Seth Godin has a great post about how people are willing to pay more for convenience or to solve symptoms rather than to fix their problems. He also spoke at the 2006 GEL Conference about This Is Broken.com.
One of my favorite Radiohead songs, Planet Telex, goes "Everything is broken. Everyone is broken." Indeed people still have the same problems today that Carl Sandburg read from his The People, Yes.

Many businesses are messed up because they try to make the customers pay more to get less or focus on things that are arbitrary self focused and do not get people excited or talking about them. And most businesses are probably not set up to be well aligned with allowing workers to profit from their passion.

At the San Jose airport Microsoft had a tag line Your Potential. Our Passion. and to me that seems backwards. I think potential comes out of passion. You can look at how many people are fleeing Microsoft to start their own company or to work at companies like Google and how much Microsoft has spent on R&D to see how the proxy for passion would be better than the generic concept of potential.

It is not just Microsoft that has to work on streamlining their business process. AOL is laying off about 25% of their workforce. In spite of the publicity surrounding an offer to pay taggers Netscape is still quite small compared to competing tag sites sites. Yahoo! has many overlapping brands and half complete projects (including their ad platform).

When Google launched they were worth less than Yahoo! and are now worth 3 times as much (and people are writing articles calling Google cheap).

Amazon.com recently had an analyst give them a below average rating for 'doing nothing unique' while at the same time getting pinged for wanting to collect data to improve their customer experience. The kicker is that most of the best ideas that add the most value to a platform are quite boring in nature. How do you tie in online marketing with offline purchases? Coupons. Boring idea, but it is worth a ton of money to a large distributed ad network owner.

The ideas that create the most value are not necessarily exciting or overtly technical in nature. PageRank takes citations as a proxy for authority. Pretty simple concept.

I think a few big things that are allowing Google to grow while others are complaining about things being broken are

1. They want to do things based on Eric Schmidt's idea of "Does it fundamentally effect people's internet experience in a positive sense."

2. Even if they do not believe in #1, they are good enough at selling it that
   • the media is buying it

   • top talent is attracted to their company
   • consumers are evangelical about their brand
   • many unpaid customers willingly provide them free work and feedback needed to increase the value of their business.

So I went to a party last night, and a friend of mine was not on the list, but got there before me and said he was my guest. Fair enough, and good for him. Usually being on the list is a good deal, but with internet marketing using the default list is a bad deal. Let's say there is a place that does cheap article submissions that has 50 places they submit articles to. Even if they did a kick ass job of it, no way would I want to submit my site to all 50 places if that list of submission places was the default one used by the industry.

I might consider submitting to the top 10 or 20 article sites, but the deeper you go the more abstract and lower quality of a link you are getting, and the more likelihood there is that those sites would probably be in a bad web neighborhood (ie: have low quality inbound AND low quality outbound links). In most fields only the top few sites are typically going to have many high quality links.

Also, if there is a potential gem that is not on the list (just for a rough example, say Buzzle.com as a decent article submission site) then maybe getting a few links from those types of sites that are not on default lists are worth more than just pushing to do what is easy to replicate and widely done by those using a default list.

That is part of the reason I do not keep my directory list up to date so much anymore. IMHO, many of the search engines have evolved far beyond that. Sure a Yahoo! Directory link is great, a Business.com listing could be money well spent, and maybe there are a half dozen or so other general directories that are going to be longterm useful and valuable to be listed in. But if you submit to 400 directories from a commonly used (and abused) industry list do not be surprised if your site does not rank as well as you would like.

As long as your mindset is stuck on a list, if you keep going deeper you may be digging a deeper hole. The more your marketing strategies, data sources, link sources, niche market selection ideas, keyword ideas, and content creation ideas are hidden from the common lists that everyone use the easier it will be to quickly create value and extract profit from your work.

If you go to an affiliate convention and see a merchant advertising all their offers to top affiliates that is a sign that their market already is or may soon be saturated beyond profitability.

I have even heard some people who sell AdSense keywords lists scrub the words with the highest easily accessible profit potential from their keyword lists.

And, this really is what makes writing a book about SEO and trying to keep it up to date somewhat hard. People want easy, simple, and straightforward lists that guide them toward success, but the more your marketing strategies, data sources, link sources, niche market selection ideas, keyword ideas, and content creation ideas are hidden from the common lists that everyone use the easier it will be to quickly create value and extract profit from your work.

The easiest way to get quality citations is through social relationships and unique original marketing ideas, but you really can't put those on a list unless people can infer how to extrapolate how an idea relates to their core strengths, potential customers, and/or marketplace.

