Much in the same way I recently mentioned SEO marketing as being a layered process I tend to view building a long-term profitable website as a layered process. My fundamentals revolve around marketing and SEO of course, but as Google's algorithms get more authority based in nature it is worth taking a look at ways to control content costs while still coming up with ideas that help build up domain authority scores.

In any publishing medium, especially one which encourages crap content, and one where people grade your work in many ways, it usually takes a while to gain enough brand / authority / trust / popularity to be profitable, or you need to create something unique or citation worthy, or you need content of various quality levels to be profitable from the start. On the web your content is graded by people in the following ways

• being worthy of attention (based on overall and subject related credibility and authority)

• being worthy of a subscription (generally being worth visiting again, or adding your feed)
• being worthy of a recommendation (via link, instant message, or email)

Then search engines look at whatever of that information they can interpret to find signal amongst the noise and try to rank pages based on query relevance, naturalness and uniqueness of text, semantic structure, user acceptance, age, naturalness of growth and citation, and outbound linkage.

Because there are so many forms / techniques / types of low quality information, and search is such a profitable targeted advertising vehicle, some search engines (for example, Google) have been placing significant weight on domain related authority to rank pages for specific queries. Put another way, if I published the same article on CNN.com and MySmallWebsite.com the CNN article will win out time and time again.

Small webmasters still can compete, but they must overcome the disadvantage of being small and having limited mindshare, trust, (and typically financial capital). There are many fundamental things you can do to help overcome those disadvantages. Once you overcome those disadvantages you can work your way into a self reinforcing market position which allows you to profit greatly from the work necessary to gain such a position.

Brand & Niche Selection
If a niche is saturated it may be worth it to pick another niche or a subtopic within that niche. One of my biggest failures when I first got on the web is that I wanted to learn everything about search. The problems with that are: Danny Sullivan is an amazing person and with all the hard work he has done it would be ridiculous to try to do something similar starting a decade later, and that niche is way too broad for anyone to do unless they had a team helping them. So I decided to try SEO, and that worked well. Today SEO is so saturated that it would be much harder for me to gain traction today than when I started a few years ago.

Site Design
A professional site design will pay for itself many times over, largely because a professional site design makes average to slightly above average content quality linkworthy.

If all you have is a few hundred dollars spend it on a logo design, and then use a minimalist site design which is color matched to the logo.

Format Your Content so it is Easy to Share & Easy to Change
Using a blog platform such as Wordpress as your content management system makes it easier for other bloggers to identify with you as being similar to them. Using a database driven content management system also makes it easy to change your site design quickly.

It is best if it is easy to change your site design quickly (to test different ad placements, etc.), and to be able to grow out any section that you found interesting and / or highly profitable.

Participate in Communities
Online (and offline, if possible) participate in communities discussing your topic to help create friendships, learn better what people care about in your field, and to help people if you can. If their site is authoritative in nature many people will come across your information published on their site.

You can start building your brand before you even have your site by selecting a username that you later relate to your brand name.

Buy a Bit of Trust
A listing in DMOZ, the Yahoo! Directory, or Business.com might seem expensive at first, but if you get a few trusted links it helps show the search engines that you are serious about business (and it shows them what community you belong to and that a human editor has reviewed your site).

Information Accuracy
Rather than aiming for bland objectivity, it is easy to be remarkable by being more biased and more personable, especially on your feature articles.

Content Quality
Mix your content quality. Try to create a few promotional pieces of content and market the hell out of those, but also leverage that authority to help improve the exposure of other things on your site. Even if your promotional pieces lose money, if you create enough other (hopefully cheap and easy to produce) content riding on the authority of your great content it can work to lower the cost of your higher quality content. Your cheap content can be textually unique but may not need to be conceptually unique. Your promotional content should hopefully be conceptually unique.

If you already have significant mindshare and a highly profitable business model you may want to try to post higher quality stuff most of the time. Posting lower quality information in bulk is more about giving your site a back-fill to aggregate the cost of the higher quality content.

Post about things you care and are passionate about, but if you are still trying to build up authority rather than publish based exclusively on information quality and passion, occasionally publish based on how well you think your ideas may spread.

If you can find a way to make consumers want to help generate your content then to them your content will be of high quality. If they create it they may also want to help market it.

Content Costs
I am using money as a proxy for value input each piece. If you are low on cash you can make up for that by putting in time and effort. Rather than writing 100's of $20 to $50 articles, write 100 or 100's of cheap ones, then spend a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per good idea. Make sure your best ideas are well executed, bake social elements into their structure, make them look exceptionally legitimate and useful, and make them easy to share.

