A Cheap Thrill or a Lasting Memory... Who Will Remember You?

Open source content management solutions like Drupal get more powerful each day. But everyone has access to it.

Firefox has extensions like Firebug that allow you to test modifying page layout or CSS in real time.

Custom feeds, leading blogs, personalization, recommendations, aggregators, filters, and alerts allow us to consume a firehose of information.

Search engines are giving away a lot of valuable data to try to win marketshare. But everyone has access to it.

You can buy full feature affiliate software for under $300.

About 40% of retailers do not have a physical store location.

Companies like 1ShoppingCart offer an affiliate program and hook into on demand publishing and fulfillment companies like Vervante. Selling an information product means no shipping is required.

Amazon reduces hosting costs to virtually nothing, offers an order fulfillment service, and now they are pushing their WebStores aggressively, which really automates a big piece of the workload of most businesses. Amazon also owns BookSurge, a print on demand publishing company.

Lots of people are solving common problems and giving publishers a wide array of choices that keep driving costs down. Just about everything is getting cheaper and easier - except marketing. Audiences fragment, people ignore advertising, and everyone is so busy that they have no time for you.

Public relations and search marketing are the new advertising because unlike most ads they are not ignored. They are seen as editorial content even if it is bought and sold on a per article basis or per ranking basis. And so you have smart business deals where you slap Lance Armstrong's name on a bunch of user generated content. Generate the PR buzz and watch the ad dollars roll in:

The Lance Armstrong Foundation, which spends about $40 million a year on health programs and cancer research, is teaming up with Web-site operator Demand Media Inc. to launch a health-and-wellness Web site funded by advertising. The site, called "livestrong.com," is expected to go live this year.

How does the Google view of spam and editing out non-editorial link buys stand up in a world where companies like Demand Media recycle the web and cross link it all, while companies like Pay Per Clip offer:

WEB MEDIA placements can range from $450 for a brief appearance in an online article, to $2,750 for a full feature, including a link to your web site, in a top tier web publication.

Google needs to realize that public relations, promotions, and advertising are a normal part of the business process. After all, ads only account for 99% of their revenue. But Google engineers can dictate arbitrary mandates based on a broken understanding of the business world because Google's founders thought big.

Value your time properly and think big. You can not invest too much in learning, clean organic looking marketing (like domain names, site design, and public relations), or brand building.

The mind can adapt itself to do whatever you want it to. But if you wait too long to act, nobody cares what you do.

Yahoo! & Microsoft Still do Not Understand Marketing

Microsoft heavily invested to create useful tools for advertisers. On their tools page contextual ads are listed on the right for subjects related to "all the data mining", no doubt from a thin arbitrage site.

If Microsoft would just let me know what that ad placement cost is, I bet I would pay more for the ad placement than the thin arbitrage site. Although the value of keeping their tool pages free of ads, so that they can increase market penetration would be worth even more.

One of the ads on Microsoft's ad tools page offers to repair Microsoft products (which hints that Microsoft's stuff is broken), while another ad is marginally relevant and leads to a no value arbitrage domain (IndustrialProducts.com) which redirects to another site syndicating Yahoo ads.

Then when the user appears on the thin arbitrage site Microsoft is buying the click back to market their own products.

Let us appreciate this brilliance:

  1. paying advertisers to cheapen their brand and pollute their core product pages in important verticals with irrelevant spammy low (or no) value offers
  2. sending away more traffic than they get back
  3. losing money on the transaction

I have ranted about Yahoo! killing their keyword tool and doing nothing to rebrand or repair it, simply wasting thousands or millions of dollars worth of leads and marketshare each day. Disclaimer: my keyword tool just broke too, but I am trying to get it fixed ASAP. Yahoo! has other areas where they can offer you useful recommendations, but chose not to.

If you ever submit a site to the global Yahoo! Directory on the thank you page they recommend submitting your site to regional directories if your site is in multiple languages.

