How do you know when to trust someone?

When talking face to face motive is not always easy to judge, but it is usually a bit easier than it is over the web.

Hucksters & Spammers:
Golden rule #1 for me is if you are so good at what you do there is no reason for you to be wasting your time cold calling me.

If you waste my time in any way: bulk email, cold call, random pop up, etc there is no way in hell I want to do business with you. But beyond that it gets a bit harder:

Sales Hype:

• Tons of affiliates openly endorse crap. They lie about how good something is to make a commission. From what I have seen the single hardest part of being an affiliate marketer is finding someone who wants to give honest advice.

• Many testimonials are fake or favors for friends.
• I could probably at least double my conversions by putting a bit more hype in the sales letter, but I feel guilty being promotional at all. Most of the parts of my sales letter which are hype sounding were wrote by someone else. Some sales letters are litterally 40 pages long.
• I write a 5 start press release for customers, but usually write a 3 star one for myself.

Selling Things:

• Credit card fraud is huge. Sometimes not only is the price refunded, but your account can be subject to significant fees.

• Many people sleezeballs buy products and then ask for a refund within the first minute.
• One of the people who said my ebook was not a fit for them last June just asked me if they could join my affiliate program. Why would you want to sell something you do not like? Certainly there is at least a little bit of dishonesty hidden somewhere in there. But I suppose that is the standard on the web.
• Others lie to your credit card processor, saying they never got a product and tried to contact you. Some of which even subscribe to your updates and ask why they are not getting updates after getting refunds.
• Rarely do people who want a refund give a single reason they are displeased.
• Multiple thoughtful people have copied my ebook and placed it on their site for free.
• You can place electronic products or other things in formats to make it harder to steal, at the cost of inconveniencing your legitimate customers. I have not done that yet, but as I grow older and less idealistic it becomes easier to see why so many people do.

Helping Friends:

• I have helped people promote products and ideas only to later find out that defending them was stupid because their actions were short sighted and driven by greed.
  • Even shittier of them, while I was actively trying to help them, they were planning on turning the project into crap and did not tell me.

  • Instead of creating a legitimate business model they now email spam for a living.
• Other friends pitch a great idea. You help promote it as a partner and then they do stupid short sighted things to destroy the value.
• Sometimes you can write a testimonial only to find out that other market forces or a lack of updating can make your testimonial quickly outdated.
• I tried to lend a ton of help and credibility to a friend and now they make the bulk of their living off blog spam. One of my friends had workers manually comment spamming one of my blogs. Not that blog spamming is entirely wrong, but when it is easily traceable is it entirely stupid.
• You can help others by creating add on promotional guides for your products only to find them write the same price on their site and write the verbiage in their sales copy as though that bonus is the same or better than your main product. Fairly short sighted IMHO.
• Some friends later are the first to laugh if you or your site fails to meet their expectations in any way. I have not had this happen to me much, but have seen it over and over again. Not that I am generally friends there, but the IHY forums is usually cutting edge in this category.
• If you help out charities you get many requests that start with something like "My cousin goes to church once every other week..." Can you give me your business model free?

Community Sites:

• There are a ton of systems set up to automatically spam social networks. The better the network the harder some of them will try to spam. Some are automated, some are manual.

• Some of the people who work hard to help others build communities are later burned by the same machines they helped build.
• It is hard to scale labors of love into profitable business models without offending people.
• If you have a profitable business model and are opinionated some people like to judge you and use the forums or other community sites to market hate messages. It is far easier to make ludicrous statements over the web. Flame wars are a natural part of broken social software.

Various SEO / SEM Related Problems:

• Link relationships are based on trust. Most link trade offers are bogus and / or automated.

• Sometimes even paying for a link in a directory is an issue of trusting the owner not to sleeze out their directory, which is counter the the stream many current directories are swimming.
• from 10 days ago, many other problems in BadRank & the Ugly Side of SEO

For one reason or another I think many sites and many people are afraid to give people something they can trust. Something they can believe in. From what I have seen Danny Sullivan seems to be one of few unifying forces / people in this industry.

How do you breed trust? How do you know who you can trust? Are there some books I should read? Am I screwing up by reading books and so many web pages? etc etc etc?

On a related note my favorite T shirt designer just put his limited edition shirts online. YIPPIE! Please look through his collection and the first person who comments below that they want one gets one. Comment below and send me an email with your sizing and shipping details.

So a new Pope was elected. I do not follow religion much, but I do offer legitimate charities my ebook free.

A friend of mine does a good amount of link building and runs a few topical blogs.

One of his recent blogs was featured in AOL, BBC, Yahoo!, CNN, MSNBC, Salon, Guardian Unlimited, etc etc etc

He created a blog about the Pope, which was a unique idea when he did it. Many people could do well to write about their interests even if they do not have a business model in mind. Odds are if you enjoy the topic it will show in your writing and it will not seem like work.

Not every site has to make money. Some provide valuable services or build social currency. From that sometimes you can make profits in other ways, or maybe only profit from a spiritual front.

