While not insecure about money issues, there is no doubt Seth Godin is one of many ego driven bloggers:

I don't blog to make money. I don't run ads on my site. I don't even blog to win awards. I blog because it pleases me to see my ideas spread. I like it when I see people talking about one of my ideas--without even mentioning where the idea came from. That means it's the idea that spread, not my brand. Which is the whole point.

For me, anyway. Not for you or for her or for him.

And that's the tricky part about marketing to ego. Everybody feeds their ego in a different way.

While I sell an ebook on this site I am sorta the same way on that front, entirely ego driven. I like helping people and I like links.

A friend of mine asked me how much money was my goal for the year and I said I will measure my success in HTML links. He told me I could get that with blogspam and FFA pages, but I believe those are only part of a well rounded link building campaign ;)

Think I am a bit behind for the month (stuck at #34 for Aaron in Goolge), so here is to a good August...Aaron Aaron Aaron Aaron Aaron Aaron Aaron Aaron

On a related note, congrats to Gurtie, who already owns 6 of the top 7 Google Gurtie results. She recently stopped targeting TheGurtster because, as she states, "it was too easy".

In a recent Fast Company article Sergey Brin stated that he thought Google still has the ability to attract the right kind of people because they have the ability to feed their ego:

"Here's the way I think of it," he says. "Is this the place I would want to work if I were graduating from a PhD program now?" Brin and Larry Page were pursuing doctorates at Stanford when they founded Google, which they now run together with Eric Schmidt, a veteran executive who had worked at Sun and Novell.

"Yes," he answers. Why? The key reason is that Google lets brilliant computer scientists work on "great technical problems" that provide the intellectual stimulation and challenge they crave. "Artificial intelligence, complex systems, user interface -- all the things I studied as a graduate student, we hit the limits of," he says.

What fills your ego? Do your offers fill the egos of those you want to do business with?

Hopefully Mike still likes me, but I disagree with this snippet from his second part of the Could PageRank Possibly be any more Overrated^TM? series:

If I'm paying for links, I want a lot more tangible evidence from the site owner. I want stats that tell me how visible the links are across all major search engines, how much traffic they send, and how much traffic they attract overall. I want to see the site owner is a savvy online marketer and is an authority in his community or is developing a presence as such. I need to know he understands and uses analytics to provide tactical data. This is sound, useful marketing intelligence. It's a lot more important to me than a meaningless 4 or 5 in a little sprinkling of green fairy dust above the pages.

Sure if you are paying a ton of money you want to have some evidence backing up the link price, but due to my business model (which lacks recurring revenue) I am willing to take gambles buying many cheap links knowing the owner may not realize the value of them (something like US Web does, but usually with a bit more tact).

Most webmasters know nothing about tracking and most successful web based businesses can not compete with the largest ones on all aspects, and thus must look for market inefficiencies to help market their sites until they tap viral marketing and their business models mutate to become more competitive with the industry leaders.

I would prefer to buy links from people who may not necissarily understand the market value of their links. I don't want the average link selling webmaster to be marketing savvy. Think how bad it would suck if you had to pay full market value for every link you bought. It would end up becoming a zero sum market like AdWords.

I bought links which quickly increased in price by over 300% for anyone who followed. A few times I did it based primarily on PageRank because I knew to have PR8 internal pages the site had to have solid connectivity data, but most of those type of link buys were over a year ago and when I did it the linking page were typically virgin and this site was a bit (maybe a lot) more obscure than it is today.

Of course due to many people reading these blog posts and looking through linkage data that sort of stuff does not last very long if I get those types of links for this site (which is perhaps a good example of why it is sometimes better to dominate low key categories than to try to compete in overtly competitive high profile ones).

I helped a friend market one of their websites, which only retails one type of product for one manufacturer, and on under $1,000 a month ad spend their site sells well over twice as much as this one does (and their site does not have much original / unique / compelling content).

I have been a bit lazy with link building recently, but for a while I was in the top 10 of Google for SEO (currently #7) & search engine marketing (currently #15) with 2 different sites on well under $1,000 of monthly link spend, due in large part to buying or renting low power links for under fair market value.

The most powerful links are no doubt worth a pretty penny to many business models, but sometimes it is just cheaper to give those people a good reason / excuse to link at you instead of trying to buy ads, and if you can't do that then the links may not be worth buying if you have to pay full market value for them.

