But is it SPAM?

Many marketers promote a naive worldview where things are black and white, but few profitable marketing methods are ever clearly black and white. The largest areas of profit are usually somewhere in the gray. You take the brand of something really white and good and you use that to gain enough leverage to monetize it using shadier or more aggressive margin rich ideas.

Using AIDS to Market Your Products:

Want an example? Werty was recently pissed off about product Red being a scam. Charge twice as much for a product and share HALF of the PROFITS with AIDS related causes.

While still on the topic of AIDS, did you know that last year Bristol-Myers Squibb got a bunch of media coverage for a site called Light to Unite, where they donate $1 to the National AIDS Fund each time someone lights a candle with the click of a mouse*. There have been nearly 1.8 million candles lit, but Bristol-Myers Squibb used the asterisks and small print to cap the payout at $100,000.

You take a corporate agenda, give a few crumbs to a non-profit, and have them market your story for you. Is that spam? Is that legitimate marketing? Not sure.

Is it biased ans self-serving? Absolutely, but then all marketing is.

Ads as Content:

I told my girlfriend that Obama will accidentally be called Osama because it was too easy to make that accident. Turns out it has already been happening for years.

Language is intentionally used and misused in specific frames, formats, and various levels of preciseness or vagueness to push the agenda of the author or originator of the story. Public relations is still going strong today.

Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.

Brand Duplication:

In most fields, most profitable businesses are arbitrage plays.

Why does InterActive Corp need Expedia, Hotels.com, TripAdvisor, Hotwire.com, and then even niche brands like ClassicVacations.com all in the travel vertical? What is the significant value add and mark of differentiation between each of those brands?

Yahoo! has search results, paid ads, local listings, their directory, Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Answers, and Yahoo! News. Those cover virtually every vertical, but then they have content in other large verticals like auto, sports, tech and travel. Some of these leverage content from one another. They extend that content further with spam aggregator ideas like Yahoo! Brand Universe, plus they own automated content networks and niche brands like Del.icio.us, Flickr, and MyBlogLog. Do they really need that many brands competing with each other? They are already the most popular site on the web and they STILL are avid link buyers. If they already have that much traffic do they still need to buy links? And why are they selling these links on their homepage?

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So that is mortgage / credit, education, credit cards, and credit reports. In SEO those are generally considered spammy fields. Why? Because they are high profit / high margin fields where there are a ton of duplicate brands which do not add much value to the web.

Google is no better than any of the other companies. How much web spam is paid for by AdSense? Why does Google recommend publishers blend the ads with the content (unless they are selling links, in which case it is a sin of some sort)? Why does Google sell ads for software they recommend avoiding in their webmaster guidelines? Why do they syndicate ads on Warez websites? Why do they recommend bidding on keywords like bootleg movie download?

Having an automated ad network that pushes just about anything does not make it any more humane. It just increases the margins, so Google can push it further. But blindly profit seeking algorithms cause people to push the envelope to stay competitive. Is it any surprise that the UK is enacting laws to make fake reviews illegal?

If Google is so worried about noise that they have to quality price many ads off the page to keep it clean, why are the Google Checkout buttons so graphically large and aggressive on a virtually all text search result page? Does Google really need to push their checkout product this hard?

Doesn't that look a bit spammy, or tacky at the least?

What is Relevancy?

In The Search Engines Are Killing SEO Mark Simon predicts that in an attempt to have relevant results that search engine optimization will be rendered largely useless by improving technology:

Searchers want relevant results. They’ll reward or punish engines according to the relevance they provide. Advertisers, meanwhile, go where the searchers are. And so in order to keep the advertisers, who make the engines money, the engines need to make sure their search results are as relevant as possible.

I would argue that branding and marketing have more to do with search market share than relevancy. Google destroys the competition in marketing savvy.

In most highly profitable commercial markets there is not much difference between one company and the next. What can a bank offer but money? And if they operate on smaller margins they have less they can spend on marketing, and they lose market share.

Look how hard Google is fighting to try to marginalize Paypal, to collect marketing data and make their market knowledge more complete. Google is making their own SERPs look spammy to try to win another market, and failing hard. With Checkout, Google is telling a story nobody cares about.