  • That upsell offer is irrelevant for most people submitting their websites, and
  • Yahoo! killed express inclusion for many of their regional directories years ago. The landing pages for the regional Yahoo! Directory submissions are broke. They do not even allow me to spend money if I want to.

Social Media vs Influencing Thought Leaders

In most markets worth being in and with most sustainable business models, sales is not a one time event, but a process. You first have to create awareness, then build trust, then finally make the sale. Do all 3 happen at once for some people? Sure, but probably not for the majority of customers.

My big issue with hyping social media is that most things that are popular on social media sites do not actually build credibility, and that you are going to have marginal success building your brand if you start by focusing on these broad third party communities rather than YOUR TOPICAL COMMUNITY.

When I first started getting well known there was no Digg. There was a Slashdot, but exposure on Slashdot did not make or break me. What really sent my personal brand on a sharp upward trajectory was when Danny Sullivan mentioned me. Because he felt I was comment-worthy many other people suddenly thought I knew what I was talking about and that I was trustworthy.

That perception of trust, audience, and personal-brand that Danny had spent years building was in some part transferred to me. Am I as well known as he is? Of course not, but while sites like Digg have audience they tend to lack that perception of trust and personal-brand that transfers BUYING CUSTOMERS to your site.

If a person who has trust and a broad base of readership recommends you that creates immediate sales. I see that in my daily sales data and my affiliate statistics. If you get featured on social media sites it does not lead to many sales. Perhaps that exposure leads to awareness, which can further be enhanced by writing about that community, buying banner ads from sites like Lead Back, or by writing other create subscription-worthy content, but generally in content editorial link from a trusted expert creates more sales than exposure on a nearly automated hollow social news site.

If your site is new to the market and you want some exposure you have two options

  • eat Taco bell for a month, take the world's biggest crap, then write a leading 10 step how-to guide on how-to polish it, or
  • create things that people INSIDE YOUR COMMUNITY will find useful

One of those strategies will get you in the Guinness book of world records. The other will make sales.

Does your content build trust?

Join Aaron and I this Evening to Learn the Trends in Blogging for 2008

It's a bit of a short notice but I manage a meetup group for Bay Area bloggers and Aaron would like to invite his local fans to join us. Details can be found at The Bloggers Group

Let us know in advanced if you can make it. The event is full but I would like to make room for local SEO Book fans. The event is free and will be held at a local pizzeria.

I post interesting things about marketing, business and all that inspire me at my personal blog, Hey Gio. I practice sincere blogging, just like Aaron ;)

Is Social Media Traffic Worth 1 Cent Per Visitor?

Fake Businesses

Today I came across an AdWords ad for an automated ebook business model website. Their screenshot highlighting their Paypal account was:

  • hosted on another site
  • named powersell_paypal2.jpg
  • did not show payments but showed withdrawals

Fake Business Statistics

A lot of (mis)marketing techniques are more covert though, through the use of

Fake / misleading research is remarkable, so it is more likely to be cited, and recycled by people hyping similar business interests. A while ago MarketingExperiments did social media marketing research which was not really research, and yet those false stats promising social media goodness just appeared again:

Claiming that the above ROI is 1,427% higher is at best dishonest. You can teach the value of something without syndicating lies as truth.

Social Media Traffic Does Not Buy

Want to know the truth about most social media traffic? Its garbage. Some of my AdSense ad campaigns use an affiliate account to track ROI. Until I filtered them out for poor performance, MySpace and Digg were providing about 90% of my overall affiliate ad volume with 0 conversions, whereas some of my better affiliates make a sale a day or a sale every few days on far less traffic.

I know that was an isolated example and it would be unfair to judge the entire market on that, but consider this...those ads had a horrifically low clickthrough rate and still only cost a dime a click. If I was getting a lot of volume on a network that size while bidding next to nothing then that ad inventory is not worth that much. Simple as that.

Some Top Publishers Are Afraid Social Media Marketing

Some leading publishers are even worried about deflating their CPM by getting to much lousy social media traffic.

