Seth Godin recently asked why it was so hard to find tweakers.

The first problem is that name. It is not descriptive and it sounds belittling in nature. But there are other problems as well. I have found that people generally have to pay or overpay to take you seriously. You can give away general advice all day long, but to take the time to do specific in depth analysis and get them to test implementing the actions you are going to have to make them pay. And pay big! Go with a low price and get no respect. It reminds me of a friend who was giving me shit recently when I asked him if he thought it would be worth it for me to go to school. He said "not trying to be a prick here, but objectively looking at it, how can you respect a business professor who is twice your age and works for 1/3 your wage? What can they teach you about business that you can't learn on your own if you are already ahead of them?"

I might classify, in some ways, as a tweaker, but since there is no domain expertise associated with that general word then why should I brand myself as that? Most times when people do an SEO consultation with me I talk SEO and information architecture. I also tell many clients about how their design does not inspire credibility, they are not effectively using their content to guide the user to the desired action, they are selecting the wrong defaults, their copy could be better, etc etc etc.

If one works on such a wide array of topics it is hard to build up the topical support you would if you worked primarily in one community, and discussed other topics in a framework of how they relate to your domain using the language of your community (Jakob Nielsen is great at that). You have to be known and branded as an expert at something to be trusted enough for your opinion to count on other things.

Why don't I call myself a tweaker? There is no money in it.

The true tweakers (who should be trusted) realize their value and just tweak their own sites or work as affiliates such that they can get paid for the value they create. It is nice to have a few friends like that on your IM list, but I certainly wouldn't hire a tweaker that marketed themselves as such, at least not to work on a successful business.

A month ago, Aaron and I published 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006. Partly we wrote it for fun ("going meta" link baiting a link building piece!), but partly we wrote it for business reasons: to gain new customers, links, and branding. In light of that, I thought I'd write a quick follow-up as to the value and ROI on that piece. I believe it's a pretty typical example of what well-executed (and well-packaged) link bait can do for a site, in terms of marketing and SEO.

What was the link bait? How much did it cost?

The link bait was a very long list of link building tips - a typical (somewhat cheesy) 101'er. (Hey, 101'ers work, sometimes cheesy is good!)

The cost in this case wasn't money - it was time. It took Aaron and I about 10-15 hours total to research, write, edit and promote the piece. Of course, as any SEO professional knows, time is money. Assuming our time is valued at $500 USD/hour (what Aaron charges for consulting), we can estimate the cost of the link bait at $5,000 USD.

What value did the link bait deliver?

1. Backlinks to the article

Technorati shows: 262 links

MSN shows: 3,458 links

Yahoo! shows: 4,309 links

Of course, SEOBook is extremely well-linked already, but link building (and authority-building, and trust-building) is a continuous process. And if SEOBook.com had been a new site, that amount of natural links would have certainly been enough to break it out of the sandbox.

But what is the exact value of these links? If you're a numbers cruncher: what does a link from Yahoo! Directory or Business.com cost (for a year)? How about a quality rented link? Then what do you value several hundred permanent, relevant in-contents link at?

2. Rankings

The article is now ranking in the top ten for "build link popularity", and in the top 50 on searches for "link popularity" and "link building." Obviously these rankings are not going to drive a huge amount of traffic, but what they do drive will be targeted; and of course, the trust and authority that these links confer on the SEOBook.com domain will help all pages on the domain rank more highly.

3. Branding

There's a greater chance now that when people think "link building," they are going to think "Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans." We also managed to reach #1 on Delicious/Popular, which exposed our names and sites to a different audience outside of the narrower SEO niche.

4. Direct traffic

Being #1 on Delicious sends a lot of traffic. So does being linked by several hundred blogs. That means eBook sales for Aaron, and new client leads for my link building firm.

What is my point here?

My point is that 15 hours of work (even split with a well-connected partner), yielded a downright silly amount of return.

Results may vary

I am not sure we can consider this particular link bait piece as typical, as SEOBook went into it with a ton of mindshare and following, which made earning the links and bookmarks a lot easier. If the piece had been written by lesser-known SEOs on a lesser-known blog, it would have probably received far fewer references. However, I think had anyone written the article and put a bit of effort into promoting it, they would have gotten a good ROI out of it. (In fact, a lesser-known SEO probably would have stood more to gain.)

Now what?

Now is as good of a time as any to announce that I am now offering a link bait service on a limited basis. At several thousand dollars a pop, it won't be the answer for most, but I think it's going to be fun to take the most effective current SEO tactic to clients.

