I always noticed that some blogs and sites like Threadwatch got uber tons of comments while this blog did not get many.

I recently bought Threadwatch, and the last couple days I have put far more effort into that site, but have noticed a good number of comments on this one as well. It sorta goes to show that sometimes by changing your perspective you can appreciate stuff more.

Thanks to everyone who has been commenting and whatnot.

Now another thing that is a huge difference between this site and that one is that in the past I think I spent lots of time thinking about and analyzing stuff to the point where few people would want to comment on any of the posts (ie: if you already say it all then there is nothing left).

On Threadwatch the audience, editors, format, and whole system is more geared around an infoporn mechanism. Find cool stuff and let others comment on it. Try to find at least 1 or 2 things every day that make readers become smilers and most likely writers.

If you want others to comment sometimes it is easy to leave a bit out. If you work really hard to say both sides of a story it is much harder for readers to quickly add something than if you mostly highlight one side and give people easy things to add.

Shorter is typically better as well. As far as social interaction goes short sweet and funny will typically beat out comprehensive and perhaps being a bit overly wordy.

I still need to work out lots of the mechanisms for the social stuff, but that is one hell of a site to be able to learn on and while I hope it does great even if I hosed up I think the experience is worth so much money. Thanks again for the opportunity Nick and all the readers / editors / writers at TW.

Matt Cutts posts on some blog and ping RSS Announcer. A few months ago I also stated my disgust with some of the blog spam salesletters.

For those thinking of investing in blog spam software or other useless related crap, search engines can look at far more than the [delete this pink text] and other obvious software footprints. The Link Spam Detection research paper stated:

A number of recent publications propose link spam detection methods. For instance, Fetterly et al. [Fetterly et al., 2004] analyze the indegree and outdegree distributions of web pages. Most web pages have in- and outdegrees that follow a power-law distribution. Occasionally, however, 17 search engines encounter substantially more pages with the exact same in- or outdegrees than what is predicted by the distribution formula. The authors find that the vast majority of such outliers are spam pages.

It's funny to see the star internet marketing crew being too lazy to even change out their bogus testimonials. But at least in the short term there is far more money is the following model:

• launch a shitty software product

• use hype affiliate marketing and joint venture opportunities with internet marketing expert hucksters
• opt in list
• then email spamming (either directly or via affiliates)
• repeat process

than in creating real value. Maybe eventually people will get a clue.

On the web there are a large number of people who will try to help you along to doing well, and then there are hollow middle men who want to take your money to shit down your throat. Since it costs virtually nothing to make most software or sites you see far more of the latter in the internet marketing realm.

There was recently a WebmasterWorld thread about why people hate Google and other successful companies. Some chalk it up to jelousy, but I just think it is disappointing when sleeze marketing and / or other dubious business practices bring better returns than honest ones.

Here is a perfect example. So about a week ago I gave away one of many copies of my ebook to a charity and recently got this response:

Hi Aaron,

Great book, I finished it a few weeks ago and now need to take notes on all the highlights. And WOW, with all the resources you have, that was in itself would be worth the price of the book, oh wait, it was free for me, :) lol

I have read quite a few books over the last 1 1/2 years on internet marketing, etc, and I really believe you are one of the few guys out there that truly want to help others and not just try and milk their list, as I heard one big name internet marketer say and that's exactly how I feel when im on his list. It really came through in your writing and the fact that you update the book on a continual basis says enough.

I would like your opinion on http://www.xyz software.com/ from what I can tell, it appears to be a great piece of software but I always like to get a 2nd opinion before I buy. (btw, I was referred to this by one of the guys I consider that will sell any and everything, every week it's a new cant miss product some of these guys are hawking so its sometimes tough to tell the gems from the duds)

I responded (roughly):

Hi Name
thanks for liking the ebook

xyz software = crap
here is why...

-qpw ($30 or so) is great
-you should mix stuff up
-sites that accept automated type submissions will tend to be
bad neighborhoods

see also
http://www.search-marketing.info/newsletter/articles/trustrank-company.htm
http://www.martinibuster.net/2005/11/link-development-is-dead.html

FYI, I recently was bogusly sued and my lawyers are raping me, so if
you feel like you got tons of value out of the ebook donations are
accepted
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001130.shtml

Cheers,
Aaron

From that I got no response or donation. Give a guy your business model and your knowledge and get nothing in response. That's pretty useless considering I just saved him $97.