Comparing Social Media to Direct Navigation

Why do you think domainers make so much money without even needing to develop websites? For a person to end up on a parked page they have a lot of implied intent in their location. The same is true for a search result. If you just searched for something you have implied intent. Google is worth 200 billion and I am not. :)

For all the hype Facebook ad system has got, there is limited value in their user data:

Google actually knows all of that, and at least 10X more data about users than Facebook, but hasn't seen the need to really mine the data yet, since search intent has proven to be worth about 100X more than that kind of data so far.

If social marketing gets you clean links it is great. If people recommend your product to their customers that is great. I get mentioned on Seth Godin's blog and sales double. I make the front page of a social news site and nothing happens. Most of the social media hype is hollow and without value.

Put Social Media to the Test Today

Still don't believe me that most social marketing traffic is worthless? Ask yourself why StumbleUpon only charges 5 cents a visitor for any category - including big money categories like daytrading, gambling, and financial planning.

If the successful secret marketing strategies that send 4 cent traffic are buzzworthy then they could at least have the decency to tell me I can get the same thing for a nickel with no effort.

Optimizing Automated Communication Strategies

When someone hits you up with a commercial email you never asked for that is spam. But there are other types of automated communication which have the opportunity to suck, or the opportunity to be helpful. Call customer support for a Fortune 500 monopoly and you will see the wrong end of selfish automation. Numerous third party solutions are dedicated to balancing these selfish relationships.

It is easy to write off fields you don't understand. seo=spam, email marketing=spam, affiliates=spam, public relations=spam. But just because you have never used a technique does not mean that it is spam. In much the same way that communication can be selfish, communication can also be meaningless, or offer the bare essentials needed to be utilitarian. Every channel and every interaction is an opportunity, and every interaction has costs. In the past the welcome email for joining SEO Book said something like this:

!username,

Thank you for registering at !site. You may now log in to !login_uri using the following username and password:

username: !username
password: !password

You may also log in by clicking on this link or copying and pasting it in your browser:

!login_url

This is a one-time login, so it can be used only once.

After logging in, you will be redirected to !edit_uri so you can change your password.

-- !site team

I recently changed it to

Hello !username,

Thank you for registering at !site. You may now
log in to
!login_uri
using the following username and password:

username: !username
password: !password

After logging in, you will be redirected to
!edit_uri
so you can change your password.

-------------------------------------------------------

Please introduce yourself here
http://www.seobook.com/introduction-thread-who-are-you-what-do-you-do
And fill out your user profile. My profile is here if
you want to take a look
http://www.seobook.com/user/aaron-wall
By default your user profile includes a couple Google
gadgets that make it easy to do competitive research.

-------------------------------------------------------

You can read the latest SEO news and participate in the
discussion here http://www.seobook.com/blog

-------------------------------------------------------

Please have a look at some of the featured content
offered on the site, including
http://www.seobook.com/glossary/ - learn SEO jargon
http://tools.seobook.com/ - collection of free SEO tools
http://www.seobook.com/bloggers - the Blogger's Guide to SEO
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml - 101
link building tips

We have many more features in development, and will
release some of them soon!

Have a great day!
-- Aaron Wall, and the !site team

I am sure I can greatly improve it from there, perhaps even offering a 7 day autoresponder series for new members, and a different autoresponder series for people who buy SEO Book.

I recently joined one service that sends daily quick tip emails for the first month. Every third email is an advertisement, and yet somehow as I marketer I have not taken offense to the ads and actually find the emails useful. 2 out of 3 emails offer tips to master topic x, while the 3rd email tells you to buy a product or service in a related market. Each email, based on who sent it, reminds me to use the service I am paying for, which lowers the odds of me unsubscribing.

Some successful marketers can take a basic concept that you would write a sentence about and turn it into a 10 page article 20 minute video. When you are trying to give people direction you rarely get in trouble for making an idea too accessible and too easy to understand. Building trust is a process. After people give you permission you can use automation to help build trust and encourage participation. Or you can ignore a free marketing channel that is easy to set up, while your competitors increase visitor value and take marketshare from you.

