Recently a SEO working for a lead generation network sent me a letter in the mail alerting me that I could improve my website by linking to their site. They mention some of the large brands they send leads to and state that the link to their site from my site would improve my site's credibility, user experience, and offer our site visitors security since their lead generation form was secure. :)

Where this letter went astray was

• recommending a really aggressive and spammy long anchor text (they should have just gave me an easy short option and perhaps a link to a page on their site with linking FAQs and banners)
• for the most part their site is just a lead generation form (so they give me little real reason to link at it)
• in the tip where they tell me the transaction is secure they tell me the third party provider (so if I was going to link I might link to the 3rd party provider rather than through their thin affiliate site)
• they included a business card for their SEO firm in their letter (if I didn't know what SEO is, then that might make me research it)
• they sent it to me (if you know the field of SEO well, you probably have heard my name once or twice, and would not want me shadowing your new site's link building efforts on my older and more authoritative directly competing website)

As a result of the letter they sent out a few weeks ago it looks like the strategy yielded 0 organic links, but I found a couple easy link sources that I have not thought of in the past. I will spend some time further researching that SEO to see what other easy link sources he can find for me. :)

Hidden Risks of Promoting Your Marketing as "SEO"

If you call something marketing or promotion then it is seen as clean and above board. But as soon as you attach the SEO label then eyebrows raise, someone talks about it, and it gets nuked. It gets nuked because if the search engine does not do so then people assume it is a fair strategy, and the search engines have Google has to make examples out of the sites or many people will start doing it.

And it doesn't have to be that way, as big brands benefit from semantic differences which should be used in their everyday marketing. Smaller brands can also enjoy the same benefits by avoiding the SEO discussion.

Findlaw recently came under scrutiny for trying to sell links to local law firms. Make the pitch to a few thousand lawyers and only one of them has to say no and out you (as a public relations and link building strategy). That discussion works its way into the SEO field and trouble happens. They may only get an aesthetic toolbar PageRank reduction. But they could have simply avoided the risks by talking about boosting exposure rather than SEO.

Seth Godin recently published a post about the dead zone between being real and being polished: "It's the banal stuff in the middle that people don't read. And yet, 95% of what I see is precisely in the dead spot of the middle zone. "

I firmly try to stay in the "real" category (largely because I can't tolerate the polished up fake stuff), though someone sent me an anonymous email today telling me I need to polish it up

You know a lot, but

• it needs to be made far simpler for laymen
• cut back on the jargon
• skip the rare profanity. It’s is a real turn off for traditional people
• you could take a more professional picture

If I tried to take their advice I would end up with a watered down brand in the dead zone. Years ago one of my mentors gave me this advice

I think the best brands, the best sites have a large portion of their founders personality in them. Never be afraid to be yourself, after all there are 1/2 billion people on the www, not all of them have to agree with you. Concentrate on the ones that share your views, concentrate on making their experience the very best it can be, the rest forget them.

Or to put it another way, the best sites say - this is what we do, this is how we do it, if you don't like it go somewhere else.

It is fun to watch Tamar Weinberg and John Andrews write about social media. Largely because they are both firm in their beliefs, and they believe polar opposites. Tamar's piece covering the definition of social media marketers is uplifting and paints social media as friendships to be won rather than games to be played and people to be fooled. But bots and ad networks are amoral, and they control the production of much of the free content.

John's view of social media is a bit more cynical - highlighting quotes like this one:

In an age when most major media outlets are providing outrage-of-the-hour content, one should not be surprised that the community built around that is also comprised of illogical, emotionally charged drivel flavored with a smattering of generally useless regurgitated trivia posing as genuine information.

Digg is full of fake profiles, and so is MySpace. Early promoters of social media ask if it is becoming a vast wasteland. But at the core the questions nobody is asking are

• Who is paying these content creators?
• How long will they keep sharecropping without financial incentive? What happens as attention becomes more scarce (and better publishing tools make it easier to keep the value you create)?

Some animals are smart, but assuming a user is real why would they spend hours a day on a general purpose social media site unless they were getting something out of it? Entertainment has value, but trading votes gets old on day #2 (at the latest)! How low must a person value their time (or how poor must their self image and identity be) for them to spend so much time on sites painted by a collage of spam? If they are poor they are probably easy to buy off, so social media is just another way to buy exposure.

The news companies are fighting back against the free content by turning newspapers into something Jerry Springer would write, with a few advertorials sprinkled in to help offset lower ad revenues. A recent survey revealed "Nearly one in five (19 percent) of senior marketers admit their organizations bought ads on a news site in exchange for a news story."

It is hard to create a destination, become an icon, or build a brand if you are stuck on a large anonymous network. And spending too much time on such a network can warp your perception of reality by showing you the nasty side of anonymity. Add in a bit of desperate attention whoring coupled with endless reams of free recycled content and you have the perfect storm for creating The Tragedy of the Commons.

