Some Things Only Spread Because Who is Behind Them

I recently created an Internet marketing mind map and published it on my tools subdomain with a link to it from tools.seobook.com, but nobody mentioned it. A few days later I blogged about it on SeoBook.com and dozens of webmasters linked to it. Same publisher, same content, drastically different results...because one channel has attention while the other does not.

The Flaw of Pull Marketing Advice

Much of the marketing advice offered on blogs assumes that you have a well read blog and can get away with great content spreading based on pull marketing, but when you publish a new site and write about ideas that others covered you don't get the credit you deserve until you build an attention asset. Which means you have to use push marketing until you get readers / subscribers / brand advocates.

Markets are not fair. People are more likely to link to familiar trusted channels then new channels. It can take years to build a significant readership. And if you wait for it to happen on its own it may never happen.

Ineffective Blogging

It is hard to be the regular news spot just by producing similar news to what is available on other channels. If you cover stories that are worth spreading, but are not dong much more than syndicating them, then even if your content is useful the reference links skip past you and on to the end story you wrote about. You might get a hat tip link here or there, but you are not going to get many if you have few readers. And those links are not going to be enough to pull readers away from market leading channels, to do so requires people talking about you. Your content has to amalgamate ideas from multiple sources or unique perspectives such that people are TALKING ABOUT YOU.

Owning an Idea

If you do not have enough leverage to own mainstream ideas then you need to own ideas on the edge or borrow the authority of someone or something else. The first person to crack an iPhone got lots of exposure. Announcing a new Google feature gets you exposure. Real in depth reviews of exciting new stuff gets you exposure. Every market has an Apple, a Google, or some relation to one of those companies.

The easiest way to get a community involved in your site is to ask them for involvement. Collect their feedback and aggregate it in a meaningful format. And interviewing a market leader is an easy way to leverage someone else's brand and gain attention. Getting community involvement is crucial because each trusted person who associates with you moves you that much further away from being irrelevant or potentially spammy. They make you worth paying attention to because they cared enough to participate.

If you get community participation it also protects your idea. It gets competitors called sleazy when they clone your idea and throw a few more marketing dollars at it.

What if you can't get anyone to participate? Desperate times require desperate measures! Wrap your message in a fictitious backdrop based on real world opinions. Want to reach out to financial bloggers? Notice they are talking about Alan Greenspan a bunch recently? Tell everyone why Alan Greenspan thinks Google is under-priced. Quote his principals and use them to justify Google at $2,400 per share.

Google can't catch most paid links. They can't even catch large malware networks that have existed long enough to be reported in the mainstream media. But they can go after business models they do not like.

As Google tries to shift the web to improve user experience AND extract as much profit as possible, certain classes of information and information formats are rendered useless and/or unprofitable.

Web Directories

There are a lot of web directories that recently got hit, and those hand penalties are not the only way directories are being penalized. Google has been fighting off parasitic (or low value) link sales web directories for years by crawling them less deeply and caching their pages infrequently. Cache date is the new Google PageRank.

You can analyze changes and beg for forgiveness from Google, but they don't care about you or your site. They are only interested in improving general web trends, search usage, and their ad driven profit. This is not to say that analysis is bad, but sometimes we chose to analyze the wrong things rather than shift our approach to marketing.

An Alternate Name, Classification, & Approach

Domain names are worth so much because people tend to refer to you using what you call yourself.

Google's recent hate toward directories does not indicate that all directories are junk, but if you were to start a new web directory today what benefit is there in calling yourself a web directory? What if rather than charging $20 or $50 for a link, you charged much more and listed a real formal review on the site? Why not be a web review guide or a social bookmarking service or something else that is more in tune with the general direction of the web? Mahalo is worthless, but due to the different classification "human powered search" and associated public relations hype, it is much stronger than most directories.

Leverage New Information Formats

Ebooks are another concept that has got abused. So are many of the other classes of sites Google is going on record as saying you should avoid. The same types of information that appears in ebooks can be displayed using something like Sketchast, and be called something different, that is yet to be abused.

If you are in a competitive market your site should not be static. Even DMOZ created a blog.

Not All Arbitrage is Made Equal

If you are starting a new business it is best to tie your name and brand to a memorable, likable, and press-worthy topic. If you run a thin arbitrage type business the name and labels you use to describe yourself may be more important than the quality of your user experience. Spend upfront or pay later with limited exposure and/or a risky rebrand.

The web has long been rich in social and viral marketing elements. Email this to a friend, social bookmarking, blogging, etc. So many services have popped up that now there is a Social Media Firefox Extension and Andy Hagans is planning his fake review optimization service.

Ultimately the communities that are focused on a niche and editorially biased will be successful while aggregator websites that are nothing more than a feature that Google can add to their suite of services will die. Google quitely launched a Digg clone, and is aiming to create the underlying platform that powers most social networks. And they might bid on wireless spectrum in the US and UK.

