If it is hard to find the answer to a question then

• it is probably easy to be one of the best answers

• those who stumble across your answer will appreciate your effort, relevancy, and knowledge

Matt Cutts recently posted some SEO tips on his site revolving around the theory that

In general, any time you look for an answer or some information and can’t find it, that should strike you as an opportunity.

You hear people say examples different ways. Some people will say to start from market edges, while others will say try to get user generated media, etc...but generally the way to make something that is hopefully useful is to be passionate and knowledgeable about a topic and then try to create something that you would want to frequently use or reference.

And while it may seem like it sucks to have to put the extra effort in to find the correct answers to certain questions, that is the exact reason that it has so much value.

There are tons of offline opportunities that will migrate online. How high is the quality of the average book as compared to the average web page? And yet due to most publishers not marketing most books very hard most of them sell fewer than 1,000 copies. Much book content will eventually be found online, but for now many people make a great living by reading various print books, condensing them down into something more palatable and publishing it as an ebook.

The web is about making knowledge accessible and selling it as credible. The more accessible your information is the easier it is to be referenced and thus perceived as credible.

Experience presents great offline to online opportunity as well. When I went to Search Engine Strategies I got an extra bonus 8 hour layover each way. One of them was because in San Diego I was required to exit a terminal, find out what terminal I was supposed to go to, find out how to get to that terminal, wait on a terminal bus, wait while the terminal bus driver allowed people to overload the bus, reorganize everyone else's luggage to make it fit good enough for the bus driver to drive, ride the length of the airport, try to get tickets for the next flight from multiple people because the machine would not work and a couple of the workers did not feel like helping me, go through security, find my gate, and get on my plane in an hour.

Now that airport runaround probably sounds a bit absurd, but the people who sold me my ticket most likely KNEW that I was going to have to leave the airport and re-enter, with a high probability of missing my flight. And if they didn't know that, then the online airline booking company which decided to find ways to aggregate and make such information readily available would have a huge advantage over competitors who did not make that type of experience related aggregated information easily accessible.

Many markets are full of people chasing money, but if you can capture experiences or are willing to share what you learn you have a distinct business advantage over people who are looking at revenue ahead of quality.

AdAge recently posted about an eMarketer study stating that changing federal drug marketing laws and the targeting the web allows that pharmaceutical companies are ramping up online spending:

More than most industries, pharmaceutical companies have wised up to the web's ability to target unique audiences with specific needs. As a result, the industry will increase online spending by about 25% this year, to $780 million, according to an eMarketer report released this week.

What I find disturbing is not that they want to spend more on marketing, but that major publishers have already taken that message to heart and have went on record stating that they are growing out their sites based specifically on the revenue potential:

For Scott Meyer, CEO of About, the decision was simple. "There's a very fast-growing market on the advertising side," Mr. Meyer said. "Health is not the only vertical we want to build out, but it's the biggest opportunity for ad revenue."

Marjorie Martin, general manager for About Health, is leading the charge in custom-branded content with exclusive advertisers. "There's huge interest from advertisers to closely associate themselves with a particular issue."

Is there any chance of objectivity if the content is built around a pre requested issue, angle, and ad creative by an exclusive advertiser? Why would the NYT go on record with this as being their official position?

Being human means we all have some inherent flaws. Some drug companies will create drugs based around masking the fact that we are human (at least temporarily). Then those drug companies will pay respected wide reaching publishers to create custom content based on spreading a marketing message they want people to find when people are actively trying to solve the problem of being human.

How much money will emotions like depression be worth to publishers? Will people be able to find accurate information if traditionally well trusted publishers are leveraging their authority to create custom advertising opportunities for the people with the greatest profit potential in spreading misinformation or a biased view of the world to a desired audience one at a time?

WebmasterWorld has a thread about scaling AdSense earnings out with site size. The thesis being pushed is that site earnings is not a linear function tied to site size. For many sites that statement is true, but part of the reason it is true is that some webmasters do not leverage feedback their current site gives them. On small sites I look at ad clicks on a per page level to see what pages are bringing in real money. I like to start new sites with at least 3 (and sometimes up to 5 or 6) global navigation sections. Each global navigational section acts as a mini site which can be expandable based on market feedback. Wherever I start ranking AND getting clicks on decently priced ads gets more attention.

Given the amount of authority a site has (or will gain due to the amount of effort I am willing to put into a project) you can sorta estimate how deep you can go and how broad your initial site focus should be. The beauty of my partitioning idea is that I do everything with includes such that it takes under a minute to add another global navigational element and it is also easy to broaden the overall site focus if it is ranking well in all the verticals you targeted and there is not much left on the depth front in the verticals you are already targeting.