To control costs, rather than hiring many employees full time it might make sense to try hiring freelance writers off Craigslist and other related sites. Consumer generated content is also a way to maximize the return on expensive content.

Content Targeting
When you are trying to write content use keyword research tools and search forums and other locations for common questions. If you are making up your bulk content make sure you control costs, but still make the content unique and legitimate enough looking to pass an editorial hand check and not undermine your brand value if you are trying to build a real brand.

If there are not any authoritative and relevantly targeted pages ranking for the related search query, and you can make a quality page on the topic which would be easy to cite then try to roll it into a high quality (and perhaps high cost) linkbait which helps lift the authority of the rest of the site. Make sure you target linkbait at specific people who are easy linkers or exceptionally authoritative linkers.

Don't be afraid to send personal targeted emails if you are launching something of high quality. I wrote something amazing and got about 300 links. I wrote something of slightly lower quality and got about 3,000 links. What was the difference? About a half dozen polite emails to friends seeded the second idea and helped spread the second idea much further than the first.

Another good way to make your site more linkable is by regularly linking out to the people who you would want to link at your site.

Social Marketing
If your content is of decent quality submit it to social sites like Del.icio.us, Digg, Netscape, and others. On your linkbait content page place links that make it easy for others to vote for your content, and ask a few friends to vote. Exposure on these social sites will put your content in front of bleeding edge link rich webmasters.

If your linkbait page looks useful, well structured and something worth looking at later many people will bookmark it, especially if it is long enough to look comprehensive and be placed in the this is too much so I will check it out later category.

Also do not forget to spend the 10 minutes it takes to make a topical Squidoo lense.

Use a Proper Title
If you are writing a quick piece of lower quality content then try to be somewhat literal and descriptive in how you title that page. Conversely, if you are writing to try to spread an idea you may want to sacrifice the title a bit if a more controversial title will make the idea spread much further.

Titles matter a lot if you want to create a controversy. Look at magazine covers, meme trackers, meta news sites, and social bookmarking sites for examples of good titles.

Controversy = discussion = links = money.

Information Timeliness
There are so many meta news sites, social bookmarking tools, and meme trackers that in most competitive markets it is going to be a waste of time to try to be the first person with every story unless you have access to insider information OR are able to create your own controversy which allows you to become the story.

You can use these fast acting sources to your advantage too, more on that later though.

Additionally you can create meta posts that strongly agree and strongly disagree with certain AUTHORITATIVE opinions on a topic. If you link at popular narcissistic webmasters eventually some of them will cite you back.

Information Sources
Use and abuse vertical search, social bookmarking, and meta news sites as the resources that they are. Even if they are 50% spam that still leaves a lot of good resources to make your articles look well researched with minimal effort.

The more creative you are with how you search the more stuff you will be able to dig up. For example, search for multiple related phrases, competing URLs, and track early votes for really interesting stories and see what other related stories those people voted for.

Don't forget traditional published books, books in the public domain, government content & research, DVDs, and documentaries. I saw a magazine at an airport for $10 which gave me thousands of dollars worth of content ideas. Their publishing format and information inaccessibility means that people creating a slightly dumbed down version of similar information get to make good money starting their ideas based on the hard work and research purchased for only $10.

Generally the less accessible a piece of information is the easier it is to sound remarkable by citing it or stating something similar on the web :)

Picture Page
Include photos from sites like IStockPhoto or Flickr in your higher quality articles to make them look more legitimate.

What has Worked so Far?
Check your traffic logs to see what articles are the most popular. Install SEO for Firefox and do a site search, or use Yahoo! Site Explorer to look at which of your articles have the most backlinks. Also search for your domain on Del.icio.us to see which of your pages got the most bookmarks.

Syndicate
Writing high quality content articles that are published on other sites is a good way to improve your credibility, link authority, drive targeted traffic, and if your site is new your content on older trusted sites might be more likely to rank to help your brand and ideas gain further exposure.

Monetizing

• If your site is brand new go lean on the ads until you have some authority. Heavy ads too early = no authority. No authority = no income.

• When links can be profitable link for conversion from within your content.
• If you plan on selling ads directly it may make sense to put up a fake ad or two in the sponsors section. After one competitor has bought an ad many companies will feel they need to buy in because the competition already did.
• Set AdSense as a default monetization model if you do not want to deal with ad sales (or need to get a pricing baseline).
• Blend the ad colors with your content and place those ads in your content area to make them look like part of the content.
• Consider factors affecting ad clickthrough rate, and check AdSense ad targeting before you write about a topic.
• Look at the ads after you write a page. Make sure your page talks about the topics the ads are targeted to or you create other more targeted pages that address the contents of those ads if that makes sense.
• Check ad clickthrough rate on a per page level and see what keywords are driving your ad clicks. Set up ad channels to test the earnings of different formats or sections of your site. Grow your site based on where the income is coming from. The deeper you want to dive into a topic the more targeted the traffic will be, but remember to keep building your site authority if you are going to build a big site.