As the leading portals collect more data they will be able to add value to more transactions and disintermediate middlemen by employing creative individuals to do jobs that were once done in offices. If people get paid for results then the quality of work goes up. Think of portals as television stations vying for a bite of your attention for as long as they possibly can, and looking to pay you for your attention with relevancy, and cash if you are really motivated.

There has always been a wall between editorial and advertising. Viral self select ads rip that down. Kevin Kelly recently posted about how he sees the new Google Gadget ads changing the face of advertising.

What happens when publishers can see what is hot right now and can create commercially oriented content targeting it in near real time? What happens when they are encouraged to track and test their results and can see the results of other ideas simply by the frequency they see it? Many current arbitrage opportunities are going to die, but others will thrive on this new opportunity.

The more third party platforms optimize revenue streams the more profitable niche attention based publishing will become. Generalist sites will be less profitable than highly specialized niche publishing. Results based distribution across large networks will force advertisers to give publishers a larger cut of revenue.The key is to scour through the ads and format them in a user friendly way to where they are looking at relevant content. You can't beat relevancy algorithms without bias, brand, focus, and strong editorial.

Call it Research & People Will Believe It

The Computers and Communications Industry Association published research on the value of fair use. The research is completely biased, to the point of being fraud:

Even by the woeful standards of the bespoke research industry, this study is a crock. It's not just bad; it's absurd. What the authors have done is to define the "fair-use economy" so broadly that it encompasses any business with even the most tangential relationship to the free use of copyrighted materials.

Even Smart People Buy This Junk

Google is a leading sponsor of the research. They know it is a lie, but one that fattens their profit margins, so why not help spread this one and spend a few dollars sponsoring the next one?

Cory Doctorow, who is brilliant, is helping spread this idea because it was the first such publication and he is emotionally attached to the idea. If you are the first person to create a value system that reinforces others values they are going to cite you day and night.

Marketing Continues to Blur into a Game of Psychological Warfare

As marketing and content merge, and as people become more aware of marketing, there are going to be a lot more non-profit organizations sharing research built around pushing lies that helps for profit companies. Some lies are damaging, others are not. Both smart and ignorant people will cast votes without understanding what they are doing. The machines that count votes promote information pollution and are amoral. Those selling sugar water to diabetics also sell safety water. Every dollar counts. As marketing advances, expect more people to play on your emotions using an ever-increasing complex and diverse array of techniques.

Many web companies significantly profit from the appearance that they are open, but anything of value eventually needs to have some limitations placed on it. In spite of no longer having MovableType installed on this server, the mt-comments file is one of my most requested files. Registration moves you away from The Tragedy of the Commons to something more sustainable.

Asking people to register suddenly makes them nicer because it makes the audience less robotic, and the most mean spirited people are not like to remain once anonymous disappears. It is harder to leave anonymous troll comments without being figured out if you have to create an account to post them. And who has time to set up 100 different accounts?

If you can sell a few people a day then you can also sell the idea of a free subscription with future bonuses to dozens or hundreds of people. It is easier to sell in small steps over time than it is to go from anonymous to sold. Pre-selling works so well because people not only learn to trust you, but they are already satisfied with your product BEFORE they purchase it. Some people ask me to do an in depth site review to try to sell them my ebook. I tell them that I do not do that because if they are not pre-sold on me then an exchange is likely going to be a mutual waste of time.

Exceptionally large communities are just as bad as anonymous communities because members have little in common, and relevancy rarely is aligned when everyone is the same. Without leaders a community is dominated by spam, poor communication, misunderstandings, and hate. I can't tell you how many porn messages I see browsing YouTube, and I just got this feedback on one of my videos:

No doubt this dude's got about 3/4 sugar in his tank. The "information" in the video is just more rehashed content available anywhere on the countless webmaster & marketing forums found all over the Web. Beyond the gay plagiarist guise, notice the example; seems we have a little Google/CNN toady here pushing THEIR brand not yours. Silly goy; he doesn't mention that all you need to be successful & dominate any industry is be a loyal satanic zionist. That's the true Google/CNN business model.

Posting the same information on my blog got much better feedback. And writing an article for Wordtracker got great feedback too. Why? Likely because I am relevant to their audience, and anyone who has subscribed to a free newsletter and clicked through to the web article likely wants to consume information.

Clay Shirky's A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy highlights many of the reasons that smaller communities are more meaningful and useful than large communities. If a site gets to the scale of a Google or a YouTube it must deal with endless spam. For most publishers it is best to be semi-porous, to get the benefits of being branded as being open, and allowing just about anyone to join or participate, but have some level of investment (time or money) required to do so in order to minimize noise.