The relationship between sales and email is not a 1 to 1 ratio, but the days I spend 6 hours answering email I sell many ebooks. Assuming your offers are compelling and clearly stated, communication and inquiry have a rough correlation for purchase demand. Each of these emails gets a personalized response, but the more you can make your automated marketing feel personalized the less personalized selling you have to do to make sales.

Automation ideas that apply to most online communities and software businesses:

  • package information in multiple formats to give people many different paths to reach conversion
  • answer common questions on your site so you can point new customers at it and so searchers can find it
  • personalize welcome or sign up emails to thank users for joining and highlight featured content (I used to do this for SEO Book orders too, but need to modify the affiliate software again after I upgraded to the latest version)
  • use autoresponders that offer free helpful tips and build trust (I need to take my own advice here too, and am hoping to soon)
  • store answers to some common emails in a searchable online database like iDevaffiliate does
  • create a community where consumers can solve each other's questions
  • offer tutorial videos and/or FAQs with any piece of complex software
  • create software which allows people to restore default settings
  • cross reference complementary tools - as is done by my keyword tool

Product launches that fail often fail because the marketer assumes everyone wants what they are producing rather than giving people what they want in a format they like. Many successful marketers have been throwing away a lot of money for a long time by assuming everyone wants to read the blog.

Jim Boykin Launches Internet Marketing Training & Tools Combo

Jim Boykin announced the launch of his Internet Marketing Ninjas training & SEO tools. His price point is not cheap, but he opened up his internal tools and flew all over the country to interview many experts to create a quality product.

Which Hurts the Credibility of the SEO Field More? ...

What is worse, when Matt Marlon's Traffic Power cold calls people selling SEO services or when Wal Mart offer SEO services for $25 a month? Both of them carve away at the profitability of real SEO by creating a market for lemons.

Given that many of the industry associatiations are hollow vehicals for self promotion and that services are not as profitable as running your own sites it is going to get harder and harder to find an SEO worth hiring that will actually want to optimize a website for what is deemed a fair market price.

The Next US President is a Bad Marketer

As Frank Luntz says "it's not what you say, it's what people hear." Politics is a game of marketing. Raise money, invest in messaging, and spread the message.

Most of the leading presidential candidates are not running AdWords ads to place a donation message on search result. Given Howard Dean's experience in raising money online, where they tested and changed page layouts based on donation data, the Democrats ought to know better.

Few candidates are buying display ads. Given this data, I am buying more display ads for SEO Book than any of the presidential candidates are.

You do not need to be a conversational marketing guru to advertise. In a couple hours I could create a campaign for any of the candidates that gets in excess of 100,000,000 monthly impressions and brings in far more than it costs. They are doing interviews on TechCrunch about technology and the web. Why don't they put their money where their mouth is?

Why Did the Search Marketing Associations Fail?

One of the big differences between things that are successful and things that fail is simply staying around and staying active in the community. By those measurements, the regional Search Marketing Associations were all failures.

  • SMA-UK.org - blog last updated a little over 2 years ago
  • SMA-NA.org - dissolved in September of this year
  • SMA-EU.org - now a PPC lander page

Cooperatives are exceptionally hard to run because you have to balance business interests, egos, recruiting new members, creating member benefits, and pull time out of your schedule for the organization. And if you don't see what the other members are doing, it seems unbalanced, so you go back to working on your own projects. Even a partnership with only a couple people can be a bit of work to balance when you add in individual business interests outside the partnership and balancing work with family life.

It is exceptionally hard to create organizations that are for everyone. Many of the top marketers in the SEO space get paid more precisely because the field has a dirty reputation. I put that theory to test a few years back when I created a non-self-promotional guide to buying SEO services, registered the domain via proxy, and, in spite of having core community members mention it, watched it fall flat on its face. It seems virtually everyone who wanted to make the industry better only wanted to see improvement if their name was attached to the improvements.

In most cases if you want to create a successful trade organization or group exclusivity is much more effective strategy than appealing to everyone.

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