Google Ranks Garbage:

What does Google consider as an authoritative quality website? Why are sites like Yahoo! Shopping, Bizrate, Nextag, MSN Shopping, Dealtime, Pricegrabber, and Shopping.com all ranked in Google as being more valuable than most smaller retail sites? Because they have some editorial guidelines and they spend a ton on marketing. But they all offer similar content, with little differentiation between them, and no value add from one to the next. If Google is so good at determining relevancy why are they ranking so many sites with similar content and similar user experience?

If Google dislikes double dipping on AdWords ads then why do they have so many similar low value sites ranking at the top of the search results for so many search queries?

Google Has to Trust Something:

Maybe search will close some of the easy loopholes, but the search engines have to trust something to create relevancy. Whatever they trust people will manipulate. So search engines will start trusting end users and popular opinion more. So SEO will be more holistic, focusing on users more than engines, but it won't go away. There are too many high margin markets with little brand differentiation, and that means that those who can differentiate or get people to talk about them will win marketshare.

It doesn't matter if you were early to a market and your market growth was slow and organic, or if you are new to the market and are better at marketing. Google has to rank something, and staying stale isn't how they are going to have the best relevancy. People expect to find the results that people are talking about. If your brand is well known Google will rank it highly. They have to in order to be relevant.

Every Market is Gamed:

You can differentiate by showing your message over and over again in hopes that someone cares (like Google Checkout), you can partner up with PR firms and non profits (like Gap and Bristol-Myers Squibb), or you can try to connect with people by sharing information about your topic or creating some other type of real value.

Anyone who thinks the search results will stop being manipulated is a person who fails to see how much the mainstream media is gamed everyday. And so is Digg. And so are most blogs. All authority systems are gamed by marketing.

People tell themselves certain lies to make the world make sense. Microsoft is bad. Apple is good. etc etc etc

The web is more targeted, more viral, and more reactive to marketing messages than other channels. Search will get gamed faster and harder as search commoditizes many thin arbitrage plays, the system teaches people to mesh ads and content, and the easy search algorithmic holes are closed.

SEO will never die. It will just continue to evolve with the market. Some self promotional gurus will associate SEO with dying low value spam, but as long as search companies are hiring SEOs I don't think we have much reason to worry about the future of SEO.

The John T Reed School of Hate Marketing

When I reviewed one of John T Reed's books I stated that his view of SEO was a bit simplistic. He believed that you would just rank for anything you wrote about, but the reason why he ranked for everything under the sun is that he published many scam and scammers review articles.

Making it Easy to Love a Hated Topic:

If your website is in a sketchy field, one of the easiest ways to gain authority is to knock down things that are far sketchier than your own business model. If you review things that are easy to hate which rip off a lot of people it is easy for people to link at that. Then that authority and link equity spreads around your site to your other pages.

The core of your site should be based on servicing your customers as best you can, but if you need a bit of a bump in terms of link equity and you are in a sketchy field you might be able to get those links by reviewing things that people are generally biased against.

How far Should I Push it?

The thing you have to be careful with is to not be too hypocritical when you do those reviews, or else a large part of the market might not take to it too well.

If what you are doing costs you significant credibility and support from within your community you are not going to rank well if the algorithms become more community oriented, plus when people search for you they won't find others saying nice things about you, which makes it hard to charge a premium for your products and services.

Emotions = Links:

People link because of emotions. If you can tap curiosity, laughter, happiness, hate, or rage you can get more link equity than you know what to do with.

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Video as a Key to Market Growth for Small Players

Brian Clark recently linked to a 51 page Michel Fortin PDF which was against writing long copy salesletters. It is a great read for any web marketer. A few highlights:

  • Human nature extends through all mediums.

  • The early web mimicked offline direct marketing. This is why long sales letters worked so well.
  • Due to increasing competition for attention (more websites, more web users, more email, more IMs,
    more spam, audio and video content, games and widgets, statistics programs, and software making the
    reach of one person greater) we have to package attention grabbing content in smaller easier to
    consume pieces if we want it to be consumed.

  • We look for proxies of trust and proxies of value. More people are looking for signs of trust
    away from sales letters, shifting sales from a sales letter to a sales process.

  • "Web 2.0 is about giving the user more control and selling them in the way they want to be sold."
  • "The more technology-driven we become (i.e., the more automated, static, robotic, and
    impersonal we become, as is the case with the web), the more we will crave and seek out human interaction."

