A number of my friends have stated that they have been growing less and less impressed with AdSense as a monetization model, but I think it provides a huge opportunity. The reasons I like using AdSense on a new site are:

• Google has huge reach, so it shouldn't take their advertisers long to pick up on new advertising trends and opportunities

• it requires virtually no effort, thus it allows you to scale without needing to hire ad sales reps
• it makes it easy to establish a baseline earnings potential so you know how much to value your other media sales at
• that also allows you to determine how much effort and investment each channel should get before committing you to spend thousands of dollars on a money losing channel.
• if you track your ad clickthroughs you can also see which advertisers you are sending your leads at. If they keep buying them over an extended period of time and your site grows to be powerful with broad reach you can either partner with the same sources they are using, or perhaps create direct and premium partnerships with similar or better offers and companies in the same field

Of course there are downsides to placing AdSense ads on your site (like having your largest income generator and one of your largest sources of traffic being the same company), but as I have been building a few sites I have found AdSense helpful in determining where to pour resources.

John Scott recently had an AdSense integrated design competition , where he is offering a couple hundred dollars for a site design. Where else could you get a profitable and amazing site design for only a couple hundred dollars? Running a forum or being socially active helps you establish other baselines outside of your company and outside of AdSense, which allow you to be more efficient at finding and using resources. Friendships allow you to scale up and down without having to worry about hiring and firing employees.

Social interaction and the distribution it brings leads to further distribution, which gives you a wide reach of great people who will offer to give you feedback on your errors. So long as you are not defensive and do not try to control language when your ideas spread then nearly unlimited fast and honest feedback are great bonuses for anyone trying to spread ideas.

Which resources do you overvalue? Which resources do you undervalue? What do you use as helpful baselines in looking at the productivity of your business?

I was chatting with a friend of mine recently, and he talked about liking to link out to related relevant resources from his new site. Given that Google has blatantly stated that they look at the quality of both your inlinks and outlinks why not help search engines associate your site with related sites when you are new.

I also got thinking about a couple other easy ways to build co-citation data and trails for building your brand and sending relevant traffic streams to your site... Directory listings provide quick and easy co-citation data. A trivial expense for large businesses, but they can be costly for people new to the web.

Squidoo is quick and easy to set up a free topical page on. By mentioning your site along with some of the top sites in the same field you can get some quick co-citation data, while also showing that you are an industry expert.

I sorta missed the ball on the Google Notebook launch. I didn't mention it because I was working on a big project and did not have much time to dig through it, but I think it is a great marketing tool for new webmasters. You can create notebooks about different topics then mark them to be publicly accessible.

Tagging is an easy way to get seen by a few people and show what you are related to. Reviewing related products on your site and major sites like Amazon.com is another way to identify your name and brand with your field. I also am a fan of learning from forums, Google Groups, and Yahoo! Answers.

Where are your favorite ways to get co-citation data or easily tap related traffic streams?

I think one of the best parts of the SEO industry is the amount of questioning and curriosity that exists in the market. It really makes you see a wide array of the web as you search around because there is information in so many formats. You also start to see people attach to ideas that are 100% true while also seeing ideas spread that are 100% false.

What the false ideas spreading really show are how people become rabidly loyal, beyond question, toward certain people or ideas. If your website or product fill a niche where there is lots of discussion or it is easy for people to become rabidly loyal then it is going to be far easier to go from 0 to successful than if there is little discussion about your field. Does your marketing message or your field contain anything that makes it easy for people to be rabidly loyal?

Things people are rabidly loyal about include peanut butter and Firefox.

Things people are not rabidly loyal about include fruit cake and Flock.

I am not a skilled domainer on any level, but if you know your industry well and you see words start to pop up as industry buzz words here or there it may be worth betting $10 to $20 on a domain registration. Do it 10 or 20 times and a few of your purchases will catch.

I own a bunch of seo domains like blackhatseo.com and whitehatseo.com. I am not doing much with them as of yet, but if I ever wanted to sell search spam software could there possibly be a better place to do it from than blackhatseo.com?

I don't think Matt Cutts reads most of my posts, but his blog mentioned shadyseo.com, so I instinctively had to register it. Now what to do with it :)

Blackhatseo.com took less than a day and $100 to put together, and now anytime anyone uses the phrase "black hat seo" I should probably be the #1 ranked result on most engines. I could redesign that site around trying to get press to contact me, and if it lead to me getting frequent press coverage how much value would that have? Much more than $100 and 4 hours of work.

Yesterday a couple of my search referrals were:

• download seo books

• definitive guide to google adwords filetype:pdf

The download search might be someone looking to buy, but the other search is most likely someone looking for something for free.

Looking to buy?

There are many searches where just adding a modifier means that the search results are going to be exceptionally uncompetitive. If you add the modifiers that people use during the buying cycle (ie: buy, purchase, reviews, compare, review, download or best) you may be able to get high value traffic for next to nothing.

Looking for free?

Looking for my stuff for free?

When you are new to the market piracy might be one of your best free marketing channels because retail only matters if you have reach and people are buying.

If you have too many bad customers that likely starts to give you a bit of a bad mood and rub off on how you treat good customers.

I like to think that if people did not want to pay for my stuff that hopefully they would get a dated version from a file sharing network rather than buying and doing a chargeback or buying and then asking for a refund without reason.

When I posted about raising the bar on what I considered a real charity others commented on that page that people can get dated versions from file sharing networks. I left the comments in there, and then liked the idea so much as to put free SEO Book at the start of the page title and to start the page with a recommendation for file sharing networks.

By creating semi accessible paths for bad customers that prevent them from needing to contact you the quality of your average customer or inquery should go up.

Looking for someone elses stuff for free?

If you are new to the web you not only want to get top rankings, but you also want to grab mindshare. Mindshare has value, and most brand terms are not deeply competitive on the web unless there are many web based retailers or affiliates for that brand.

A cheap or easy way to gain mindshare is to review relevant products and recommend them on your site. If the person selling the product is clued in and likes your feedback then they may be inclined to link at you. Also when people do background searches on competing products they will be introduced to your brand. Don't forget to use words they may not have used in their marketing mix (for an ebook maybe they didn't use the version e-book or talk at all about PDFs, for example). I also have also been given free books based on reviews of other books I did on Amazon.

The people looking for things for free or doing background searches may not be as likely to buy as people who are already looking for your brand, but if you have not built up much of a brand it is not hard to tap into the brand value and traffic value created by others brands. Even if you make no money off of much of this traffic it still grants you additional mindshare for limited effort. Some search engines may consider usage data as a type of recommendation. So long as you present quality information you can almost guarantee that reviewing some of the most popular products in your vertical will be a cheap and profitable investment.