Top Intersection: Most of these people are not available for traditional client consulting projects because they simply lack the time needed to do them and run many successful projects of their own.

Right Intersection: The person who is available and under-priced quickly gets overworked. I have experienced this with multiple contractors in other fields where they would offer killer services and be surprisingly affordable and fast...and then on the next project they would disappear.

The guy who made the logo for SEO Book back in early 2004 was probably the most talented and most unreliable logo designer I have ever worked with. Sometimes he would be fast, sometimes he would be slow, and sometimes I would pay him and get no response. I wanted the guy to become more successful and reliable so much so that I offered him tons of free marketing so long as he would be available for the boatload of work I was going to send him. He said sure. Before beginning that marketing campaign I asked him if he was ready and got no response. ;)

And last year there was a designer/developer that had amazing skills. We hired him full time and it took him 2 months to make a website design. There are a lot of people in the world who are talented at what they do, but just are not skilled at business and/or do not approach their business like a business.

Left Intersection: There are lots of people who are good at sales who have no substance. If an SEO firm contacts you out of the blue (via tele-spamming or email spam) that is a good hint that they have more salesmen on staff than they have practitioners. If SEO is bolted on as a package for cheap then it is usually a scam.

It is nearly impossible to have enough time to study a fast changing craft, brand yourself as an expert in the space, and yet still find time available for doing consulting. It is not hard to do any 2 of the 3...but all 3 is brutally tough. In consulting so long as you have popularity you do not need much knowledge, as some well known SEOs have proved. But knowledge without popularity can be hard to monetize effectively.

Even if you are pretty decent at sales and have a strong brand it is hard to make an SEO services business model scale without watering it down. And watering down is rarely a solution because it leads to churn.

• WebSourced at one point was the largest SEO firm, but closed abruptly, largely because their clients were not getting any value.
• The guy who speaks at 40 SEO conferences a year does little SEO work...his job is to generate leads for the firm where an intern can work on the project. And the projects that the interns work on are rarely top shelf because you often pay expert rates while getting automated and systemized mystery meat services from someone new to the market.
• Some of the smallest clients tend to be the most demanding, even while paying crumbs. And Google/the search market, which is becoming more corporate, is making it harder and more expensive to service such clients profitably.
• Corporate client projects which at first may seem like mega-paydays still perform poorly when compared against putting the equivalent effort into growing your publishing projects.
• Rather than watering down we have decided that scarcity and value are a better strategy. But that is still a work in progress. This site is about 90% of my work time, had a 5 year head start on most of our other publishing efforts, and yet the SEO industry is so hard to monetize (unless you use loads of hype) that this site earns a minority of our income. As we get better at sales we can try to increase earnings...but lately we have just been pushing more on what is working and maintaining this site's quality for existing members (and closing it off to growth) while putting a bit more effort into the higher yielding projects.

SEO came about soon after the advent of the web crawler. The commercial imperative was obvious - where there was web traffic, there was money to be made. Positioning a page first in the engines was pretty much a licence to print money.

Still is, of course.

Throughout the history of search and SEO, the predominant metaphor of the web has been one borrowed partly from publishing - the page - and partly from computer science - the domain. A domain contains pages. A domain is a silo. A domain has clear borders.

The Search Metaphor

Search forces quite a different metaphor on the web.

Search is a connector between a person and a page. Search subverts the domain structure because the visitor can dive in at the page level. In this respect, all pages become a part of the much bigger silo. In 2009, that silo is Google.

Search also strives to be the ultimate answer engine - the mind of God. Got a question? Google it. Google will provide the answers.

But search is not quite there yet. Search still returns pages - the user still digs through the page to find the answer.

But for how long?

The Slow Unraveling Of The Page Unit

Consider social media. Is a page the basic unit of Twitter? No, it's the sentence. How about Youtube? The video. Social networks? The person. All can be extracted, re-purposed and dis-intermediated without losing meaning.

