Good design makes quality content look and feel better. Design can help improve conversion rate, makes a site more linkable, and sometimes a site generates additional links and mentions just for having a great aesthetic design.
I frequently get asked how we can run a wide array of websites with only a few high-quality part time employees. One of our secrets is staying away from the stuff we are no good at - like web design. I could show you my attempts at design, but you would think less of me if I did. ;)
Rather than going the DIY route, I have been getting quality custom website designs from Wildfire Marketing Group for many of our newer sites, and they look great. I liked their services enough to work a deal with them to get SEO Book training subscribers $100 off their designs, which start out at $765 for a basic design and $975 for a design + a Wordpress theme. Their services page is here, and the coupon code is here.
A couple other people I would also recommend for design work without hesitation are Sophie Wegat and Chris Pearson. Though Chris Pearson is working on Thesis and no longer is available for hire. Luckily we have a 20% off Thesis coupon too.
Before you do, it pays to take a look at your competitors. By choosing the right sites to compete against, you can gain significant advantage.
Firstly, you need to position your offering relative to your competitors.
1. What Problem Do you Solve?
Making money is mostly about solving problems. Write down the problem you're going to solve. Be specific.
For example:
Provide auto repair training to amateurs
Sell bomb detectors to airlines
Sell ice to Eskimos
For this article, we'll use the idea "sell ice to Eskimos". No doubt you've already spotted the problem with this rather lousy business model, but let's have a look at what a bad idea looks like within this evaluation process.
2. Who Is Your Audience?
You may have noticed I included the prospective audience in my examples above. Know what you're selling, and to whom.
Demographics, in other words.
Who are you customers? What do they want? What type of language do they use? Build up a profile.
In our example, our customers are Eskimos. Eskimos live around the North Pole region, mainly in Siberia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. Internet access is obviously going to be an issue, not to mention language barriers, which is about the point the idea should die.
Yet, surprisingly, many prospective web businesses never address this simple question. Various Web 2.0 businesses clearly didn't ask questions 1 & 2. Presumably they jumped straight to the "how can we get a few million dollars in VC?" question instead.
3. Where Are Your Customers Hiding?
You need to get in front of your audience.
SEOs know a lot about keyword research, so have a huge advantage over others when it comes to finding out who their competitors are, and where the opportunity lies.
Find out the keyword terms your potential audience use, conduct searches, and make a note of the big players under those keyword terms. Keep in mind that language people use on search engines is always changing. There are more queries that are longer and more specific. These give you valuable insights into how to position your offering.
What questions are people asking? What problems are they trying to solve? What are the many different ways they describe that problem? What keyword areas are your competitors missing? What value can you provide that they do not? Have your competitors missed lucrative keyword areas?
4. What Is The Nature Of The Market?
You should look for rapidly growing markets. You want to avoid established, declining markets, unless you can provide a new layer of value that is difficult for competitors to emulate.
Take a look at the type of sites you intend to compete against. Are they big companies? Are they hobby blogs and thin affiliate sites? It's going to be much easier for your new site to compete against the thin affiliates and hobby projects than it is to compete against the establishment.
One of the common stumbling blocks at this point is solving a non-problem. The "ice to Eskimos" market is not dominated by established players, or hobby blogs for that matter, but there's a good reason for that - Eskimos don't have a "lack of ice" problem. Beware of the Web 2.0 trap - solving the non-problem.
5. What Related Markets Exist?
If the market you were thinking of entering is competitive, are there any closely related markets you can enter? You can find these areas by looking for patterns in the keyword research results.
You might notice there are numerous searches for fitness locations i.e. a gym, a center, a club. So, instead of targeting fitness in terms of health, which would see you up against established health organizations and generalist publications, you might want to target the fitness center section of the market e.g. a comparison of gyms and centers. Such a niche could possibly be more lucrative, as there is a clear money making opportunity as people need to pay to join these facilities.
Which brings us onto...
6. Is there Potential To Make Money?
Just because a lot of people are doing something, doesn't mean it is worth doing.
Some areas are difficult to monetarize. Science, for example. And social discussions. Some area's are saturated, making it very difficult to find a new value layer to add. SEO, for example.
How easy would it be for one of the major players to copy your value proposition? Look for areas that have a clear path to monetarization and that aren't dominated by major players, or saturated by sites with little to distinguish them.
