I think my wife came to say hi to me when I was sleeping a week or so ago and I started singing "you are my sunshine" in a rather annoying voice (not sure where I first heard the song, but think it was maybe school chorus class). She started laughing and wanted to know where I got that annoying voice from (I wasn't sure but maybe it was my way of being annoying in chorus).

Few thoughts are original...so if I thought it, I figured someone else did too. So I went to YouTube and searched for "you are my sunshine." A couple normal versions and then there at #6 was something that looked like it could be annoying. Perfect!

After seeing the flower I had to buy it, and that took me back through Google and eventually to eBay, where it cost $20 after shipping. My wife loved the flower and was totally surprised by it.

What if YouTube not only listed related media, but also pulled related products/services/offers from Google Base (or other structured sources) and could charge merchants on a CPC basis or a percentage of the transaction?

Most of the people on YouTube are looking to be entertained and waste time, but if media wants to be free on YouTube then maybe they should try to sell media in other formats and sell physical stuff. YouTube has huge distribution...so even if only 1 in 100 or 1 in 1,000 have interest in commercial offers they should be able to make the market fairly efficient pretty quick.

I saw about a half dozen blogs mention this review of Predictably Irrational...a book we covered 4 months ago that is still getting tons of new press. The book is so good that Rand did a review of the review. :)

If you have not yet read the Predictably Irrational book then you owe it to yourself to at least read the review. But the book is better than the review...it costs about 1% of what it should. :)

When you are fairly new to the web, if you have a lot of free time, one of the best ways to come up with new content ideas is to read books in other industries and relate some of their key points to your own industry.

If you are starting a site and are new to a field, then looking at the structure of some books in your space is a great way to get a baseline outline for a site structure. $100 on books and 2 weeks of reading and you can have a structured baseline topical knowledge level and site structure that is superior to 99% of competing websites.

In Mike Grehan's New Signals to Search Engines he highlights how personalization, social media, and universal search may help move search beyond text and links.

Mike also contended that ranking reports are dead. While clients should see the end effect of optimization in their analytics and sales data, ranking reports still have good value to professional SEOs. Below are a couple examples of why and how ranking reports are still important, even as Google crowds the organic search results with universal search stuff.

New Sites

Track Your Growth

When you build a new site from scratch you get to see how effective your link building strategies are as the site's rankings improve. You have to get in the game before you compete...ranking improvements give you an idea of how your site's trust is growing even before you rank well enough to receive much stable traffic.

This early feedback data can be used to guide further investment in link building efforts, and prioritize which websites get the most effort and investment.

Show Clients Baseline Rankings & Growth

If you sell services to clients and they have a brand new site with limited traction then a ranking report shows baseline rankings and proof of growth, even before top rankings yield lots of traffic. This helps customers have confidence in their SEO provider, even if their SEO investment loses money before making it back.

Page 2/3 Rankings

If you rank on page 2 or 3 for some high value keywords you might not see much traffic from them. But if your keyword rankings let you know that you are close to the top you can consider working on link building and altering your site structure to improve the rankings of those pages.

Services like SEMRush also help give insights into such ranking improvement opportunities.

Algorithm Changes & Penalties

How Are Search Algorithms Shifting?

Is Google putting more weight on authority sites? How much does the domain name count (if at all)? Is anchor text becoming more important or less important? How aggressive should you be with anchor text?

When major algorithm updates happen, tracking a wide array of sites and keywords can help you hypothesize what might be gaining importance and what might be losing importance.

What Happened to My Google Traffic?

Sometimes sites get filtered out of the search results due to manual penalties, automated penalties, automated filters, algorithm changes, or getting hacked. Sometimes the issues are related to particular pages, particular folders, whole sites, or keywords closely related to (or containing) another word.

Seeing a traffic drop gives you some clues that something may be wrong, but one of the easiest ways to isolate the issue and further investigate is to look at ranking reports to see what keywords and what pages were affected...then you can start thinking about if it was a glitch, something you can fix, or something you can't.

The US (and global) economies are in sharp decline after a period of growth that was largely fueled by speculative (and fraudulent) loans that increased money supply way too quickly. While carnage is wide reaching offline, it is simply a phenomena that has not really touched our publishing business.

The Illusion of Safety

There is an illusion that if something is physical that it has a sense of permanence to it, but this year the US government has had to bail out banks, automakers, insurance companies, and credit cards. Residential real estate has dropped hard and commercial real estate is also in the hurt locker (if retail is off 10% in some areas then many businesses operating on a 5% margin will go bankrupt - leading to vacancies and lower prices).

Much of the residential real estate decline is simply due to excessive capacity and various flavors of mortgage fraud (appraisal fraud, loan application fraud, principal-agent problems, malfeasant regulation, etc.), but the commercial real estate slowdown is due to the residential slowdown, global economic slowdown, and the existence of better and cheaper alternatives - namely online retail.

Investing in Growth

The Tribune Company recently filed for bankruptcy and the New York Times is reporting dropping ad revenues. Amongst the carnage Amazon.com reported record numbers. In a lot of ways some of the offline decay is just a shift toward more efficient online business models.

Fred Wilson highlighted how many publishing, finance, and retail business models are all being destroyed by the web

I had breakfast last week with a person who has been in retailing for more than 30 years and has been operating at the highest levels of the industry. He said that he expects every category to be winnowed down to one dominant retailer with all the others going by the wayside. This too has the internet as an underlying cause. comScore says that online holiday shopping this year has been flat with the year before and I've seen reports that offline retail is down 6-10pcnt. The fact is that consumers have finally come to the realization that shopping online is easier, cheaper, and often a better experience. Physical retail will survive, but it will be a smaller industry in the next decade and those that do survive will need to give consumers a very strong rationale to get in the car and come to their store.