I find people that have no money to support people who help them but want to spend money on the latest interent marketing scam software to be greedy and/or stupid. It's not uncommon for business people to take the low road though.

Traffic Power Sucks saved people over a half million dollars and did not get much in donations from the people they helped when asking for donations to fight the bogus lawsuit they got.

I have about 700 emails in the inbox and I likely will be changing my charity policy soon to be more accomidating to paying customers. I don't expect to profit from helping charities, but the semi shady charity requests weigh on my time and spirits. And I still haven't said thanks to all the people who have helped me fight off the internet marketing scam that is Traffic Power :(

SEO Chat is quite possibly the most overly commercialized forum I have ever seen. They get their content free, and I think most of the moderators worked free too. Recently they once again made changes without informing the moderators, and this time they pissed Rand off pretty good.

The irony of it is that they said they were fixing up the site for SEO reasons and did not ask any of the SEO moderators about the changes beforehand. Pretty stupid, IMHO.

Surely there is a great deal of noise they are trying to contend with, but after a system becomes noisy you can't change it without breaking it.

Channels can have a bunch of noise and still do well, but if some of the things that add some of the noise draw people toward your network then you are going to lose big when you remove them, especially if you do it in a disrespectful manner.

You only need about a half dozen to dozen members to make a good community, and if you lose them then you are a bit SOL.

As recently stated by a friend I met at Pubcon, creating a hierarchical framework can work to help moderators think that you are helping them by letting them be a moderator, but there still needs to be some level of respect.

Rand wants people to join Cre8asite, and Barry thinks Digital Point is more fitting.

I see Digital Point forums doing well long term because

• being uber technical and monetizing page views Shawn will have no problem dealing with the massive server load

• it is built around openness with minimal editing
• Shawn created a bunch of free useful tools that are easy for anyone to use

Going forward I think most successful communities will be more about setting up a functional social framework and letting the best framework spread rather than advertising top down systems which do not respect their users.

There is a thread on WMW about the right price to sell an article for. The general consensus is that the author should probably wait it out until their site ranks and just keep their content.

While that is nice in theory, there is no guarantee that a site will eventually rank well just because it has decent content. Of course I am taking stuff out of context here, but you can read the thread to get the gist.

Comment:

As one site is willing to pay you, it doesn't make sense to give your articles away to the other site just to get a link.

Reply:

A friend of mine recently published an article on A List Apart. I think it would be hard to sell most any article for the value he is getting out of the authority of the link from that site, let alone the boost in credibility.

plus good primary links to your site may lead not only to direct exposure and link popularity, but also secondary exposure and more link love.

since your site is new you likely have lots of content and not so many links.

comment:

Whatever you decide, don't make the mistake of granting anyone exclusive rights to publish your work in perpetuity for peanuts.

reply:

for books I totally agree, but if you are obscure / new and / or are operating in a not so well known field and are good at writing articles sometimes giving them away is a great form of marketing.

rule #1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

comment:

Regarding your site, you will never leave the sandbox unless you keep your content 100% to yourself.

reply:

I think sitting chill with minimal link popularity is far worse than trading some of what you got a lot of for something you don't got a lot of (ie: content for links)

The web has taught me alot about not considering what things could or should be worth and that unless you actively work to make them worth it then inferior products which are marketed more aggressively will often win big.

if you have around a hundred articles I don't think it hurts you to share a few of them.

Some of the links you get by giving stuff away are links you never could have bought. Those are the ones that are usually worth a bunch too.

Friends don't let friends go unlinked. ;)

Disclaimer: I am not real good at business. When selling services I always sold myself short, which made it pretty hard to scale services while working by myself. Hence the writing the ebook and some pieces of the Cosmos falling into place for me :)

Todd has seen a good bit of a few different SEO businesses. He recently offered up links to a ton of resources to help you run a web based business. I am not so sure about the business card tip ;) but otherwise everything sounded good to me :)