SEO Question: I'm researching poison or forbidden words and I've only found a few vague or older posts from 2000 in a few SEO forums. Supposedly if a site uses poison words in the title etc. it is pushed way down in the SERPs. Any idea if this is fact or fiction? I'd love a complete list of poison words, although right now I'm specifically trying to find out if sale, best, about, contact us, website, or free shipping are poison because I have a retail product site with those words in the home page title, description, and body text.

SEO Answer:
Poison words were a way to deweight low quality content pages:
I have actually never put much effort into researching poison words, but I will try to give my opinion on the subject.

The initial research and information about poison words came out well before I jumped into the SEO market. This page talks about the idea of poison words:

Poison words, are words that are known to decrease your pages rankings if a search engine finds them in the title, description or in the url. They don't kill, they just bury pages in rankings.

Generally, people think of adult words first. Adult words (obscene) often put your page in an adult category where it is filtered out by various filters at search engines.

Newer non-adult Poison Words are being uncovered. These words don't throw you into a different category, then just decrease your rankings. Poison Words signal to a search engine, that this page is of low value.

Forums are Bad?
That same page goes on to cite how forum may have been a bad word around that time:

The worst of the lot would probably be the word "forum". Chat and BBS forum systems have taking body shots by all the major search engines this year. Two well know search engines now specifically look for links to BBS software makers and kill the pages in the index outright - possibly the whole domain.

Other possible poison title/url words and phrases that come to mind: UBB, BBS, Ebay, and all variations on the pa-id to surf program keywords.

Why Would Forums Have Been Bad?
As stated above, I was not around on the web during that time period, so I can only guess as to why forum would have been such a bad word.

Largely I think it would have came down to two factors:

• overweighting of forums in the search results

• how easy it was (and still is) to spam forums

In early 2000 there were far fewer pages on the web than there are today. Because of the textual nature of forums and how many pages forum conversations generated it would not surprise me if forums tended to make up too large of a percentage of the search results, and thus they had to offset that by deweighting forums.

Things which show either a lack of moderation of content or page contents that are not vetted by the site publisher may make search engines want to consider deweighting a page. Imagine a page with few inbound links from outside sites and 100 external links on the page, and all 100 links used the nofollow attribute. If you were an engine would you want to trust that page much? I wouldn't.

The Web Was Much Smaller:
To put it in perspective, back in early 2000 Google was still pushing people toward the Google Directory on their home page, had a link to their awards page pushing Yahoo! and did not even yet have the number of documents page count that they had for about 4 or 5 years. On June 26th of 2000 Google announced that they had 560 million full-text indexed web pages and 500 million partially indexed URLs. Right now Webmasterworld has over 2 million pages in Google's index, so you can see how a few large forum sites would be able to dominate a search index that small. Combine that with many forums being hit by internet marketers aggressively spamming them and the content seems less desirable.

Deweighting User Interaction:
As far as deweighting pages that allow user interaction that makes sense as well. Why? Because for most sites the page and site gain authority primarily for the actions of the site owner or paid editors. If third parties can add content to a page they can influence the relevancy of that document, and thus leverage the authority of the original author without much expense. That is why search engineers pushed the nofollow attribute so hard.

Plus if pages and sites are legitimate and allow value added useful community interaction typically those sites will get more links and authority, so knocking them down a bit for allowing interactivity and third party publishing does not really hurt them - since the legitimate sites would make that right back through gaining more citations.

Turning a Page Into Spam:
I don't search as much as I would like to because I spend too much time reading and writing stuff (and not enough time researching), but on occasion I search around. I have seen totally unrelated blog posts rank #1 on Google for certain types of niche pornography because someone came by and left a comment that made that document become relevant to the uber gross porn query.

Blog Comment and RSS Spam:
In a recent post on SEO Buzz Box DaveN hinted that comments may make a page be seen as less clean, and thus give a search engine a reason to deweight it. Combine that with the vastly growing field of citation spam and it makes sense that Google would not want to promote similar content that is only differentiated by ad placement and a few third party comments.