Consider the semantic web:

Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Finnish word for "monkey", reserving a library book, and searching for a low price for a DVD. However, acomputer cannot accomplish the same tasks without human direction because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing, and combining information on the web

What happens when the machine "understands" the query enough to provide a direct answer to a question, as opposed to returning a list of pages?

Black Clouds On The Content Producer Horizon, Or Opportunity?

In a recent Techcrunch interview, Eric Schmidt said something rather telling:

So I don't know how to characterize the next 10 years except to say that we'll get to the point - the long-term goal is to be able to give you one answer, which is exactly the right answer over time.

Perhaps he was quoted out of context, but that strikes me as an absurd thing to say. As if there is ever one "right" answer. Well, I guess there is if you live in some Orwellian nightmare.

More importantly, if this is where Google intend to be in ten years time, then where does this leave content producers? If Google provides "the answer", why would anyone click-thru and visit a page? Conversely, why would anyone let Google crawl their content if Google's aim is to disintermediate the producer from their content? Johnon had an excellent post on this topic.

Recently, Google released rich snippets, a feature whereby you markup you data to suit Google's display criteria.

Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance.

If the answer is "rich" enough, I guess the user doesn't even need to visit your page. Perhaps the user will get distracted by the Adwords listings, instead ;)

If Google aims to extract information and keep the visitor on Google, rather than just acting as a conduit between visitor and page, then this does not bode well for content producers.

This brings up the burning "Newspaper vs Google" argument. "How", the newspapers argue, "can we make money if Google undermines our revenue model? Ultimately, this is a question all content producers must face. Just ask those in the music industry.

Seemingly in response, Google is planning to roll out micropayments in the next year:

Google is planning to roll out a system of micropayments within the next year and hopes that newspapers will use it as they look for new ways to charge users for their content.

The question is, will micropayments and web advertising be enough to pay the bills, especially when it comes to expensive, high-risk media production, such as television and movies:

Grade’s criticisms were echoed in October by C4 chief executive Andy Duncan, who said Google had failed to invest in UK content creation. “Google takes more ad revenue out of the UK than ITV makes and it isn’t regulated. It isn’t fair [that] it’s not reinvesting that back into content and independent film production companies in the UK,” said Duncan.

Content producers are posting losses, whilst Google continues to post massive profits. What happens if content isn't worth producing anymore? What happens when revenue falls below the cost of production? Or perhaps content will still be economic, but only if production quality is sacrificed? Is it really just a case of fat media producers cutting bloated production costs?

What is Google's long term strategy as far as content producers are concerned? Besides PR fluffery, they never really say.

It's Not All Bleak

Of course, if content producers really did get disintermediated to the point where content production wasn't worth doing, Google may well collapse soon after. What would there be left to search? Wikipedia?

Where would the "answers" come from? Who would fund "answer provision"? Sufficient income must flow to the content producers, but the question still remains "how"?

And I don't really think the page is going away. The page has served humans well for thousands of years as a container of information. But if the information on pages can be aggregated in such a way that users don't need to visit the source page, where does this leave content producers? Where does this leave SEOs?

In 2009, SEO plays fall into three distinct categories.

• Agency model: people offer services to others for a fee.
• Affiliate model: people gather traffic and funnel it somewhere else for a performance fee.
• Content model: people generate content and make money off advertising.

The last model is, I'm guessing, is one a lot of SEOs will pursue. Many do so now.

Check this out:

Demand Media operates based on a simple formula for success on the Web: create a ton of niche, mostly uninspired content targeted to search engines, then make it viral through social software. Demand Media has been heavily funded to carry out that mission, to the tune of $355 million. So yes, brute force - quantity of content + money/power - works more often than we'd like to think on the Web.

The aggregator wields most of the power in this relationship, unless the publisher can lock in an audience who will by-pass the aggregator.

Is Dis-intermediation Over-Rated?

On the flip-side, John Battelle argued a few years back that search dis-intermediation is overrated.