Also if your site is small enough and you set up page level clickthrough tracking and track the search queries sometimes early in the morning you can see what a page is earning or what some specific queries earn. Another big indication of page level earnings for some of the more important concepts is going to be a change in overall site earnings due to a page suddenly ranking well or a page that dropped out of good grace with one or more of the major search engines.

When you branch out with new sections it is also important to give yourself the opportunity to put a foot in the water before committing to a bunch of work. For example, a friend recently started creating pages about topic + all 50 states. I told him that I would have started off with the 3 to 5 states that best fit the purpose of the site and had the most demand. Now he is 30 states into the project and a bit bored with it, and as it turns out the ad targeting on those pages is not as great as the ad targeting on the other pages, and there isn't much search traffic.

A couple of the other pages on the site are making the bulk of his earnings due to being highly commercially oriented, heavily using semantically related words, and avoiding excessive duplication.

If a site is working on limited authority it might be worth spending extra time to create a bit of link bait to help ensure you have enough authority to keep getting new pages indexed and ranking. A while ago I also made a post titled Factors Affecting AdSense Ad Clickthrough Rate and Earnings Potential.

My friend Joel recently mentioned a cool project called We Feel Fine, which tracks human emotions expressed in blog posts. After his most recent commercial shoot I think Joel feels sore (but his post is funny).

I am sure the methodology to We Feel Fine could be a bit more advanced, but what a cool idea, eh?

"I am the Center of the Universe" - random A list blogger.

An innocent fraud is a lie, but it's a lie that's more white than black. It's a lie that makes most everyone happy. It suits the purposes of the powerful because it masks the full extent of their power, and it suits the purposes of the powerless because it masks the full extent of their powerlessness.

Most of the people blogging about making money probably do not make that much money. Most people selling how to (insert your topic here) advice also fall in the same category. And they do it off the backs of people who link at them hoping to one day do the same. But in reality most people fail because it usually takes quite a bit of innovation, time, effort, risk, personality, or passion to break out of the mold, and many self-reinforcing institutions and social norms make it hard to succeed.

I think I have been learning enough about social networks, sociology, psychology, marketing, business models, authority structures, etc. that if SEO ever somehow lost its direct value that I would still be able to do well, but imagine the day that a field you studied for years was rendered useless. Would you instantly be able to change your model or pick another field? Would you keep pushing your ideas even after you knew they hurt more people than they helped (like the old LinksToYou link farm did)? Where do you draw the line? Or imagine that if many people you wanted to help never gained anything out of it other than the ability to help you grow more authoritative while they paid you with their time, attention, trust, link equity, and perhaps cash too.

Of course there is the hope that those things are not true, but the value and quality of advice you get from people (as well as how accessible their ideas are) is not just a function of what they know, but also market timing. Anyone who is doing well on the web right now was born it to some amazingly lucky timing to have found the web while it is still so nascent. Most people and/or business models that get to the top of a social structure have some idea how it works, and would never want to admit that their structure is overrated or their field has died. All that comfort, all that self reinforcing market position would be erased.

Why does Matt Cutts warn people about certain types of links? Google's authority is based on links representing relevancy. Without relevant links search has no ad based business model.

As the blogophere has become more rigidly hierarchical, not by design but as a natural consequence of hyperlinking patterns, filtering algorithms, aggregation engines, and subscription and syndication technologies, not to mention human nature, it has turned into a grand system of patronage operated - with the best of intentions, mind you - by a tiny, self-perpetuating elite.

Much like traditional media there are certain biases to blogging and web publishing.

• Old sites get more exposure than new ones.

• Controversy spreads fast.
• Lists and types of bite sized content that offer immediate reward to an attention and time scare audience typically spread further than content which requires more attention. The attention deficit most of us live with is going to constrain the types of ideas that are profitable.
• Better tracking and targeting, more social networks and meme trackers, cheaper and more efficient distribution, more feedback loops, and ad targeting engines that block certain words or categories are making it easier for the average publisher to know how profitable writing about an idea is before they even type the first key.
• If my SEO for Firefox extension was SEO for IE7 it would have got about 12 links instead of a couple thousand. Is that group think linking legitimate?

It feels weird sometimes when you come across some of the self reinforcing patterns in action...like when you predict an idea will spread for a specific reason then see it happen, or see a high ranked article from someone talking about a topic they clearly demonstrate they know nothing about, or something spreading quick as correct when it was factually incorrect garbage the day it was published.

And that is another part of the reason it is so easy to rely on your established authority. The fear of being called out (some economics students hated my post on central banks) when trying to learn something new. And thinking of all the time and effort required to get back into another self reinforcing market position.

But relevancy is a personal thing. The market for something to believe in is infinite. Those who can get in early and evangelize their field will likely profit from it long after their techniques are rendered useless or their field has died. And if you are associated with an important market then your distribution and the self reinforcing nature of search will allow you to heard in other markets as well.