People pay a lot of money for the chance to change. Often they pay for a chance to place the blame on another party because they were unwilling to change (ie: that diet program didn't work). A large part of the reason why so many prescription drugs are popular is because drug sales pitches convince us that we can change without actually changing, though that is rarely the case. Typically the side effects are just suppressed or played down.

In much the same way that people think a drug will make things better, we are constantly pushed value systems which make us think things like:

• I am too fat. If I weighed 20 pounds less I would be happier.

• I am too poor. If I just had more money everything would work out.
• I am too lonely. If I just had someone that loved me maybe life would make sense.
• I am too shy. If I just had more confidence and talked to more people I could figure life out.

Part of the reason self help programs from people who suffered from the same problem work so well is that they are easy to identify with. The more people believe you felt their struggle or pain the more they will believe that you can help them get past it.

A large part of the reasons that many of these programs never lead to happiness is that they solve symptoms instead of problems. Many of them focus on what not to do, instead of what you should do. Inadequacy is just part of being human, but many companies create products or services which claim cure us of the flaws of being. When we buy into these systems, we are not just buying into the product / program / service, but we are buying into the pot of gold at the other end of the rainbow. The belief that things can be different and better, and the sense of relief that brings. Wherever there is a real or manufactured sense of inadequacy there is a large targeted market.

People trying to change social classes and win approval of established members of their community are also likely to pick up the domain specific language and symbols better because they will feel that learning it is an important sign of sophistication. If you can create things which people new to your industry would consider vital (rules, standards, regulations, ethical guidelines, etc.) naive people will push them until they realize the purpose of them. For example, at one point in time I was sucker enough to proudly display someone else's code of ethics on my site until I realized that all it showed was that I was a sucker ignorant to marketing and my market.

What do you do that makes people feel validated in their quest to change or be validated? How easy is it to identify with your position and spread your way of thinking? Do your customers outgrow that feeling? What do you do next?

If your business model solves problems but is financially inferior to business models that solve symptoms how do you get past that?

What are the most radically worldview changing or inspirational things you have ever done?

I recently posted that I thought almost any successful marketer could be defined as a spammer at some point in time. The main point was that to be successful, you have to be willing to live outside of other's boundaries, and be willing to accept arbitrary labels people will throw at you for doing so. But that is not to say that everyone will succeed ONLY by spamming. I got an email today from a guy who was down and out. I got a call yesterday from another guy who seemed to be in a similar market position. The biggest commonality I notice amongst people who seem like they want to do well but are not is that they either lack focus or passion. If you are passionate about a topic it is much easier to stay focused and avoid burnout.

WebmasterWorld recently had a thread about authority which has a number of great quotes in it.

whitenight:

So for most people, an authority site is built as a labor of love on the subject.
It's that "This is the site I wanted to find on the subject when I was looking for info, but couldn't" mindset.

MikeNoLastName, being a contrarian with the thread theme, stated:

So NO I do not agree that the internet is anymore (if it ever truly was) the great playing field leveler that many still believe it is. Perhaps, for a while you'll out-fox your bigger competitors by knowing more about SEO, at least until they wise up to the potential and hire a whole staff of SEOs, but in the end it will still be who is a better business organizer and who can afford to throw more marketing money in the ad buying pot, which is greatly encouraged by the likes of G & Y.

In some cases Mike is right, but Google just bought YouTube for $1.65 billion, which shows that the underdog can beat the giant. In most cases they probably do, as long as they are truly passionate about the topic. If a person lacks passion then they are typically far easier to steamroll over though. Why?

There are people spending $5K to $100K+ a day on arbitrage or spamming. If you try to compete just on numbers and are starting with a smaller chip stack you are fighting an uphill battle.

That same WMW thread linked back to an old Googleguy comment:

Of course, folks never know when we're going to adjust our scoring. It's pretty easy to spot domains that are hoarding PageRank; that can be just another factor in scoring. If you work really hard to boost your authority-like score while trying to minimize your hub-like score, that sets your site apart from most domains. Just something to bear in mind.
...
Let me clarify that last post a smidge. You can try all sorts of stuff to "conserve PageRank," but that's no guarantee that something will work, or that it will work in the future.

If you lack passion then you may feel you have to get something before you give anything out. If you are passionate about a topic it is much easier to become a platform.

Not only is it easier for passionate people to become topical platforms, but if you are passionate

• you are more likely to want to understand what ideas are important (and why)

• you are more likely to see what ideas are spreading
• you are more likely to see why ideas are spreading

And as a net result of those you are more likely to be able to create ideas that will spread. When you start seeing things like unrequested quality links, mentions on high quality sites, or other people saying I wish I would have thought of that it means you are on the right path.

Once you learn how ideas spread in one market it is easy to apply that line of thinking to quickly analyze another market.

So how does the passion bit relate to the spamming stuff I mentioned at the top of the post?

• The more passionate you are the easier it is to create signs of quality and the more people will trust you.