The Importance of Viral
From Andrew Goodman:

Some well-funded companies with strong business development plans are able to negotiate means of driving underpriced traffic to a site, while selling listings at a higher price (this is why all the kerfuffle about "click arbitrage" seems to be overblown: many businesses have grown through "click arbitrage" and continue to be built around it).

In the past, quite a few companies were built up quickly simply through the grace of free mass organic Google referrals. As spaces get cluttered and large media companies spend in multiple channels in order to indirectly maintain their organic lead, this gets harder to achieve for a startup unless something goes a bit viral.

Thus if many of the current successes launched today with their current model they would not be citation worthy enough to earn their current market position.

What Did I Miss?
Any other tips we should add?

After recently writing that people should write about politics on their blogs I saw that Jim gave it a try only to have it backfire. Rand also noted

Aaron - Last night I thought my opinion on this was fairly solid, but reading your piece and recalling some of your excellent posts that dealt with the subject (sometimes slyly, through links), I'm beginning to think that maybe you're in the right.

I don't think I am real good at being sneaky, but I have come to realize that I really only know a small portion of the world and that even if I care about some things there are people who know far more about them than I. I think that is part of the reason why I try to let links speak my opinion sometimes, but another good reason to link out to other things that represent your opinion is that you will go bonkers if you speak your mind about every issue that is on your mind. You have to pick and chose your battles.

Werty recently reminded me of a Paul Graham article titled What You Can't Say which stated:

If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.

...

Obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

....

I think many interesting heretical thoughts are already mostly formed in our minds. If we turn off our self-censorship temporarily, those will be the first to emerge.

So, as Paul Graham was saying, frequently exercising the freedom of thought was far more important than frequently exercising the freedom of speech (especially because if you do the latter too much then nutters will eat up all your time and do their best to reduce you to their level).

Many artists and writers tend to cloak their intent such that only some people get their intent. I think that on business sites a combination of rarely posting political stuff combined with some form of cloaking intent such that only some people would care to comment is probably the best route to go if you want to express political beliefs on your work blog.

Many people are still stuck in the bulk and automation line of thinking with link building. Largely because service providers are lazy. Largely because business models that are highly automated in nature are easier to extract value from if people are not thinking through what they are buying. In much the same way many SEOs will still sell you search engine submission stuff, for many years many SEOs will sell you bulk or automated link building programs. People new to the market may be cheap or too lazy to learn SEO, are heavily pitched bogus offers, and read a bunch of outdated information that reinforces old ideas which no longer have any value.

Why does the outdated information get so much exposure? Because search (especially Google) is biased toward older sites. And, with search replacing directories and link lists at the primary means of web navigation people do not link the same ways that they used to. Google not only wants to automate selling paid links on your site, but they also are even trying to automate recommending related links, thus trying to require publishers to do more to earn an editorial link.

But if something is automated, aggressively marketed, widely used, and was effective at manipulating the results you have to think that the search engines would quickly aim to stop it. If those same techniques are generally associated with other low quality sites is that a good network to actively place your site in? Odds are that search engines would be extra aggressive at deweighting the technique if it was effective and generally associated with junk content.

Sketchy SEO techniques have a limited shelf life, and not long after you hear them mentioned people start patching up the holes, so those technically savvy enough to find new algorithmic holes are typically going to keep quiet about them and extract as much value as they can before the holes are closed.

Matt Cutts hinted that having mostly low quality links may prevent your site from getting crawled deeply, and, more recently, he also mentioned that if a site added pages too quickly it may get flagged:

It looks like the primary issue with the Windows Live Writer blog was the large-scale migration from spaces.msn.com to spaces.live.com about a month ago. We saw so many urls suddenly showing up on spaces.live.com that it triggered a flag in our system which requires more trust in individual urls in order for them to rank (this is despite the crawl guys trying to increase our hostload thresholds and taking similar measures to make the migration go smoothly for Spaces). We cleared that flag, and things look much better now.

Admittedly, if you participate in some markets (like consumer finance or insurance) many automated junk content sites will place you in their network by scraping your site and linking to you, but if you can get a few quality links you can easily beat out people playing the bulk numbers game.

If you want your SEO to be effective longterm it is best to avoid easy and automated techniques, in favor of layered or complicated techniques that are going to be hard for most competitors to replicate.

