Recently NickW started testing IntelliTXT. I dislike those ads. The perfect example of why I think they suck is when the people from Vibrant Media posted "feel free to email us directly" and the word email became one of their green ad links.

The problem with those little green ads is that they are more noise, which goes counter to the less noise more signal tagline on the site.

The audience of ThreadWatch has some serious cash, but what they are most interested in that which is shared freely amongst friends.
The people you make money off are not necissarily going to be the same people who help build up the network though, but you still can leverage that market position and those friendships to help sell a related idea.

I think if Nick created a guide to community building and blogging it would get far more support than my ebook does.

One of Nick's friends said that he wouldn't want to let a guide to cloning ThreadWatch to get out there, but:

• if they were smart enough to clone it they probably wouldn't need a guide

• few people are going to want to work as hard as Nick has building up that site
• few people have as many friends as Nick does
• eventually the fakeness or cloneness comes out in the writing if people try to clone it
• without a highly profitable business model few people will likely want to clone it
• adding more and a wider variety of advertisements to that site goes counter to why it became successful
• as you add noise you lose mindshare, and that is the only thing that will make it possible for others to duplicate ThreadWatch...if it becomes more noise less signal

The first version of my ebook was free and sucked, but over time it got better. If Nick threw something out there and was open to feedback then the people there would help make sure he was offering something they would want to recommend, plus they would be more invested into helping it become successful if they offered suggestions and feedback and his site saved them a bunch of time.

Even if Nick starts off as only a 10 or 20 page guide it can get reshaped and improved as time passes. The key is to just pick an idea and start writing about it. Some people who in the past sent me hate mail now point unrequested link into my sites in part because I accepted their feedback.

As search algorithms advance guides which help people do well with community interaction will have far more value than guides about algorithms and engines, because ultimately the algorithms and engines are just trying to emulate people. For many people it will be far easier to create something others want than to push something they don't.

Recently HitWise jumped into the keyword research market by offering their Keyword Intelligence tool starting at $89 a month. Trellian's Keyword Discovery just joined the competitive analysis market.

It is cool to see another competitive analysis tool available for those of us who can't afford to splash out the $20,000 or so for HitWise. Trellian's new tool costs $65 per month per URL.

A few things I do not like with Trellian's package are:

• limited data reach (most of these types of tools do not have much data when you compare them to the likes of Google or Yahoo!, but none of the big portals have decided to sell this type of data yet, probably for fear of a privacy backlash & bad press).

• they don't have a package deal. you have to keep ordering one domain at a time, which could probably lead to confusing credit card bills and the like.
• When they tell you the number of domains that they have tracked traffic from they don't group the subdomains with the main domains, so that can throw the numbers off.

Before you subscribe they tell you how many keywords and websites they have listed for that domain. They state that they have stats for the top 100,000 domains.

I bought one domain, and did not see any gems from it, but I suppose if you find one or two good spots to market from it then it would be a good buy and $65 is not much risk.

I will post some stuff on the conference soon. Off to the Google Dance.

There are always screwed up things going on in the world, but some of them are moreso than others. This story relates to search, because you really have to search hard to find any information about it...

Recently Andy Hagans mentioned to me that in northern Uganda there is a war where children are being abducted and trained to kill or abduct other children. For safety at night many children are forced to leave their homes and sleep in a pool of overlapping bodies hoping they are not abducted or killed, living in perpetual fear.

Invisible Children is a recent DVD which shows what is going on in Uganda. If you would like, I have a couple of them and I can send you one (just send me an email with address, etc).

The war has been going on for about 19 years and has got next to no legitimite media coverage here in the United States. Andy Hagans has been helping Uganda CAN do SEO, but the problem is nobody is going to be searching for it if nobody knows about it.

Recently some people from Uganda CAN got a bit of coverage on a few articles and on NPR. The online petition to stop the war was getting about 10 signatures an hour, but that number has started to drift back downward :( I think if blogs really got ahold of the story that number should be able to run well into the thousands / hour. With enough voices of concern the US government will hopefully be forced to help the Uganda government face and fix the problems.

Not too long ago, when Ian Turner was missing, search related bloggers helped spread his name to where it was the #1 search term on Technorati. Hopefully we can raise the war in Uganda to #1 as well.