  • Some people learn better with video and for many people video is far more stimulating that reading.
  • People are becoming more insatiable and want quicker answers and more free samples.
  • Many people are seeking more content upfront instead of getting it after they get on your newsletter.
  • Even after the purchase videos can be used to help orders stick.

How Salesletters Relate to Search:

You can take Michel's thesis on salesletters and extend it out to everything else on the web. Search is largely a proxy of how well people trust a website, a merchant, or person.

If a person searches for your brand name do they find any feedback about your company? Or is it just a bunch of ads for competitors and a few customer complaints? Or, worse yet, is nobody talking about your brand?

If a person searches for THEIR needs how THEY want to do you have any relevant trustworthy content to lead them into your sales process?

Cutting Edge Search Engine Marketers on Video:

Martinibuster recently posted a fabulous entry titled Creating Authority and Link
Development. Like Michel Fortin's report, it is worth reading from end to end, but here is a sample:

Every selling point relative to the product is appropriate subject matter for demonstration.
It can be presented as one long presentation or it can be broken down into chunks. Yes, it’s an infomercial,
but it’s a way to demonstrate your product in a manner that site visitors are coming to expect and
appreciate. Giving them a way to preview the product is an excellent way of providing value with quality
content. It’s something to link to.

Roger also recently mentioned the move from text to video.

Matt Cutts, WebProNews, and a few search marketers like Lee Odden and Rand Fishken have been using video much more than in the past. Over the past few years Google has been the leading innovation platform at scale. And they recently bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. All of these should be seen as a signal of where things are headed.

Video was shunned in the past largely due to bandwidth costs, and because it had little to no text associated
with it (and was hard to find). But that is changing because:

  • bandwidth costs are dropping - essentially free

  • transcription costs are dropping
  • within a few years audio search will significantly improve (think of how approximate general search is, yet people use it because it is good enough, audio search does not have to be perfect)
  • aggregators, taggers, and bloggers are making it easier to find interesting and unique valuable video content, and are making it easier to find in general search indexes by writing about it
  • if people are talking about me and linking to my site it raises my authority and the authority of every document on my site...so even if one of my videos does not have a lot of text near it but still gets linked to it still adds value to my site

Killing Off Small Players

Currently there is a large blurring between ads and content. It is what Google teaches publishers to do, and targeted ads as content is one of the reasons smart affiliates have been able to make a killing over the past decade.

But due to improving duplicate content filters and an increasing amount of people producing editorial content and editorial links it is getting hard to rank a site which is targeted ads as content unless you attach some sort of editorial or other value add to your site. Plus easy to organize link lists are losing value to improving search technology, social bookmarking and news sites, vertical search engines like Google Custom Search Engine, and the editorial value added by bloggers and media discussing their topic and reviewing related websites.

Large players are wising up to search, with companies like eBay and AOL buying up vertical authorities like TradeDoubler and StubHub. Yahoo! has been pushing splog-like brand universes to leverage traffic streams associated with well known brands.

And it is getting harder to buy the search ads too. Minimum ad relevancy and quality score improvements make some terms out of reach for newer and less sophisticated players. And even traditional content sites like large newspapers are buying keywords to boost their exposure.

If you are logged into a Google Account Google just stopped giving you the ability to see
which results are personalized as they ramped up personalized search. AdWords manipulate the organic search results. And as noted in a comment by Hawaii SEO, the large brands will not only have more authority to rank for the more generic terms, but they also will be able to afford keyword ads early in the buying cycle, even if those keywords offer a negative ROI. If that early broad exposure leads to those sites being biased for long tail keywords as the buyer does deeper research that will also bias traffic streams to larger sites.

Major corporations, which typically are slow at reacting to new markets and opportunities, are already using keyword based search data to determine what products to make and how to name their products.

A while ago I wrote a post about how Google could commoditize nearly everything. I wasn't writing that to be a pessimistic wanker. My point was that as they get better at distinguishing the differences between real brands and non brands it is going to be much harder to keep making money from Google trust if you aren't also heavily trusted AWAY from Google.

Video & Interactivity Helps Keep Small Players Competitive:

Those who are getting into video now have a head start on people who still think of the web exclusively in terms of text. Think of the current video players as the equivalent of early domainers or people who were creating legitimate domains in your field a decade ago.