• People trusting you means you will do well even if you temporarily fall out of graces with the search engines.
• The less effort you have to put in to build your backlink profile the more likely your site is to look like a natural part of the web.
• Many authority sites started out as hubs.
• Sites with more signs of quality can get away with doing a lot more shady things (or accidentally screwing up lots of things) while still being in the realm of normalcy.

We tend to believe that authenticity is typically more associated with the information source rather than numbers or how we evaluate them, but precise numbers typically sound

• more factual

• well researched
• authentic

even if they are not.
When you want to play down something, you

• don''t focus on it

• gather weak data
• using research methods with favorable slippage
• round in your favor
• use rough estimates
• IF you talk about it, use loose language

But since 2003, Johns Hopkins researchers estimate 655,000 Iraqis have died. Bush thinks it is closer to 30,000, but even that is a large number considering how our reason for invasion was fraudulently associating Saddam Hussein with September 11th events.

As Bush would say:

"One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror." – President Bush's interview with CBS News' Katie Couric, Sept. 6, 2006

Even math is dependant upon marketing [PDF]. I am always perplexed when people say you shouldn't talk about politics on a marketing site. Politics is nothing but marketing. It is an ideological system of fraud and measures to bilk the world of its wealth and beauty for the profit of select power sources - at any expense necessary, and often without any connection to reality, or concern for the future.

From Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes

I pledge my allegiance,
say the munitions makers and the international bankers,
I pledge my allegiance to this flag, that flag,
any flag at all, of any country anywhere
paying its bills and meeting interest on loans,
one and indivisible,
coming through with cash in payment as stipulated
with liberty and justice for all,
say the munitions makers and the international bankers

"War is a racket always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
...
The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes even twelve per cent. But wartime profits-ah! that is another matter-twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent-the sky is the limit. All that the traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let's get it."

If Death Tax is such a big deal, then why don't politicians care about death itself?

Sometimes I give quite bad advice. And the reason is that not everything applies to everyone. One of the bigger flaws in the advice that I give is that I am quite ambitious. And thus when I enter a market I try to come up with ideas that will eventually allow me to get a dominate long-term self reinforcing position. Endless Ambition:
I try to rank sites for queries like SEO, Forex, and other exceptionally competitive markets. And then I have worked with some of the largest sites on the web, which further reinforces that line of dominate big markets thinking. And as my income has increased it is also quite easy for me to have a value system which is quite inaccurate when compared with people new to the web trying to dig into a market (just like I was a couple years ago).

For example of my overly broad ambitions, a person might have a site about car engines, and on occasion I may respond with something overtly ambitious like these are the keys to dominating the automotive vertical.

Wide Audience:
The reason it is so hard to give SEO advice are:

• the rules are ever-shifting, people read and believe old content, and many sources intentionally publish misinformation

• many people take everything literally
• many established authorities trade on inflated income levels based on past reputation, and some likely are not even competent in the current market
• in an industry where most lack credibility one of the quickest and easiest ways to try to build authority is to call out an established authority as being wrong
• controversy breeds links and authorities, even if it is created under a false pretense
• business risk profiles, brand strength, financial and technical resources, and competition levels are vastly different from company to company and market to market

Doing Well is an Iterative Process:
Sometimes I give that dominate a broad market type of advice to other people, but many people who are new are just trying to carve out a niche, so they can quite their job and then reinvest into the web. And when you are doing many things at once you are rarely going to be able to start off with a near perfect market position. I still have my earliest websites, but relative to this one they were all failures, but eventually they led me to create this one (and other profitable sites).

Most Markets Are Easier:
I recently gave a friend some advice, and then after I did a bit of in depth market analysis, I realized that my advice was garbage, and that they did not need to do ALL (or even most) of the things I suggested. Their market is low hanging fruit. In many markets doing this or this is really all you need to do, as long as you establish a bit of trust right out of the gate. Part of the reason that seemingly expensive SEO services may be worthwhile is that you don't just get answers, but answers that are tailored to your business, website, market, brand, and resources.

Most businesses (and most markets) are not well integrated into the web. That is part of the reason someone who is actively involved in discussions about the web can easily dominate their vertical in search. If a bath tub website gets link love from popular blogs because the owner speaks at webmaster conferences then he has a distinct advantage over competing sites, especially because those links will be hard to replicate.

Instant Success, Just Add Blog!
After a person writes a blog for years it is easy to assume that blog juice is the answer to everything, but it really depends on what you are good at. Many leading blogs are only leading blogs due to market timing, and only keep their position by selling white lies.

It also didn't hurt me that blogs work well as a marketing tool for those in controversial topics which rapidly change (like SEO).

The Bias of Self Preservation:
Unless you are a whack job nobody wants to feel like they are a bad force. Any source of advice, business, or topical authority is typically going to biased toward the goal of self preservation. With that in mind, many bloggers will keep blogging long after they no longer have anything original to say, and will error on the side of making the importance of their trade (or blogging in general) far more important and complex than they are. Especially if their goal is to sell a how to information product that is sold as a way to make sense of the space.

