Early Preview: Sneak Peak of the SEO Book Training Program

So I am beta testing setting up the SEO Book community and training program. A couple issues have come up so far, but generally stuff is looking pretty good. I am still working on fixing a couple details, but to get a preview of the training part you can go here. I am hoping to do an official launch in the coming week unless something major comes up.

As time passes I intend to make the training program richer and deeper and add lots of videos and other content to it. But you can kinda think of the online training program as being a high quality editorially controlled Wikipedia of SEO information, complete with an interactive community forum. :)

The Kinds of Search PPC Arbitrage That Are Not Dying

I got a bit of flack via email about saying that Google and Yahoo! were killing off arbitrage. I think, more accurately, I should have said something like they are trying to kill off most forms of garbitrage and click to click arbitrage...the type of stuff where there is no value add AND the affiliate has no brand.

CJ just announced that Yahoo! changed their policy and is allowing affiliates to direct link to merchant websites. From the most recent Commission Junction newsletter:

After more than six months in the making and much customer feedback and testing, we are pleased to announce that Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) has recently updated its editorial policies and will now allow U.S. publishers to direct link to their advertisers. In the past, YSM's editorial policy prevented publishers from linking directly to their advertiser partners and required that traffic be sent first to the publisher's Web site. The new policy eliminates this restriction and opens a much broader search marketing opportunity for publishers.

After you look at the fallout of recent changes, it appears many thin arbitrage sites still are fine advertising, but the ones that are still doing well are typically associated with larger brands. The following arbitrage sites are still bidding on a wide array of keywords

A few of the other big arbitrage players like FindStuff.com and Toseeka.com and some other MeziMedia/ValueClick sites still seem to be directing ad traffic to their sponsored search results.

Google and Yahoo can not clean up all the arbitrage at once because that would have hurt the ad networks too much. They started with many of the more open and potentially abusive relationships and will work to keep elevating the value add of partner sites by bringing more content directly into the search results. Consider how aggressively Google integrated local results in their organic search results and that Google is now testing displaying video ads in their search results.

Google & Yahoo! Kill PPC Arbitrage

Google has been getting tighter with their control of their ads, fighting arbitrage with the following changes

  • manual reviews, smart pricing discounting (of publisher clicks), and quality scores (increasing the cost of advertising junk)
  • improved duplicate content detection
  • decreasing the clickable area in many AdSense ad units
  • killing sub-syndication of their feed with companies like Ask
  • keeping a greater percentage of ad revenue from each click
  • requiring advertiser display URLs to match ad destination (starting April 1st)

From this graph you can see the sharp rise of click arbitrage quickly fell off when Google decided to work on fixing the problem.

Yahoo! has turned a blind eye to arbitrage for years. Some people who had strong feeds only saw their arbitrage profit margins increase as the weaker players could no longer compete arbitraging Google traffic. And then Yahoo! dropped a bomb, announcing that arbitrage to their ad feeds is now against their TOS and Parked.com confirmed it.

The biggest distributed ad networks do not want to buy any traffic that is bought directly via similar networks. These companies are cutting their short term revenues in an attempt to make their ad ecosystem healthier. On multiple occasions I have logged into Yahoo! Search Marketing to see a random multi-hundred dollar spend on a keyword that typically costs under $1 a day. I, for one, am glad to see this crap die. But it died a few years too late.

Google and Yahoo want a direct relationship with publishers and merchants. They hate virtually any type of affiliate that is not a highbrow relationship. More power to the organic players, and please static text links instead!

Free 7 Days to Search Engine Success Series When You Create Your Free SEO Book Account

I created a 7 day email series that new members can sign up to when they create a new account. In addition current members can sign up to it in the right sidebar. If you have been doing SEO for years you probably know most everything that is in the autoresponder sequence, but if you are new to SEO it is a great place to start learning.