Chris Garret's Killer Flagship Content

My buddy Chris Garret recently started offering a great downloadable ebook about creating Killer Flagship Content. He gives it away for free if you subscribe to his blog.

Sending Bad Customers to Competitors

One of my friends thought that a good keyword to rank for was cheap widgets. Now on the receiving end of those customers, my friend regrets ranking #1 for cheap widgets. Has anyone ever mentioned poisoning competing business models by sending them floods of low quality leads? If someone helped you rank for junk, and you figured it out, how would you counter? Alter the topic of the page? Remove the page from your site if it was of low value? Change the purpose of the page to harvest and distribute link equity? Point a few links at authoritative websites (like newspapers)? Edit the Wikipedia to put a few extra words in an article? Create parasitic pages on authoritative sites that outrank your site? Recommend a competitor's services to all your bad customers? .htaccess redirect to a page full of ads or a competitor based on referral string? Buy the associated ads for a competitor? Get a competitor links and help them outrank you?

The web is a fairly anonymous place in many ways, and as long as a technique is (remotely close to) legal people will do it. Not saying that I advocate it, but it is good to think about what you would do if any important variables in your business changed (like lead quality, competition in the marketplace, changing technology, etc.)

Targeted Marketing vs Spam Marketing

Almost any marketing method can deliver good or bad messages, be tied to good or bad causes, or be of value or negative value. I think whether marketing is targeted and effective is much more important than the delivery method. SEO gets a bum rap for a variety of reasons, but one thing about good SEO is that it is targeted. Most marketing is not.

SEOs Are Scum:

A person who sold text links for scuba blackjack is considered credible when calling most SEOs scum? By who? And why?

Banks:

I pay my credit card bill and get ads for stamps, soccer, and health insurance. And the envelope contains coupons which, if redeemed, enroll me in worthless programs that cost 10x the value of the coupon. Banks the size of Chase have to do stuff like that to be profitable?

Ad Networks:

Now ad networks are writing things on people's foreheads to get buzz and attention. If the only way you can get people to talk about you is to create controversy or do stupid things that associate you with BumFights is there any satisfaction in that model? And then on the back of that you have your PR firm emailing an owner of a competing network, alerting them to the latest inside scoops and strategy? And then send that same person email spam pitching the SEO value of your wares without my name in it and the email titled "strategic partnership". Where is the relevancy?

Directories:

In spite of already writing the most popular Work.com guide I get emails inviting me to see what Work.com is all about. Why?

Search Engines:

Google is now pushing selling off topic branded advertising and continue to sell ads on sites they banned for spamming. Google sells AdWords ads for software that they specifically say not to use in their webmaster guidelines. Why?

Yahoo! is so desperate that they are reduced to marketing via phone spam. They call that innovation?

The Truth:

But everyone is fighting to say they have the best ad targeting, while the goal of many quality updates is to drive up ad costs, even if that precludes quality or relevant ads. But in some cases targeting is what will make the ad network more efficient. Let me run through an example...

Imagine that you use Google Checkout and one of your customers bought your product and uses Gmail. Now imagine I am a competitor who bids on your brand. Do you think Google may show my ad in your customer's email? Why wouldn't they?

But most people can't serve ads with the precision Google can. And at some point, even if you are targeted, you still have to do some amount of push marketing to get seen. Look how much push marketing and public relations work Google still does even after they are worth over $100 billion. You don't get to be a market maker without first being a market manipulator.

Be a Relevant & Profitable Marketer:

I think whether marketing is targeted and effective is much more important than the delivery method. If you are lacking on scale or budget you can always make up for it using creativity and targeting. Here are a few targeting methods I find exceptionally effective:

  • Frequently sharing my thoughts.

  • Asking for feedback.
  • Answering emails.
  • Participating in forums.
  • Bidding on new buzzwords before others.
  • Linking to a site I want to be seen on. (Bonus points if I write a bunch specifically about them).
  • Legitimate blog comments.
  • Interviews.
  • Reviewing other well known products in the vertical.
  • Going to conferences.
  • Syndicating articles to well read sites.
  • Buying site targeted AdSense ads.
  • I have tried buying ReviewMe ads on sites that decided they did not want to accept money to review my stuff, but decided to review it anyway. When they reviewed it I left a comment on their blog. Another well known blogger then linked to me based on that comment.
  • Personalized emails.