A Lack of Traditional Business Costs:
Another error or bias in advice that I give is that I still have almost no traditional offline business experience. Being in the military does not count because it is so dysfunctional, and other than that I only had one middle level management job for about 8 months before jumping on the web. I create partnerships, but have no employees or product costs, so it does not hurt me much if I take far bigger risks than other people do because my lifestyle and business are fairly immune to huge cycles in my level of exposure or income. I have roughly the same amount of work to do with this site each day weather I sell 0 or 25 ebooks.

A Lack of Respect for Most Self-Imposed Authority:
After hating living on a submarine and then working 70 hours a week as a middle level manager I grew to hate authority and traditional jobs at a young age. Watching things like The Money Masters and Manufacturing Consent, reading authors like George Orwell, and books like A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History have made me highly suspicious of authority.

Feedback:
In some ways some of my biggest weaknesses may also be strengths, depending on your perspective. But, what other common biases / flaws / errors do you see in the advice I give or logic I use to dispense it? What do I do that you really like? What do I do that you really hate?

A9 recently largely died off. Why? Because few people talked about it, and it never gained any real traction. Google, on the other hand, even has people talking about their ads. Rand recently noted that he doesn't believe it pays to game Digg, while Loren notes that people are willing to game it for you for as little as $20.

Quoting Rand:

If you game Digg, you get none of these benefits. The visitors might click, they might even start reading, but if you don't have truly exceptional content, you're spinning your wheels - no one is going to remember you or your site as being anything other than a waste of their time; that's not a positive brand association.

...

If the content wasn't good enough to make the top of the link sites naturally, there's little hope that anyone who manages their own content will link to it.

Rule #1: If people enjoy it and vote for it then it is not spam.
I have seen average (or slightly below average) content become remarkable and Diggworthy through appropriate formatting and heavy use of Instant Messenger to seed the idea. If you can get the idea half way to the homepage (about 15 - 20 votes) before the general Diggers start voting you stand a good chance of making the home page.

Rule #2: Exposure leads to more exposure.
And in spite of the fact that you will not get many links to cheesy content, I have seen somewhat cheesy content garner high trust links from old school media sources. You really only need one of those types of links for the Digg spam to pay for itself. And those links are going to be hard for competitors to replicate (unless they know how you did it).

Is it wrong to pay people for exposure? If so then why do search engines teach content publishers to blend their ads into the content?

Rule #3: Most members of the media are overworked or lazy.
Another thing to think about, is that many of the people at mainstream media sources are lazy, underpaid, or overworked cogs. In the same way that some journalists have swiped ideas from bloggers before, many of these journalists may rely on these social news sites to find new things to mention or link at. And I have seen anchors at one social news site submit one of my stories to their site only because they found it on another one.

Read more about the relationship between public relations and the media.

Rule #4: New typically means easy to spam.
The newest systems are generally going to be some of the easiest to spam.

And the spam doesn't look or feel or smell like spam if people are reading about themselves. SEO Blackhat wrote a funny article about how to get seen on Digg and over 4,000 people voted for it.

Rule #5: Older systems are typically more expensive or harder to spam.
A year or two ago it was far easier to spam Google using mini domains and keyword rich anchor text, but since then the algorithms have been placing more and more weight on citation based authority. Newspaper sites are reporting a large increase in online exposure. The publish the same old bland content and are competing with more and more sites. I don't think I would be in error to assume that a large portion of that increase is due to bias shifts in Google's (and other engines) algorithms.

Rule #6: To be successful, you have to be a bastard to somebody.
In an interview with Rolling Stone (available free via iTunes), John Lennon stated that you don't get to make it big without being a bastard. And The Beatles didn't get to become The Beatles without being serious bastards.

Rule #7: Almost everybody spams.
Any for profit system has rules set up that help it make money at the expense of others. If you are starting from nowhere you really don't have much to lose by being a bit aggressive. After you establish a strong brand then overt spamming may not look as appealing on your risk to reward ratio scale, but off the start it shouldn't hurt to be a bit aggressive, and if people are going to hold that against you forever, then screw em.

You have to spam somebody to get people to grant you enough authority to influence other markets. After you gain enough influence you keep pushing after other markets:

Google's Eric Schmidt predicted that "truth predictor" software would, within five years, "hold politicians to account." People would be able to use programmes to check seemingly factual statements against historical data to see to see if they were correct.

A statement like that makes you wonder if a Google ad campaign might help determine what truth is perceived to be.

Even after you have lost touch with your core purpose businesses keep pushing for growth:

TRUSTe’s Fact Sheet (2006) reports only two certifications revoked in TRUSTe’s ten-year history... According to TRUSTe’s posted data, users continue to submit hundreds of complaints each month. But of the 3,416 complaints received since January 2003, TRUSTe concluded that not a single one required any change to any member’s operations, privacy statement, or privacy practices, nor did any complaint require any revocation or on-site audit.

TRUSTe has only a small staff, with little obvious ability to detect violations of its rules. Rule violations at TRUSTe member sites have repeatedly been uncovered by independent third parties, not by TRUSTe itself.

Is there a single profitable well known online business that doesn't spam or at least pay others to spam for them? And, at some point, did they spam to get where they are?

I linked to this before, but I love this audio file.

Here a down and out. There a game fighter who will die fighting.