At best most large social media sites are an Amway-like pyramid scheme. Sure you can count uniques, but what's the point? Social media sites are a transitory vehicle used by newbies hoping to gain status and recognition, while professionals use them for marketing and link generation. Those who realize the game rarely waste time on social media sites beyond satisfying the criteria needed to manipulate them to achieve their goals.

The only difference between most social media sites and a traditional free for all page is votes. As social network spamming programs get cheaper and bots get smarter look for that difference to narrow.

In the past I have mentioned that I am not a fan of doing lots of traditional SEO consulting for a number of reasons (mostly economic), but I still work on a few large projects from time to time. One of the great parts about working with large corporate clients is when you uncover holes in their strategy, finding areas and opportunities that they can own just by deciding to. To some degree it feels like editing the search results, just like a search engineer, seeing you will pushed upon them.

Unlike playing with Wikia Search (which only has a couple millions lifetime searches and nearly a million edits!!!) some of the changes you suggest for enterprise level sites can bring millions of high value visitors to their business free of charge.

When taking on new consulting projects you have to price with the confidence that you will be able to find something that really helps them build their business (and if you are not there is no point taking the project). At first sometimes it can seem like you set the bar too high, but when you do strong research and have a strong partner to bounce ideas off back and forth good things just happen.

Those easy big wins are rare finds, but seem to happen on every project, just in different areas - site structure, duplicate content issues, keyword coverage, internal linking strategy, etc. Digging into a large site with fresh eyes allows you to see things that people who have been close to a project for a long time can not see. Why is that link there? Can this page rank for a couple more related queries? You end up stumbling into something that catches your eye and keep digging in until you have a good solution that earns far in excess of the consulting investment.

With affiliate and AdSense oriented sites the wins are typically much slower, smaller, and harder - sometimes requiring 6 months of effort just to get to break even, and requiring you to fight for every additional link and every additional rank. But the slow and steady path is a stronger business model for SEOs than giving clients millions of dollars of advice for a small fraction of the price. If only I knew how to talk Fortune 500 companies into giving a % of the upside, as that would make consulting so much more profitable than the slow and steady model. :)

Google hires remote quality raters part time for $15 an hour. SEOs working in client based business models usually top out somewhere in the mid 6 figure range. CEOs and some leading web publishers make deep into 7 or 8 figures a year. And some of the early Google engineers might have 9 figures worth of stock. And every one of them is getting paid in part to edit the search results. Does your business model match your ambitions?

Rich Schefren recently interviewed Dan Ariely. The recording is freely available online here. In the call Dan highlights how companies can increase perceived value and get their customers to spend more by creating a decoy offer, which is discussed in the first chapter of his Predictibly Irrational book.

The decoy marketing offer introduces false choices to make another choice look more appealing. We have a hard time valuing offers, but are relatively good at valuing relative deals. The example Dan uses to discuss the decoy is the pricing of The Economist.

Lets say the pricing is

• web $60
• print $120
• both $120

Given the above virtually nobody will order print, but adding the false choice of print only will make many people buy the both option, whereas if the print option were priced lower or the print option were not there more people would be inclined to opt for online only instead of the web +print combination.

Non-commodity based value is largely a game of perception. You can build perceived value by

• building exposure and trust in the marketplace by giving something of value away for free (people will think "if this is free imagine how good the stuff they are selling is")
• minimizing downside risk (through the use of payment plans, refund guarantees, etc.)
• comparing yourself to higher priced offerings (the words SEO training are considered far more valuable than the words SEO Book - something I wish I would have considered in 2003!)
• expanding your target market and resonating with niche brands (what is the difference between Prozac and Sarafem?)
• breaking the language of a commodity product and reshaping it to associate it with higher value fields or fields with less competition (Starbucks language sounds more like fancy tea than a I need caffeine cup of coffee)
• using scarcity (how much did Beanie Babies, Pet Rocks, and Tickle Me Elmo dolls sell for?)
• requiring prompt action (when we ran a discount during the launch of our membership site people joined at a much faster rate before the price increased because the price increase was a real tangible cost of not acting quickly)
• adding bonuses and benefits that are unique to your offering

Everything around us is a collage of overlapping value systems competing for attention and resources. What backs the value of the U.S. Dollar? Why has it fallen 20% in the last couple years? Housing prices went up for a long time, and then they stopped. Last year Indymac bank was a top 10 mortgage lender and now they are bankrupt.

Many investors shorted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In response to deteriorating business conditions the U.S. federal government offered to allow the companies to borrow directly from the Federal Reserve and increase their borrowing limits. That help stabilize their stock prices a bit.

What really scared investors away from shorting the stocks further? A proposal from the White House to Congress would give the U.S. Treasury authority to buy the stocks to provide needed liquidity. Imagine betting on a company failing when your government says that they are interested in buying stock in the company if the company gets in a pinch. That is the sort of news that can send a stock price up 40% before the market opens.

Why would the government care about the stock prices if they have little to do with the functionality of the businesses? It all comes down to perception. A healthy stock price gives the perception that all is well and helps keep the housing market as fluid as possible, whereas low stock prices erode confidence and evoke a sense of fear, which adds a lot of risk to an already unstable housing market. Perception becomes reality.