Because I offer a marketing related ebook and blog about marketing stuff I get about 20 emails a month asking me if I reviewed product x or heard of person y. Most of the time these are hyped short lived marketing products or services that are repackaged ideas from 6 months earlier that upsell people on other junk. This is my general review guide on what types of products and services are trustworthy.

Are They Getting Paid Directly?

If people offer something of quality then most of their referrals are probably going to be more likely from non-affiliates than affiliates. Be wary of products that sound too good to be true, especially if the reviews sound exceptionally similar. Some merchants go so far as to pay people to spam internet marketing forums asking about their products.

Are they Getting Paid Indirectly?

On some of my other sites I have made thousands of dollars by publishing content on topics I am ignorant about, only because I saw brands spending millions of dollars on advertising and piggybacked on their marketing and brand.

Even if a site is using contextual advertising or some other non-direct ad model it does not mean that it should be trusted as non-self interested. In a search and advertising driven Internet world, just writing about popular things brings in money. If their ads are aligned top and to the left in the content area they shouldn't be trusted at all.

Even free non-profit content can be shady. Many not for profits pay their CEOs over $300,000 a year, and many people write about topics that grant themselves link equity, mind-share, or authority just by talking about them. John T Reed is exceptional at propping up his own domain via hate marketing.

Personal Trust of Sources:

It is much easier to rip off anonymous people than it is to rip off your friends.

A person who has spent significant time and effort building their brand and exposure is not going to wildly recommend scam after scam because building their mind-share and brand equity cost them too much to just throw it away.

The better you know the person making the recommendation and the more you trust them the more likely they are to be making a good solid recommendation.

If two independent friends recommend something then you can probably bet it is worth doing. Two days ago a friend mentioned a name to me and today I saw a mention on a blog I follow. After the second mention I had to have it, with no questions asked.

Self Interests:

Early SEOs, early AdSense publishers, and early domainers did not get rich by telling everyone to do what they are doing. If something is highly profitable, easy, and scalable why are they selling it? Why not just do more of it themselves?

If they are not motivated by profits and just like helping people their site should offer valuable information or serives for free or given away for donations instead of selling all the time. The first version of my ebook was free until I got a bunch of market feedback to help make it valuable. I really didn't care that much about money until I get sent a bogus lawsuit. I still blog a lot because it is an easy and scalable way to gain reach and authority with minimal cost.

Others are in far better position than I am and give back a lot, but most of those people are not constantly selling you something. They give just because they enjoy doing so. Some of the early domainers offer great entrepreneurial advice, fund non-profits, and even give living advice.

Think of Externalities: Value & Profit Have to Come from Somewhere:

• Spam Google and Make Millions While You Sleep!!!
• Unlimited Automated Content Today!!!
• You are only $19.99 and one click away from wealth!!!

The value of any deceptive technique is inversely proportional to the number of people using it. If a spam idea is scalable and actually works, the profit has to come from somewhere.

If an idea is aggressively marketed, works (in a best case scenario...though most of the scams do not), and fills Google or some other large network with spam those networks will fight it off. They have to fight it off or they will lose their trust and market position. This is why companies like Digg have to keep some perception of control to keep their authority.

We strongly believe attempts to game Digg are ineffective. While it would be foolish to say that Digg has never been artificially manipulated in the 2+ years (50,000,000+ diggs) we've been live, we're confident that such attempts do not impact the content that reaches the home page.

But eventually the market calls them on it if it is a lie.

There is a reason the term banner blindness was coined. People learn to ignore even legitimate forms of advertising. If an idea tricks end users then eventually people are going to learn to ignore the noise.

That is not to say that there are no shortcuts, but if any single spam tool is widely promoted is going to have a limited lifespan. I generally consider spam to be things that are mass marketed to newbies and appeal to laziness, typically via wording that essentially means something like "secrets formula to unearth unlimited instant profits without passion or effort, guaranteed".

Understanding Search:

Anyone who tells you that all you need is a one page website is probably missing the point of search. Of course it is possible to rank a one page website, but typically only if it is in a non-competitive market, or if that person is well known away from that page, or if that page offers significant value, like some self reinforcing authorities do.

Giving Value:

Anyone who does not offer any value without squeezing information from you to pound you with an auto-responder is going against the general trends of the web, and the trend for how most people create authority by first creating and sharing value then monetizing.

Anyone can grab a couple small samples or other biased statistics, and hit you with them over and over again, but there is no reason to subscribe to that sort of never-ending sales stream.

It is even worse if the list is leveraged to hype the same things that are hyped by other JV gurus at the same time. If their information contains nothing but affiliate links to the next big thing then tune out the noise.

Real people trying to help you will recommend things that are of low margin or free. Give away value and people will come back. That is what Google does. And it works.

Is Email a Better Format?