Writing Sales Copy is Tough

After reading many bad and cheesy salesletters and many salesletters that I know convert well you might think that I was good at writing sales copy. After all, even before Brian Clark worked his magic on my salesletter, other internet marketers frequently asked me who wrote my original sales letter because they wanted to hire that person to write their sales copy. That person was me, but to this day I still felt that the sales copy I wrote was a bit (or maybe a lot) cheesy.

I am trying to write more sales copy and keep finding myself falling into the typical traps:

  • Jargon filled verbose prose.
  • Poor formatting and organization.
  • Self aggrandizing.
  • Too much focus on me.
  • Features not benefited.

I have came up with an angle or idea to start from. Even though it may be true it still keeps sounding a bit weird. It is easier to talk about my book or some other random object that has been on the marketplace for years, but it is so much harder to personalize it and take ownership over something and talk about it as an extension of me. And then I wonder am I just talking about me for me.

Blog posts seem to write themselves for me. No so with sales copy. I find writing sales copy for myself hard. Especially if I am trying to write it for a new product that does not have any public feedback yet. The best I can do is use feedback on other public services and products I sold as a proxy for value, but it comes off a bit dis-jointed. Ultimately social proof and trust are what sells. But if you are just launching a new product it is tough to show social value on day 1, especially when you intend to iteratively improve your product based on customer feedback. Maybe I should ask a few friends look at version 1 and offer feedback to me.

Do you sometimes feel a bit weird or too self promotional when writing sales copy? What do you do to get past it? How do you make people want to salivate without feeling like you are spitting on something or someone?

Is Influencer Theory Garbage?

Duncan J Watts recently published a study debunking the role of influencers in synthetic virtual worlds, then debunking them again by showing how ads spread through the online world. I think the problems with the thesis are

  • machines do not have emotions
  • most of the people spreading the ideas in his studies did not have a large potential gain as a potential outcome of sharing the idea
  • we live in a time of such an abundance of information that information / knowledge workers need to trust filters
  • some filters have publicly available stats showing 10,000's of people trust and follow them
  • the easiest way to target influencers is not through ads, but through content which gets exposure in some of those trusted filters...if your idea starts in an ad box you already tuned out many influencers

The Fast Company article covering the research goes on to state the following

As Watts points out, viral thinkers analyze trends after they've broken out. "They start with an existing trend, like Hush Puppies, and they go backward until they've identified the people who did it first, and then they go, 'Okay, these are the Influentials!'" But who's to say those aren't just Watts's accidental Influentials, random smokers who walked, unwittingly, into a dry forest?

In some cases that might be true, but online you can learn communities and individuals well enough to create content targeted around their needs / wants / passions / biases / identities. You can predict the viability future ideas with some degree of accuracy. And there is so much data to study that virtually anyone can pick up the patterns and start spreading ideas within a few months.

I have changed a few words in a blog post to change the angle of it to target certain individuals. My success rate with getting a mention from the specific personality or person I was targeting is much too high to be an anomaly. Not only have I taken past ideas from other markets and applied it to my market, but I have taken some fundamental social and psychological principals and value related ideas, applied them to markets I know almost nothing about (and have no influence in), and still over half of those linkbait ideas go viral.

And once you give an idea exposure on a leading channel or two (not as an ad but as editorial) you display social proof of value and start the cumulative advantage process.

I am not trying to toot my own horn. Just trying to write from experience rather than theory. Some people, like Andy Hagans, are way better at launching linkbait than I am. The reason that linkbait is so powerful is that it can be so targeted, and it targets the foundation of the web's value system, which typically does not look like an ad - the link.

Build a Brand. Own the Network.

VideoEgg announced $1.5 million in ad revenues over 5 months, which is not much when you consider that they have over 150 top widgets. You can use targeted widgets and gadgets to push things that are already valuable, successful, unique, or interesting outside of the social networks, but traditional advertising is no good.