Much in the same way I recently mentioned SEO marketing as being a layered process I tend to view building a long-term profitable website as a layered process. My fundamentals revolve around marketing and SEO of course, but as Google's algorithms get more authority based in nature it is worth taking a look at ways to control content costs while still coming up with ideas that help build up domain authority scores.

In any publishing medium, especially one which encourages crap content, and one where people grade your work in many ways, it usually takes a while to gain enough brand / authority / trust / popularity to be profitable, or you need to create something unique or citation worthy, or you need content of various quality levels to be profitable from the start. On the web your content is graded by people in the following ways

• being worthy of attention (based on overall and subject related credibility and authority)

• being worthy of a subscription (generally being worth visiting again, or adding your feed)
• being worthy of a recommendation (via link, instant message, or email)

Then search engines look at whatever of that information they can interpret to find signal amongst the noise and try to rank pages based on query relevance, naturalness and uniqueness of text, semantic structure, user acceptance, age, naturalness of growth and citation, and outbound linkage.

Because there are so many forms / techniques / types of low quality information, and search is such a profitable targeted advertising vehicle, some search engines (for example, Google) have been placing significant weight on domain related authority to rank pages for specific queries. Put another way, if I published the same article on CNN.com and MySmallWebsite.com the CNN article will win out time and time again.

Small webmasters still can compete, but they must overcome the disadvantage of being small and having limited mindshare, trust, (and typically financial capital). There are many fundamental things you can do to help overcome those disadvantages. Once you overcome those disadvantages you can work your way into a self reinforcing market position which allows you to profit greatly from the work necessary to gain such a position.

Brand & Niche Selection
If a niche is saturated it may be worth it to pick another niche or a subtopic within that niche. One of my biggest failures when I first got on the web is that I wanted to learn everything about search. The problems with that are: Danny Sullivan is an amazing person and with all the hard work he has done it would be ridiculous to try to do something similar starting a decade later, and that niche is way too broad for anyone to do unless they had a team helping them. So I decided to try SEO, and that worked well. Today SEO is so saturated that it would be much harder for me to gain traction today than when I started a few years ago.

Site Design
A professional site design will pay for itself many times over, largely because a professional site design makes average to slightly above average content quality linkworthy.

If all you have is a few hundred dollars spend it on a logo design, and then use a minimalist site design which is color matched to the logo.

Format Your Content so it is Easy to Share & Easy to Change
Using a blog platform such as Wordpress as your content management system makes it easier for other bloggers to identify with you as being similar to them. Using a database driven content management system also makes it easy to change your site design quickly.

It is best if it is easy to change your site design quickly (to test different ad placements, etc.), and to be able to grow out any section that you found interesting and / or highly profitable.

Participate in Communities
Online (and offline, if possible) participate in communities discussing your topic to help create friendships, learn better what people care about in your field, and to help people if you can. If their site is authoritative in nature many people will come across your information published on their site.

You can start building your brand before you even have your site by selecting a username that you later relate to your brand name.

Buy a Bit of Trust
A listing in DMOZ, the Yahoo! Directory, or Business.com might seem expensive at first, but if you get a few trusted links it helps show the search engines that you are serious about business (and it shows them what community you belong to and that a human editor has reviewed your site).

Information Accuracy
Rather than aiming for bland objectivity, it is easy to be remarkable by being more biased and more personable, especially on your feature articles.

Content Quality
Mix your content quality. Try to create a few promotional pieces of content and market the hell out of those, but also leverage that authority to help improve the exposure of other things on your site. Even if your promotional pieces lose money, if you create enough other (hopefully cheap and easy to produce) content riding on the authority of your great content it can work to lower the cost of your higher quality content. Your cheap content can be textually unique but may not need to be conceptually unique. Your promotional content should hopefully be conceptually unique.

If you already have significant mindshare and a highly profitable business model you may want to try to post higher quality stuff most of the time. Posting lower quality information in bulk is more about giving your site a back-fill to aggregate the cost of the higher quality content.

Post about things you care and are passionate about, but if you are still trying to build up authority rather than publish based exclusively on information quality and passion, occasionally publish based on how well you think your ideas may spread.

If you can find a way to make consumers want to help generate your content then to them your content will be of high quality. If they create it they may also want to help market it.

Content Costs
I am using money as a proxy for value input each piece. If you are low on cash you can make up for that by putting in time and effort. Rather than writing 100's of $20 to $50 articles, write 100 or 100's of cheap ones, then spend a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per good idea. Make sure your best ideas are well executed, bake social elements into their structure, make them look exceptionally legitimate and useful, and make them easy to share.