Ebb and Flow:
So given that forums were a type of content that may have been overrepresented and undesirable I think it is worth noting that maybe right now they may be considered to be better than they once were. Perhaps contextual advertising programs and the rebound of online advertising may have gave forum owners more compensation which allow them to run better forums. Also algorithms are more link focused and most forum pages tend to score naturally poor because there are so many pages as compared to the quantity and quality of inbound links to most forums.

Search engines constantly battle with marketers for what types of sites to rank in the search results.

Sometimes you will notice Amazon and large vertical sites ranking for almost everything under the sun. At other times directories are given more weight than would seem logical.

In late 2003, around the time of the Google Update Florida directories started showing up way too much in the search results. People took advantage of the opportunity and thousands of vertically focused or general PageRank selling directories sprung up.

Since then many of those directories seem to be packing less punch in the SERPs - in direct rankings and with how much their links help other sites.

Closing Holes Opens New Ones:
So what you see is wave after wave of content type. As search engines close some holes they open up others. When WG and Oilman interviewed Matt Cutts they also spoke about how the face of spam has - at least for now - moved from blog spam sites to subdomains off established sites. Right now Google is putting too much weight on old established sites.

Blogs Getting Away With a Bit Much:
With all of the blog networks springing up right now I wouldn't be surprised if some search engineers were starting to get sick of blogs, and looking for ways to deweight some of those networks as well. That is another example of why forums may become more desirable...if blogs are so hot that everyone and their dog has 5 of them maybe the people who are looking to make a quick buck are going to be more inclined to run blogs than forums.

Poison Words No Longer Needed?
That sorta leads me into my next point. I don't think poison words in their old traditional sense are as important as they may have been.

I still think the concept of poison words has a roll, but it is likely minimal other than how much search engines can trust citations. IE: pages that flag for poison words may not pass as much outbound link authority.

The inverse rule of link quality states that the effect of a link is going to be inversely proportional to how easy it is for a competing site to gain that same link.

So if the words "add URL" and "buy PageRank" are on the page those links may not count as much as other types of links. On this page Ciml noted how guestbook pages were not passing PageRank, but then Google undid that, at least to some extent. Stop words may not be necessary to deweight low quality links though. De-weighting may occur fairly naturally via other algorithmic mechanisms that generally parallel the effect of stop words:

• Far more people practice SEO today than did in 2000, so many of the loopholes that are exploited are hit faster and harder. (see The Tragedy of the Commons).

• Most people selling links do it in a manner that it is painfully obvious to search engines.
• Here is an example of how the average low quality greed driven general directory is ran.

Search engines collect more data and have far better technology as well. If pages are not found useful by searchers then they will eventually rank lower in the search results.

Establishing Trust:
So right now - and going forward - search relevancy will be about establishing trust. How trust is established will continue to evolve. Those who have more trust will also be able to get away with more aggressive marketing. Some new sites that use the DP coop network do not do that well with it, but sites that are either old and/or have built up significant usage data via email or viral marketing seem to be able to do more with it.

Google's Informational Bias:
Also note that Google tends to be a bit biased toward sites they believe to be informational in nature. Yahoo! Mindset shows how easy it is for search engines to adjust that sort of bias. You could think of words like shopping carts and checkout as being treated as poison words, but odds are highly likely that if a merchant site provides a useful feature rich page that search engines want that content. Most merchant sites that are getting whacked in Google are likely getting whacked for having thin sites with near duplicate content on most pages or for having unnatural linkage profiles.

Many thin affiliate sites are also getting hit for having no original content and outbound affiliate links on nearly every page.

Improving Content Quality:
With all informational databases Google pushes they first push getting as much of it as possible, and then as time passes they learn to better understand it (looking ultimately at human interaction), and try to push for the creation of higher quality content. Most web based publishers will face a huge strugle with balancing content quality and content cost.

The only way their business model works is if others allow them to give people free access to high quality content. I don't think that poison words are necessarily needed to do that though...at least not for most natural created-for-human pages in their general search database.