In the past when you did something quite cool and attention-worthy people would reference it on their blogs. But now in the age of Twitter, many people mention your stuff on Twitter. This can be good if they have thousands of Twitter followers, but if most the people mentioning a topic are all in the same small tight knit space then you are only reaching a fraction of a fraction of the potential distribution you would have before the age of Twitter.
How many people read every Twitter update from the people they subscribe to? Very few. Since you are in a high volume aggregator the loyalty is nowhere near where it is with traditional blog subscribers.
Exciting news quickly falls into the archives due to the rapid nature and high volume of Tweets.
If you dominate a channel and keep reaching the same people over and over again that does help provide social proof of value, but after seeing the same message 5 or 10 times it becomes noise.
Worse yet, even though Twitter mentions are organic links and recommendations by highly trusted topical experts, those don't show up on the broader web graph since Google pressured Twitter into adopting nofollow EVERYWHERE, even for user profiles.
And unlike Delicious...
most people do not have automated mechanisms to dump their daily Tweets / Tweet links into their blog to provide trusted direct links
people rarely use Twitter as a bookmarking service, so it is rarely worth searching into yesterday's content. The Twitter content is very zen-like...here today, gone today.
Multiple people asked me to add their RSS feeds to the default set that in the SEO Toolbar that was soon to be downloaded by over 10,000 webmasters. And for wanting all that exposure (and future exposure) they didn't even post about it on their blog. They mentioned it on Twitter...where the same 3,000 people saw the message 20 times each. No value add whatsoever.
Out of over 21 pages of Tweets (300+ Tweets) mentioning "SEO Toolbar" in the last 3 days, Yahoo! is showing less than 10 inbound links to the SEO Toolbar page that came from sources other than direct friend requests, social news sites, or automated links brought on by that exposure. Twitter is pretty worthless as a link building strategy, even if you are giving away something that is both free and better than similar tools selling for hundreds of dollars.
Even if you have a strong launch and a product far superior to related products, the exposure you get may not matter if your coverage is stuck on Twitter. It is a connecting medium, but it doesn't make money:
Venture Beat says that Twitter made Dell a million dollars. That's nuts. Did the phone company make Dell a billion dollars? Just because people used the phone to order their Dell doesn't mean that the phone was a marketing medium. It was a connecting medium. Big difference.
Is Twitter a nice complimentary channel that can add exposure to your launch? Absolutely. But if the conversation does not leave Twitter.com then it has quite limited value in a search-driven Google-centric web. And that limited value is even less if you don't already have thousands of Twitter followers.
The "make money on Twitter" ebooks will be coming out soon, but other than the ebook authors, I doubt anyone will make much money from it (unless customer feedback helps them create new product lines).
I think my wife came to say hi to me when I was sleeping a week or so ago and I started singing "you are my sunshine" in a rather annoying voice (not sure where I first heard the song, but think it was maybe school chorus class). She started laughing and wanted to know where I got that annoying voice from (I wasn't sure but maybe it was my way of being annoying in chorus).
Few thoughts are original...so if I thought it, I figured someone else did too. So I went to YouTube and searched for "you are my sunshine." A couple normal versions and then there at #6 was something that looked like it could be annoying. Perfect!
After seeing the flower I had to buy it, and that took me back through Google and eventually to eBay, where it cost $20 after shipping. My wife loved the flower and was totally surprised by it.
What if YouTube not only listed related media, but also pulled related products/services/offers from Google Base (or other structured sources) and could charge merchants on a CPC basis or a percentage of the transaction?
Most of the people on YouTube are looking to be entertained and waste time, but if media wants to be free on YouTube then maybe they should try to sell media in other formats and sell physical stuff. YouTube has huge distribution...so even if only 1 in 100 or 1 in 1,000 have interest in commercial offers they should be able to make the market fairly efficient pretty quick.
Recently we lightened the background color and increased spacing between keyword results in our keyword tool...making the results look more aesthetically appealing.