To control costs, rather than hiring many employees full time it might make sense to try hiring freelance writers off Craigslist and other related sites. Consumer generated content is also a way to maximize the return on expensive content.

Content Targeting
When you are trying to write content use keyword research tools and search forums and other locations for common questions. If you are making up your bulk content make sure you control costs, but still make the content unique and legitimate enough looking to pass an editorial hand check and not undermine your brand value if you are trying to build a real brand.

If there are not any authoritative and relevantly targeted pages ranking for the related search query, and you can make a quality page on the topic which would be easy to cite then try to roll it into a high quality (and perhaps high cost) linkbait which helps lift the authority of the rest of the site. Make sure you target linkbait at specific people who are easy linkers or exceptionally authoritative linkers.

Don't be afraid to send personal targeted emails if you are launching something of high quality. I wrote something amazing and got about 300 links. I wrote something of slightly lower quality and got about 3,000 links. What was the difference? About a half dozen polite emails to friends seeded the second idea and helped spread the second idea much further than the first.

Another good way to make your site more linkable is by regularly linking out to the people who you would want to link at your site.

Social Marketing
If your content is of decent quality submit it to social sites like Del.icio.us, Digg, Netscape, and others. On your linkbait content page place links that make it easy for others to vote for your content, and ask a few friends to vote. Exposure on these social sites will put your content in front of bleeding edge link rich webmasters.

If your linkbait page looks useful, well structured and something worth looking at later many people will bookmark it, especially if it is long enough to look comprehensive and be placed in the this is too much so I will check it out later category.

Also do not forget to spend the 10 minutes it takes to make a topical Squidoo lense.

Use a Proper Title
If you are writing a quick piece of lower quality content then try to be somewhat literal and descriptive in how you title that page. Conversely, if you are writing to try to spread an idea you may want to sacrifice the title a bit if a more controversial title will make the idea spread much further.

Titles matter a lot if you want to create a controversy. Look at magazine covers, meme trackers, meta news sites, and social bookmarking sites for examples of good titles.

Controversy = discussion = links = money.

Information Timeliness
There are so many meta news sites, social bookmarking tools, and meme trackers that in most competitive markets it is going to be a waste of time to try to be the first person with every story unless you have access to insider information OR are able to create your own controversy which allows you to become the story.

You can use these fast acting sources to your advantage too, more on that later though.

Additionally you can create meta posts that strongly agree and strongly disagree with certain AUTHORITATIVE opinions on a topic. If you link at popular narcissistic webmasters eventually some of them will cite you back.

Information Sources
Use and abuse vertical search, social bookmarking, and meta news sites as the resources that they are. Even if they are 50% spam that still leaves a lot of good resources to make your articles look well researched with minimal effort.

The more creative you are with how you search the more stuff you will be able to dig up. For example, search for multiple related phrases, competing URLs, and track early votes for really interesting stories and see what other related stories those people voted for.

Don't forget traditional published books, books in the public domain, government content & research, DVDs, and documentaries. I saw a magazine at an airport for $10 which gave me thousands of dollars worth of content ideas. Their publishing format and information inaccessibility means that people creating a slightly dumbed down version of similar information get to make good money starting their ideas based on the hard work and research purchased for only $10.

Generally the less accessible a piece of information is the easier it is to sound remarkable by citing it or stating something similar on the web :)

Picture Page
Include photos from sites like IStockPhoto or Flickr in your higher quality articles to make them look more legitimate.

What has Worked so Far?
Check your traffic logs to see what articles are the most popular. Install SEO for Firefox and do a site search, or use Yahoo! Site Explorer to look at which of your articles have the most backlinks. Also search for your domain on Del.icio.us to see which of your pages got the most bookmarks.

Syndicate
Writing high quality content articles that are published on other sites is a good way to improve your credibility, link authority, drive targeted traffic, and if your site is new your content on older trusted sites might be more likely to rank to help your brand and ideas gain further exposure.

Monetizing

• If your site is brand new go lean on the ads until you have some authority. Heavy ads too early = no authority. No authority = no income.

• When links can be profitable link for conversion from within your content.
• If you plan on selling ads directly it may make sense to put up a fake ad or two in the sponsors section. After one competitor has bought an ad many companies will feel they need to buy in because the competition already did.
• Set AdSense as a default monetization model if you do not want to deal with ad sales (or need to get a pricing baseline).
• Blend the ad colors with your content and place those ads in your content area to make them look like part of the content.
• Consider factors affecting ad clickthrough rate, and check AdSense ad targeting before you write about a topic.
• Look at the ads after you write a page. Make sure your page talks about the topics the ads are targeted to or you create other more targeted pages that address the contents of those ads if that makes sense.
• Check ad clickthrough rate on a per page level and see what keywords are driving your ad clicks. Set up ad channels to test the earnings of different formats or sections of your site. Grow your site based on where the income is coming from. The deeper you want to dive into a topic the more targeted the traffic will be, but remember to keep building your site authority if you are going to build a big site.