Vertical Search:
Some vertical search engines may use certain words for inclusion or exclusion in their database. For example look at Edgeio or NFFC's post on Become.com.

Alternate Meaning for Poison Words:
Some people have also called terms poison words because some of them throw off contextual ad targeting.

Google allows you to use section targeting to help target your AdSense ads away from common generic words like blog.

SEO Question: Some of my clients sites have different customer types. I am afraid of pigeonholing the prospects. Should I make pages for the different customer types?

SEO Answer: If the services offered and price ranges are drastically different or people buy your products for exceptionally different reasons then it makes sense to create pages for different demographic groups.

Here are some of the advantages of creating different pages based on different demographics:

• Most people will not enter your site through the home page: If people do transactional or informational searches they are far more inclined to land on an internal page than a home page. Why? Because there are many more web pages than web sites. Creating the individual pages allows you to drill down and build large quantities of traffic by being relevant for many highly targeted niche phrases.

• Conversion: pages which speak to a specific audience will do much better than pages that try to appeal to everyone
• Improved margins and targeting: If you participate in pay per click marketing or any other type of marketing that runs on thin margins creating a page that can convert well to a specific self selected demographic will allow you to continue to compete while some competitors are forced out of the market on margins.
• More doorways: Each additional page of targeted useful content is another ticket in the search lottery. If your competitors just focus on the generic what words and you create quality targeted content around the why words you should be able to pick off some low hanging fruit.

If most of your business comes from one client type then it may make sense to set the home page to target that market segment by default.

In addition to targeting different demographics it may also make sense to create pages targeting their common questions, problems and important points along the buying cycle.

If your demographic groups and empathetic buying points are vastly different (and perhaps diametrically opposed) it may make sense to create different brands and sites to allow you to target the different demographics without risking offending or turning off other groups.

You can still use your home page to give people the gist of what sets you apart, but by focusing pages on common problems and questions consumers may have, and creating pages for different consumer types you open many additional doors to your site which are also easier to advertise and are more likely to convert.

There are a ton of fun or cool demographic tools or ideas being shared on the web. A couple examples:

• New York City demographic map by decade from 1900 to 2000

• using termites to activate the sales cycle

SEO Question: I was thinking about buying a link exchange software product. I was looking at ___________ and ___________ and wanted to know what one is the best?

SEO Answer: I think Arelis can be decent for harvesting email information, but many sloppy webmasters screw that up by using too much automation. You really need to try to connect to a webmaster, and since each site and each person has different motives anything that is automated or generated is crap.

For example, I recently got this gem of an email:

I'm an editor of a website ______ about watches. I looked through your site http://www.threadwatch.org and I think that it is very interesting. I have an offer for you. I'd like to send you a few of interesting, cognitive articles with unique content about structures and machinery of watches, which will be written by a group of authors. If interested, feel free to contact me. I appreciate your opinion.
Thank you in advance.

Sincerely yours, Anastasia

Notice that they didn't specifically mention link exchange, but they wanted to put link laden content on my site that was unrelated to my site.

Most of the software designed for automation leaves footprints if it generates pages, and / or is crap for other reasons.

And while it may seem like the watch example above is a rare one many authoritative sites tend to rank for terms that are a bit random in nature. For example, Matt Cutts ranks at #173 for Bacon in Google right now. If you fired off emails to the top 200 bacon resources sure enough one of those spam emails would hit Google's search quality / web spam evaluation leader, and obviously that is not a good thing.

The links that you really want do not exist on generic will-exchange-with-anyone link pages. Most of those pages are not designed for humans and are likely rather easy for most sophisticated search engines to detect.

I think pretty lowly of most link exchange networks as well.

Automation works well for some people, but if you are new to the market you probably are not going to figure out how and what to automate until you have a bit of experience. As a general rule of thumb I never automate any human interaction and avoid using software that leaves footprints, especially if that software is typically primarily used by people who aim to game search relevancy.

If you are in a competitive marketplace with a new site and the only links you can get are ones that you have to request then you eventually are going to need to mix up your methods, especially as your market becomes more hyper saturated.

