A few days ago Andy Hagans sent me a link to a 1924 article titled Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men, which has a couple killer quotes in it. The first is how to succeed in business:

That criticism may be justifiable, fo I am mediocre. But the point I have in mind is this: Business and life are built upon successful mediocrity; and victory comes to companies, not through the employment of brilliant men, but through knowing how to get the most out of ordinary folks.

And the second killer quote covers how some people fail to live in reality:

You conceive a big idea, get the whole organization on tiptoes to carry it out, and then you lose interest and go off on a new tangent. You think everybody else's mind ought to function as swiftly as your own, so you are alternately overenthusiastic and over-depressed. One day you carry some poor devil up into a high mountain and make him think he has a chance to become general manager. The next day you blow him up for not doing something which you think you told him, but which you actually forgot. You are always living, in imagination, about six jumps ahead.

That second quote applies to anyone in publishing. Businesses may not need many employees to have reach, but as marketing gets more insidious you need your customers to do your selling for you.

Without clearly communicating ideas designed to spread, few common people will talk about a business, and that business will stay stuck in a niche. That is unfortunate for those business owners, because in many fields the perceived topical authority (and person getting paid well) is determined outside of the niche. Creating value is not about writing knowledge on a page. Value is determined by the actual transfer of knowledge to others.

The web is speeding up communications. As companies and politicians continue to get caught lying and abusing language, we will be more willing to forgive those who make small errors while clarifying topics and making them more accessible to us.

Even if you are a doctor or scientist you can still communicate clearly using small words. Fields dominated by complex words and prose are full of opportunity for common folks to learn them, simplify them, and share them with other common folk. Most people are common in most ways.

The Excessive Demand Problem

About 5 people a day ask me to recommend an SEO or link builder or site designer, but many of the people I have traditionally recommended

• have either quit providing services to work exclusively on their own sites, or
• have long wait lists.

Add that to the increasing complexity of SEO and increasing rates commanded by top experts, and it is hard for me to recommend any specific service provider to readers of this site. There are people offering to pay me good money to do some jobs and I simply do not have enough time to do everything I want...to the point where I probably even accidentally come off as rude to some people, just because it is so hard to keep up with 100 emails every day.

Job Boards Are Your Friend

I recently hired a blogger from the ProBlogger job boards. I was shocked by the quality of worker I was able to find (and some of the potentially great ones that I had to turn away). I also started placing help wanted ads in the SEO Book feed for things like gadget developers and link builders and got great results, but placing job ads in the main feed is a bit selfish.

With that in mind I decided to place an SEO jobs board on SEO Book.com. Currently I am not looking for people to submit advertisements offering services (the web is already full of that) but I am hoping to help people in need find someone to help them out with SEO, link building, site design, PPC, programming, etc.

Warnings

Of course due diligence is necessary when choosing who to work with, but sometimes good things start with a hello, and some of the newer hungry workers do sell their services for less than what they are worth. Don't take risks you can't afford to and never bet against your gut.

Currently the job boards here do not have a feedback module in them, but if the feature becomes popular you can expect me to add many features to help the marketplace get more efficient.

A True Story About Me

I met my second SEO customer ever on a jobs board at an SEO forum. I only charged him $300 back then to rank his site. That customer ranked #1 in Google, sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of merchandise, sent me a large Christmas bonus, became a great friend, and was the first person to review the first copy of SEO Book. He has since sold that top ranked website, but he and I have started working together on other projects. Hopefully others meet and have cool stories to share from the job boards on this site.

One theory of web marketing starts off with controlling cost. Where you try to find what works right now, and do exactly what is needed to get to the level of success you want to reach. The theory sounds valid, but...

• By the time something is common knowledge, its value and effectiveness has decreased and is heading lower.
• The markets are shifting. Tomorrow's marketplace is uglier and more competitive than today's marketplace. And it has lower margins for average players too!
• Those who invest in building real assets are going to eventually beat you. And their success is self reinforcing.

Investing & Adding Value is Better Than Being Cheap

Rather than thinking of how to control costs while growing a web business, it is better to spend that same time, energy, and focus learning how to create value and how to get people talking about how valuable your widget is. When I was new to the web I kept my reported income far lower than it should have been because I kept reinvesting in learning and marketing, even when I was heavily in debt. Some of the spend was a waste, but I know enough to compete in many markets with minimal investment.

How to be Cheap

Two months ago my mom told me she wanted to create a new blog about Diverticulitis, a topic effecting my grandma. With no warning, that afternoon I...

• learned how to spell the word Diverticulitis (2 minutes)
• used WordTracker's free keyword research tool (2 minutes)
• bought my mom a $6 domain at GoDaddy (2 minutes)
• spent 5 minutes aligning the DNS, hosting her site at Dreamhost, which allows unlimited sites to a $7 a month account. I recently created a 5 year account for a friend and only spent $300 for 5 years of hosting!
• set my mom up with a default Blogger template (5 minutes)
• created a cheesy logo (that took me 5 minutes to make using low end $50 logo design software I bought years ago)
• modified the CSS file to match the logo (5 minutes)

My mom wrote 10 blog posts that took her ~ 5 to 10 minutes each, and a week later I spent 5 minutes and ~ $80 submitting it to a couple directories.