The Importance of Viral
From Andrew Goodman:

Some well-funded companies with strong business development plans are able to negotiate means of driving underpriced traffic to a site, while selling listings at a higher price (this is why all the kerfuffle about "click arbitrage" seems to be overblown: many businesses have grown through "click arbitrage" and continue to be built around it).

In the past, quite a few companies were built up quickly simply through the grace of free mass organic Google referrals. As spaces get cluttered and large media companies spend in multiple channels in order to indirectly maintain their organic lead, this gets harder to achieve for a startup unless something goes a bit viral.

Thus if many of the current successes launched today with their current model they would not be citation worthy enough to earn their current market position.

What Did I Miss?
Any other tips we should add?

After recently writing that people should write about politics on their blogs I saw that Jim gave it a try only to have it backfire. Rand also noted

Aaron - Last night I thought my opinion on this was fairly solid, but reading your piece and recalling some of your excellent posts that dealt with the subject (sometimes slyly, through links), I'm beginning to think that maybe you're in the right.

I don't think I am real good at being sneaky, but I have come to realize that I really only know a small portion of the world and that even if I care about some things there are people who know far more about them than I. I think that is part of the reason why I try to let links speak my opinion sometimes, but another good reason to link out to other things that represent your opinion is that you will go bonkers if you speak your mind about every issue that is on your mind. You have to pick and chose your battles.

Werty recently reminded me of a Paul Graham article titled What You Can't Say which stated:

If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.

...

Obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

....

I think many interesting heretical thoughts are already mostly formed in our minds. If we turn off our self-censorship temporarily, those will be the first to emerge.

So, as Paul Graham was saying, frequently exercising the freedom of thought was far more important than frequently exercising the freedom of speech (especially because if you do the latter too much then nutters will eat up all your time and do their best to reduce you to their level).

Many artists and writers tend to cloak their intent such that only some people get their intent. I think that on business sites a combination of rarely posting political stuff combined with some form of cloaking intent such that only some people would care to comment is probably the best route to go if you want to express political beliefs on your work blog.

Many people are still stuck in the bulk and automation line of thinking with link building. Largely because service providers are lazy. Largely because business models that are highly automated in nature are easier to extract value from if people are not thinking through what they are buying. In much the same way many SEOs will still sell you search engine submission stuff, for many years many SEOs will sell you bulk or automated link building programs. People new to the market may be cheap or too lazy to learn SEO, are heavily pitched bogus offers, and read a bunch of outdated information that reinforces old ideas which no longer have any value.

Why does the outdated information get so much exposure? Because search (especially Google) is biased toward older sites. And, with search replacing directories and link lists at the primary means of web navigation people do not link the same ways that they used to. Google not only wants to automate selling paid links on your site, but they also are even trying to automate recommending related links, thus trying to require publishers to do more to earn an editorial link.

But if something is automated, aggressively marketed, widely used, and was effective at manipulating the results you have to think that the search engines would quickly aim to stop it. If those same techniques are generally associated with other low quality sites is that a good network to actively place your site in? Odds are that search engines would be extra aggressive at deweighting the technique if it was effective and generally associated with junk content.

Sketchy SEO techniques have a limited shelf life, and not long after you hear them mentioned people start patching up the holes, so those technically savvy enough to find new algorithmic holes are typically going to keep quiet about them and extract as much value as they can before the holes are closed.

Matt Cutts hinted that having mostly low quality links may prevent your site from getting crawled deeply, and, more recently, he also mentioned that if a site added pages too quickly it may get flagged:

It looks like the primary issue with the Windows Live Writer blog was the large-scale migration from spaces.msn.com to spaces.live.com about a month ago. We saw so many urls suddenly showing up on spaces.live.com that it triggered a flag in our system which requires more trust in individual urls in order for them to rank (this is despite the crawl guys trying to increase our hostload thresholds and taking similar measures to make the migration go smoothly for Spaces). We cleared that flag, and things look much better now.

Admittedly, if you participate in some markets (like consumer finance or insurance) many automated junk content sites will place you in their network by scraping your site and linking to you, but if you can get a few quality links you can easily beat out people playing the bulk numbers game.

If you want your SEO to be effective longterm it is best to avoid easy and automated techniques, in favor of layered or complicated techniques that are going to be hard for most competitors to replicate.