SEO Question: I have a little personal side project going -- selling an info product (completely unrelated to SEO; it has to do with _____ and local markets) and I loved the simpleness of your delivery of your ebook. It was straight forward and easy to follow. I want to mimic your process -- I will be using Paypal too.

Any advice or pitfalls you encountered along the way? Techinical or otherwise? Just thought I'd ask someone who has been there before. Maybe save me some time / mistakes.

SEO Answers: There are many ways to go with selling info products. We'll start off with the pieces I think are important and then maybe others will add info at the end.

First you really have to survey the market.

How to survey:

• Do keyword research, looking at things like Overture price and search volume. Perhaps even set up a test Google AdWords account.

• If you know the market well what were the major questions you had when you were buying information and products about your market? You can use Google AdWords to collect feedback for what issues are important to others. Tell them you have a nearly completed book that will be for sale soon and that you will give them it free for feedback on what they would like to be in the book. Alex Mendosian calls this concept the Ask Database, although it may be just as easy to set up a form box that sent mail to a Gmail account and use tagging and their email search to sort through the feedback.
• You can also search industry forums, blogs, and Google Groups to see what common problems and questions people have.
• Do information products, software, and service products in your market have commonly complained about issues? If so you may want to make that part of your sales angle.

Competitive Analysis:

• Does the business model and delivery model make sense? Sometimes by changing the format something can become hyper successful or a complete failure.

• Look at the Clickbank marketplace to look at the sales techniques used by many people pushing affiliate marketing heavily in your vertical, related verticals, or verticals that would appeal to similar audience profiles.
• Do link analysis on competing sites.
• If you see one product appear in the regular search results and search ads many times that may be a hard site to compete with.
• Buy competing products to see their whole sales cycle.
• Look at high ranking search results for competing products names to see how deep their affiliate network is and if they have any mainstream news coverage. Also look to see what bloggers and forums say about them. How can you appeal to the various potential viral marketers of your product?

For most people it is typically going to be easier to work in an under saturated keyword market than it is to work in a hyper saturated one or create a keyword market from scratch. I did it the stubborn pig headed way and just sorta went after making my own market. It is working great now, but for about a year it was somewhat brutal.

Reacting to survey:

• If a market is saturated you may not want to enter it or you may want to focus on a niche within that topic.

• If people seemed to be exceptionally concerned about one issue then that might be a great sub niche to focus on. Especially if that niche seems complex and / or is high margin (or if the niche seems complex to others but is still rather easy to create a fairly automated high value service in).
• If there is one or few exceptionally common problems with information items in your field you may want to use that as your marketing angle.

What is the goal of Creating Your Information Product:

• To help people

• Name recognition
• Influence
• Build a targeted audience or subscriber list
• Direct profit
• Indirect profit

Some ideas will help in multiple areas, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices in some of the categories to help your end goal along in other categories. Generally though if you can build a large enough targeted audience you can get any or many of the above in most fields.

Writing the Book:

• Spend a day or a few days creating an outline before you write the book.

• I used Word and Adobe PDF to make my ebook, although that was like a $600 or $700 spend buying those. If you want to go the cheap route OpenOffice is free. It has a program similar to Microsoft Word and a PDF creator inside of it. I distribute my ebook as a PDF.
• I revised my book many times so it really is a bit hard for me to even say what the original looked like, but using short text, bulleted lists, and not trying to write at exceptionally advanced levels are good tips to live by if you are writing a how to book.
• John T Reed wrote a book on how to write how to books. I think his general thesis and content are great, with the exception of his thoughts on online marketing and DRM. I reviewed his book here, and explained why I thought his views on DRM and search engine marketing were not up to par.
• Do not feel you need to be stuck to a specific format. There are probably other formats that would sell as well or better, and maybe even at higher price points.

Digital Rights Management:

• Piracy is a form of progressive taxation.