Pope Benedict XVI was just elected, and no doubt if Andy keeps enjoying and working as hard as he has been he will continue to have a voice in that space.

302 Redirects:
Claus over at ThreadWatch is reporting Google may have solved their problem.

Tivo:
TiVo is in talks with Google and Yahoo over a possible deal aimed at bridging television and the web. The deal would likely be exclusive, which means whoever partners with Tivo may get stuck overpaying if a bidding war ensues.

Interview:
Of me. I could have answered a couple questions better. Interviewing people is an exceptionally easy way to build links.

It is fairly rare that marketers turn down an interview opportunity if you approach them nicely.

SEO Friendly Affiliate Programs:
May not be so friendly if you grow your link popularity too quickly.

Ethical SEO:
I got this great comment via email:

I think when people talk about ethics in business they are concerned about someone cutting into their profits or threatening their profits. It has nothing to do with human rights or suffering (which is wrong). Either way, business people will continue to talk about ethics all day - even while they own sweat shops - because sweat shops have very little to do with ethics.

That comment was the foundation for a quick article I just jotted down. Please leave comments and hate mail below. :)

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia (Nasdaq:MACR) in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion.full release
Not entirely search related, but MacroMedia DreamWeaver & Adobe GoLive are two of the more popular web design software programs on the market. Additionally Adobe created PDF, PhotoShop, and Illustrator. MacroMedia has Flash and ColdFusion.

MacroMedia was also one of the first large software companies to have many employees blog about their work and products.

random tidbit: My old roommate's girlfriend used to work as the secretary for Allaire before MacroMedia bought them out.

Currently Adobe PDF is in a partnership to have their PDF search done with Yahoo! Search. According to the Wall Street Journal the combined Adobe / MacroMedia company looks to be taking on MicroSoft on many fronts.

Mr. Chizen, who took over as chief executive in 2000, has his sights on a larger business-software market, built around Adobe's document-management capabilities. Adobe's sales of such document-management servers were only about $100 million last year, but the company has revamped its salesforce and marketing efforts to push those products, which carry price tags of $50,000 and more.

Documents are the lifeblood of business and governments, and the ability to secure them, sign them and let everybody view them with the free Reader gives Adobe a major head start, he says. "The only other vendor that has that kind of penetration is Microsoft," Mr. Warzecha said.

Macromedia has been working to build its business selling multimedia tools to corporations and media companies. It wants to make Flash the underlying technology to enable users to work with a broad range of applications and devices, such as cellphones, in which small screens and the lack of a full keyboard present special challenges.

In Japan, for example, Macromedia says Flash is used by 60% of the more than 4,000 content suppliers for NTT DoCoMo, Japan's top mobile carrier. Macromedia predicts that in five years, 75% of mobile phones sold will have multimedia capabilities.

Could MicroSoft be fighting on too many fronts?

Transparent Business Model:
About.com overlapping ads. Ads actually cover the words in the articles. How annoying. And worthless.

The average surfer is not going to be able to read that article. The average webmaster is not going to link to that content. Who the hell is that article for?

Self Publishing:

• Jason Fried asks about self publishing

• Tim O'Reilly chimes in, and also referenced this New Yorker article.
• The Self-Publishing Manual was recommended in the thread
• Lulu is a well known print on demand service.

Gmail Feeds?
Evehead noticed a feed in his Gmail.

Google Hype:
Google founders only take $1 in pay this year.

No Mamma NO!!!
Copernick says no to being purchased by Mamma.com due to government probes. Mamma.com has become a day trading favorite and is currently out of season on prettymuch all ends.

Ranking a New Site in Google?
can suck.

Not Worth Optimizing:
another article talking about why it is not worth performing SEO services for many people.
also covered here here and here

As a person who gets many inqueries I see many many many prospective clients want $100,000 of results on a $300 spend. If that opportunity was worth doing it would be just as easy to become an affiliate of a competing site, spend $1,000 to throw up your own site, and make $5,000 a month on the same work without needing to deal with clients.

Marketing SEO Services:
Many SEOs who sell SEO services remain somewhat faceless on the web, which is a huge mistake IMHO. I have yet to find a single type of marketing which worked as fast at driving SEO sales as writing and syndicating an article can.

The trick to doing well is to simply be a good salesmen on the phone and ensure your audience is more ignorant than you are. While Stuntdubl thinks it is a solid article, he also points out that DG shows the other side of the coin.

The main portion of my current business model banks on the fact that the misleading confusion of various outdated or incorrect articles, blog post, and / or forum posts will lead some people to want to buy an up to date linear guide about SEO and related topics.

If you do sell SEO services I can't stress enough how well writing articles works. The more you learn about SEO the more you see that many of the branded experts are only experts because they have a strong brand. Articles are a cheap way to building brand. Many businesses outside of SEO could use this technique far more often as well.

Automated Content:
becomes academic. hehehe

Audio:
The Architecture of Participation