Each site has unique goals, audiences, and desired actions from each audience. By creating content and ideas that are formatted around filling the needs of the various stakeholders you lower your risk profile and increase your profit potential.

Common Stakeholders in Every Site:

• content creators

• customers
• suppliers
• site members
• bloggers
• mainstream media
• topical experts
• other high authority link sources or publicity sources
• search engines

Content creators: Those who format your content and ideas can make or break your site. Small changes in formatting or packaging can be the difference between being one of billions of web pages and being an industry standard resource. Publish a few well received link baits on a site that is generally geared toward conversion and suddenly you have an authoritative top ranked site that converts like crazy.

Customers: Every site aims to sell something... products, services, market position, a way of thinking, etc. Customers can also do your marketing for you if they firmly believe in your product or service, but that doesn't typically happen until AFTER you have customers. A site that does not convert customers is without purpose, but you also have to address many other audiences to be able to afford market exposure to potential customers.

Suppliers: As you gain exposure you have leverage over suppliers. The more they need you the better your prices will be. This is the reason you can get a gallon jar of pickles at Wal Mart for $3. Given that many types of online marketing are highly measurable and profits may be driven off of thin margins, having a thicker margin than newer competitors creates a strong barrier to entry.

Site Members: People who believe in your value proposition or enjoying your website may help recruit others to participate on your site, may provide feedback on how to make your site or business more streamlined or better, and may help create content that you can leverage for profit. Site members may also advocate your way of thinking or your community in other communities they participate in.

Bloggers: To many of us it is our source of power, a sense of empathy, or perhaps a large chunk of our personal identity. Bloggers like to hear the sound of their keyboard clicking, and the first guy with the story gets the links. Many more people write blogs than there are stories to spread or critical thinkers. Get covered by a market leading blogger and get dozens of links.

Mainstream Media: As more and more people create information there is more information than there is time to consume it, thus many of us use trusted guides / brands / companies to act as news gatherers or proxies for the value of something. Sites which are mentioned in the media tend to be trusted more by many other authoritative sources.

Topical Experts: Each industry also has topical experts who speak for their industry. Many of them will have big egos. You can reach them a variety of ways, but interviewing them or letting them participate early in your idea is an easier way to reach them than to try to sell them on how great your are.

Other High Authority Link Sources or Publicity Sources: People in related fields, fields deeply tied to the web, people tied to traditional power sources or human rights, and other offline authorities can also shape how people act online.

Search Engines: Search engines are distributed ad networks which need to scrape content to show ads against. They prefer to feel that they are in control, and like to use bloggers, media, and other authorities as proxies for the value and trustworthiness of content from a particular source.

Google's Parallel Stories

Google is exceptional at telling different stories to and about different groups of people, and leveraging each group for profit.

For example, Google sells its technology to the media as being uniquely democratic, largely because we are trained that democracy is a word which is an estimation for things that are good. Yet when Google goes to court over their index they will state that their index is a subset of the web and is not designed to be a reflection of the web. Two unique stories for two different audiences.

Search marketing is the most effective type of advertising in the world. SEOs are scum who are at fault when our search technology does not work. Two unique stories for two different audiences.

Content and ads should be clearly separated. If you merge them you are being deceptive. Unless of course you are using AdSense to monetize your site. Two unique stories for two different audiences.

Google also is great at making their marketing look like content. For example, if they want to get young kids indoctrinated on using their software, system, and services what better way could they do it than to package it as being for education?

Topical Experts:

Topical experts become known as experts not only because they know their stuff well, but also because they are good at addressing the needs of many stakeholders. Look how well Danny Sullivan addresses so many audiences.

What Audiences do You Reach?

You do not get to be a market maker without being a market manipulator. It is hard to manipulate markets unless you come up with creative ways to meet the needs of and leverage profit from many stakeholders. What key audiences does your site and competing sites have? Do you address all of them? If not, what could you do to address them?

If you have a site which equally covers 4 parallel areas and you put the same amount of content up for each area odds are that one area will drastically outperform all the others. I have a 1,000 page AdSense site which gets about 100 ad clicks a day on the most profitable page of the site, while the site as a whole averages about 1 click a page. The reason one section will drastically outperform the others is not just due to how well that section is integrated into the web, but also due to what types of sites you are competing against. For example, many large corporations still do not get SEO, and in certain high margin verticals (especially with certain high paying keyword modifiers) the top ranked results are dominated by cheesy spam pages. It is going to be easier to outrank the cheesy spam than to carve out marketshare in results dominated by legitimate authoritative sites.

After you get the base of your site up listen to the feedback the search engines provide. They will tell you what they think your site is about and what sections they think have enough authority to merit a top ranked position.

And while this advice can sound like it is geared exclusively toward spammy AdSense sites, the same type of market feedback, if tracked, can be applied to improving lead quality for smaller ecommerce sites. Every market has gaps in it. If you create a base of real content and listen to your site you will find enough easy opportunity to create a revenue stream which builds up a profit stream that allows you to invest in building up the authority of your domain for more competitive queries.

SEO Question: Our site has an about us section which links to press coverage of our site. We are worried about bleeding PageRank, and are wondering if we should use nofollow on our links.

Answer: The worry about bleeding PageRank is probably a bit dated in nature. It is based upon thinking that you have a finite amount of PageRank, and that if you link out to other sites you are wasting your PageRank, but truth be told most good sites have both inbound links and outbound links. And you shouldn't be afraid of a few reciprocal links with large trusted media sites either...as reciprocation is part of the natural link structure of the web, and linking out to trusted sites helps associate your site with other high quality sites.