While playing with it I wondered how hard it would be to change the captcha questions to make them relevant and SEO oriented rather than having them ask generic questions. The big issue I had with it was the need for structured answers (as the PHP coding was not yet set up for fuzzy matches)...which sorta forced me to ask really generic questions or give away the answer. An example captcha is below
The links in the various captcha questions lead to various sections of the training subdomain, which should cause a few people to click through and consider joining. At the very least it should help some people new to SEO get some of the basics, and is a reminder "hey, this is over here." :)
It seems like a pretty cool marketing idea...it is relevant and free, much like advertising on your own search results. I am not sure how well it will work, but this is yet another one of those 1 hour conversion improvement hacks that can pay for itself for many years.
The good news is that captchas can be a legitimate part of any interactive website...so this idea could apply to blogs, forums, web based software tools, etc...anything where people comment and/or interact. But will users find it useful or annoying? What do you think of the idea?
The US (and global) economies are in sharp decline after a period of growth that was largely fueled by speculative (and fraudulent) loans that increased money supply way too quickly. While carnage is wide reaching offline, it is simply a phenomena that has not really touched our publishing business.
The Illusion of Safety
There is an illusion that if something is physical that it has a sense of permanence to it, but this year the US government has had to bail out banks, automakers, insurance companies, and credit cards. Residential real estate has dropped hard and commercial real estate is also in the hurt locker (if retail is off 10% in some areas then many businesses operating on a 5% margin will go bankrupt - leading to vacancies and lower prices).
Much of the residential real estate decline is simply due to excessive capacity and various flavors of mortgage fraud (appraisal fraud, loan application fraud, principal-agent problems, malfeasant regulation, etc.), but the commercial real estate slowdown is due to the residential slowdown, global economic slowdown, and the existence of better and cheaper alternatives - namely onlineretail.
Investing in Growth
The Tribune Company recently filed for bankruptcy and the New York Times is reporting dropping ad revenues. Amongst the carnage Amazon.com reported record numbers. In a lot of ways some of the offline decay is just a shift toward more efficient online business models.
Fred Wilson highlighted how many publishing, finance, and retail business models are all being destroyed by the web
I had breakfast last week with a person who has been in retailing for more than 30 years and has been operating at the highest levels of the industry. He said that he expects every category to be winnowed down to one dominant retailer with all the others going by the wayside. This too has the internet as an underlying cause. comScore says that online holiday shopping this year has been flat with the year before and I've seen reports that offline retail is down 6-10pcnt. The fact is that consumers have finally come to the realization that shopping online is easier, cheaper, and often a better experience. Physical retail will survive, but it will be a smaller industry in the next decade and those that do survive will need to give consumers a very strong rationale to get in the car and come to their store.
Not only is the web growing during the downturn, but much of the online growth is driven by marketing and search. SEO exist as the intersection of those two points, and SEOs that approach the topic from a holistic marketing standpoint have a significant advantage at building distribution and growing capital. Give me an average passionate player, add SEO, and I can help them rank #1 in most markets.
When you back out inflation and opportunity cost, professional investors are lucky to gain 5% a year. With smart market research and effective SEO implementation many businesses can outpace that by a factor of over 400! Being in SEO today would be like being in coal, oil, or railroads in years past...you help connect supply and demand.
Trimming Profit Margins
Outperforming the market by hundreds or thousands of percent presents an opportunity that will draw lots of competition - and one that will not last long if not evolved. Scraping raw data is getting easier. Why should people chose to work with you (and vote for you)?
If you get a #1 ranking which provides amazing profit margins it is best to look for ways to thicken out the site even if those strategies lower short-term profit margins. Search algorithms will change, and the thicker and more interactive your site is the more sustainable your rankings will be.
Additional expenses can be offset by refining conversion process to increase visitor value and lifetime customer value, and lower forward marketing costs as you leverage the additional earned exposure.
Another thing to consider is the use of advertising to build other quality signals. Awareness leads to conversion. And if you can get advertising to pay for itself and gain other signals of quality as a side effect of user interaction with your site then you will end out ahead in the long run. I love recycling dollars because it costs nothing, builds free credit card points, and builds up a website's online footprint in a Google friendly way.
Making Online Businesses More Sustainable than Offline Businesses
If much of your online revenues revolve around a thin SEO centric approach then it helps to create at least 1 or 2 aggressively branded sites that hedge against the risks algorithm shifts present. The net effect of building a brand is that you are not overly-reliant on any search engine or any physical market. If people talk about you and recommend you then you win. This site has members from dozens of countries all over the world, so even if the US Dollar collapsed we would still have a diverse income stream.