Those who fear disintermediation should in fact be afraid of irrelevance -- disintermediation is just another way of saying that you've become irrelevant to your customers. It doesn't mean there isn't a customer, or middlemen of some sort who service that customer, or that the core proposition of your business has disappeared. It just means you're in a bit of a rut, and as much as you might pine for the past, it's probably time to rethink things before it's too late.

He reasons that writers can go outside the traditional silos:

And what of the role of publisher or content creator? Increasingly, those who have the ability to create great media can get pretty far without attaching themselves to the traditional indentured servitude of a publisher, label or network. Writers, for example, are finding their own voices outside the strictures of magazines and newspaper publishers. Blogs like Boing Boing, Daily Kos and Cool Tools are drawing millions of readers each month, and their overhead is the cost of a high-speed Internet line.

However, what they're actually doing is jumping out of one silo and into another. Google is the master silo in this scenario.

So, what do you think? what is the role of SEO in the future? Will it be more about making connections, and a less about making pages? Will the page itself be subverted? Have Google gone moved beyond the idea of "organizing the world's information"?

You would either have to be new to the industry or under a rock to not notice how the SEO industry has become more corporate over the past 3 or 4 years. The trend has been slow and gradual with many small steps, but I thought it would be a good idea to try to put the pieces together. What started off as a 5 minute project took a couple hours. I hope you like it! If you are a creative thinker you should be able to get a number of actionable ideas by thinking about how such trends will change your market.

Warning: this image is big! ~ 225KB

http://www.seobook.com/images/corporate-seo.gif

This is sorta a high level document which looks at many existing and emerging trends and how they combine to change the landscape. A lot of small businesses and small online publishers are feeling the following trend

In a recent comment on a blog post about link buying Google's Matt Cutts stated:

Personally, I believe the reason that so many people come to Google is that for the last decade, we’ve worked really hard to protect our users and return the best search results. When other search engines showed pop-up ads, Google didn’t. When every other major search engine offered pay-for-inclusion into their search results, Google didn’t. And Google has taken strong action to protect our users from spam, malware, and poor-quality sites. I think part of Google’s lead (and brand loyalty) in the search space is because we’ve taken strong action to protect our users.

Sure I think they try to protect people (and do a good job), but I never really see the bits that are inaccessible, so I don't know what I am missing. In time I do wonder if you could have too much media consolidation due to favorable reviews of "too big to fail" brand companies while smaller competitors are flushed away for using similar marketing techniques.

To the best of my ability in the above linked image I tried to explain why SEO outing is bad in how it influences the entire search engine optimization, search, and online media ecosystems. If I had to shorten it down to 3 points, those would be...

1. Outing limits media diversity. Media plurality is important, but it is something that Eric Schmidt doesn't get. And it is often the independent types who have the editorial freedom that enables them to highlight major fraud. Some media channels are so driven by advertiser interests that they fire employees who dare to mention risks in advertiser's products. (And I would rather pay a bit more to not drink poisoned milk!)
2. Outing harms small businesses while corporatizing the web. Historically most economic innovation has come from smaller companies. Microsoft was once a small company. And so was Google. ;)
3. Outing drives down the earning potentials of many SEOs and will eventually force many independent SEOs into low paying in-house SEO jobs. Most societies operate on a debt-based money system where debt slavery controls many decisions. The ability to be self-employed, do what your passionate about, and operate outside of that system should be cherished by anyone lucky enough to not have a boss.

Google's Eric Schmidt claims that "brands are how you sort out the cesspool." Brands take money to build, but they are bought and sold just like anything else - only they require more capital and/or more insider connections to buy.

You know those damn bankers who bankrupted their own companies through the use of leverage and predatory lending? And then the same people lied, cheated, and looted trillions of Dollars from United States tax payers to save their companies (and pay their bonuses)?

