? Why can't we just call those people Google affiliates and leave it at what it is, Google = spam?

Some people claim that Google is out for the best interest of their users, but why the need for cost per action ads that are only labeled as ads on a scroll over? Ads cloaked as content are what is best for users? In a couple years we will see:

The game is now to manipulate consumers not only to click, but to take some further action. And I don't use the word 'manipulate' arbitrarily. This is about turning the web into one big pile of junk mail, aimed at getting you to sign up, buy, or commit to something that you hadn't necessarily wanted.

The Ups and Downs of Socializing Your Content

There are many ups and downs to adding a user generated content section to a site. It has been interesting watching the effects of SEOMoz's user generated content and points systems. The ups:

  • users feel they are part of the brand.

  • they are more likely to push the brand and link to the site
  • points are created free but give some perception of value
  • users create free content for the site even when you are not doing so.
  • some of their content will rank in search results. today I did a search for search engine marketing and saw Google listing a link for recent blog posts listing this post
  • contributors might give you good marketing ideas or help you catch important trends before competitors do

The downs:

  • people who spend lots of time contributing tend not to value their time too much AND are hard to profit from (especially in savvy marketplaces that ignore ads).

  • having many relationships allows you to be a connector that knows someone for just about any job, but focusing heavily on building community and maintaining the many relationships needed to do so may hold you down on the value chain. A few strong relationships will likely create more value than many weak ones, especially as we run into scale related issues.
  • if your site is not authorititative, user generated content may waste your link authority and lead to keyword canibalization
  • if your site is authoritative many people will look for ways to leverage your domain or authority
  • as you get more authoritative more people will try to exploit it. even friends get aggressive with it, and unless you call people out it gets out of control quickly.
  • as you extend your commitments, spending time to police a site, it is harder to change course. I get frustrated when I see spam on the homepage of ThreadWatch, but I guess I can't be surprised people do it, and due to database issues I am uncertain if I will be able to upgrade TW without just archiving the old information and switching to a new CMS.
  • some people looking to promote their work may spam or aggressively associate your brand with the articles they wrote. For example, is this comment spam? Or is it good?

If a relationship is affiliate based it is quite easy to police undesirable activity by banning accounts, but if people are adding content to your site and marketing it aggressively in ways that may not bode well with your brand it might be harder to police it, especially as you scale your community. And typically the people that are most likely to give you crap for it are hypocritical with their beliefs.

I think on the whole a community section is a pretty good idea if you tie it into a paid content model, but even when you do that you will still run into scale issues if you provide any type of support for the paid content. I have over 600 emails in my inbox, and recently stopped advertising free consulting with an ebook purchase because I stopped scaling as a person. As your profits scale the opportunity cost of any one revenue channel become more apparent. That is one of the things which has prevented me from putting a forum or community section on this site.

Help Me Help You

It looks as though Scoreboard Media is pumping out better content than Tropical SEO. This post is no exception.

I’m constantly amazed at how many of these “SEO Firms” with the big followings generate little to no income from their own projects. If there is a stronger signal of quality for a lack of confidence in their own ability, I can’t think of it.

If anyone with more than 3 years of experience is allocating more than 50% of their time to consulting, I’m going on record as doubting their skills.

Why is it so important for a consultant to market their own sites?

  • During periods of uncertainty having limited obligations creates easy income opportunities - one reacts to the market quicker.

  • So we can do risky stuff without risking client sites. Not testing limits is intellectually dishonest and defeats the purpose of calling oneself an optimizer.
  • Better pay. Building growing passive income streams is far better than getting paid by the hour.
  • Growing passive revenue streams help the consultant get a baseline for their value and ensure they value their time.
  • A reasonable consulting rate filters out the worst potential clients while attracting high value clients.
  • Passive revenue streams allow us to be selective with clients, working with the rare client worth taking on, and extracting enough profit from them to deliver them significant value.
  • We learn how to spread ideas better if we are pushing things we are passionate about. It is hard to be passionate about a client site and see their full potential unless I pushed myself first. We learn when...
    • good ideas spread;

    • when good ideas do not spread;
    • when we see garbage spread; and,
    • when we see things backfire.
    • Seeing junk spread and figuring out why some good ideas do not teaches you much more than when the market acts as you would expect.

Elite Retreat Was Fun

Elite Retreat just finished, and I think this one was even more fun than the last one. Wendy and Kris both blogged it. Thanks to everyone who attended and spoke.

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