I am sure I have posted about the concept of market edges before, but I am about to go away for a few days and wanted to make one last post before I went on my trip to Bonnaroo for a music filled weekend with Werty, Radiohead, DJ Sasha, Beck and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Each time a new vertical search service or content distribution type comes about it offers a quick and easy opportunity to help you boost your exposure. If you get in a market before it is saturated there is likely going to be

• less competing content

• fewer and weaker social barriers to break through
• fewer signals of quality that are usable to organize information (thus if you title / label it smartly you won half the battle right there)
• less of a requirement to be citation worthy
• larger margin per unit effort

So lets say you go to the largest auction. The only way you are going to find great deals there are if

• the competition is clueless

• there is a glut of supply that either saturates the market or prevents people from wanting to dig through the noise to find the gems
• the seller does not know how to describe the value of what they are selling
• you know a market better than the market does and can accurately predict future performance (I was bad ass at this as a kid with baseball cards)
• you think you are getting a deal, but are actually getting quite screwed ;)

You can think of search (and the web as a whole) as an auction for attention. SEO is all about maximal ROI per unit effort while using a risk level you are comfortable with.

If you take a typical low risk path and take on investors that may cost you your business.

What has prevented us moving forward is a battle with a group of minority shareholders, some of whom claim to be lead by our ex-CEO Salim Ismail and are, in any case, primarily his "friends and family." This group is using very unusual clauses in our Shareholder's agreements to block mergers or financings. We've found it difficult to determine their motives, however, some have said that they believe that it is in their interest to drive the company into bankruptcy so that they can buy our software and start a new company.

However if you can spread bottoms up stories they will provide marketing so cheap that you can't help but be profitable.

Popular sites like YouTube prove that not only that artists will give away their work for exposure, but that eventually some may even need to pay just for the opportunity to give their stuff away. Writers are going to have to be the same way. When I turned down a major publishing house I did so because I thought I would be able to do a better job marketing than they would. Part of that marketing is giving away some copies of my ebook for review, while other parts of that marketing include sharing a ton of ideas.

When I wrote a long post a couple days ago it only got about 10 links (which is a terrible short term ROI for a 30 page article) but it may have also got me a speaking opportunity at San Jose SES, which is huge huge huge.

To do well with search long-term you have to find the new markets or be willing to over-invest and realize that many of the things you do will not do much, but some of them will do much better than you think they should.

I recently ranted about blogspamming comments being a poor way to win an SEO contest. It is a technique that for the most part came and went. Especially if you are taking the time to do it manually to leave garbage comments on a blog with nofollowed comments that other people are hitting hard too.

When Google Base launched there were stories of people making $10,000 a day from it.

Most of the large web companies are trying to bridge the gap to try to find new and innovative ways to make user feedback useful.

Yesterday I spent about 10 hours looking at eBay. Did you know they have a wiki, blogs, community forums, keywords, profile pages, auctions, eBay express, reviews, guides, market research data (for $25 a month) and stores. Setting up a store only costs $16 and then the per month per item listing fee is only 2 cents.

Surely as they work on integrating all that information they are going to create under-priced marketing opportunities.

I have seen people make Amazon guides that recommended my ebook. I have seen people review other books and tell people to instead buy mine. Amazon also has tagging, product wikis, and Alexa feedback.

Again you can probably find some ways to market your site on there (by reviewing related products or creating guides, etc.).

Google is doing in-line search suggest for related popular searches. They also are providing guided categorization of travel, medical, and perhaps a few other types of search. Each time they split up their traffic on the generic terms and provide a path to more niche fields they help boost those niche markets. The framework with which they set up their categorization might be a good keys for ways to set up internal navigation or what niche sites are worth building.

Now there are a ton of meme trackers that provide free authoritative links to the quickest spreading ideas. Make sure you own a couple blogs you can link from and make sure you have a number of blogging friends on your IM list, so that when you need to spread an idea they can help give you a boost. The web is just a social network.

Not only are their meme trackers, but there are also social news sites that aim to cut the editorial costs out of running a news site. Netscape is looking to clone the Digg model, so again it is worth it to have a number of friends on the IM list.

If you just get a few blog links and a mention on those two sites you might only be a quality link or two away from being able to rank in most niche markets.

Those social news sites are also killing the importance (and availability) of blogs which aim to be first with all the news. And they are going to make it harder to get traffic to sites that lack opinion, because they are going to create tons of boring content on fairly authoritative domains.

With all these market edge type ideas am I suggesting you spam? Nope. I am just saying that at market edges there is great profit potential, and if you look to see where markets are headed and get in early on new markets you can establish a self reinforcing base with much less effort than is required to build yourself up from scratch in an already competitive marketplace. Just look at some of the junky old sites that rank in Google. Why do they still rank? Because in the past less was needed to be citation worthy.

As time passes even MSN Search will eventually get harder to manipulate (it looks like they are going to start manually editing their search results more actively).

For those people who consider all aggressive marketing as spam or for those who tie some arbitrary ethical garbage to their marketing methods, don't forget that Google is one of the biggest spammers on the web.

How does Google spam?

• Profit share partnerships with garbage AdSense sites.

• Inadequate editorial filtering of their ads such that they have even profited from ads promoting child porn.
• Accidentally making pre-releases available or listing them in their robots.txt
• Labeling everything as a beta so they can double dip on news.
• Relaunching old products as though they are never before seen offerings. Just today they duped the Washington Post into writing an article about Google's *BRAND NEW* government search when the service is actually about 7 years old. How is that anything BUT spam?