If you do not like the idea of children being abuducted, murdered, and living in constant fear please help. A few options:

• Sign the petition

• Mention and link to the petition on your website. Also tell your friends to link up and sign it.
• donate
• volunteer
• speak out
• for background watch the video or read about the conflict in northern Uganda

Techorati Tags: Uganda War Uganda Children

WordTracker created a free online PDF guide to help people with their keyword research. The ebook is 75 pages, and describes some of the basics to the keyword research process.

I see the guide as being pretty good for people new to the search market, as it gives them the snapshot of a variety of voices helping them get a better picture of the keyword research and internet marketing process.

The three big criticisms I have with the guide are:

• it promotes KEI, which I think is a garbage measurement of competition, and Dan Thies recently said the same when I interviewed him.

• the guide recommends using WordTracker as a fairly strong quantitative measure of traffic, when I think it is actually a bit more qualitative.
• there are other tools which can also help the keyword research process, but many of them are not given much coverage due to the goal of the guide being primarily wrote to sell WordTracker

If you have been around the block you probably will not have your hair blown back by the guide, but it is definately good for newbies. They also licensed the guide via Creative Commons.

Most emails that are sent from unknown strangers are garbage. Sending a somewhat vanilla looking link request email means people are going to be predisposed to wanting to ignore you.

Seth explains why timely, targeted, and personalized link requests are much more effective than the average link request. (although he is talking about a different topic I decided to try to relate it to SEO) When I was new to the web I worked much harder on link building than I do today. I usually found the best link requests only worked if I took the time to really understand the motives of the webmasters or made it look as though I was just trying to help them out.

An example technique I did, was when a site was taken down and redirected to another site I:

• used a tool similar to Hub Finder to find authority links pointed at the old site.

• manually reviewed the sites to look for their motives and how on topic the page was to my site
• emailed webmasters of some rather powerful websites reminding them that they had an outdated links, told them the new site location, and listed a few other highly recommendable resources (one of which was my own site).

By breaking link to me down into a 4 or 5 step process to highly qualify the leads and make myself look like I was helping them I was much more effective at building links than the random rogue hunting methods.

By making it look like I was trying to help them make their sites better my link conversion rate was like 30% to 50%, and these were for free powerful links.

Around the same time I wrote an article about Google's Florida Update that got to be somewhat well known. Some people want to know your status or whatever, and when some ask I played down any success I had up to that point and said well I just wrote an article a couple days ago... and based on that even more people converted.

Here is another, similar example, that blatently failed. A while ago I used a tools like Hub Finder, Link Harvester (I should soon add a feature to limit the domain type on Link Harvester), and Yahoo!'s Advanced Search Page to find some of the college sites that linked into search engine submission companies years ago.

I wanted to see if I could persuade them that search engine submission was outdated, and that they could keep current with search news by linking through to some of the search related blogs (one of them of course being my blog).

This had horrific conversion rates, and probably was a complete waste of time. Why? Because I was asking people to make multiple changes at once:

• First it requires them to admit that their information is outdated, incorrect, or useless; and unlike a site moving location I did not have blatent obvious proof of this fact assembled.

• I did not sell why they should change the page as mutch as I needed to
• students changing sites need permission to change stuff and
  • they have little reason to believe me or care

  • most of them get paid next to nothing and would probably rather work on their homework or real job than worry about me
• most professors like to think of their own information as pure and correct.

How could that have been more effective? I could of asked Danny Sullivan or Robert Clough or one of the other authoritative search site owners if they would publish an article about search engine submissions being outdated. I could either write that article myself or pay a friend to ask those people if they can write it and have it published. Then I could have used that article to quote various search reps as saying submission is outdated, as well as link through to other more effective ways to list and rank sites, and then use that as reasoning for people to avoid submissions.

I could also write a part two to the article describing many submission services as scams, going over how they use submit your site buttons to gather link popularity and many of them also are notoriously well known as email spammers.

By sourcing authoritative voices on the topic I, or at least by developing my credibility beyond a random person sending emails, I would:

• better speak the language of academia

• have the opportunity to create targeted content around linking opportunities
• would have had much greater success at link building.

And the other hidden tip sorta mentioned in the post is that while you have credibility, traffic, media coverage, authority, etc etc etc you should work harder at building links or spreading ideas, as your effort will be much more fruitful if launched on the back of some other success. Find a hit and run with it.