Outside of SearchEngineWatch, DMOZ, & Yahoo! this site has few on topic high power links from official type resources. I have bought or rented:

• many cheap on topic links from low power sites

• a few off topic links from sites with great webwide connectivity

and this site ranks well for a wide variety of search related terms without significant ad spend.

***Disclaimer: I am not saying my time is an unlimited free resource, but am saying that spending a bit of time finding underpriced links may be a better link buying route than expecting webmasters to come up with numbers and justifications for expensive link prices.***

While I am still feeling obstinate, Jakob Nielson disses Amazon's usability, also calling contextual ads on merchant sites crap:

Amazon spends about two inches of each product page advertising other websites. Although this generates revenue, the average e-commerce site should be ashamed if it can't make far more money selling to a hot lead who's already investigating one of its own products. Amazon's position as the default place to buy books is so strong that it can afford to send shoppers off to other sites, knowing they'll return later and buy the book anyway. You can't make the same assumption. Sell to your prospects, rather than throw them away.

Many people have stated contextual ads provided a low effort passive income stream without doing much damage to the main income streams. The only way you can be sure whether or not ads are right for your sites is to test.

Jakob should probably step away from his ideals and visit a bit of reality before calling good business logic a shameful activity.

Commission Junction is one of the largest third party affiliate marketing networks. Every year they hold a conference out in Santa Barbra. This year it is occuring from September 18-20th.

I have not done much affiliate marketing yet, but was wondering is there good value in going to CJU? I believe they sell out early, so anyone gone and recommend it? Is there value in going? Is it just for really new people? Do you think I would probably learn a bunch, or make good contacts by going?

So a while ago NickW GrayWolf posted a thread about the affiliate list, which is a list of information related to top affiliate marketers.

The post in and of itself is not that interesting, but the conversation below it is. Nick GrayWolf threw something out there that might have been good or might have been bad, and the audience decided. From that thread it appears some of the things surrounding the affiliate list are a bit dodgy. Hate threads always suck (and I have been the featured guest of many of them), but this thread is prettymuch a how to guide on piss poor word of mouth marketing.

Jeff Molander, the creator of the Affiliate List, jumped in the thread to try to defend his product, but berates anyone who does not see eye to eye with his position. Some people on the list want off it and Jeff does not appear keen on letting them off. In escence he is selling contact data about people who stated they do not want to be contacted.

Jeff appears to be forgetting the memory of the web. At one point in time he talks of gaining access to proprietary data

If it remains a mystery as to where I've seen the data (that allows me to pass judgment on retail focused affiliates) after helping found an affiliate network, lead the sales effort at the leading affiliate data services provider and manage dozens of programs as an outsourced services provider to marketers

and soon he acts as though those words were never wrote.

There are many other contridictions in the thread, but the whole point is that if you are angering a large group of people you should know your words are going to be held against you. The best thing to do is either not participate in the thread, or be accepting of some of the feedback it offers.

You rarely are going to get criticised for playing new, naive, or empanthy cards; typing things like "well I guess I never looked at it that way" or "that's a good point" or "yeah, I probably should fix that. thanks for the great feedback". Whenever you lay the "you are all dumb and this is a bogus hate thread" card it is hard to win over supporters. It becomes hard to see your point of view.

Another important issue Lots0 raised in the thread is that if people have a legitimate opportunity for you then you should be able to seek it out. You shouldn't be ready, willing, and excited to work with most of the people who email or call you up with a deal out of the blue.

Affiliates and marketers should usually chose their products rather than letting affiliate program managers try to chose you. If someone has a great opportunity it is only a matter of time until you should run into it if you are truely interested in the topic.

More than any thread I have read in a long time that thread demonstrates how web conversations are different from other conversations, as the people in the thread gain knowledge and better perspective from each additional post. Jeff is trying to invoke Nick into butchering the thread, but I hope Nick sees past Jeff's juvenile attempts.

Looking through keyword research databases it is funny to see how much more volume there is for wedding vows than there are for people renewing their weddings.

People sell weddings as being the perfect day, even though most of them end in divorce.

Normally I wouldn't look at that sort of data, but an old client wants me to rewrite their meta tags. A total waste of time, but if it makes them happy, oh well...Meta tags? I do.

hehehe

On another funny note, I have a strange desire to put gay wedding vows next to Christian wedding vows in their meta keywords tags...but I resisted.