I get asked to review a wide array of sites being asked "what is wrong" and "why isn't this working".

Many times I think that the underlying problem is something I call cart before the horse syndrome. While you can view many data points in the competitive landscape when you view a site what you see now is not the way it has always been. Many of the most authoritative sites were created without any commercial intent, and then the site owner later fell into a business model, and as they saw profit started to maximize their profit potential.

If you start off with a lead generation form as your website and are unwilling to give anything away until people give you money or an email address then you should be looking more toward the pay per click market than at organic SEO.

There is nothing wrong with maximizing your potential profit, but if you create a site geared around converting 10% of the site visitors into paying customers right off the start you are probably going to limit your ability to gain any serious link authority and serious distribution unless your conversion rate and profits are so great that you can convince affiliates to push your product.

If you can afford heavy PPC spending by automating your sales process and maximizing your ROI that is fine, but if you want free traffic there are hidden costs to maximizing right out of the gate. It is like buying a 99 cent burger. Sure the upfront cost is next to nothing (and it seems like you are getting more for less), but as competing sites build traffic while you stagnate those invisible costs start to reveal themselves. You have to consider what search engines want and what your site visitors want. Try to create something that covers those wants and then roll commerce into it.

Seth Godin frequently stresses that getting people to PAY attention is a cost, and even if they give you no money PAYING attention is still a cost. Once you earn that it is worth a lot of money because it takes a long time to build trust. And trust is fragile. If I hadn't built up a lot of friendships and trust over the last couple years there is no way the SEO for Firefox launch would have went so well. The new links and new readers that tool brought in are probably worth far more than the tool cost to build, but it may not have spread so well (and it may not have covered its cost) if I had not worked so hard to build up my authority.

Hitting the traffic jackpot once does not make one a marketing expert, but in spite of being on the delicious popular list and Digg homepage yesterday this site only doubled its typical traffic. A friend of mine says that it is a marathon and not a sprint, and that is the way you have to look at getting traffic, especially if you have a new site.

Back to the new sites I get asked to review. What do they need to spread messages or compete in the SERPs?

• Set reasonable goals. Do not expect to rank for mortgage or search in one month if you have a $0 marketing budget and a site that is so bland or conversion oriented that it would never merit a single legitimate organic citation.

• Pick a path and run with it. Be a maximizer or an optimizer, but know your path and run with it. If you are stuck mixing up in the middle you will probably do worse than a person who is working hard at either of the edges. After you are well established on either front and are beyond self sustaining then you have money to invest and room to play and test, but you need to have a clear message off the start. You don't want your site to one day say you believe on taking the hard and steady and slow and... way to the top, and then have visitors come to your site the next day to see a picture of a check for $50,000 that you allegedly made while you were on vacation last week.
• Come up with a clear unique branding angle that makes you stand out. Make sure it is obvious what you want people to do on your site and make sure it is obvious what message you want them to spread away from your site. When it doubt it is better to be niche and unique over broad and not unique.
• Do not chose cheapest as your branding angle unless you are a masochist.
• Create a clean site design which reinforces your brand image. For example, if your brand is supposed to be fun and hip POO BROWN is a bad color. If your service is supposed to convey a sense of trust to businesses or people seeking health advice go lean on red and orange. I typically favor clean over going too far with a design. If you can find a good priced logo designer and spend a day learning a bit of CSS you can create a reasonably decent looking site for around $100.
• If you are unsure of what you want to do participate in topical communities to learn about the market and what the market wants. If all of your marketing is done on your site and it is not backed up by friendships away from your site it is going to be hard to convert potential prospects if they dig further into the SERPs and can't find anything about you other than a few cheesy syndicated articles and free directory listings. The web is cool, but also make sure you find your way to relevant off the web (ie: real world) events. That is where you really solidify your friendships and get to know the people you really should know.
• If you have down time make sure you keep learning. You should be able to learn quicker than the market leaders because you know less, are more hungry, and have less busywork filling your day if you are seriously focused on success and are new to a market. Read and experiment widely. Especially if you aim to be a consultant review that which you consume (it helps buid relationships, and most personal brands are not too deeply developed, so it also provides a cheap and easy relevant traffic source). Don't wait around for a golden day for things just to fall in place. Don't be afraid to be wrong. I have had people take the time to email me and tell me what a piece of shit I was for having incorrect information on my site only later to have them buy my product, put huge ads for it on their site, and recommend it on various community sites.
• If you want to rank for competitive terms you have to give to get. Look to create ways to make people want to revisit your site many times and/or link to your site for having a definitive topical resource. When you create a (hopefully) definitive article it may go nowhere, but if you do a half a dozen of them well eventually one of them will take off. You are over-investing hoping that eventually one of the investments will pay big dividends. When you have a great idea make sure you tell a few friends to see if they would be willing to help you market it.

I used to be a big forum junkie, but have recently cut back a bit. There is still lots of great stuff going on in the forum space though. Lee Dodd, who is serious about monetization, launched Earners Forum last week and it is already in the top couple thousand sites on Alexa.

As part of the launch he is giving away over $15,000 worth of cash and prizes including 5 copies of my ebook. Sign up there if you would want to win a free copy.