Helping Others
Once you are doing really well you can give back in a variety of ways - donate money to charities, donate services to charities, and/or give income-producing websites to family members. You can give away featured content and tools that help others knowing that in the end it will also come back to help build your business. You can also pour thousands of dollars into building non-profit sites that may also be able to pay you back in exposure, credibility, and link equity.
One of the biggest problems with this site from a business model perspective is how much free content (including tools) that we give away...as the site was started out of passion with intent to help people, rather than to maximize short term revenues. That lead to me helping people for free way more than I should have, and not earning as much as I could have from paying customers (because I spent too much time helping people who had no intent of becoming customers). Shifting the business model to charging a recurring fee fixed part of that problem...using economics to add a layer to filter out real customers from freeloaders.
Another large problem is that I have asked forum members not to mention specific forum threads without getting permission from other members who contributed this to the thread. People love the forums and leave unsolicited testimonials virtually every day, but rarely do people write publicly about the forums due that restriction.
Many top SEO professionals no longer spend time on forums. That is not the case with the SEO book community forum. The caliber and quantity of top seo experts who are ready to answer any question sets the forum apart. Let alone the personal effort Aaron invests ensuring that no question goes unanswered.
But such public mentions are rare due to the above restriction.
The combination of limited public discussion of the paid content with so much discussion of the freebies creates a website that is easy to mention to attract pageviews, but does not convert anywhere near as well as it should because the conversion process is nowhere near as refined as it could be.
This site gets a ton of traffic...but we have enough to where it makes sense to put more effort into sales.
Building the Perception of Value
It is hard for people to accurately value information they do not have access to...which is why many hyped up marketers have systems built around duping newbies with fake testimonials, affiliate schemes, and "launches" promoted through email list spamming. (Everyone is talking about it, so it MUST be good!)
I hate asking people for money, but if I simply do not then this site will only perform at a fraction of its full potential. My wife is a much more aggressive sales person than I am (she did high tech marketing in the past and was responsible for landing a huge deal that ended up getting her company acquired by their biggest competitor for big money). She is always pushing me to be more aggressive. I have been naively reluctant on some fronts, but am slowly coming around bit by bit. ;)
Value systems are built through marketing and publicity. This site makes way more than what it needs to for me to consider it successful, but there is a lot of money left on the table. I bet the upside potential from conversion improvements is at least 200%...maybe way more.
How Much Are Your Internal Search Results Worth?
If a site has conversion issues, the easiest way to fix them is to break down the conversion process into steps and processes. I thought I would take a step in that direction by advertising our community forums and training program on our internal search results.
Generally there is no better place to advertise than on your own site.
Each day hundreds of people use our public facing site search, and they have done over 100,000 searches in the past year or so. My average cost per click on Google's search results is over $1 per click, and yet I have never advertised on my own search results. Think about that number...over 100,000 times people have found the brand then done a specific search on this site with 0 of them seeing an advertisement. As a marketer that is an embarrassing failure.
Advertising on Your Internal Site Search Results
Here is what I did to fix the above issue...
Signed up for the Google custom search engine to allow us to include their technology into the site. Labeled and feature content from key portions of the site to promote them within those search results.
Created a custom CSS file for the search page, which allowed me to make the search results skinnier and the related advertising column wider (when compared to other pages on the site).
Included mini-logos, search boxes, and testimonials from the training section and user forums on the search page.
Used a PHP page such that I could pull the search variable from the URL string and add the query in the page content (in various places - including headings and search boxes).
Here is how to pull a variable from the URL string
Was the above worth the effort? I am not certain yet, but I have to imagine so. If it helps convert 1 person a day that is worth over $100,000 a year for the one hour of effort it took to implement. There are aesthetic improvements that can still be made, but at least now that page has potential to build revenue rather than just being a sunk cost.
As we approach the end of the year, and people start to wind down, it might be a good time to take stock of our web strategy beyond SEO. How can we make more of that traffic we're already getting?
Here are some things you can do to optimize your sites credibility.
1. Reduce Wait Time
Streamline your visitors experience.
We all know server response time is important, but so is any wait time you impose on the user. Do you make visitors fill out forms? Do your competitors? If you do, but your competitors don't, you might find your visitors go elsewhere.