Marketing doesn't have to be expensive if it is targeted, especially if what you are marketing is of real value and you are good at conveying the value.

Talk Talk Talk

Based in part on Calacanis's recent tirades, Scott Karp recently published a great post about SEO from an outsider's perspective. In his post he runs through how and why some people are biases against SEO. I think a couple big reasons that few people talk about are mis-direction and outsourcing faults onto others.

In other news, what is going on with Goog on Google Finance? People are talking about Cramer. Some are talking about how intelligent he is while others are saying his packaging is bad and he is an idiot. Both are probably increasing his brand value though.

I have to agree. I find Cramer a bit of an idiot. I mean, apparently he has done well in stocks, I am not disputing that, but for an investment adviser he is someone I find....well, comical. I've watched his show, and to me he's like the circus; something to see and laugh at when it comes to town, but not something to take too seriously. His biggest fault, and this is ironically the draw of his show, is how he preys on and encourages the emotions of his followers. Now, he may say that its best not to invest with emotion, but watching him run around on tv with his sleeves rolled up, yelling like some motivational speaker selling a new brand of energy drink, sure sends a different message. In fact, the high quality of his marketing skill, and the poor quality of his advice, kind of reminds me of the Motley Fool.....

In every market people who evoke emotional responses win. Even if they are wrong, you will see them refererenced often just because they are good at marketing and preying on human emotions.

Many popular people create far more controversy than value, but links and trust follow conversation. And so do ad dollars. If people are talking about you, you win, even if you are wrong.

Popular and correct are two different things, and the only way to know who you should trust is to test and then aim.

With the advancement of modern technology, people do not even vote on the content, just the headlines, which somewhat feeds into my belief that search personalization + using links as a proxy for value are going to create a polarized biased web full of recycled garbage. Everything is recycled.

Is it unfair to throw any of that blame toward search engines, or is it just default human nature to outsource our own faults and want to split things up to identify with things that are false but look good at a glance? Are our egos so broken that we have to be part of some minority or fighting for one to feel we have purpose? Must we have outspoken leaders to follow? Do the leaders believe their own words, or is it just self-serving marketing?

As more forms of vertical search come about, subscribing and publishing get easier, and more people vote without reading, you can bet that packaging will become more important than information quality...at least until people get sick of it.

I saw two popular pieces about saving money that explicitly gave money saving tips opposite of each other, both published by a friend, who recently talked up the value of his content. Some days sites like Motley Fool will tell you why a stock is a must buy and then have another article dissing the stock the same day. I think they even have a column based on biased polarized advice called Dueling Fools.

Big claims are remarkable, and worthy of a link. In a sea of rushed judgements and meaningless votes sounding convincing is more important than being correct. The perception of value and actually being of value are two different things. For the next couple years it will be far cheaper and more profitable to cater biased marketing to the ignorant rather than to create meaning with a bit of touch and originality. Or am I wrong?

Adjusting Your Marketing

Some marketing fails because it does not use market feedback to help improve the ROI on the next generation of marketing. For example, if I make a couple sites and then take what I learned from making those and apply that to making more sites I will probably be more efficient than if I try to make many sites in parallel without collecting feedback. Many of the best marketers do absolutely stupid stuff that destroys the value of their work, other than what they have learned from testing the boundaries. But after you test them you learn and then you can incorporate that into your next round of marketing. It doesn't matter if you screw up as long as you keep learning from it, and adjusting to the market.

Before making a large commitment see if there are ways you can test the market and gain quicker and cheaper feedback. Build some content and links and see if it ranks. If it ranks build more content and links.

It is smart to emotionally invest into some of your most important projects, but it is a bad call to be so invested into the idea that if that idea doesn't work you keep pushing it against the will of the market until you go bankrupt, especially since there are so many market opportunities out there if you are willing to use market feedback to tweak your ideas to make them more profitable.

Ready. Fire. Aim.
Ready. Fire. Aim.
etc etc etc

Everyone is a Hypocrite and a Spammer

One hates to give Jason Calacanis any additional exposure, but how can a person be so against SEO while selling text links for scuba blackjack online? Is he ahead of the market on global warming?

Grow up.. the only thing you're ever going to prove by trying to game my SeRP is that you're low-class idiots.

True, or maybe we are looking for scuba blackjack customers, and knew that you publish high quality original content and ads for that market.

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