Where ads look like content, or people are willing to pay for ads as content you can make a lot of money, but if your website is about marketing, and you heavily place ads on it there is no way to know how much that is going to cost you.

Your Blog is Your Business Card:

I disagree with Jason Calacanis about many things on many levels, but I think this quote is spot on

I make money building profitable businesses, not selling ads on my business card (and that's what I consider my blog to be).

Selling Yourself Short:

Good select targeted advertising can be interesting and add value, but most back-fill advertising networks do not provide enough context to add as much value as they take away. AdSense now lets you place their ads alongside competing ones, but should you?

One of my recent AdSense campaigns matched some blog related keywords, and the ad was getting over 5,000,000 impressions a day for under $40.00. And Google is getting a cut on that too!

Does Your Optimization Factor in Invisible Costs?

What is one quality link worth? What is one reader worth? Due to limited market attention and the self reinforcing nature of networks anything that costs a few credibility points will have an increasing cost as time passes, but because it is a cost you don't see you may not be aware of it. If a reporter does not call you will you see that costs? How many other reporters may have called you but did not because you did not get mentioned in that first article? Did you miss out on business or life changing relationships or feedback because your site was too focused on the short term?

Anyone Can Steal Attention:

The cost may not matter now, but when you want to spread ideas it is going to be much harder to do if people do not already know an trust you. The guy who copied my about page (who even came off as a liar in his apology) is blogging about how his Alexa went up (temporarily) and how smart he thinks he is, but it makes me wonder When you have to steal to get exposure do you think it makes you look smart or worth trusting?

It is easy to lie or cheat or steal once or twice or to do it anonymously, but it gets much harder to do repeatedly to people you know. And you surround people who think and act like you do, so if your foundation is based on stealing you are fighting an uphill battle.

Perception is Reality:

It is not an issue of who is better than who, or even who is right or wrong - but do people trust you? Many current market leaders are there not because of amazing intellect or great work, but more because of slowly building trust and being around for a while.

Trust & Intense Relationships:

As Seth says

LinkedIn tends to make networks that are sprawling and weak. Web4 is about smaller, far more intense connections with trusted colleagues and their activities.

Imagine violently emotional feelings that make it hard to walk or talk or do anything. People that make you cry or laugh so hard it hurts. To get in those types of relationships people have to trust you. Some people get there from a few lucky home runs, but most people build that trust slowly over time.

It seems everyone is writing an article about linkbait right now. Hi Todd, Rand, and Nick!

All the articles are great stuff, and today is a great day to get started with linkbait. It can seem a bit overwhelming off the start, but if you try a few times just about any creative person can make the Digg homepage in well under a month. A friend of mine started a Digg account less than 2 weeks ago and makes the homepage almost every day now. And even Forbes is getting into link baiting.

Each site has unique goals, audiences, and desired actions from each audience. By creating content and ideas that are formatted around filling the needs of the various stakeholders you lower your risk profile and increase your profit potential.

Common Stakeholders in Every Site:

• content creators

• customers
• suppliers
• site members
• bloggers
• mainstream media
• topical experts
• other high authority link sources or publicity sources
• search engines

Content creators: Those who format your content and ideas can make or break your site. Small changes in formatting or packaging can be the difference between being one of billions of web pages and being an industry standard resource. Publish a few well received link baits on a site that is generally geared toward conversion and suddenly you have an authoritative top ranked site that converts like crazy.

Customers: Every site aims to sell something... products, services, market position, a way of thinking, etc. Customers can also do your marketing for you if they firmly believe in your product or service, but that doesn't typically happen until AFTER you have customers. A site that does not convert customers is without purpose, but you also have to address many other audiences to be able to afford market exposure to potential customers.

Suppliers: As you gain exposure you have leverage over suppliers. The more they need you the better your prices will be. This is the reason you can get a gallon jar of pickles at Wal Mart for $3. Given that many types of online marketing are highly measurable and profits may be driven off of thin margins, having a thicker margin than newer competitors creates a strong barrier to entry.

Site Members: People who believe in your value proposition or enjoying your website may help recruit others to participate on your site, may provide feedback on how to make your site or business more streamlined or better, and may help create content that you can leverage for profit. Site members may also advocate your way of thinking or your community in other communities they participate in.

Bloggers: To many of us it is our source of power, a sense of empathy, or perhaps a large chunk of our personal identity. Bloggers like to hear the sound of their keyboard clicking, and the first guy with the story gets the links. Many more people write blogs than there are stories to spread or critical thinkers. Get covered by a market leading blogger and get dozens of links.

Mainstream Media: As more and more people create information there is more information than there is time to consume it, thus many of us use trusted guides / brands / companies to act as news gatherers or proxies for the value of something. Sites which are mentioned in the media tend to be trusted more by many other authoritative sources.

Topical Experts: Each industry also has topical experts who speak for their industry. Many of them will have big egos. You can reach them a variety of ways, but interviewing them or letting them participate early in your idea is an easier way to reach them than to try to sell them on how great your are.

Other High Authority Link Sources or Publicity Sources: People in related fields, fields deeply tied to the web, people tied to traditional power sources or human rights, and other offline authorities can also shape how people act online.