Are your processes more cumbersome than they need to be? Is it difficult for a visitor to find things on your site? Could you organize your structure in a better way? Can you think of sites that were a pleasure to use? Compare these sites with your own.
Brand is the entire experience, from the moment someone sees your listing in the search engine, until the time they recall your site from memory a few weeks later. If you had one message you wanted to leave your visitors with, what would it be? Do all your pages reinforce this message? Does your design? Your copy? Your layout? Look at ways in which you can empathize with people and the problems they are having. People need to believe you feel and understand their problems in order to read and take your advice.
In the good old days, brand wasn't much of a consideration in SEO. Relevance to the keyword query was all that mattered. However, Google has pretty much solved the relevance problem.
These days, Google wants to find the one right answer.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt said:
"Brands are the solution, not the problem... Brands are how you sort out the cesspool."
Google's challenge is to weed out false information. Schmidt sees brands as a way to do this.
Brand is going to become increasingly important in terms of rank. What do brands have that unbranded sites do not have?
For starters, brand names are typed into search boxes as a keyword term in their own right. Brand names are readily associated with a product or service. When Aaron started SEOBook.com, nobody searched on "SEO Book". Now, plenty of people do, and Aaron "owns" that keyword term in organic search.
Think about ways you can own a keyword term so the association between it and your brand becomes synonymous.
Are there opportunities to edit your copy writing in order to make the purpose of your site clearer? Are the benefits you provide crystal clear? Sometimes, when we spend a lot of our time focusing on search engines and incorporating keyword terms, we can lose sight of the people who actually read the copy.
On-page SEO and writing for search engines has never been less important. It's mostly about links and, going forward, the level of visitor engagement.
For each page on your site, ask yourself what you want the visitor to do next. Does your copy make this next action clear? Provide external citations and recommendations from third parties.
Can you reduce complexity and clutter? It's not that your visitors are stupid, it's that people won't invest time learning your interface unless there is clear benefit in doing so.
What is the message conveyed by your site? Does you design support that message? If your site is difficult to use, what does that say to your visitor? People quickly evaluate a site by visual design alone. Your visual design should match the sites purpose.
One of the reasons social sites are popular because information is linked to a personality. The same goes for blogs. People like to get a sense of the people who produced the information.
It helps build trust.
Do you include signals of human involvement? It can be as subtle as the way your write e.g personal viewpoint, or as overt as using a photo. People like to see contact details, personal details and other markers of the human presence. Highlight your expertise. Update your content often.
A couple years ago I helped a friend set up a website, and tried to teach them SEO, but they never really took it to heart. Their page titles are not that descriptive, and their writing typically aims to be clever rather than direct. They have published just over 100 pages of content. I built a few links for them to help get them going, but their site has failed to achieve a critical mass. Over the last year their traffic has been precisely flat with about 20 unique visitors a day. It is hard to monetize a traffic stream that small.
About 2 months ago another friend set up a website in the exact same vertical. They published a small website and got it a few links to get the age clock going. About 2 weeks ago they expanded the site out to about 70 pages, which have since been indexed by Google. Rather than writing winding and non-descriptive content, each article on this site is on target and direct.
If anything the link profile for this site is inferior to the link profile for the older site, but this site is already getting 50 unique visitors per day. Many of these visitors come from page 2 of the search results, in international versions of Google, and/or for misspelled queries that this site ranks for (though the site does not have misspelled content on it). These rankings can be seen as signs of progress, and hint to future rankings the site will have for more competitive keywords.
The audience is still too small to monetize, but as this site ages and gains search engine trust, it will likely develop into a site with ~2,000 unique visitors a day.
One site was mapped out against the search traffic, has targeted descriptive page titles, and uses well structured categories. The other does not. And inside of a year the site that employs SEO will out-perform the other site 100 to 1. With similar backlinks, similar quantity and quality of content, similar domain names, and similar site designs the sites have 2 different outcomes. One is at best a hobby, whereas the other can (and will) grow to become a flourishing business.
Give me an average market participant who has a passion for a topic and I can help them dominate the search results. Whereas the person that knows 10x as much but ignores SEO advice will get stuck in the mud, failing to build a critical mass, not getting the exposure their knowledge and content deserve.
