On average we are all average. There is no money in average though:

Bob would fail if he did average work for average editors just to make a living. But by turning down the average stuff and insisting on standing for something on the edge, he profits. By challenging his clients to run stuff that makes them nervous (and then having them discover that it's great), he profits.

This is scary. It's really scary to turn down most (the average) of what comes your way and hold out for the remarkable opportunities. Scary to quit your job at an average company doing average work just because you know that if you stay, you'll end up just like them. Scary to go way out on an edge and intentionally make what you do unattractive to some.

Which is why it's such a great opportunity.

This is sorta like my recent porn post, except more sanitized and generally much better.

Some people are going to outragiously overpay. Why not let those people be your customers.

Lets say you write a blog about poker. It is pretty hard to get legitimate links to a poker blog, but lets say you talk about how you met Phil Ivey but the story is not that interesting sounding. You can add a bit of authenticity to the sound of the story by buying a Phil Ivey autographed poker chip for $23 and include it in your post.

In certain markets (like poker) just about any type of link is worth $23. There are also other types of junk or collectibles that may be selling for far less than their linkability factor - weather you post about them and get a few links or you hold a contest of some sort to give them away, and get many more links.

Collecting allows you to easily create original linkable content which leverages the value of a celebrity or brand without needing to fully invest into the cost of building that brand or getting a celebrity to endorse your site. Branded keywords or celebrity keywords are typically high traffic and / or high value terms.

Clicktracks offers up a free version of their analytics software by the name of Clicktracks Appetizer.

At WMW Boston Mike Nott pointed me at FlashObject, which is a Javascript Flash detection and embed script.

It is XHTML compliant and allows you to use flash detection and is probably the best way to do SEO for a flash site. A couple old related posts:

• How do Flash Sites Rank Well?

• Flash Design & SEO

I am probably not the biggest conversion expert in the world, but after you start playing around with pixels and offers sometimes doing a few small things makes you realize how important some of them are.

One of my web only clients was making about $3,000 a month in sales when he contacted me. I did SEO and PPC for them and got them up to $12,000 a month. I tweaked some of the conversion aspects of the site and the same traffic now brings in over $40,000 a month in sales. Some sites have their link equity split up between the www version and non www versions of their sites. By consolidating that link popularity (via a 301 redirect) your net number of pages in the index goes down, but each page becomes more authoritative.

My sales letter had a couple broken links to reviews (due to a JupiterMedia analyst moving on and another site changing its URL structure).

My sales letter had a couple broken links to search results due to MSN changing their search string and Ask killing the Teoma brand.

Some sites use sequential URL names and screw up their page level link reputation when they add a new page.

Some about pages or sales letter pages place AdSense front and center, which end up killing the brand credibility of those sites. Many of these sites would also make far greater profits if they sold ads directly instead of through AdSense.

Many websites have Liveperson contact me buttons even on content pages about topics they would not want contacted about. Many many many sites have too many things competing for attention which end up killing their conversion ratios. Give me too many things to do and most likely I will do none of them.

If you flip a person to a related idea in your content make sure you label it as being relevant and explain why the related idea is relevant and useful to the site visitor.

Many sites have content areas with text but no headings or subheadings, and worse yet no links in the active content window of their site. Assume people are going to ignore your sitewide navigation if you want to build a site that converts.

If you are using pay per click marketing try to aim some of your ads at the high end of the market. Write ads for conversion instead of clicks, and perhaps sell the idea of selling a quote for large orders instead of selling an item. If you already rank in the regular search results then you can limit the incremental spend of PPC while ensuring you attract the big fish by reminding them that you service big orders.

Use analytics. Some of the terms you are focusing on may be a complete waste of time.

Your email address may also hurt your conversions. If you are selling relationships some people may prefer to email help@, name@ or support@ instead of sales@.

If you give people information via your site give them an automated follow up email. This is an area where I need to work on. I also should have an autoresponder series set up, as that would surely help me make thousands and thousands of dollars for minimal effort.

Direct transactions also likely convert at a better rate than transactions which require you to go to another site. Eventually I hope to either better integrate the payment system or move away from Paypal for some of my transactions.

What are some common errors you see on many sites that could be corrected to drastically increase their profitability?