Well they are not only leading media advertisers, but they now own a HUGE chunk of the traditional media sphere:

One wonders why Goldman and JPM were so eager to provide "rescue" financings to virtually the entire distressed media space: both companies knew too well that sooner or later they would end up with full equity control over essentially the most coveted industry: thousands of TV stations, radio channels, newspaper and magazines. If you thought the media propaganda was unbearable now, just wait.

Unbelievable Stupidity

When I was in the military they would run these stupid drill where they would try to create as much stress and chaos as possible in a short burst of time, find someone who makes an error, and chastise them for it. That killed morale. So to make up for declining morale they decided to run more frequent test and drills. And thus being an enlisted nuclear power sailor in the US Navy is a horrible life that I wish on nobody.

At one point in time I was on watch when a new kid made a mistake during maintenance that killed all electrical power on the submarine. Later we had a discovery meeting where we found out what went wrong. Having been 5 feet from the maintenance, I knew that the kid's boss came over and told him "remember to trip close trip the breaker when maintenance is done." The kid listened to that wonderful tip and turned the turbine generator into a turbine motor.

But since the new kid was dumb enough to listen to the bad advice he took all the shelling and blame. It was as simple as that, but even the captain of the boat (along with everyone in the chain of command - including the guy who gave the stupid tip) were together in a huge group insult fest where they tried to one up each other insulting the new guy. It lasted for like an hour and a half and the lines were so bad that things like do you realize how stupid you are? were said to that kid. I thought that if the meeting lasted another 5 minutes they were going to start chastising him with questions like do you realize how fat you are?

It got so bad that the electricians had to set up a work area to change a light bulb, making each bulb about a half hour process. But since I wasn't an electrician (I was in reactor controls) I could go ahead and change the light bulbs in about 30 seconds each. But if I wasn't helpful to the next division what took me a half hour would have took them about a whole day. The solution to every problem is closer scrutiny, more testing, and more baby sitting.

On the same boat the leaders had us take out the flooring railing in the engine room to have them repainted. This flooring railing was never meant to come off and would not fit out of the boat's escape hatch. BUT someone was stupid and said it must be done. And so there we were using a hacksaw to chop up the floor supports (ruining their structural integrity and making the submarine far noisier and less safe in the process) so the floor supports could be freshly painted and look slightly better.

If you want to see a horribly run organization full of miserable people put them in a confined high stress environment where no matter how shitty they make someone else's life, they get no market feedback or pain for coming up with an endless array of stupid ideas.

The military is a rat testing lab.

You can learn a lot about yourself, what drives you, how to succeed, and how to fail by putting yourself through such a miserable experience...though I would not recommend it to anyone smart enough to be reading this blog right now! ;)

What Drives You?

I respond well to positive feedback and I simply shut down from negative feedback. One of the hardest things I have struggled with is someone I know giving me the wrong kinds of motivation. XYZ knows less than you, works less, sells far inferior products, and makes more so you must be screwing up.

This is true of a lot of direct marketer types who don't give a crap about the success of their customers but are willing to hype anything and everything they can put their name on - even if they make false promises and don't know what they are selling. But if you care about the quality of your product, use what you make, and actually provide real customer service you can't compete on hype without pulling in a lot of people who were not worth having as customers.

In the short run you can't compete with the top line numbers (especially the inflated ones before the affiliate commissions and the huge number of refunds & chargebacks associated with people realizing they bought into a scam), but after a decade of solid effort you can compete with the scammers on earnings (plus many of them get flushed out of the market, constantly replaced by a new breed). But are your goals short term or long term? What are your goals? What drives you? Is it money?

Money in Context

Money is just a tool for exchange. If it is your sole motivation you will end up losing motivation quickly. And as long as you are not printing the money supply and do not have lobbyists working CONgress for funds, it will almost universally hold true that someone dumber than you who doesn't work near as hard will earn more money. But it is not a relevant mindset that will lead to anything productive with your life. What good is money if chasing it makes you miserable?

After reaching a certain level of success an additional dollar of income doesn't provide much additional marginal utility and a singular focus on it can harm other aspects of your life. Money can buy a bit of happiness, but it can't buy a lot of it. And we often spend it incorrectly.