• Retail only matters if you have reach and people are buying.
• Time spent creating value is typically time better spent than time spent worrying about value you have yet to create.
• If you intend to market heavily on affiliate networks like Clickbank and your product is internet marketing related expect lots of fraud if you do not use a DRM system. Since I do not use DRM people who buy my ebook are about 10 times as likely to ask for a refund or reverse charge their credit card if they bought through Clickbank than if they bought through Paypal.
• If you plan on using Clickbank and are selling an internet marketing related product you may really want to use some DRM stuff so you can pull their right to use your tool or print your book if they ask for a refund. For $197 eBook Pro provides DRM. If you don't want to spend that much money and want to use Paypal as your shopping cart Payloadz is free off the start, and then its price scales up as you use it more.
• Eventually I expect Google to create a micro payment system which ends up beating out Paypal. Google will become the default amateur video network and then extend the system out to other content formats.
• If you sell a product and give it away to certain people make sure there is some taxing element to it. For example require some sort of authentication and require their email to match a qualifying website. When I did this it cut down on sleazy requests and associated fraudster hate email by over 90%. It made life way better.
• Some people also try to buy feedback or require links to their site in exchange for giving their products to charities. I guess on some fronts that may work, but it is probably not something I would feel good doing, though in some markets doing a technique like that could be the difference between a highly profitable business and a venture that provided little to no returns.

Using Paypal:
You can use Payloadz to set up an affiliate program and to create temporary URLs which only make your download page available to individuals for a limited period of time.

If you are selling an information product and have no digital rights management make sure you encrypt your Paypal button so your order return location is not in the page content. When you create a payment button you also want to click the add more options button in Paypal and set your successful payment URL and cancel payment URL. If you do not set the cancel payment URL I believe visitors hitting the cancel button will be forwarded to your thank you page.

Business Models:
Typically most information products are used to up sell services or make up sells via affiliate links. Some ebooks, like the version of 33 Days to Online Profits I read, seem like they were primarily created to recommend as many affiliate programs as possible.

Do you want to go with a low price point (maybe even free) and try to raise your status, build an audience, and monetize that growing audience by sending them affiliate product offers or high end service offers?

Do you want to go with a high price point? If you go with a higher price point that will filter out many bad leads, but you sacrifice distribution with price. If you go with a higher price point it is recommended that you do not use affiliate links in your work or some will question the motive of your recommendations and why your price point is so high.

One Book or Many?
Many people selling ebooks and information products make far greater income than I do because they create products that rarely need updated, are hyper targeted, and sorta set and forget them after initially creating the sites.

Some people then push those sites via affiliates while others use AdWords and the like.

After you perfect the sales process with one or two it should be easy to churn out dozens more books and sites on other niche topics. If they each make around $1,000 or $2,000 a month you are making a great income.

It took me a while to start earning decent money, so it may take a few months before sales start rolling in. Make sure you are not duplicating errors in the sales process from site #1 on sites #2-12.

Give yourself time to learn from feedback from the early channels before duplicating those problems across a half dozen or dozen channels.

Marketing Your e book:
I started with absolutely zero authority or credibility, so you may not need to do all these steps, but here are the things I did.

• Participate in communities discussing your topic. People who chat about your topic can also recommend your stuff. It is also where people as questions about your topic. If you are new to the market you can also learn a boatload of information by actively participating in topical forums. Forums can also create friendships that may last longer than your career does.