A few months ago I bought a domain name for $2,500. Last month I was offered $17,500 for the domain, and not too long ago the same guy paid over twice that for a similar but worse name. If he offered me that much I might have sold, but unsolicited offers are typically on the low side.

Today I was sent an unsolicited $500 offer for my mom's new site. Why? Because the site already ranks in Yahoo and Microsoft. If I spend a few hundred more the site will likely compete in Google too. My marketing knowledge was expensive to acquire, but everything else was good enough to compete for cheap or free (at least in that market at this moment in time).

The reason this story is remarkable is because people were willing to buy such a small site when it was so new. In two months the site was conceived, created, competing, ranked, and someone already made an offer on it. Two months ago that same domain name was $6.

Everything is Becoming a Commodity

It started with the average travel broker, then it hit classified ads and regional monopolies like newspapers, and it is working its way toward your industry. Just look at all the above web industries listed that are free or nearly free. Due to more efficient markets, automation, outsourcing, and the need to compete on an open marketplace, the margins for almost everything needed to compete on the web are heading toward zero.

My mom's new site competes on about $100 of investment, but in a year or two that domain name might have cost $500, and a couple more competitors entering the field might have pushed the marketing costs to $1,000. A year or two later the domain name might have been $2,000 and the marketing costs might be $10,000.

Don't Become a Commodity

The three solutions to the commodity issue are

• use new technologies to create and publish the DIY tools and information that will commoditize other businesses competing in your space
• build your knowledge in related fields that interest you, such that you can add value to multiple points on the value chain. Google is search + ads + documents + hosting + syndication + etc etc etc. I know a bit about SEO + SEM + marketing + branding + conversion + domaining + etc etc etc.
• Invest to build your awareness and brand (build mindshare and distribution) to where you are not considered a commodity. Create enough of an abundance of demand that you chose who you work with.

Unless somebody is talking about you or consuming your stuff right now you are becoming a commodity, although you may not realize it yet.

If your Google AdWords quality score is too low, Google will allow you to compete in the auction with reasonable ad pricing ONLY if you give them your conversion data:

The arguement from my representative was that your pages are terrible so if we can’t see how well you convert our users then we will need you to pay $10.00 per click to make up for your low QS (my average keyword price was $2.75 at the time). That of course would have put me out of business.

Once I caved and allowed them to snoop on my conversions they allowed me to keep buying at or near my original keyword price.

If your copyright content is being uploaded to YouTube, Google will protect you if you upload your copyright content to Google:

I see a monetization in the works.

a) All of the big companies will make the effort to supply Youtube with good qualities of their videos. Movies, Shows etc.
b) YouTube gathers all that stuff, and builds the largest database of top quality videos.
c) Youtube offers the media companies to enter into a partnership. “Hey guys, you already have the stuff uploaded…why not sell the premium content to our millions of users?

If people are scraping and stealing your content Google will eventually allow you to rank for your own work if you sign up with Google Webmaster Central and register your copyright work.

After all your sites are registered with Google, how easy will it be for them to force compliance on smaller webmasters? Given the indiscriminate attitude exhibited when Google recently hand edited PageRank scores, it seems there is good reason to not register with the borg.

Keyword Density vs Conversion Oriented Content

• Keyword density as a measure of relevancy is at best limited. If pages have too high of a keyword density and are too focused they may have suppressed rankings or may get filtered out of the search results, plus dense copy does not read well, does not convert well, and nobody will link at it.
• If your content is emotionally charged then it does not need to be as optimized to rank well. If people respond to your content by linking at your site then you gain authority and will rank better.
• Conversion rates and value per customer are far more important than keyword density. If your content converts you can always afford to buy traffic and/or sign up affiliates.
• Great usability is a key to converting. Read Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think if you are new to the concept of usability. Make sure your pages are structured with headers, subheaders, and bulleted lists.
• You should actively drive people toward conversion using text links in your content. Cleanly segment the page into small easy to read chunks using headings, subheadings, and bulleted lists to make the page easy to scan. Use textual formatting and other visual cues to call out the different audiences or the different reasons people would buy your product or service. Dan Thies does a great job of this on his SEO Research Labs website.

Setting a Baseline

• Use web analytics tools to track your traffic sources AND what keywords are converting.
• Work on improving on page optimization and conversion rates of your most important pages first.
• Ensure you have some trusted quality inbound links. Start with a few trusted directories if you are starting from scratch. No matter how much on page SEO you do, you are not going to get much exposure or rank for competitive terms until AFTER you have some trusted inbound links.

Mixing Things Up

• Search for your keywords on Google and look at the text from top ranking pages. They are defining the local language set. Make sure you include some of the words and phrases that are common in those pages.
• Use tools like Quintura and Wordtracker to find modifiers to include in your page. After you are done optimizing the page, you can enter your URL in the Google AdWords keyword tool to see what they think your page is about. If they do not select the right topics that means they might not be certain what your page is about.
• Mix up the order of words and phrases in your page. If your page title uses farm insurance in it, then include something like insurance for farmers in your h1 heading. Also mix up how you use phrases throughout your page where it makes sense, but stay clear of using language that doesn't make sense, like butter peanut.
• Instead of paginating, it typically makes more sense to keep some pages longer in nature. Glossary pages and other text heavy pages rank for a wide array of keyword phrases. Using various word counts depending on sales needs, content requirements, and topic selection is a better strategy than writing every page to match a specific arbitrary length.