Once you have a trusted market position advertisers will buy in even if you hurt their business model or call their products crap:

To my enormous surprise, the company that threatened to call the feds on me made another offer to advertise on CamcorderInfo.com. Because of our popularity - we have the No. 1 search listing on Google (Charts) under "camcorder reviews" - it couldn't afford to avoid us anymore. I okayed the deal, comfortable that the electronics firm was aware of our ethics policies. It has since become one of our largest clients. When I asked the executive if he ever actually called the FBI on me, he insists he did. He said the agency found me guilty of nothing except a passion to build a reliable company.

Every Ad Network is Flawed:

Once an ad network has buy in they look for ways to leverage that market position. And there is fraud involved nearly every time

• newspapers puff up their circulation numbers

• magazines run ads and give themselves away to boost circulation
• a keyword that normally costs me $4 a month on Yahoo! cost me over $100 this month due to syndicated click fraud
• look at how much of the web spam Google funds

How to Extend Your Reach Without Getting Too Dirty:

Once you establish a trusted market leading niche site you can extend your circulation by buying traffic from cheap sources. Some people will just send fake traffic generators over their own site for impression fraud, but there are many cheap sources of traffic that may provide ongoing value and look much more natural than blatantly committing circulation fraud.

• Keep your feed rather clean so it is easy to subscribe to. The people subscribing to it will likely be the people who link to your site. Maybe put one exclusive sponsored by ad unit in your feed.

• Create an email newsletter that recycles your best online content. Maybe run one or two ads in it, and use it to drive traffic back to your site.
• Buy interstitial ads from AdBrite on related websites. If AdBrite is underpricing the inventory of a strong site try to buy out all their ad slots.
• If AdSense is under-priced in your market consider buying AdSense ads on related sites to drive longtail traffic back to your site and further position yourself as the market leader. You see this sort of activity all the time with web directories, where a couple of them have ads on other web directories.
• If you are really motivated you may want to resell ad inventory of other smaller players in your field.
• Buy traffic from StumbleUpon.
• If you write what is essentially a news site try to get syndicated in Google News and other related news sites.
• If your site has a high authority score, write a few posts here and there that use analogies or other ways to pull in related traffic without looking like you are straying too far off topic. For example, one of the leading search queries for this site is Google Auctions.

• Interview industry experts that have greater reach than you do.
• If you have been ignoring SEO at least give the topic a cursory look, and consider buying a few trusted links by doing things like joining trade organizations.
• Create linkbait and get it exposure on the popular social news websites. Also consider promoting your best content via Review Me buys on popular channels. (disclaimer: I have an equity stake in Review Me)
• If you have enough time to manage it (or know someone else who can) consider adding a forum or other user generated content sections to your site. Active forums can have hundreds of thousands or millions of page views each day.
• Have your pages refresh once every few minutes to rotate through advertisements. I believe MarketingVox does this.
• Make sure your site design is clean, you publish quality original content, and your about us page looks trustworthy. These will make it easier for people to buy ads directly from you, and will make it easier for the media to use you as a source.

If you have a high value market position in a large competitive sector and are not making much from AdSense make your site brand ad friendly by pumping up your circulation numbers. Many of those ad buys are cheap on a CPM basis and will lead to additional recurring traffic and links. In many high value markets as your get more exposure your ad revenues increase logarithmically because you get more traffic and people are willing to pay a higher CPM rate.

Yahoo! allows paid inclusion members to buy quick links in the search results and indexes sites more fully if they use Yahoo! for their site search. While neither of these may seem like a big deal they both are. Allowing businesses the chance to buy a greater share of the search results or giving them greater indexing priority for them using your search service are both things that would make search purists cringe.

While Google is busy turning the text link into a performance based ad network Yahoo! sells their search credibility and marketshare too cheaply. Buying Del.icio.us and MyBlogLog are not going to make up for the undermining effect on credibility paid inclusion offers.

When I was new to the web I was excited when I would get things to rank from scratch, thinking I did a great job of SEO, but if your results are effective and consider applicable risks does it matter what techniques you used to promote a website? None of us really start out from scratch. When I started on the web I was a recluse with low living costs, lots of time, the need to be successful, and lots of rage. Those were off the web assets that played in my favor, as well as my liking for reading and writing, and my experience selling baseball cards in high school. I also had a friend who was web savvy and made many friends on forums. Without them I would have failed online.

That is probably too much of talking about me, but consider yourself:

• what unique experiences or biases do you have?

• what resources do you lack?
• what resources do you have a lot of?

After you think of your own assets and skill sets, ask yourself if it matters how you achieve your results.

• Does it matter how you learned what you know?

• Is it better if your site is brand new? Or is it better if you bought an established site?
• Is it better if you designed your site? Or is it better if you used a free template or paid a site designer to create it?
• Is it better if your site is hand coded? Or is it better if you use an extensible content management system?
• Is it better if your site validates? Or is it better if your site renders in browsers and you spent that extra time and money to create more content?
• Is it better if you created all the content yourself? Or is it better if you paid writers to create it?
• Is it better if you sell your own product? Or is it better if you sell ad space?
• Is it better if your links are all organic? Or is it better if you bought a few topically related trusted links?
• Is it better if you rank your own site? Or is it better to buy an ad on an authoritative site and rank that page?

You learn more by doing things yourself, but you can't learn and do everything if you are trying to make a scalable business. All those points of distinction are arbitrary. Every market is gamed, and so long as your methods work it doesn't matter how you got there as long as you didn't have to hurt others to do so.

After you are profitable and growing, for many projects it makes sense to outsource tasks, including:

• website design

• content creation
• ad sales
• maybe even initial marketing, by buying old websites

Thinking that you have to do everything from scratch means that you are going to run into scale issues much quicker than a competitor who believes in outsourcing will. Once you consider opportunity cost, doing everything yourself becomes far less appealing.

A couple friends recently mentioned The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. It is a great DVD from the perspective of a former Secretary of Defense, about the errors he made and the lessons he learned in his life.

It is mind boggling to hear about all the fire bombing in Japan, how serious the Cuban missile crisis was, and that the Vietnam war lasted so long due to a lack of empathy. So much has been smudged away from the school books. The DVD concludes a killer quote derived from T. S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploring, and at the end of our exploration we will return to where we started, and know the place for the first time.

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Machines optimized for market efficiency and profit don't have ethics, and do not promote businesses that do. How much we will allow ourselves to trust personalization and quality scores?

"They knew they were being lied to, but if lies were consistent enough they defined themselves as a credible alternative to the truth. Emotion ruled almost everything, and lies were driven by emotions that were familiar and supportive, while the truth came with hard edges that cut and bruised. They preferred lies and mood music...." - J G Ballard, Kingdom Come