Search Engines: Search engines are distributed ad networks which need to scrape content to show ads against. They prefer to feel that they are in control, and like to use bloggers, media, and other authorities as proxies for the value and trustworthiness of content from a particular source.

Google's Parallel Stories

Google is exceptional at telling different stories to and about different groups of people, and leveraging each group for profit.

For example, Google sells its technology to the media as being uniquely democratic, largely because we are trained that democracy is a word which is an estimation for things that are good. Yet when Google goes to court over their index they will state that their index is a subset of the web and is not designed to be a reflection of the web. Two unique stories for two different audiences.

Search marketing is the most effective type of advertising in the world. SEOs are scum who are at fault when our search technology does not work. Two unique stories for two different audiences.

Content and ads should be clearly separated. If you merge them you are being deceptive. Unless of course you are using AdSense to monetize your site. Two unique stories for two different audiences.

Google also is great at making their marketing look like content. For example, if they want to get young kids indoctrinated on using their software, system, and services what better way could they do it than to package it as being for education?

Topical Experts:

Topical experts become known as experts not only because they know their stuff well, but also because they are good at addressing the needs of many stakeholders. Look how well Danny Sullivan addresses so many audiences.

What Audiences do You Reach?

You do not get to be a market maker without being a market manipulator. It is hard to manipulate markets unless you come up with creative ways to meet the needs of and leverage profit from many stakeholders. What key audiences does your site and competing sites have? Do you address all of them? If not, what could you do to address them?

If you have a site which equally covers 4 parallel areas and you put the same amount of content up for each area odds are that one area will drastically outperform all the others. I have a 1,000 page AdSense site which gets about 100 ad clicks a day on the most profitable page of the site, while the site as a whole averages about 1 click a page. The reason one section will drastically outperform the others is not just due to how well that section is integrated into the web, but also due to what types of sites you are competing against. For example, many large corporations still do not get SEO, and in certain high margin verticals (especially with certain high paying keyword modifiers) the top ranked results are dominated by cheesy spam pages. It is going to be easier to outrank the cheesy spam than to carve out marketshare in results dominated by legitimate authoritative sites.

After you get the base of your site up listen to the feedback the search engines provide. They will tell you what they think your site is about and what sections they think have enough authority to merit a top ranked position.

And while this advice can sound like it is geared exclusively toward spammy AdSense sites, the same type of market feedback, if tracked, can be applied to improving lead quality for smaller ecommerce sites. Every market has gaps in it. If you create a base of real content and listen to your site you will find enough easy opportunity to create a revenue stream which builds up a profit stream that allows you to invest in building up the authority of your domain for more competitive queries.

Back in September I posted that I thought it was somewhat sketchy for Google to recommend there photo search when a person searched for Istockphoto and got flamed for it. Recently Blake Ross, the creator of Firefox, said similar. Because of Blake's market position, the exact same story was credible, important, spread, and is something Matt Cutts needed to make multiple blog posts about.

Based on the credibility and market position of an author certain stories may be important, or may be worthless. Even completely true stories may still cut at your credibility if you don't later reference them again to remind the dismissive parties of how their thought process changed over time.

The media is largely owned by conglomerates tied to banks, geared toward selling ads and their business agendas, manipulated every day, but most authorities would like people to blindly trust the media as a representation of truth, even as that same media wraps self serving messages in a self-aggrandizing article that dismisses their competition.

Search is also a topic that is easy to love, but SEO has been painted as a scourge on the web. Any authority or authority based system has to pretend that they hate market manipulators to justify their own legitimacy, market position, and how they got where they are.

SEO is largely based on speculation and predicting market trends that most people do not see, so it is easy to be seen as having little credibility, so long as your brand is focused on SEO, even if you are 100% correct. At least one board member of a major search engine has called me for investing advice, though I guess it would be a bad idea to blog any specifics on that.

It is quite ironic that the main reason this site was worthy of press attention is because I was sued by an unethical business, and I can even get interviews published in the London Times as an expert on Black Hat SEO largely because I own the matching domain. But even after about an hour of talking, showing highlights of how search engines pay for much of the spam, and how they don't stop paying for it even after they catch it, all I could get was a few sweet soundbytes like:

"Who is and who isn't a black hat is dependent on what Google says is black hat," said Wall. "They would certainly class me as a black hat."

Nice.

And then you remember that stories need to sell ads. To do that they exposure. To do that they have to be controversial. They have to be pitched, sold, and then the matching facts have to be collected. Rarely is there ever enough column space to risk challenging conventional wisdom if you can be controversial and conventional at the same time.

Knowing that the whole polarized black hat vs white hat garbage was going to get more and more self serving press was probably smart marketing, but is it SEO? And, if a site that cost me a half a day and under $100 gets me featured as content in the London Times (with an HTML link) is that efficient marketing?

A year and a half ago I predicted that Google would eventually create an automated commodities trading platform where they could leverage their pure data. Since then Google has leveraged their market position and used predatory pricing to become a large payment processor. Just about anything without a brand will eventually be commoditized by cheaper communications, search, more efficient markets, and other forms of automation that are good enough. Google has already won the web. Don't be surprised if you see Google Checkout offline in 2008.