If people allow free subscriptions to email lists, and their content has ANY real value, they would be better off sharing some of it online so they build their link authority and exposure. If you were sharing something that was honestly valuable and decided to make it freely available wouldn't you want as many people as possible to see it?

If they send every email twice with slightly different headlines or lots of oops I forgot messages realize those for what they are - aggressive hard sale marketing, not accidents.

Price Point & Temporal Effects:

If the price point is high and you hear next to nothing about a topic right up until many people are hyping it all at once they are probably getting paid an affiliate commission to hype it. Don't buy the hype.

Do the Math:

A few years ago one well known Internet marketing company tried hard closing me on some mentorship program. After I did the math I realized that I was already making more than my business mentor would be making working under the head guru. Where is the value in a business mentor who uses exceptionally aggressive sales techniques to make less money than you do?

Years later the same company who tried hard closing me was blowing up my inbox asking basic SEO questions. Months later they started selling an SEO information product at a higher price point than mine.

Your Complete System:

The web works so well because it is loosely bound. You can get the best pieces of this here, and the best parts of that from over there, often free. If you want to start a blog it is easy to set up Wordpress with a MySQL database (both free).

It is exceptionally hard for me to just keep up with the topic of SEO. Any company that has ALL the solutions for you is generally doing you a disservice if you want to be a market leader.

A Paid Ebook Full of Affiliate Links:

Some people sell no cost information products then load them up with affiliate links. If your sales price is all margin there is no need for back-end upsells. I asked my mentor NFFC how many affiliate links was too many to place in a for sale information product. He said 1.

What happens when affiliate commissions invade an information product is that the author tends to give you recommendations that run really deep, doing things like recommending smaller pay per click search engines alongside the big players even though the smaller ones have little real traffic and are probably not worth your time. Another problem is friendly recommendations and recommendations of paid products where better free alternatives exist.

Ugly Design:

Outside of UseIt, most authoritative sites generally look aesthetically pleasing, with some unique design elements to them. If a site is ugly then I think that cuts at the credibility of the information, especially if they use hard sales techniques.

Who are they?

Look for the same signals of credibility that librarians look for. If you can't tell who is behind a website it is probably a bad idea to buy from it. And if the person who told you about it said it is a secret or for members only, and there is an email subscribe box on the landing page I would not trust them. If they have to use games to garner attention then their stuff is probably a joke.

Dated Information:

One of the flaws of search is that many current experts are people who own old domains and are still considered experts even if they have not kept up with their topic for years. Just because a document is dated does not mean it is bad, but an old document about a changing field like SEO is going to have a high likelihood of having some bad analogies or advice in it.

Gut Check:

If you are skeptical of doing something don't do it.

Why Write This Page?

When I first got on the web I was lucky enough to meet people like NFFC, read Andrew Goodman's book and learn about Seth Godin, and learn to gain more confidence in my marketing skills. I was also lucky to be able to help set up a Search Engine Strategies conference and get a free pass.

If you are lead astray off the start you may not stick around long enough to succeed. But if you find the right mentors they may help you succeed far quicker than you expected.

I have friends that have grown faster than I have because they associated with good friends that provided symbiotic marketing opportunities. If your friends and information sources keep learning, keep pushing, and help build you up then you are going to do far better than a person who listens to people focused on maximizing how much revenue they can get out of you, because maximizers will keep selling even after their products stop delivering value, and they are more likely to lead you astray than to help you out.

Every day bloggers and members of the media are looking for stories to talk about. If you are afraid to be associated with and talk about your own projects how can you expect others to talk about it? How can you get people to talk about you as much as they talk about competing channels if you are anonymous? For a long time it was easy to be fake. You could find a few non-competitive markets, buy a decent domain name, buy a custom site design, do good research, get a few good links here or there, etc...but it is getting much harder to do that today.

Savvy webmasters are rarely interested in link exchanges with new anonymous sites (especially because they have been getting bombarded with link trade requests for years), webmasters who own sites that have AdSense on them tell you that they won't sell links, and if you buy too many link based advertisements or do other things that fall outside the norm you risk your site getting nuked for being too aggressive.

As more people get online you have to connect with or influence more people to achieve the same goals. Each connection takes both time and money. Buying a half dozen trusted on topic links could be a couple day project, whereas a smartly launched content as marketing idea could garner hundreds of natural organic links faster, cheaper, and with less risk.

People manipulate search engines because they are trying to get around creating what the engines want. The goal of search engines is not to make manipulation impossible, but to make the cost and complexity of manipulation prohibitive to where it is cheaper to rank by winning the hearts and minds of other webmasters.

Search engines show you some data points (like PageRank) but they don't show you which votes don't count, if they are using phrased based semantic relationships, how old sites or links are, how fast things have grown, etc. etc. etc. As relevancy criteria moves to things you can't see it is going to be hard to be fake and amass enough trust to rank without tripping over some filter or penalty.