• Write articles. I started writing articles about 4 months before I started selling my ebook. Whenever I wrote an article and syndicated it I noticed my phone started ringing and money flowed into the bank account. Cool for me. I really should get back to writing more articles!
• Try to win the trust of influential voices in your industry. See if you can write an article for their site or if they would be willing to read a free review copy of your book.
• If you ever get any publicity make sure you leverage it. If one of your articles is a hit, while you are popular for 15 seconds ensure the effect is lasting by trying to push other citations or ideas through. For example, while your site is hot and your name is in the news maybe that is a good time to request links from great resource sites or try to do a few link exchanges with sites you like. Of course with asking for links tact is important.
• Write a topical blog. If people read your stuff daily then they can get to feel that they know and trust you. It also makes it easier to market your site in search results if your site is more than a one page sales letter. Conversation is easy to cite. I predict that many people will use a format similar to SeoBook.com to sell information products.
• Writing short witty posts that invoke laughter or other emotions is great, but if you want to convert new people in your industry into buying customers writing at a lower level and doing in depth posts probably works far better than the abstract funny high level stuff. It also helps build a large keyword rich database of pages that will rank for lots of random queries related to your field and target audience.
• As an example of the above, my mother thinks we write Threadwatch in some sort of code. That site is not published in a format that is good for selling to people new to the SEO market. The content on this site probably does a better job of selling market entry products.
• People love pictures of people and testimonials.
• Sometimes the people who recommend your site and give you your authority are not the same people who buy your products. Make sure they have the opportunity to review your product.
• Sometimes the concepts, ideas, and content which make people authoritative are different than what they make most of their money from. Think horizontally. Are there any vertical databases or viral ideas you could create to help market your brand or site?
• Make it easy for people to do what you want them to do. For a while I advertised my ebook on the sidebar of my site. The day I moved it to the content area my income tripled.

Bundling:
If you put serious effort into your brand do not let your name and work be bundled with others without looking hard and long at the potential side effects. I totally screwed this tip up. I wrote a mini version of my ebook for someone else so they could bundle it with their software.

They did things like market their other free guide they wrote using the colors from my site. They also wrote my ebook sales price as the suggested value of my throw in book I gave them the rights to. I got dozens of support requests from their customers and some of them said that they would have bought my book long ago but they thought they already got it. Most people probably do not send me those sort of emails, and I probably threw away about 20 to 30% of my potential income with that one time fee partnership.

Another time I sold rights to a few thousand of my ebooks to a SEO related company so they could give it as a gift to their clients at Christmas. It was a nice cash bonus for me, but that also led to others giving away my ebook and business model without asking me. So even if a deal is a great deal there might be some unexpected side effects.

Joint Ventures:
I believe it is typically worth avoiding most joint ventures.

If you are not serious about being successful there is no point wasting someone elses time and envoking potential lawsuits. If you are serious about doing well most of the time the other person will undervalue what you can do.

If you are not well recognized as a trustworthy expert then the other person is also likey going to undervalue what you can do. If you are already well known then you have to ask yourself what value the other person adds that you can't buy for a one time fee instead of giving up liquidity or creating recurring expenses.

Worse yet, if you are in a category largely dependant on thin margins and the other person does next to no ongoing work and gets a cut that cut might turn shift your business away from profitable venture into the waste of time category, and a bad partnership may even take away your motivation to create and succeed.

Tracking Content Theft:
If you are pushing your name and your brand really hard I do not think you need to spend much time tracking potential content theft and distribution. If you are opinionated and publish frequently most of the market will know who you are. If others start to publish your works one of your kind readers will likely tell you about it.

If you go more of the one page salesletter site route you may want to use Copyscape, subscribe to search results related to your product, or some other method to look out for content theft.

Product Naming:
This is not something I would call myself an expert at, but my short list of criteria in things I would look for in the name of something I was going to work exceptionally hard at would be:

• something I thought I could eventually rank for (ie: if there is a huge open source software project with the same name you probably are not going to be able to outrank them)

• something that is short
• something that is memorable
• something I can get the .com domain name for if possible
• There are arguements for and against using your keywords in your domain and product name. I don't want to go too deep into that idea because that could be a long post on its own. It is something that should be considered though.

Sales Letter Writing:
Read lots of other sales letters in your field. The sales letters at sites like Marketing Tips.com are wrote to convert. Make sure you also pay attention to the tone and voice of your sales message...make it match the rest of your site if you have a content site pushing your information product.

Leveraging Affiliates:
Not something I am good at because I have not done it much yet.

It is important in many markets, especially in categories like internet marketing or if you have the one page salesletter type of site.

Sometimes it helps to be able to give them something that they can give away which is a product of some value that really pushes the value of your product you are selling.

Your price point matters as well. If your price point is too low you can't give affiliates much for their efforts.

I also set my minimum payout to be at the 2 sales level to prevent self sale discounts.