Update: After reading Alan Greenspan's book I realize that not all central bankers are bad, but I still believe there are a lot of dirty people in international banking.

Even markets that seem like they should be somewhat honest and forthright are not. Consider the Federal Reserve - a deceptively named private bank which holds a monopoly over currency supplies in spite of likely having no actual reserves. All the evils of a corporation heavily exist in a privatized for profit central bank. Some of the past US central bankers, seeking to keep their power, have stated things like:

Nothing but widespread suffering will produce any effect on the congress...Our only safety is pursuing a course of steady restriction - and I have no doubt that such a course will ultimately lead to restoration of the currency and a recharter of the bank. - Nicholas Biddle.

Shortly after Nicholas plunged the US economy into a deep depression he was caught making comments like the above in public. Back then the media was far more honest (ie: less sold out and owned by bankers) than the current media, and Andrew Jackson won enough support to pay off the bank and prevent it from being rechartered. Shortly afterward there was an assassination attempt on Jackson's life. The assassin bragged that rich bankers from Europe put him up to the test and promised to protect him if he were caught.

After President Garfield spoke out against private bankers he was assassinated.

The civil war may have also been largely caused by powerful bankers from Europe. Slavery was not a major issue prior to the war according to Lincoln. Lincoln, who opposed a privately owned central bank, was assassinated only 5 days after Lee surrendered to Grant.

After the civil war the US was quite prosperous, but powerful bankers pushed congress to contract the money supply
1866 - 1.8 billion in circulation - $50.46 per capita
1867 - 1.3 - $44
1876 - 0.6 - $14.6
1886 - 0.4 - $6.67

The tightening of the money supply caused deep depression.

Through cycling interest rates and money supplies central banks can create false markets then extract the profit from the work of others when they re-tighten the monetary supply. The boom bust business cycle is used for central banks to exploit profits from citizens and companies alike. The bankers in the Federal Reserve more-less have insider info on how to bet for or against sectors of the economy (on top of having a 100% profit margin plus interest on the central bank credits to the government).

The Federal Reserve pays for government bonds by the issuance of electronic credits based literally on nothing. How pathetically inept is the US government to allow an arbitrary 3rd party to have 100% + profit margins on creating the currency needed to run that government?

England was at war for 56 of the first 119 years after the bank of England was created. Many banks finance both sides of a war. Many times the loans are placed with the guarantee that the winner will pay the debts of the loser.

Nathan Rothschild had started selling English stocks and bonds after the defeat of Napoleon to misdirect the market while he secretly started buying assets at a fraction of the price. As Napoleon Bonaparte stated:

The hand that gives is above the hand that takes. money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency: their sole object is gain.

Ernest Seyd admitted that in 1872 he was set to bribe US congressmen to demonetize silver. By 1873 gold was the only accepted form of coin money in the US. Since gold was quite scarce and monopolized, putting America on the gold standard allowed the owners of gold to manipulate the markets.

In 1933 private ownership of gold in the US was confiscated by the government (for the price of $20.66 an ounce). After most gold was turned in the price per ounce was raised to $35, but only foreigners could sell gold at the new higher price. Then over the years gold was likely smuggled out of Fort Knox to wealthy foreigners associated with international bankers at cheap prices. In 1982 Regan commissioned a group to study the feasibility of going back to a gold standard. They reported that the US treasury had no gold at the time. This is a perfect example of why true patriots chose to fight or ignore bad laws.

In 1891 the American Bankers Associate sent out a memo stating that on September 1st 1894 they would cause a deep depression to seize assets at pennies on the dollars. And it happened.

There has been a nongovernment ran US central bank at least 4 times. In 1913 the current one was put in place. WWI occurred a year after the federal reserve was created. Within the first 25 years of its existence the Federal Reserve caused 3 major economic downturns, including the great depression.

In April of 1929, Paul Warburg, the father of the Federal Reserve, sent out a secret memo to friends stating that "a collapse and nationwide depression was certain." In August of 29 the fed began to tighten money. Rockefeller, JP Morgan, and others just happened to be lucky in getting out of the stock market in 1929. On October 24th, 1929 big New York bankers called in their 24 hour broker call loans. That day was known as black Thursday.

After the crash, instead of lowering interest rates the fed continued to contract the money supply by 1/3 from 1929 to 1933. While America was suffering in depression 10s of billions of US dollars were sucked out of the US economy to prop up Germany (which had assets largely owned by international bankers that bought them for next to nothing after WWI).