About a month ago I was chatting with Rand via email. He explained that he thought that the perception that SEO is manipulative was harming the industry, in part to justify his outing strategy. I explained that I thought the goal of most media was manipulation (with attention sold to the highest bidder) and promised him that I would write a post along those lines.
It is not going to be an easy post to write. It will eat thousands of dollars of my time. And I most likely will not make any sales from it, but it is a nice introduction to how media works for anyone who has not yet seen or read Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent.
Self-survival is the First Goal of Any Organization
Parking meters are needed to add cost to a finite good (parking places) to decrease demand. Recently in Oakland they went from $1.25/hr to $1.50/hr. The meter man explained inflation to me, right before I read a bunch of news about the potential horrors of pending deflation. Why was I talking to the parking meter guy? I talked to the parking meter guy long enough that the person he was going to write a ticket for got away. I had done my good deed for the day. :)
The payment gateway for that particular area was broken. I pointed that out to him and he said "oh yeah I will call it in" with a matter-of-fact tone. So he knew the meters were broke, but didn't get them fixed because he knew he would be able to write more parking tickets that way.
About a week later, parking in a nearby area, I put a quarter in a regular pay meter and went in to pick up food that I had ordered. When I came back to the car the meter showed a minute left, but there was already a parking ticket on my window. Probably the same corner cutting public servant hooked me up on that deal.
Fraud can happen at the individual level, but as an organization grows bigger it...
requires more capital to be sustained
has more stakeholders (employees, partners, investors, & customers - each having unique goals and interests)
finds additional incremental growth opportunities are harder to come by
Bob Massa mentioned being at a business meeting where the CEO was told all our KPIs point south...to which the CEO replied "sounds like we need some new KPIs."
Which leads us to the inverse law of business ethics: the larger a business grows the more hypocritical it must be to sustain its growth and please its stakeholders.
The Media Sells What is Hot
Best. Bubble. Ever.
The US society is largely based on instant gratification, consumption, and debt. To keep growing we need to build bubbles (and promote them via the media), hoping to make each bubble larger than the last. Mortgage fraud replaced the tech bubble. And the next bubble will likely be related to green energy.
Media Pandering
"If it bleeds it leads." The press is always pandering the story of the day to make it seem more important than it is in an attempt to capture attention
The media lemmings, the same ones that encouraged you to get a second mortgage, buy a McMansion and spend, spend, spend are now falling all over themselves to out-mourn the others. They are telling everyone to batten down, to cut back, to freeze and panic. They're looking for stories about this, advice about this, hooks about this.
Or as a commenter named Mike, on one of my favorite investing blogs, wrote:
Some idiot on Bloomberg is talking about how irrational consumers had been and how they are now getting rational. Judging someone's rationality depends on what they knew at the time. And, Joe the Plumber was bombarded for years with propaganda about how your house was your best investment, stocks always go up, we are the kings of the world, etc. They did what you would expect.
Now, if those of us who look behind the curtain had bought into the hype, that would be irrational.
Media is usually selling you up the river to some advertiser interest.
Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
Years later, after Google became the world's largest ad network by scraping that content and wrapping it in ads, how did their view of that same web change? Eric Schmidt explained:
The internet is fast becoming a "cesspool" where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted.
"Brands are the solution, not the problem," Mr. Schmidt said. "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool."
"Brand affinity is clearly hard wired," he said. "It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component."
But Google has obscene profit margins and market leverage and does try hard to strike some level of balance. No other large media company has similar profit margins or market leverage, and thus they tend to be more controlled by advertiser interest.
Consider Fox News, which fired some of its reporters for wanting to report the potential link between rBGH and cancer. Why were the reporters fired? They refused to be silent about the research they had done, and as an advertiser pushing rBGH onto ignorant consumers, Monsanto was going to cut their ad spend if the truth about their product came out. Killing people with cancer for a dollar...that is how low some media standards are.
Many companies live by telling multiple stories simultaneously. When Google was promoting PageRank they talked about how it leveraged the "unique democratic structure" of the web. But when the Department of Justice sued Google for search data, Google's response stated that "Google only attempts to crawl the "best of the Web" to create a useful repository of Web pages." And when they feared GoogleBombing potentially causing negative blowback during the 2008 election cycle, Google tried to defuse the practice.