Terrible post title, I know, but recently I have been asked many times over about the general theme of where do I find high quality free easy to get links. But when you are brand new to a network you can't add up all those pieces and expect it to work. Here's why If I know unique and innovative ways to pollute the web for personal profit why would I share them for free with someone who does not have any passion for what they are doing and wants me to value my time at $0 to help them make money?

To be fair, some of the people who asked me were also paying customers, but the reasons I don't push the get as much as you can free without thinking angle are:

• if you are doing the work for a client and your client has no marketing budget and/or values your time at next to nothing then they are a client worth firing. if they want marketing to be free they should do it on their own dime and time.

• I think to be good at profiting from algorithmic holes you have to have an analytical mind that is good on picking up on patterns. If you can't identify the obvious algorithmic holes by looking through the search results or looking at this then I am not certain what I can tell you that would help you.
• as time passes more and more of the easy money market is getting chewed up by vertical integration
• most sites that are marketed in that "all I can get for free that is easy" manner are low quality sites
• many people market sites in that manner and leave obvious trails of where they have been
• search engines probably notice some of those patterns ;) ... you are the company you keep. Sometimes less is more.
• it may take a year or more to rank if your market is competitive. it may never be attainable if you are not focused on trying to create value
• it never builds any tangible value. you don't catch and pass the competition just by following them.
• if you do well and your work is easy to replicate then many others likely will.
• if your work is easy to replicate a program will probably replicate it thousands of times over, so in essence you are valuing your own time as being worth less than that of an automated software program. is that any way to live?

You can't do well long term just going after the holes unless you know how to spot them and predict them and quickly capitalize on them yourself.

Switching Costs:
While the only 1 click away theory is a nice theory there are real switching costs to changing web services. the same can be said of finding new people / channels worth regularly reading or linking at.

Finding / Creating Unique Content:
If you are trying to build from scratch you need to be conceptually unique, not just textually unique.

If you take the time to look outside the typical sources that most people in your vertical scour over then there is a ton of low hanging fruit for creating / recycling / inspiring ideas

There’s something exciting about coming to musicians when they’re just names, when you’ve no idea who Derrick Harriott looks like, or what his reputation is - considered naff by real dub fans, maybe ? Derivative ? Or maybe ground-breaking ? I know the Stooges were ground-breaking - maybe that’s what has been putting me off. The weight of knowing already how good it’s meant to be. With this compilation, I’ve just ploughed through all these faceless names, liking things I probably shouldn’t (covers of soul songs! Spanish guitar solos!) and maybe finding nothing I like by the supposed classics

Sites like Del.icio.us, Digg and Techmeme surely have a techy slant to them, but they surface ideas that interest people daily. Sure some of them will be spam, hype2.0, or garbage, but occasionally some of them will be interesting, and give you ideas of how you can related your site to the link rich populous. Even casinos are doing a good job of it.

A friend of mine that goes by the nickname aojon and posted some of his phat affiliate earning stats on Sitepoint a while ago. He recently launched his new affiliate marketing forums.

If you are a forum junkie you may want to add Wickedfire.com to your list of daily visits. Be warned though that Jon might be a bit rough around the edge and like to curse from time to time. But then again, the world would be a better place if political correctness was thrown in the trash can in favor of fucking honesty. :)

One of Google's biggest problem is that anything they do has a large impact on the web. AdSense made it profitable to create garbage, but at the end of the day it just leads to a web full of garbage.

How does Google fix the problem they created? Some businesses will be hesitant to trust giving Google too many profit points and data points in their business model, but for Google to improve the quality of the web (and thus the quality of their index) they are going to need to evolve their contextual ad program to evolve beyond just selling clicks. Not surprisingly, Google is launching a cost per action distributed affiliate network.

By providing search, analytics, a purchasing mechanism, an affiliate program, a search offering, contextual ads, and a toolbar bundled with everything they are able to get a more pure set of data and are able to insert themselves into more pieces of the shopping cycle while making the entire market more efficient.

I also believe that Google understands that biased content is in many ways more profitable than unbiased content. By teaching many traditional publishers and authorities about conversion Google has the net effect of allowing them to trade in some of their authority for profit. As traditional authorities lose some of their brand value and trust Google's roll as a data aggregator and recommendation engine goes up since people will need to do more re(search) before trusting any entity.

I believe the net effect of search will be that it pushes a more biased and commercial web highly focused on psychographic marketing (that is where marketing is headed if Google is making markets as efficient as they can possibly be).

Many of the best business models are also atrociously inhumane. Are there any ethical guidelines to how well a search engine should automate knowing you and understanding what you want? If some of our worst ideas are reinforced and directed toward existing markets (or at least monopoly markets or markets with expensive and significant ad depth) at an early age it seems the world would become less diverse.

• Is that a bad thing if it is also accompanied by consumers more aware of the biases of intermediaries?

• Or how many people will think about authority related issues in commerce, life, and information consumption?
• How do you increase global conversion rates without sacrificing the quality of the web?
• If you were Google what would you do to improve network efficiency while also considering the hidden costs and concept of humanity that is often ignored by extremely efficient homogenized capitalism?

Fantomaster has some awe inspiring comments about the future of search and social engineering. Read them on a recent TW page starting with this one.