If you have to hide your identity or be something fake your number of profitable days online are numbered, and you will be missing out on publicity that your competitors use to eat your market position. And there is an even worse factor that plays into the demise of anonymous sites. Those who are getting publicity can be more aggressive with their link buys and other forms of marketing without needing to worry too much about how the engines will perceive it. Google is more concerned with your ratio of legitimate marketing to shady stuff, and it is getting hard to have enough power to get to the top of the results while staying above board if you do it anonymously.

Google can never show the most relevant results for everything. No matter what algorithmic loopholes they close they inadvertently open up others. And anything they trust gets abused by marketers.

• Search engines trusted page titles and meta descriptions. Marketers stuff them full of keywords. So then search had to move more toward trusting page content. Marketers used hidden text and other similar techniques.

• Search engines trust links. SEOs buy and sell them and create link farms. Search engines only allow some sites to vote, have some sites pass negative votes, make certain votes count more than others.
• Search engines place weight on anchor text. SEOs abuse it, so they created filters for too much similar anchor text, and offset those by placing more trust on domain names when they exactly match the search query.
• Search engines place weight on exact match domain names and domainers start developing nearly 100% automated websites.
• Too many new sites are spammy so they place weight on older sites. SEOs buy old sites and add content to them.
• Place more weight on global link authority. Spammers find cross site scripting exploits on .edu domains and media sites start posting lead generation advertisement forms on their sites.
• Bloggers are too easy to get links from and comment links are easy to spam. Search engines introduce nofollow to stop comments from passing PageRank. Then Matt Cutts pushed nofollow to try to get webmasters to use it on advertisements.
• Too many people are created automated sites, especially affiliates are creating a large number automated sites. Search engines employ human reviewers, get better at duplicate content detection, and require a minimum link authority on a per page level to keep deep pages indexed.
• Social news sites are providing a sea of easy link opportunities and low quality information. Too many people are doing linkbait. Perhaps Google may eventually only count so many citations in a given amount of time.

When your site changes in rankings it may not be just because of changes you made or changes in your field, it may also be due to Google trying to balance

• old sites vs new sites

• old links vs new links
• big sites vs small sites
• fresh content vs well linked pages
• exact match vs rough phrase match
• etc

Search engines, especially Google, place a lot of trust on Global domain authority when computing their relevancy scores. If a page is on a trusted site it automatically gets a boost in relevancy scores. Premium content providers know that Google needs them so they take advantage of their market position. Lets look at a few examples of authoritative leverage in action:

• Topix is aiming to be citizen driven, but opens up new markets using an automated blogging technology called RoboBlogger.

• The Wall Street Journal, which called blogging overhyped rubbish, recently started producing advertorials. Their CollegeJournal site links to Scholarships.com sitewide, and provides a co-branded scholarship search on CollegeJournal.com.

How will Google minimize the media's ability to sell advertisements that rank in Google as though they had editorial value? They are going to have to start breaking sites and search results into pieces. If they do, it will not only minimize the downside potential of advertisements on popular sites, but that would also kill the .edu spam.

Personalization will lower the profitability of leveraging off topic broad nationwide ads by lowering their exposure by biasing search results to locally trusted sources. Matt Cutts has talked about personalization recently, not once but twice.

Given that some domainers control millions of daily page views, and there are plenty of cheap traffic sources I don't think raw usage data will be that strong of a signal of quality. Like links, usage data is easy to manipulate.

As the web gets polluted with low cost links, other low cost marketing opportunities, and recycled junk the key to Google's success is tracking attention data. They have the most popular feed reader, and their new homepage allows you to create topical tabs that show related feeds.

In tracking how people consume and share information they can understand local topical networks, while reinforcing the views of the local topical editors. It sorta creates a bunch of micro-Digglike communities, but more free-flowing, with less focus on free votes. Time is the one thing we are all limited on, and if you are paying attention to something then there is a lot of value in trusting that attention.

Selling your stuff on either of those networks might be a good way to leverage their domain related trust to rank in the search results, but you can also use both of them to research what is worth selling or writing about, even if you do not sell on their networks. Since their research data is conversion oriented, in many verticals it is worth more than keywords from other sources. eBay offers a Marketplace research service that costs $2 to $25 a month.

Amazon shows which products are the best for last year, current top selling products, movers and shakers, and hot new releases.

In addition to giving away this free conversion information, Amazon lets you see what customers think of the product via review, allows you to bid on keywords related to products via ClickRiver. If you sell your stuff on Amazon.com, you can buy a better together listing with a popular product.

If you are in the info-product market Clickbank's Marketplace is a goldmine.

Once you find interesting products you can refine your keyword research using general keyword tools, then further refine that data by using a tool like KeyCompete to see what keywords competitors are bidding on.