The difference between spam and good marketing is perception. Most techniques are not typically classified as spam until after people heavily abuse them. In other words, market timing and unique techniques are all you need to do to succeed, and that is pretty cool since new markets are always forming.

Have a great weekend everybody.

While I would describe myself as financially secure and profitable I still am a bit wet behind the ears on business partnerships. These are some of the general attributes I found in partners in good business partnerships. I think I have had about a half dozen great business partners so far. Here are brief descriptions on some of the things that made some of them great.

Hey Asshole! If a person is willing to tell you that you are a piece of shit or that you are screwing up it is much easier to trust them and their motives than the average person email spamming you with the Joint Venture opportunity of your lifetime. If they are willing to be blunt and honest with you then you have to respect that. I found at least 4 great business partners this way.

Questions Authority: When people are willing to ask but why they not only show the courage to tell you when you are full of crap (and thus help you make better ideas) but they also are going to be more likely to find other ideas that help you out-market the competition or find holes in relevancy algorithms to outmaneuver the search engines. Where conventional wisdom is wrong great profit potential exists.

Most authority systems are hypocritical garbage designed to increase the wealth or power of the authority figures or rule makers. If you are willing to look at them from that perspective it is much easier to find potentially profitable opportunities and algorithmic holes.

Believes in You: One of my friends quit his job and is working full time building out a website for me. Behind his computer on the wall he actually wrote the word FOCUS in big black marker. After about a month of consistant growth yesterday was the first day that the website paid over 100% of his living costs (including his somewhat expensive home mortgage).

Focuses on Automation: It depends on your business models, but if people think of the scalability or ease of replication of a business model at launch that is going to typically lead to a much higher profit yield than a person who starts creating before they think about profits or automation.

Has Different Sources: Their sources may be their own experiences or channels that are not typically read by most people in your market, but generally if people can pull value from sources that are generally overlooked in your industry that is a good sign for the value they can create.

It is hard to make money doing the exact same thing everyone else is doing.

History of Execution:
One of my hyper-successful friends and business partners recently said

I do think it is all about execution though and we will not be out executed.

Having too much confidence can be a bad thing, but if you have partners that have shown the ability to follow through it is a great sign to hear them that confident.

Excitement: A person who feels they just deserve to be successful may not add much value to whatever you are doing. A person who is hard working and excited may not realize their value an / or can be trained to produce valuable work, and will be much more malleable than someone who is already stuck in their ways.

What attributes do you look for in a business partner?

Peter D recently mentioned a PDF on website credibility.

If you think of a search engine as a user trying to perceive how credible documents are then many of those factors make a lot of sense from an SEO perspective, because

• Your site visitors will consider many perceived credibility factors when deciding weather or not to buy, transact, or link to your site. Credibility is the key to conversion, especially with expensive or non commodity products and services.
• Search engines also evaluate how others perceive your site through looking at linkage data and usage data.

It might also be worth taking a look at Beyond Algorithms: A Librarian's Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can Trust. Imagine that many media members use some similar criteria as the above two documents, and it is easy to see how librarians, media members, and other authoritative voices propagate trust through the web, and why many sites lack credible citations until their site sells itself as being credible enough to merit quality citations.

So there was an old domain name I really wanted. I saw that the site was down and that the PageRank was already stripped (which happens to most expiring domains anyhow) and the name was kinda junky, but I was hoping that it would go to auction and I would be the only one backordering it. Oh how I was wrong.

It just cost me about $4,000 to buy a generic domain with 0 PageRank because I was too dumb to try to get it earlier, perhaps while it still had PageRank. So the tip is, if you see a site down and think you would like the traffic stream the domain enjoys you are probably better off asking the current owner if they would part with it for a few hundred dollars instead of paying $4,000 at auction for it ;)

Recently 11 blogs from the Fine Fools network sold with content, designs, and links for a total of $4,500. I am still busy kicking myself in the teeth, because I would have paid much more than that for those blogs. Those blogs were generating over 300,000 monthly pageviews, but the sites were generating only roughly $300 in monthly revenues.

Without even adding any content to those sites, given their traffic volume and link authority (most of the sites were strong PageRank 6 sites with natural backlink profiles) I could have easily increased the income to over $5,000 a month (ie: had the network more than pay for itself in the first month of ownership).

I think that limited $300 / month revenue figure is a great example of why it is worth worrying about more than just pageviews. SEO is just one piece of the puzzle, and usually most sites have big obvious on site gains that could be pursued long before you look to invest heavily in increasing traffic.

I get some people who tell me that they are already getting a million pageviews a month and they want me to guarantee they will get 3 million pageviews a month if they read my $79 book. If you can get 2 million monthly pageviews for $79 please let me know the source and I will follow you with a few thousand dollars in hand. When you are to that scale the issue is not that you need more distribution. If you can't make money with hundreds of thousands or millions of pageviews you ought to consider changing your revenue model.

I realize that celebrity sites might get tons of low quality traffic, but how hard would it be to add ring tone affiliate ads, concert ticket text links, or dating affiliate ads to the sites? How hard would it be to write a dating ebook you sold for $30? And the blog A Man's View could have easy been changed to a porn blog that would make in excess of $5,000 a month by itself.

I guess a valuable lesson here is that networks that don't profit will eventually fall apart and/or will be sold for well less than they are worth. Another valuable lesson might be that there is still a huge disconnect between traffic and value in the minds of most webmasters, and the WWW still has near endless profit opportunity about.

A friend normally gives me the scoop on auctions at Sitepoint, but something went wrong on this one. I am still kicking myself in the teeth. I would have loved to have bought those blogs, especially that cheap. Damn damn damn damn etc ;)