The problem isn’t money, it’s us. For deep-seated psychological reasons, when it comes to spending money, we tend to value goods over experiences, ourselves over others, things over people. When it comes to happiness, none of these decisions are right: The spending that make us happy, it turns out, is often spending where the money vanishes and leaves something ineffable in its place.

Measuring Success

In time smart efforts (combined with a bit of luck and a lot of learning) produce results. So long as you are honest even dumb or failed efforts produce wisdom. But you can't be #1 at everything.

You have to decide what you view as success and stick to comparing yourself against only yourself, or else you will get burned out, singularly focusing on an arbitrary goal while your health and happiness erode. Until the past week I basically had chronic back pain which is just now lifted and I feel like a kid again. That was only made possible because I decided to temporarily close off the site to new members to make enough time for exercise. And it is already working. Paying customers are still getting great customer service, but for now I am not stuck doing as much admin stuff as new members cycle in and out of the site. That leaves a little bit of time for sanity, which I hear is important. ;)

Giving Praise

• If a person who is gifted but lazy is praised they will just become more lazy and arrogant and worthless, feeling they deserve the world even if they did nothing to earn it.
• If a person is doing their best and you keep telling them it is never good enough (like the Navy ORSE testing regime) you are just going to make them miserable, shut them down, beat them into submission, and kill their happiness. Such policies kill motivation and drive away talent.

You shouldn't praise the results, but praise the right kind of effort:

Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.

Social Clustering

Much like you are what you eat, many of your good and bad traits are driven by (and drive) the people who are in close proximity:

When a Framingham resident became obese, his or her friends were 57 percent more likely to become obese, too. Even more astonishing to Christakis and Fowler was the fact that the effect didn’t stop there. In fact, it appeared to skip links. A Framingham resident was roughly 20 percent more likely to become obese if the friend of a friend became obese — even if the connecting friend didn’t put on a single pound. Indeed, a person’s risk of obesity went up about 10 percent even if a friend of a friend of a friend gained weight.

So if you are living an unbalanced lifestyle and sacrifice other aspects of your life for a singular (and often short-sighted) view of success, it will likely harm you AND the people around you.

The Frequent Failures of Self-Help Groups

Many well established organizations built around causing change eventually become stuck in their ways, fearing change and becoming yet another bureaucratic institution. How much harder is it to create lasting change that creates growth if they bond is built around a weakness?

When people go to support groups they often create bonds around their weaknesses with others who share the same weaknesses. Perhaps this makes the weakness become more ingrained in their identity, makes it seem more normal, and makes it harder to change. If this is true then perhaps the support groups that work are those based around doing something positive, rather than those based around not doing something negative.

And, from an online publishing perspective, if you write about having a specific personal problem (not being able to quit smoking, being overweight, etc.) then that can attract people with similar flaws into your life...recalibrating your sense of normal and making it harder to change the behaviors which create the undesirable results. It is no wonder that most sites in some such self-help categories are scams - anyone who legitimately cares often surrounds themselves with negative influences - making it harder to build and maintain lasting change.

The more you try to erase me, the more that I appear.

Synthetic Happiness

Dan Gilbert has a great talk about how we can synthetically create the happiness that we seek. If our fears or ambitions are not limited then it is hard to be sustainably happy. But by overcoming our fears and limiting our ambitions it is much easier to be happy sustainably.

Do You Realize How Lucky You Are?

Speaking of happiness, I saw the following video on Kevin Kelly's blog, which really helped add perspective.

Now that I have enough spare time to think and grow I see some of the errors in my ways from as little as a month ago. Life is great :)

BTW, this free Clive Thompson article on how social networks work is probably the best marketing article I have read in the past year. It is 10 pages, but well worth the price of admission.

Remember how the news media wanted Google to come riding to the rescue and save them, and their failing business model?

Well, Google might have found a way.