Improving Customer Experience linked to me (so they are obviously cool), but, more importantly, they mentioned a cool related keyword research tool named Quintura Search. Quintura is a free LSI type keyword research tool which shows you related keywords pulled from top ranked websites in any of the major search engines and major content sites like Wikipedia and Amazon.com.
If you do not know a topic well this can give you added things to think about when trying to optimize for it. If you do know a topic well this can give you a way to test how sophisticated or biased different search algorithms are. In addition to being able to compare various engines, you can grab more results, and adjust the coverage depth of keywords it sorts through to find what keywords are most semantically related. Also when you scroll over a keyword it highlights other related words, likeso:

Awsome and slick application. Well done :)

Jim recently asked if he should post about politics on his blog. Rand recently posted why he thinks politics should stay out of your content. I strongly disagree with Rand's position. Why?

• Almost anything that I have been told was stupid to write, I also had others tell me that they thought it was cool. To me, I would much rather ensure I was memorable over avoiding risk.

• When you go outside of the conventional framework of what you are expected to do you are probably going to be more memorable than when you subscribe to a framework that everyone else subscribes to.
• People who have a strong emotional appeal to what you write are going to be far more likely to remember you and/or want to talk to you. Most others will just let it go.
• People subscribe to their own biases. We are constantly seeking things which reinforce our worldviews and identities. As long as you are fairly rational with what you write, those who disagree with it will usually tune it out. Those who agree with it will be more likely to remember it.
• People use language (and thus search) using queries that will likely indicate their biased worldviews. Thus they are not as likely to find your opinion if your political views differ from their own.
• People are more likely to link at things they can identify with. Just look at the most popular political blogs. Most of them are extremely biased.
• Many political bloggers are link rich. If you can create something that they will link at you soon will be too.
• People are more likely to link at thinks they think are totally screwed up. Even if people think your position is full of crap they may cite it because they want to say just how wrong you are.
• Politics generally is nothing but marketing and a game of double speak. The very fact that people react to it emotionally shows how strong the marketing is and how strongly people identify with it. It is important to understand how that language relates to marketing.
• If you let fears control your actions then you are guaranteed to produce watered down stuff.
• If you are full of crap in your worldview and have intelligent readers who care about you then audience feedback will help you quickly see other ways of viewing the world.

The four potential downsides with occasionally posting on politics and religion I have encountered thusfar are

• It may cost you some top down support, but I think it will get you more bottoms up support from people who find it easy to identify with who you are and where you come from. The bottoms up support will more than make up for the lack of top down support if you are small and passionate.

• If you post about politics too frequently it could alter the perception of your brand to be more about politics than your core value.
• You get death threats, etc. Some idiot has already offered me a dual. hehehe
• The death threats and ideological asshats may start to eat up some of your time and attention, and try their best to undermine your views of humanity and evolution.

But in the end, do I really want to help this person spread their belief system and control my life? Nope.

On Rand's blog he mentioned

The current political environment has exacerbated sterotypes and tensions in the political spectrum such that overarching assumptions about a person's qualities are built around even the smallest admission of idealogical leanings. For example, in the US specifically, those who put themselves far to the right of the political spectrum may create stereotypes of amorality, anti-family attitudes and military appeasement for those on the left. In the reverse, the accusations might be homophobia, racism, close-mindedness & lack of education. When you claim political affiliations of any kind, some of your readers/clients/colleagues are prone to jump to these type of conclusions.

There is an endless stream of amoral profit driven sources that will try to use fear to control your activities so that they may gain further wealth and influence. Why subscribe to thought control? Why let the close-mindedness and ignorance of others limit how you express yourself? I took to the web precisely because I didn't want to let others control my actions, how I express myself, or what I could say.

Only a couple hundred years ago slavery was an accepted practice here in the land of the free. Things are able to become much worse and take a much longer time to get better if people are afraid to talk about them. When you need to be a comedian to be honest doesn't it mean there is something wrong with our perspective of the world?

I probably post political stuff a bit more often than I should if I were focused on optimal conversion. I think if you do something rarely, but do it really well then you really get to drive home your desired message. Like take Danny Sullivan when he roasts Google or another engine. He is typically so mild mannered that when he roasts them you are pretty certain they deserve it. Or take Keith Olberman's recent take on the president. It really doesn't get much better than that.

We are all human, and thus are all biased and hypocritical, so of course we are going to look stupid to some of the people some of the time, but at least they looked. Feel free to throw stones and/or flames below ;)

Update: Paul Graham has a cool article called What You Can't Say, from which I will quote:

Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.

...

If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s-- or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have.

....

obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

....

I think many interesting heretical thoughts are already mostly formed in our minds. If we turn off our self-censorship temporarily, those will be the first to emerge.

Thinking outside the framework others set up, predict, and control is what allows you to create your own for profit framework (and by profit I do not mean only money).