The goal of public relations is to get people to view your company the way you want it to be viewed, and to get people to talk about your topic and your company from your perspective using your language and metrics.

If you make the mainstream media, it generally has the following effects:

• Improved credibility with the media, which makes it easier for the media to review your products / cite you / interview you again (if you show you were trusted in the past it is easier to trust you again).

• increased trust with other link sources on the web - for example, the Wikipedia notability guidelines include "The company or corporation has been the subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the company or corporation itself."
• When people who do not know your subject write about your subject they will likely trust many of the same sources that the media has (see Wikipedia mention above).
• If few people in your market make the news when someone makes the news it may be considered linkworthy.
• If the subject that causes you to make the news is a big deal many links will flow. When I made the Wall Street Journal that also got coverage on sites like Slashdot. I also mentioned it on my blog and even more people mentioned it.
• Increased trust in the minds of consumers and many members of your market.
• Increased mindshare and share of voice in your marketplace.

In addition to the above obvious side effects of media exposure you can also further leverage that exposure. Many media sites have strong domain related trust, and thus rank easily in the search results if they have even modest link equity pointed at them.

When people search for your company name which is a better set of search results:

yourcompanysite.com
yourcompanysucks.com
another conspiracy theory about your company
random (could be good or bad or competition)
random (could be good or bad or competition)

or

yourcompanysite.com
news article you helped promote
another news article you helped promote
yourcompanysucks.com
random (could be good or bad or competition)

In any case, you will likely have some results that are bad or out of your control, but if you link at pages that talk about you in a positive light you are helping those pages be fairly represented or overrepresented in the search results.

Consumers, consumer advocates, raged consumers, and journalists researching your company will research you and your company on Google. When people say nice things about you it helps to make it easy for others to find, and that also helps bury some of the negative stuff.

When you link to a news site you are mentioning it on your site because you trust it. When you use a nofollow to link to a news site you are saying you do not trust it. If you don't trust the people who are talking positively about you then it is going to be an uphill battle.

Back in September I posted that I thought it was somewhat sketchy for Google to recommend there photo search when a person searched for Istockphoto and got flamed for it. Recently Blake Ross, the creator of Firefox, said similar. Because of Blake's market position, the exact same story was credible, important, spread, and is something Matt Cutts needed to make multiple blog posts about.

Based on the credibility and market position of an author certain stories may be important, or may be worthless. Even completely true stories may still cut at your credibility if you don't later reference them again to remind the dismissive parties of how their thought process changed over time.

The media is largely owned by conglomerates tied to banks, geared toward selling ads and their business agendas, manipulated every day, but most authorities would like people to blindly trust the media as a representation of truth, even as that same media wraps self serving messages in a self-aggrandizing article that dismisses their competition.

Search is also a topic that is easy to love, but SEO has been painted as a scourge on the web. Any authority or authority based system has to pretend that they hate market manipulators to justify their own legitimacy, market position, and how they got where they are.

SEO is largely based on speculation and predicting market trends that most people do not see, so it is easy to be seen as having little credibility, so long as your brand is focused on SEO, even if you are 100% correct. At least one board member of a major search engine has called me for investing advice, though I guess it would be a bad idea to blog any specifics on that.

It is quite ironic that the main reason this site was worthy of press attention is because I was sued by an unethical business, and I can even get interviews published in the London Times as an expert on Black Hat SEO largely because I own the matching domain. But even after about an hour of talking, showing highlights of how search engines pay for much of the spam, and how they don't stop paying for it even after they catch it, all I could get was a few sweet soundbytes like:

"Who is and who isn't a black hat is dependent on what Google says is black hat," said Wall. "They would certainly class me as a black hat."

Nice.

And then you remember that stories need to sell ads. To do that they exposure. To do that they have to be controversial. They have to be pitched, sold, and then the matching facts have to be collected. Rarely is there ever enough column space to risk challenging conventional wisdom if you can be controversial and conventional at the same time.

Knowing that the whole polarized black hat vs white hat garbage was going to get more and more self serving press was probably smart marketing, but is it SEO? And, if a site that cost me a half a day and under $100 gets me featured as content in the London Times (with an HTML link) is that efficient marketing?

A year and a half ago I predicted that Google would eventually create an automated commodities trading platform where they could leverage their pure data. Since then Google has leveraged their market position and used predatory pricing to become a large payment processor. Just about anything without a brand will eventually be commoditized by cheaper communications, search, more efficient markets, and other forms of automation that are good enough. Google has already won the web. Don't be surprised if you see Google Checkout offline in 2008.

The WSJ recently published an article that called blogs parasitic trash:

The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.

But actions speak louder than words. That same WSJ reported on an unconfirmed TechCrunch rumor about the YouTube acquisition by Google.
They also mention the lack of overlap provided by self selection bias:

This cross-referential and interactive arrangement, in theory, should allow for some resolution to divisive issues, with the market sorting out the vagaries of individual analysis. Not in practice. The Internet is very good at connecting and isolating people who are in agreement, not so good at engaging those who aren't. The petty interpolitical feuding mainly points out that someone is a liar or an idiot or both.

But the web also makes it easy to reference past facts and changes in bias or perspective over time, which is something they are afraid of.

Any attempt by authority to make things seem universally right or wrong / white or black amounts to a self-serving attempt to stay relevant. If they believe their lie enough hopefully they can convince others to do the same.

Professionals do things for money. Amateurs do things because they are genuinely interested. Who would you rather trust?