All the above obvious market manipulation shows that privately owned central banks do not breed any sort of stability (and in fact just the opposite), which shows just how useless they are.

Money is not a finite commodity but a means to barter. Since I was a little kid I went back to the town that I grew up in and noticed so many payday loan stores that never existed when I was a kid. Why are all of these scammy loan businesses popping up?

If you want to learn more about the economic fraud that is the Federal Reserve (and if the 16th amendment may even be illegal) check out The Money Masters - where many of the above points came from - (also on Google Video here and here).

The US is now in a persistent war that will most likely only end when economic incentive for it goes away or the public cares enough to force the powers that be to end it.

How pathetically inept is the US government to allow an arbitrary 3rd party to have 100% + profit margins on creating the currency needed to run that government? Why are so many countries and individuals living in a state of persistent debt to arbitrary sources when money is not a finite commodity but just a means for barter? Money is usually created from nothing and based on nothing by arbitrary for profit companies.

Shouldn't the debt of most men be to their children more than to a few opulent sleazeballs who arbitrarily inherited a large portion of the world's wealth based on voodoo economics?

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." - Mayer Amschel Rothschild

This is probably quite an absurd post for an SEO blog, but it is just a reminder that markets can sway at any given time, and even allegedly valuable and trustworthy standards of value are heavily manipulated and can erode quickly. Smart business owners make their businesses fluid enough to be able to ebb and flow with large powerful market forces.

I used to work on a submarine, and one of the biggest design criteria for the sub was redundancy. Many businesses fail because they bank on one channel working forever. That is rarely the case.

Patrick Gavin recently offered an insightful post about keeping a spare website or two just in case an algorithm update whacks your site.

I went to Affiliate Summit this week. I probably could have went to more sessions than I did, but I had too much fun hanging out with the TLA crew.

I did see the keynote speech by Jim Bouton. His thesis for success was that you must be persistent and you must love the process of whatever you are doing. Jim made it to the majors twice, co-created Big League Chew, and wrote a groundbreaking book titled Ball Four, which in many ways changed the way baseball operated as a business. I have attended many conferences, and it seems like most everyone says the same thing, but with their spin on it (based largely on their own experiences). Go to SXSW and you will hear how important design, standards, and blogging are. And you will hear how you have to be persistent and work hard and keep learning, etc (that is generally the thing you hear everywhere, that and maybe if someone had good market timing they say they were lucky too).

At Affiliate Summit I also listened to Rosalind Gardner offer affiliate marketing tips. I think she is highly focused on getting email addresses to create large targeted mailing lists and use pay per click to protect your site from the engines. Her tips for success seemed similar to things Jim Bouton would say, I would post here, or things I have read on many SEO forums. The one downside I felt in her speech was that she really talked down on SEO as though it was not as reliable, predictable, and as safe as pay per click marketing.

While my position is largely biased by my own experiences, I never really understand when people say pay per click is going to be more reliable long-term than SEO is. All of the markets are growing increasingly more competitive. With PPC someone can overspend you out of the market, and the market makers weed noise from the market. Both of which result in many casualties.

People can also spam the heck out of email too, which may limit how effective email is. And what happens when the major email providers allow more targeted ad buys on their email products? Competitors to your business may subscribe to your newsletter and bid against its contents to show up wherever you are.

With SEO, if you have good market timing and can create better ideas than the competition you carve out a market position and then are sorta stuck there, with the help of reinforcing links. I recently launched that SEO for Firefox extension. Assuming I keep the software functional the download page will probably rank in the top 5 for SEO Firefox and Firefox SEO for years.

The best converting terms are typically brand related terms and search is about communication. As long as you build a brand and gain mindshare search engines will deliver an irrelevant user experience if your site is not showing up.

In some cases it makes sense to buy mindshare, even if it only barely pays for itself and lowers your overall margins. Why? Because it provides another lead source and strengthens your overall brand awareness and mindshare (and, of course, exposure leads to more exposure).

I spend about $1,000 a month on AdSense just breaking even on the ads because the additional 12 or so unit sales does not increase my customer service load by much, but the $1,000 ad cost provides millions of ad impressions and increased mindshare. If I ever need to cut that ad cost I can.

Once people see your brand enough they will assume you are successful and offer free honest feedback. Exposure not only leads to more exposure, but it seems the less you need help the more people are willing to help you. And they may offer you free help that is better than anything you could have paid for.

Using any single medium as your exclusive lead provider is going to be risky, but by using multiple you can make your business profile less risky.