Sensationalism
Sensationalism works. Write something that is factual and nobody cares. Twist is just a bit and it is press worthy. That is why guys like Jason Calacanas are so fond of writing lines like "What you do in the next 30 days will probably make or break your company."
Distortions
Just about everyone knows that magazine cover and billboard photos are edited.
But did you know that when Fox News producers are angry at someone they will edit their photo to yellow their teeth and make their nose larger?
Reductionism
Alan Greenspan was known to speak in "Fedspeak" in an attempt to guide markets without causing panic. But in some cases he was crystal clear with his messaging. When asked of the Bush tax cut plan, Alan said that if US economic surpluses remain, then a tax cut at some point might make sense. And the next day the newspapers flooded the stands with the message "Greenspan endorses Bush tax cut" (ignoring the if surpluses remain part). Alan Greenspan discussed this reductionism in detail in his The Age of Turbulence.
Lies
If your budget is large enough and your sample data pool large enough it is not hard to lie with statistics. Some business models are based on pushing through biased research and hoping that their solution is so ingrained in society that by the time the truth comes out nothing changes.
In almost any area where Google talks about their being "spam" there are brands built off of sleight of hand marketing.
Finance
The bogus consumer bankruptcy bill was pushed using biased stats highlighting a subset of people that filed for bankruptcy because they did not pay their credit card debts. But the real leading cause for personal bankruptcies in the United States is medical issues. The same bankers that pushed that garbage are now at the trough begging for handouts amounting to $7,400,000,000,000 ($24,000+ for every man, woman, and child in the US).
Want to know what that taxpayer money is being spent on? They are not sharing that information! Bloomberg is suing the government in an attempt to find out. Gerald O’Driscoll, a former vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, had this to say: "Nontransparency in government programs is always associated with corruption in other countries, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t be here."
The examples are so abundant it is hard to pick one. But as an example, here are pre-election stories blaming high oil prices AND low stock prices on the market pricing in the likelihood of an Obama presidential victory. Such analysis is usually thin on research.
Greed and Fraud Are Fundamental Parts of Capitalism
I could list dozens more categories here if I took the time to do the research. Kickbacks and misinformation are everywhere because capitalism promotes short term gain at the expense of future generations. When a company goes public so much is driven by making the numbers and getting your bonus. Some media companies even carry fake video clips created by public relations companies.
Even the US Government Actively Manipulates the Media
The US government actively manipulates the media to mislead and misinform consumers. If you watch Robert S. McNamara's Fog of War you will see him talk about how they timed Vietnam War related releases to play them down and minimize blowback.
30 years later the media is still being used to propagandize war. What ever happened to those weapons of mass destruction that were central to the lies that started the Iraq war? George Bush thinks their absence is funny. So does the press corps
As one Youtube commenter puts it:
As repulsive as Bush is, we shouldn't forget some of the people laughing at his "humor," notably the press corps who helped him sell his phony war and who derided, as naive or unpatriotic, those who raised doubts about the WMD issue before it started. But hey, war makes for great great TV and big profits for the military-industrial-media complex. They're a big part of the reason why America is so frequently at war.
Back when we were pushing to go to war there was nothing but cheer leading from the media, and now the same media reports how the Pentagon used (and still uses) TV analysts that have equity stakes in defense contractors to sell the Iraq war to the US public:
Collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror.
...
Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence.
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Members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.
There are laws against inside trading, and yet somehow it is legal for the government to give defense contractors classified information so long as they are willing to lie to the US public in exchange for it. Mind blowing!
In 2004 (just before the US elections) the BBC aired Adam Curtis's The Power of Nightmares - a documentary showing that Al-Qaeda is a fictitious organization created and promoted to scare US citizens for the political gain of neoconservatives. The US TV networks refused to give it air time:
"Something extraordinary has happened to American TV since September 11," says Curtis. "A head of the leading networks who had better remain nameless said to me that there was no way they could show it. He said, 'Who are you to say this?' and then he added, 'We would get slaughtered if we put this out.'" Surely a relatively enlightened broadcaster like HBO would show it? "When I was in New York I took a DVD to the head of documentaries at HBO. I still haven't heard from him."
