Matt kicked our asses in the recent best SEO blog vote.

If we work out ways to spam his index hard enough maybe he won't have time to make any posts. ;)

If he beats us again I start investing into creating a wide variety of automated content / site generator software :)

Thanks to everyone who voted for me.

So I have been diligently reading my feeds, and came across a few ideas that are worth cross referencing. DaveN recently said:

• 75% of his income is whitehat
• When out for a casual drink with Greg Jarboe, Dave also said "Black hat stuff is getting too hard," he said. "I'm actually thinking about turning legit."

DaveN also mentioned that he is starting to work on a search engine, and has been producing legit content...even posting niche channels with furry animal USB drives.

In a recent WMW supporters thread Brett Tabke said:

I count 15 independent blackhat SEO's that have went to work for other corporations. The actual number must be closer to 50 or 60 that have thrown in the towel and went to work for the man.

But Marcia added

If the newer breed of the SEO black arts involves link-based manipulation, how could anyone assume there wouldn't be a good degree of underground collusion involved?

Contextual advertising and easy blog related links are making niche channel content production a no brainer. Even if it was only self funding or moderately profitable a content network would still allow you the ability to help market anything in a hurry. Partner up with a few friends on the idea and you are talking about some serious link authority that can be shifted to and fro.

So long as it is scaled out in a logical manner I think many SEOs are going to start becoming large scale publishers of many niche networks.

Sure the blog hype might be overrated, but there is something to be said about having your own network which can be used to help launch newer sites. Content costs are usually a one time fee, and so long as your niche selection is smart within a year or so the revenues should be able to outpace the cost on most channels.

Many paid links may be a bit obvious to engines and discounted, but there is only so many links they can chose to ignore. If you have a legit network that does not blatantly sell links your link popularity and content base will likely be leveragable in more ways than you can count.

I think the SEO theme for 2006 is networks and friendships with network owners.

When something is free, that's what people expect to pay for the next one.

When overpaying people have to talk to others about what they are doing to justify their course of actions.

Many people need marketing messages pounded into them to act.

Today I noticed this review, stating:

Wall states that while he markets the book as being about SEO, it really is more about conveying everything he knows about the web. And providing the reader with lists of valuable resources so they can do more research on their own.

This book is for anyone with a website, who wants to get out there and get noticed by search engines. And I suspect that is everyone with a website. If you want the world to know about you, you need to know about SEO.

but they also said my ebook is expensive. And yet I am highly tempted to raise the price.

Today I also got this via email

If I buy your ebook will it stop inserting your ebook advertisement when I browse your site?

to which I responded

Unfortunately I don't have user custom accounts set up...the site format is the same for all site visitors :(

If you subscribe to the RSS feed there are no ads in that.

Ads are annoying and I hate them, but the day I moved my SEO Book ad inline my sales tripled. To move it out of the content area could likely be a big risk.

Leaving the RSS feed ad free makes it easy to subscribe to and recommend, but most of my potential clients probably have not heard of RSS or do not use it.

Rand reports on OR being an ignored as an ad targeting word in Google AdWords.

Pretty bad deal for those using their keyword selection for regional Oregon AdWords campaigns.

I don't do as many power searches as I should, but today I noticed that when I searched for "blah" or "fla" Google ignored the boolean function until I capitalized the term. Can't they trust that a capitalized OR stands for something in the ads too?

I think Rand's post about OR is a good example of how just being around and experiencing SEO or SEM teaches you many tricks, problems and ideas that most would not naturally think of before playing around in the field.

Perhaps if Oregon becomes part of Baja Canada Google will not have to worry about this problem. If CA and WA stop working as intended then we will know Google is trying to send a hint, and adjust our ads to target Baja CA.

Google has been involved in political redistricting in the past.

Now I know people say you should always be nice, but I sometimes screw that up. Most potential business relationship offers are garbage and the guy who accepts every offer he gets is lucky, born rich, and/or likely eventually homeless.

It takes a dumb business person to try to help everyone who contacts them because if you develop any real brand value many more people will want you to help them than you possible can help. Couple that with the easy of communication and the anonymity of the web and it gets easy to feel a bit shitty if you don't do things to filter out the noise and scamsters (and yet I still get astrology websites claiming to be legitimate charities).

Recently I had one person contact me about 5 times a day asking questions like where is the Overture suggest tool. Stuff that would easily pop on the first page in Google if they used the exact same queries as they instant messaged me with. I explained to them that search is there for a reason and my time was limited, but my explanation was to no avail.

Had I not progressively ignored them and gave continuously shorter answers to encourage reading or searching I would have probably got about 50 questions a day from them. Eventually things were not going to do well.

They asked me questions which to me seemed to show they did not even attempt to read my book. In essence they said they bought my ebook, but I think what they wanted was a full time SEO tutor for a one time $79 fee. Sure I answered a bunch of questions but then after a while I told them I couldn't answer any more because it was not an honest or functional business model for me to continue to do so.

$79 is a bunch to pay for an ebook that you don't read, but $79 is not enough for a real time long term ongoing one on one internet business strategy consultation. People create autoresponder lists and write books and build software to leverage their time because individuals only scale so far.

I think the person who contacted me is probably a good person, but I think that even attempting to make myself widely available on IM is probably not a great idea as it makes it too easy to chat away instead of spending time learning.

I have spent a bunch building free tools to help people leverage their time. Some people are not going to appreciate you do no matter what you do or how hard you try though. Likely their expectations are unreasonable, selfish, or (most likely) they do not place much value on their own time and project their valuations on your time.

You still can learn something from clients who frustrate you and site visitors who seem like they don't have a clue. I am not sure if I will launch it anytime soon, but I think there is a good business model to be made by running an SEO Q&A service for a fee. If I did that it would solve multiple problems:

1. If I placed a tangible value on each answer people would value my time more.

2. I still could answer free questions if I wanted to, but would not have to worry about people viewing me as arrogant if I chose not to.
3. Much of the content on this site is not geared toward picking up newbie targeted traffic from search engines because I can't keep hitting the same questions and ideas over and over as I learn more and the industry changes. Most potential customers are early on in the learning cycle, and this blog started after I had already learned for about a year, and that was a couple years ago. By having a feed of nothing but high quality answers to common newbie questions that content would rank great for many queries and likely convert at around 2 to 5% depending on search query and page layout.