The information age is killing many traditional arbitrage based business models (or thicker business models that are heavily reliant on local monopolies as a big part of their business). Companies that thrived when there was no competition are simply folding like Origami.

Search is the Primary Growth Engine of the Web

Most future economic growth will occur online or have online touch points. The market for something to believe in is infinite.

Not only is the web growing during the downturn, but much of the online growth is driven by marketing and search. SEO exist as the intersection of those two points, and SEOs that approach the topic from a holistic marketing standpoint have a significant advantage at building distribution and growing capital. Give me an average passionate player, add SEO, and I can help them rank #1 in most markets.

When you back out inflation and opportunity cost, professional investors are lucky to gain 5% a year. With smart market research and effective SEO implementation many businesses can outpace that by a factor of over 400! Being in SEO today would be like being in coal, oil, or railroads in years past...you help connect supply and demand.

Trimming Profit Margins

Outperforming the market by hundreds or thousands of percent presents an opportunity that will draw lots of competition - and one that will not last long if not evolved. Scraping raw data is getting easier. Why should people chose to work with you (and vote for you)?

If you get a #1 ranking which provides amazing profit margins it is best to look for ways to thicken out the site even if those strategies lower short-term profit margins. Search algorithms will change, and the thicker and more interactive your site is the more sustainable your rankings will be.

Thickening up may require giving away tools and software, public relations strategies, becoming the media, providing a platform for others to use, compiling data in a useful format and/or creating the community water cooler.

Additional expenses can be offset by refining conversion process to increase visitor value and lifetime customer value, and lower forward marketing costs as you leverage the additional earned exposure.

Another thing to consider is the use of advertising to build other quality signals. Awareness leads to conversion. And if you can get advertising to pay for itself and gain other signals of quality as a side effect of user interaction with your site then you will end out ahead in the long run. I love recycling dollars because it costs nothing, builds free credit card points, and builds up a website's online footprint in a Google friendly way.

Making Online Businesses More Sustainable than Offline Businesses

If you are an online marketer and publisher then you become a market researcher, learn how to track trends, test what works, and change with the market.

If much of your online revenues revolve around a thin SEO centric approach then it helps to create at least 1 or 2 aggressively branded sites that hedge against the risks algorithm shifts present. The net effect of building a brand is that you are not overly-reliant on any search engine or any physical market. If people talk about you and recommend you then you win. This site has members from dozens of countries all over the world, so even if the US Dollar collapsed we would still have a diverse income stream.

Helping Others

Once you are doing really well you can give back in a variety of ways - donate money to charities, donate services to charities, and/or give income-producing websites to family members. You can give away featured content and tools that help others knowing that in the end it will also come back to help build your business. You can also pour thousands of dollars into building non-profit sites that may also be able to pay you back in exposure, credibility, and link equity.

While at Pubcon I did an interview with Ralph Wilson about link building. I have got wayyyyy too chubby, but I think the video turned out ok outside of that. And there is even a guest appearance of Abraham Lincoln in the video!!! :)

Invesp referenced me on a top marketers list. Classic ego-bait that worked great. I got so many Twitter followers this past week that I thought someone released a Twitter spam software program or something...and then I remembered the top 100 marketers list and knew it went well. ;) It was popular enough that even follow-up post about it got lots of exposure. If you don't understand egobait, then this is a great resource to study and emulate. People love awards and anything that strokes their ego or gives them a sense of purpose or sense of community and belonging.

Simplicity as a marketing strategy...it works! I am trying to create a few new features on this site (and off it) that should support simplicity and make SEO more accessible to the average webmaster.

Debra Mastaler offers a funny post about link building with elephants and link building tips for 2009.

The RIAA is now trying to go after ISP level filtering rather than suing their customers.

According to comScore, Youtube represents 25% of Google's US search volume. They may be losing money, but renegotiation with partners on payouts and improved ad technologies will eventually turn Youtube into a huge revenue stream. Youtube holds a lot of contests and could easily turn revenues up if they can figure out a way to make Youtube ads more social and interactive. Google has always been great at public relations...if they advance their ad network to offer such services they could make their unprofitable media highly profitable.

Digg is burning through cash, but may be working to create a social ad unit:

One experiment Digg is working on, says one source close to the company, is a self service advertising product that will be somewhat similar to Google Adwords, but with a twist. The product would insert advertisements into the Digg news stream (presumably clearly marked). Where those ads end up, and how much an advertiser pays per click, would be based on user feedback. So users would have the ability to vote on advertisements in the same way they vote on stories. The better ads, as determined by Digg users, will get more prominent placement and a lower cost-per-click.

That takes public relations and social media to the next level...allowing Digg to make revenue from their attention stream, and allowing advertisers to promote content that is well aligned with user interest...rather than having advertisers set up fake accounts to do guerilla marketing.

The WSJ shared social media marketing tips and Michael Gray shared examples of how social media links turn into rankings.

While the web might have some issues here and there, online commerce is still growing like a weed, with coupon sites and Amazon.com seeing sharp year on year rises in traffic.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman explains click volume vs profitability "to generate more total profit dollars by moving higher on the page, clicks have to rise faster than per-click profit falls." He also shared this 2004 Atlas image on Google click potential by rank:

Frank Watson highlights a start up gone bankrupt due to a botched deal with Google, and presumes that the Google/Yahoo! search deal was simply to stop Microsoft's advances in the search space. Most market makers actively manipulate the markets they manage...doing so is too profitable to ignore.