Rarely will you see the relevancy line up this well unless the gadget was created custom to match the item being advertised. But gadgets need to be extensions of brands, I don't think they can become destinations themselves. And if they do, the network can always change their policies or clone them.

It is harsh doing business on someone else's network. eBay, which has raised rates in the past, but never did much cleanup in over a decade, just announced their first quality score.

And if your offering is just basic data or something that is easy to replicate that is a zero sum game with those profits heading to Google, other market makers, or scammers arbitraging holes in the marketplace:

Data has this really weird quality. In economic terms data has an increasing marginal utility. Anyone who took Econ 101 knows that most physical objects have a decreasing marginal utility. When it is raining my first umbrella keeps me dry, a second may be handy if the first blows out, but a third is unlikely to be used. This is true of shirts, steaks, houses, of almost anything you can think of except data.

Data has the opposite characteristic. Each incremental point of data adds value to the ones you all ready have. It is easy to see this in the context of an advertising network. If the ad network knows that a user is female it can show more relevant ads. But, If the ad network knows that female’s age, it can do even better, and data about location, household income, and recent web sites visited all add value to the existing data points, making it possible to show more and more relevant ads.

Look at how Google expanded their local listings. How long until they own that category? By the time other aggregators want to opt out all of the data (and value) will have already been transferred to Google.

With all the value going to the aggregators who should sue who? Will that grow a broken business model?

The solution to market dilution is information pollution. Oops, wrong quote. What I meant to say was what Brian said here:

The replication process is quite intense and getting faster, which is why we need to focus on building trademark businesses (based on brand) instead of businesses dependent on copyright law.

New Tagline at SEO Book...

The old tagline a new chapter every day... was around for about 4 years and I figured a change was in order. The best I could come up with was Learn. Rank. Dominate.

Do you like or dislike the new tagline?

BTW, have been doing a bit of spring cleaning fixing what I can. The archives page was not updating, but I got that fixed. Still lots of small things I need to fix in the coming months.

And Matt Cutts confirmed that the #6 ranking was real for anyone who thought it was just speculation.

How Much is a Wikipedia Page Worth to Your Business?

I recently published an article on Fast Company about how advertisers are using Wikipedia listings as a measuring stick for their advertising campaigns. The University of California, Irvine is even using their Wikipedia reference as the ad creative

You can sign up for a Fast Company account here.

The Spamification of Trusted Words, Ideas, & Organizations

I am going to go on record offering you this powerful life-changing advice that will be the most valuable information you ever consumed. Sound familiar?

If you pay attention to spam you can view the trends and see where it is going before it even goes there. One of the big trends that is rarely talked about is how hard spammers hunt hard to find credible sounding words. In spite of being on the do not call list, every day I get a call from the message center, the card center, the consumer center, or the national consumer protection foundation, etc.

If at the core the business model was created to annoy people and steal from them then the people behind these outfits are going to be results oriented, using whatever techniques they find profitable (auto-dialers, powerful words, fake partnerships with trusted bodies, etc), until they burn away the profit margins.

Some words (and even formats) get so polluted that the perception of value goes down. Free killer ebook to change your world forever...chuck full of affiliate links for products not worth buying. Ebooks take more effort to create than web pages do, and so they were once somewhat trusted, but over time have been associated with spam because the format has been abused. Online video is fairly new, but it is already being heavily abused.

Trusted names and charities partner with businesses to extend out the public relations campaigns of the businesses. As featured in loses its value when anyone can go write a column. Consumer generated content is bolted onto mainstream media sites, but how much of it is as good as leading independent channels? The people who really have something to say probably already run their own websites, and the primary intent of most people participating on media sites is going to be nefarious in nature. Speaking of that, I just got a good idea. :)

On the flip side, some words become valuable because other people significantly invest to create the value behind those words. The value is greatest if you are sitting on the exact .com name that becomes popular, but even if people are propping up words in unrelated markets they still can drive up the value of domains with that word in them. These community sites also drive up the value of short domain names that can support a community of their own.

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