So I am starting to be a bit more honest with myself about the lack of value of my current business model. My price point puts myself rather low on the value chain. As the field of SEO has grown and my share of voice has grown I have attracted far too many wankers. Many of my customers are amazing people (I have met, became friends with, and learned from many of them), but it only takes a few bad ones to sour my mood. And it isn't fair for my girlfriend to have to put up with me being pissed off at wankers. For example, in the last 5 minutes I just got the following:

a blog comment from Whaterver@hotmail.com, stating

Not the only SEO book on the planet, just check out Chapters. If your SEO book were so good, why would I have to drill down four pages in a Google search to find it? Crap

a phone call about from a customer (not my customer, someone else's) asking me about why her site designer and SEO were fighting and if there was some independent ethics verification body

a refund request complaining that my book was too good

and this comment from a prospective customer

if this book doesn't help me the way i want it (= dramatic increase in traffic as determined at my discretion --- what is my guarantee i'll get my money back?

This wanker exposure is not uncommon either. In spite of making my phone number and email address less accessible I typically get to enjoy about 10 to 20 wankers a day. Some I ignore, but even when I try to do that, these people still make my outlook on humanity and the human race a bit bleak.

The people buying PPC stuff are already looking to spend money, but many of the people who are attracted to SEO are attracted to it because they are lazy, want a free ride, and refuse to add any value to the world around them. This is exactly why the target market for a PPC book is so much nicer than the target market for an SEO Book.

As search gets more complex and changes faster (you could write a 500 page book on just AdWords, let alone organic search) my job is to push traditional marketing principals rather than SEO loopholes because that is less risky and delivers more real tangible long-term value. Also, it is hard to write a book that is fairly comprehensive, up to date, applicable to the spectrum of readers, and easy to understand. I am thinking I need to change my business model. Potential changes may include any of the following

• selling nothing on this site (though I would still update my ebook for a while if I did this)

• increasing price point to $299 to filter out many of the wankers
• charging recurring fees to new customers
• selling a recurring newsletter instead of an ebook

Not sure when I will change my business model, but the sooner the better. What would you do?

Being a (Near) Monopoly is Expensive

The more I think about it the more I realize why Google doesn't like the various flavors of paid links. It has nothing to do with organic search relevancy. The problem is that Google wants to broker all ad deals, and many forms of paid links are more efficient than AdWords is. If that news gets out, AdWords and Google crumble.
DoubleClick was the wrong model until Google bought them. But smart marketers are not trying to waste millions of dollars on overpriced brand ads.

Google Doesn't Sell Social Ads

If you are buying ads on Google you are trying to reach everyone searching for a keyword. If you buy contextual ads you are trusting relevancy matching algorithms. Those used to be the standard, but now there are far more efficient ways to reach early adopters. Social influence is far more important than most people give it credit for.

Content as Ads & Cheap Social Ads

People game Digg, draft stories for specific trusted editors, suggest stories to popular blogs, buy reviews on blogs, create products or ideas with marketing baked in, link nepotistically, etc. There are a lot of cheap and affordable ways to reach early adopters.

Editorial and social relationships have far more value than Google realize, and Matt Cutts's recent outbursts are just a hint at how Google is losing their dominant control over the web. And they deserve to, because...

The Web Doesn't Want to be Controlled

Sure Google likes link baiting today, but that is the next paid link. Google is backing themselves into a corner, destroying each signal of quality they once trusted, until one day the web is a piece of junk or Google is no longer relevant.

Not talked about much, but my partner noticed Yahoo! once again shifted paid inclusion to a yearly flat rate.

While Search Submit Pro allows you to have more control over listings and is sold on a costs a per click basis, their Search Submit Basic allows you to submit URLs for $49 per year per URL.

In the past Search Submit Basic was called Search Submit Express. It charged a flat inclusion price and sold clicks on CPC basis. Here is an Archive.org link to the old program.

If you have launched a new site and are not getting much Yahoo! traffic, submitting a few of your highest value pages is a good call. If you have key deep high value pages that are not staying indexed in Yahoo! this program also makes sense.

A couple friends recently recommended watching Idiocracy. It is equally funny and disturbing, especially when you consider how our media consumption habits have shifted. Small isolated chunks pretend to be valuable information, but when placed outside of useful context, typically in ordered lists of factoids, they have much more marketing pull than they have actionable value. Some of my better posts go without comment, while some of my lists get thousands of backlinks.

Some people have hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of readers. Some people have millions of inbound links or MySpace friends. Virtually all of it is recycled content and recycled marketing in a fight for mindshare. The struggle for marketing anything beyond thinly disguised self promotion is to be able to add context, all while time starved people learn to hate and reject it, as they rush off to blog the same story before you do.

Via Marketing Pilgrim, Google now offers a Placement Performance report, which shows what pages and sites your content ads are displayed on, and which ones are converting. Here are tips Google offers on how to use this data:

• If your goal is to increase conversions such as purchases, page views, sign-ups or leads through your ads, reassess how you're tracking your conversions. Make sure you've implemented conversion tracking so you can understand how individual sites are converting for you. Please note: A low CTR reading on a site does not mean your ads are not performing well. This is because users behave differently on content pages than they do on search sites.

• Use the site exclusion tool to exclude sites that are not converting for your campaign.
  Refine your targeting. If you find that your ads are not showing up on sites with a particular theme that you do not find relevant, try using negative keywords

• Adjust your bids. Enabling our content bidding feature will allow you to bid separately for the content network. Learn more.
• Identify sites that are converting particularly well for your campaign and take steps to increase your exposure on those sites. We recommend enabling our content bidding feature to bid more aggressively on those sites, or targeting them through a site-targeted campaign. Please note that site targeting utilizes cost-per-impression (CPM) bidding.

While those tips generally revolve around track your ads and spend more, they could be a bit more altruistic and useful. Thus, here are my tips on how I might use the data:

• If you are using CPM site targeting on a large site, but find only a few pages convert, consider just targeting those few pages.

• Find sources to buy ads from directly, and buy all their ad inventory. Maybe you can even broker a custom ad deal involving presell pages.
• Find link sources...if they are already selling AdSense it doesn't take much more work to buy ads directly, especially if they are a smaller player and are not making much from AdSense.
• View what TYPES of content converts and search for other content that matches that intent which you may want to advertise on.
• View page content to see what keyword phrases the converting content covers. Create content covering the same keyword groups.