Things I could do far better:
I am good at finding and creating value but am not the best at maximizing value returned for value created. For a long time I sold my ebook for half its current price. I also do not charge recurring fees yet for updates and some of my friends have told me that is a large error.

Affiliate marketing - as noted above.

Write and syndicate more articles - as noted above.

Email marketing and list building - I really do not do it much...and that is a huge error.

Business - in spite of getting inqueries from companies worth billions (and once even hundreds of billions) of dollars I do not leverage my mindshare well enough and work with some large companies. Business in general is not me deal at this point, and I am not sure if it will ever be, for a variety of reasons.

Sales vs the Knowledge Curve:
The demand curve for search marketing is based on what was effective a while ago.

Here is a perfect example: It is well noted that keyword density is typically not that important compared to other things in the grand scheme of SEO. Yet when I recently added many tools to my SEO tool list the only tool someone requested to buy was a keyword density analysis tool, which is probably one of the least valuable tools on the page. (I later made it open source so I gave it to him free).

If I sold any of the following I would make far greater income than I do with less effort, but I probably would not be creating more value for others than I currently do:

• links from high PageRank pages

• link spam software
• link exchange software
• reciprocal link software
• subscription based link network access

By the time the mass market really understands the quality links and trust concepts search may move on to being more focused on user data.

In some fields it makes sense to try to be on the cutting edge, but often sitting back a bit and profiting from the lack of knowledge in the mass market will provide far greater profit.

SEO Question: I am new to the seo world..however I am veteran the ________ digital marketing space. There is a ton of opprotunity in the ________ space in regrads to PPC. I want to start a consulting firm for ___ sellers and help them shift their ad bugets to PPC. I would like you're advice on starting a company like this.

SEO Answer: As far as getting your feet wet in SEO/SEM go to some of the conferences. Search Engine Strategies and WebmasterWorld World of Search are the two largest, but you can often do well going to local ones because it may be easier to access some of the players there. There is a small conference in Dallas Fort Worth next Monday, for example.

If you already have great industry related authority or reputation then it should be easy to add the new services to your umbrella of offerings.

Call up some of the people who really know and trust you. Maybe try to add on the PPC services at no obligation to them to see if they like them. Offer them a free test campaign as a deal to a friend.

A low hanging fruit technique is to come out with a study that says how the ______ industry is screwing up PPC. Make it sound like you were absolutely shocked when you discovered that 82% of ____ companies were not even doing PPC, and that the other 17% were doing it sloppily (this probably works well for regional or topical targeting).

If you can using stats from companies like Nielson NetRatings, ComScore, and Hitwise may make your sales pitch sound more like legitimate research. You then want to try to get your research published on sites like DMNews and Clickz if possible.

Sometimes people are not using PPC and other times they have horrific targeting. You can either create one massive report or create a monthly state of the industry report.

I think Fathom Online shows monthly click prices by industry in their Keyword Price Index. You can ball up that sort of data with some other ideas to create a monthly state of the industry newsletter. Perhaps also track how certain brands are mentioned in the news (a la Topix.net) or on blogs (Technorati, BlogPulse, etc.). Depending on your motivational level you may also want to run an industry related blog to send out that information and any other related thoughts on the industry that you wanted to express.

Another option might be use the Google AdWords API and other tools to not only create your own custom reports, but to also create a tool some people can use that attracts the right audience. Then use that site as a lead generator.

Really love the industry? Maybe it makes sense to create a portal or partner up with someone who has a large portal related to your industry. If need be, perhaps even partner with sites at minimal margins for yourself just to brand your name and leverage that market position. Eventually that should allow you to either take on smaller content partners and make a greater premium there, and/or allow you to sell more search ads.

An aggressive technique might be to buy underpriced ads where people in your industry should be and then link those ads through to a report on how they are not effeciently marketing (and how you can obviously help them).

Disclaimer: while being ok to good at blogging and SEO I don't have a lot of experience on the selling services biz front because I tend to underprice services and thus have been more focused on creating my own sites and content than working for others.