Mitch Ratcliff had an interesting post about Why Conservative Blogs are More Effective - they are more inclined to spread a consistent message...whereas liberal bloggers are more likely to slightly change the message to fit their version of the story.

In some markets it may make sense to tell stories in a manner where people use consistent language and anchor text and create a story that they will push far amongst their demographic.

At other times it might make sense to make your post or framing a bit less clear to ensure the anchor text is mixed around a wide variety of phrases and such that the story can appeal to different demographics.

The framing can help determine who picks up what stories and how far they will run with them. It is easier to syndicate spin, hype, and biased information, but it is a balancing act because too much can equate to lowered authority.

So yesterday on my drive cross country I called back a person who wanted some strategy advice for marketing his sites.

He was creating satellite sites using stuff like spam-brandname-productname.info but putting quality useful articles on those sites.

There are two ways to do well on the web. Create uber high quality channels or create lots of garbage. The people at the top of the content pyramid gain from the additional public relations and linkage data. The people at the bottom gain by appearing relevant for so many random queries. If you are stuck in the middle you are going to get ate up from the edges.

If you are creating garbage you need to keep your costs low - both in attention and in money. If you are creating good stuff you want to have something that is original and one of the best channels in your field such that you can get linked from the experts in your field and even some web experts outside your field.

100 small satellite domains probably are not going to work well at promoting your main channels directly unless they are niched down to be uber unique and/or require essentially no ongoing commitment.

If your field is really spammy you can eventually do well by starting off with one of the least spammy channels if you can keep it fairly low cost until they are profitable, but as the markets get more competitive and become attention markets eventually some of the profits need to be reinvested or you end up losing market share.

DaveN offers up a Sanbox tip

on the sandbox... try this .

so you have a site loads of content, yet you know deep down that you should be ranking but you're not .. ( I can't confirm or deny that this is the sandbox ), you have good links and a good site structure.. but still you don't rank ( I can't confirm or deny that this is the sandbox )

You rank in Yahoo and Msn .. but no where in Google ( I can't confirm or deny that this is the sandbox ) ..

ok get an old domain, something which google crawls, then put a subdomain on it ... newsite.olddomain.com original and copy the site exactly on the sub as it is in the orginal date last modifed to a few months after the domain was first registered ... yer i know that makes all the content look really really old ... lol

Add a link from the www. oldsite.com to the newsite.oldsite.com forget about seo anchor text links, these are just to let google in.. now 301 the subdomain to the new site

Bob Bly, the well known copywriter, recently wrote an article about why he did not hold much stock in SEO copywriting.

To create powerful copy, you need to have a single core audience in mind and concentrate all your effort on writing to that one audience. When I write copy, that audience is the prospect, the potential buyer of the product I am selling.

However, with SEO copywriting, you pander to another "audience" — the "search engines" and not the reader. And by creating copy that's optimal for attracting search engines, you are, to some degree, weakening that copy's power to sell. You dilute its strength because you are worrying about two audiences - the reader and the engines - instead of focusing every word on the customer. That's not how to write copy that sells.

As a copywriter, I would expect him to say something like that. But to a large extent I think many people would be better off if page titles and content had viral marketing or conversion in mind more than the search engines.

If the page is good enough at converting the following will happen

• affiliates will push traffic at it
• you can afford to buy in on PPC
• you can afford to place many link ads or hire article writers or hire a public relations firm and the links will boost your natural rank

Using common permutations of your keywords in the anchor text will help you rank better. If the page converts at getting linked at or selling something that's about all you need...at least as long as you understand a bit about how search engines work.

I don't know how many link exchange sites there are (way too many), but someone created a content + link exchange site.

Ultimately this still has similar problems to traditional link exchange sites:

• Over 99% of websites are useless

• Most people attracted to the trade your way to the top schemes couldn't create useful stuff on their own site or else they would not be using community based schemes.
• Many of those who have content worthy of exploiting the effects of commmunity linkage are already doing so in better systems like del.icio.us.

link via Rand and Donna