This should be of huge interest to anyone who produces content on the web.

IF

...it comes off.

Micropayments

Google is planning to roll out a system of micropayments within the next year. Micropayments, as the name implies, are small payments - a cent or even a fraction of a cent - and the idea is that micropayments can be used to pay for accessing web content.

Google sent a paid content proposal to the Newspaper Association of America outlining their ideas. Micropayments will be an extension of Google Checkout, Google's PayPal competitor.

While currently in the early planning stages, micropayments will be a payment vehicle available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year,” Google wrote. “The idea is to allow viable payments of a penny to several dollars by aggregating purchases across merchants and over time.”

Micropayments are not a new idea, of course. People have been suggesting micropayments will be the next big thing for quite a while now. Jakob Neilsen got it rather wrong in 1998:

I predict that most sites that are not financed through traditional product sales will move to micropayments in less than two years. Users should be willing to pay, say, one cent per Web page in return for getting quality content and an optimal user experience with less intrusive ads. Once users pay for the pages, then they get to be the site's customers, and the site will design to satisfy the users' needs and not the advertisers' needs."

Will Google be the first company to make micropayments work? It remains to be seen, but if they do, this will be the biggest game-changer on the web since PPC.

The Decline Of News

The news industry have been howling as their outdated business model falls apart. Their days of running regional oligopolies are fast coming to end, eroded by the ubiquitous web and the low cost of online publishing. The media is fueled by advertising, and as their readership fragments, the value to advertisers drops.

But what happens if 100% of a newspapers revenue came directly their readership? Micropayments may make this possible.

The big question is: who would pay for the garbage the media serves up? Why should we pay for regurgitated press releases and stories about celebrities shopping expeditions?

Micropayments could help increase the quality of news. Paid news outlets, like STRATFOR charge $349 for annual membership. How can they do this? By providing a level of analysis and research you don't get from mainstream media. Clearly some people are prepared to pay for news that isn't driven by advertisers and the lowest common denominator.

However, the subscription price is still a barrier for most. But what if micropayments, by introducing economies of scale, made it possible to get quality news, analysis and content for a few cents a week? What happens when the price is so low you barely even notice you are paying it?

The scale of the web, plus the tiny charging increments, could be a game changer. And not just for news. This opportunity applies to anyone in the web content business.

How Would This Work?

Nielsen may have got the timing wrong, but he had some good ideas about how a micro-payment system should work:

A true micropayment system would operate invisibly and simply accumulate charges on the user's monthly bill without an explicit confirmation for every click. That's exactly how electricity bills and long-distance telephone bills work. True, people wouldn't make many long-distance calls if they first had to discuss the fee with an operator (though we certainly made calls back when we had to talk to a long-distance operator and acknowledge charges for each call). In any case, telephone companies now simply add up the calls and put them all on a single bill. Intellectually, you know that it costs money to use the phone and turn on a light, but if you want to talk to somebody, you pick up the phone. And if the room is too dark, you switch on the light. You don't go out to the meter every few minutes to check on your electricity bill.

A micro-payment system should be quite different from existing payment systems. You won't be asked to fill out your details each time. Rather, it would be as simple as a click of a button, and tracking and billing would happen in the background.

Google Extends Their Reach

With Adsense, Google cleverly figured out a way to click the ticket on content it didn't own or produce.

The problem with Adsense is that it works best when placed on content heavily geared towards commerce. Micropayments opens up a business model for other types of content, content that is not easily aligned with a commercial imperative.

Imagine the potential for high quality, non-commercial content. Imagine the potential for channels like YouTube. On demand television and movies for a few cents. With micropayments, the volume of content Google could click the ticket on gets much, much bigger.

But the big question remains....

Will users pay the price?

What do you think?

Poscript by Aaron: Clay Shirky published an article in 2003 about fame vs fortune & micropayments. And, while I have generally been skeptical about micropayments, we recently had an interesting thread about this topic in the forums that changed my perspectives of the topic.