I think humans tend to be somewhat dismissive of or scared of technologies they do not understand. That is why Lori Drew was tried on 3 counts of accessing computers without authorization, rather than being tried for psychologically abusing a child.
Reporters should be skeptical because in some cases people are willfully feeding reporters inside details that are false to try to push a stock (or some other business interest). The sheer level of detail in The London Times's report on the false Microsoft Yahoo deal last weekend is mind-boggling. Those sorts of lies are embarassing and make reporters cautious.
Some reporters know their stuff and do in depth research, but some go into writing their pieces with an end goal in mind, looking to misquote you to drive home their point...asking leading questions and making you the focus of them. For example, I was asked about how I could use Google Knol for spamming. I responded with something like "I don't consider myself nefarious, but for sake of argument lets say you or I were the nefarious type..." and that got quoted as "lets say I am the nefarious type."
Why do People Buy SEO?
SEO is Worth a Lot of Money
I gave a presentation at an investor conference and ended up charging somewhere around $1,000 a minute for the presentation.
I recently charged a CEO $300 for a 30 minute speech and hung up feeling guilty that I under-charged him. I taught them all sorts of advanced topics like conditional site structure alterations based on crawl information and traffic levels all other sorts of goodies. I estimate that call will add at least $1,000,000 of search traffic to his business if he executes on 50% of what I taught him.
Nobody Wants Average Rankings
While I have had well over 10,000 paying customers, not a single one of them has ever paid me with the goal of "rank them where they deserve to."
Everyone who has paid me a large sum of money (say 5 figures or more) wanted to rank better than they were, and in most cases (all but 1 so far) better than they would deserve to from an objective view of the web. And those who were already clear category leaders wanted to know how to create a second or third white labeled high ranking site.
Search Can be a Cheap Distribution Channel
If you are already paying for the cost structure of running a brick and mortar business, there is little incremental cost to gaining more organic search traffic...the medium is still exceptionally under-priced.
Search Exposure Builds Real Value
If you are one of 400 insurance brokers or real estate agents selling the same recycled stuff, then you don't want to rank where you deserve...even if you are number 12 out of 400 you are probably getting less than 1% of the potential traffic. That is pretty crappy relative to how well you would do with just a bit more effort.
A thin affiliate site with little to no editorial content was recently bought for $34 million. That site was not bought out because it was above average, but because it had above average rankings. The CEO even stated that they bought the site based largely on its search engine rankings.
Isn't SEO Manipulative?
As referenced above, most of the entire media ecosystem is heavily manipulated. Why? The intersection of 2 key points. ;)
Many people who claim to be against manipulative SEO practices have no problem with being manipulative and lying with their public relations. Both have the same end goal of profit, but renting a link to try to rank one spot higher is nowhere near as toxic as lying is.
Almost every public facing person in media is a salesman, electioneering for their own self-interests.
Even Search Engines Hire SEOs
Large media organizations like the NYT employ SEO tactics. Even search engines have internal SEO teams. Laura Lippay is the SEO program manager for Yahoo!. I know Microsoft has an SEO team because a couple years ago a headhunter contacted me wanting to hire me to work on that team.
If search engines employ SEO then you should too. Why not help your company rank the best it can?
Why Outing is Bad
For many webmasters profitability comes from leveraging new platforms along with creativity and innovation...often within the gray area where marketing strategies are not yet abused. But when a well known SEO outs something they are intentionally trying to make the search engine look stupid, forcing the search engineer's hands into banning something or making something 'not count'.
As an industry will we fare better building each other up or advocating knocking each other down?
Want to Help Google Clean Up the Web?
Google Sells Ads to Spammers
Google sells ads that promote virtually anything. All a person needs to do to get exposure through their ad network is open up their wallet.
Eric Schmidt said that the internet is fast becoming a "cesspool" where false information thrives. Here is how you can make the web a better place! Anytime you see a Google AdWords/AdSense advertisement that does any of the following...
makes a false claim
engage in cookie pushing, reverse billing fraud, or push spyware
promotes something that is illegal or immoral
is published on a copy of stolen copyright work
make sure you file a Google spam report AND out it on your blog. Google needs more help cleaning up their ads than the organic search results (as the paid search algorithm is much less complex and is directly influenced by payment). That is, of course, unless Google likes promoting infidelity while cleaning up the web.
