I have read Seth Godin's blog consistantly for the past year. I also believe I have read every book that he has wrote in the 5 years. I even went to his office one day to hang out. In the past he has made some comments about SEO which were a bit off mark, but in the end I agree that for most people SEO is not going to be a long term business model. If you really know your stuff well you might be able to get by just doing SEO, but for some people that will eventually get old. Technology will continue to advance. SEO can enhance distribution but if SEO and selling stuff cheap are your longterm brand strategy you could be making more money creating legitimate value for a growing social network which may eventually market your products for you.

Seth is a smart marketer and knows that on the web it is virtually impossible to give away too many good ideas. Stuntdubl just spent a day in Seth's office, and from his post and an IM chat he said it was great.

A few things you really learn when you visit hyper successful people who are still down to Earth:

• You don't need a suit to do well.

• Hard work does pay off.
• More than you realized you probably share a lot in common with that successful person.
• Being successful does not have to change who you are.
• Many of the people who are successful in your field may be more successful primarily based on past experience or time in the field.
• It is more lucrative being yourself then acting a part.

How does this relate to SEO?

1.) SEO Software:

I recently read a book which recommended a decent SEO tool and appoligized for mentioning it due to sleeze sales copy.

I recently tried another SEO tool, which has recurring monthly fees. The tips newsletter immediately offered me a special deal not promoted on the site - some Cory Rudl affiliate links. I even replied to the person to tell them that I thought it was sleeze.

If you are charging me a healthy recurring subscription on a low cost system do you need to sleeze upsell me? Is an extra $4 a month worth me not wanting to recommend your software? Worse yet, the how to manual for the SEO tool had three pages reminding readers how they can become rich reselling the software. Gross.

[disclaimer: within my sites I market my ebook heavily, but as time passes my sales letter will probably become more and more soft sell. My end goal is to be able to have no need to have a sales letter, but that might still be a bit down the road. ]

2.) Consulting & Services:

As a consultant or person working in a related field the best position to be in is to have more leads than you can possibly use. That way you get to chose what hours you work, set your prices, pick your clients, etc.

By not being a hard seller you miss out on some sales, but it also helps to build trust if you don't immediately go for a hard sell. Taking time to review things and build a relationship you are less likely to waste effort trying to sell to a person who is not interested in buying.

I think Jill Whalen has worked rather hard at developing a soft sell system which lets her pick and chose who she wants to work with.

3.) business meetings:

When I go to SES or related conferences many people are like "do you have a business card?", and I never do.

In that situation I look stupid, confident, or both. If you want to remember me that is great, if not I don't want to be another card in the stack.

Sure you want to build relationships over time, but if you give a few hundred people your card you might get a couple leads out of it. I have a huge stack of business cards and know few of the people.

As long as you appoligize for any mistakes you make or any inconvenience you cause someone they will probably think better of you than if everything just went smoothly off the start.

The added effort to get or give someones data without convenient little cards makes it more personal. If you want to remember me I probably do not need a card.

If you don't have cards and chose to meet a few people really well you might be better off as you will likely stick out a bit more than the average card in the stack.

[disclaimer 2: I might be full of crap, but these are my opinions, and I am sharing them. Please let me know what you think of them in the comments below]

A while ago I bought Dan Thies's Search Engine Marketing Kit because I think Dan knows his stuff pretty well. Many people miss out on the fact that if you make your product just a little better by understanding what other related products are on the market and learning even just a few things from them you build significant longterm value.

There are some sectors of his kit and my ebook that overlap, but many sectors do not directly overlap.

things I liked about Dan's kit:

• You can tell that he wants to help people do well. Self promotion is kept to a minimum. It is also obvious that the book is based on years experience.

• Branded as the keyword expert it is no surprise that he covers keyword research in depth.
• Throughout the book he reinforces how much the reader has learned. I think my ebook would be improved if I added a few more of the reinforcement statements like that.
• He offers a good amount of tips on setting up and selling an SEO / SEM service. I think his goal when making the guide was to create something similar to the Web Design Business Kit for SEM.
• He provides sample documents for prospective SEO businesses. Such as service agreements.
• Most of his guide is wrote in a manner that it will not be outdated in a couple days, weeks, months, or years.
• Talks a good amount about server, duplicate content, and technical issues. This is an area where I could improve my guide a good bit.
• Has some useful interviews in it.
• Focused on big picture concepts, not irrelevant and/or short term solutions.
• Well edited.
• I end my ebook stating that I think people should continue reading and learning about the web as there is no one source that is going to teach you everything to make you do well. He also did that and I think that is a necissary mark of a good book in this space.

things I think could be better:

• The kit could focus a bit more on creativity, especially in the link building area.

• Although we are both willing to mention them, he and I both do not usually use or recommend the most aggressive techniques. I think me being indepenant gives me a bit more leway though. For example, I can say I don't think most people need to cloak, but if you do chose to cloak go with the best, Fantomaster.
• Dan could have done a bit more to talk about some of the social aspects of the web. Some of his examples and his interview of Scottie did help show some of these types of ideas in action though. I think did a fair job with it, but I think it is an issue that is sorely missed within the SEO community. It is impossible to stress the social aspects of the web too much.
• The resources area at the end of the guide was a bit thin. I think this was a function of a few main factors:
  • My ebook links to a ton of sites and tools, so that may throw my baseline or expectation off.

  • What is a useful tool today may not be a useful tool tomorrow.
  • He did not intend to create a comprehensive tool list.

  The resources he recommend are useful and best of breed ones though.

• One of the weeknesses of my ebook was that I did not link to much search research because I did not want to make my book too technical. I later added some links on that front due to people asking more about some of the topics and current research. I think he references some, but it would be hard for him to reference the Google patent that came out less than a month ago.
• Some of the nuances to link building were not well versed. Of course Google sometimes rolls in almost random penalties and lots of concepts that may change over time. It is hard to be exceptionally in depth on the latest techniques and go through the whole publishing process.

How else our guides differ:

Process: Dan covers the importance of process. I do not stress that in my ebook. My philosophy is that it is easy to get stuck in ruts and the things you do should be efficient and flexible. Proccess makes some things efficient, but you should also spend a good amount of time doing unique things. Creative or original ideas do well on the web. I also think it is important to learn markets and learn how to react quickly.

Freshness: His book was crafted in a manner to where it would not go out of date in a day. That also means that it is not going to be able to go as far in depth on some issues and cover some of the newest techniques.

Target audience:
His book seems to be more focused on those aiming to sell SEO services. My book seems more focused on those who are aiming to buy services. We both overlap in covering those who want to do services on their own sites.

Generally I do not like selling SEO services as a business model. SEO is a flooded marketplace with a ton of scams in it. Most of the prospective clients have other problems and some view SEO as free money. It may sound arrogent to say that over 90% of the prospective leads are no good, but client greed and the invisiblity of the job make it hard to land clients worth working for unless you are smooth at salesmenship. If you already know how to sell stuff why not create your own products and sites?

To me it usually makes sense to build your own stuff and work on your own sites if you can afford to. Sure you may have a few clients off the start, but the quicker you shed service based work the quicker you can look at creating your own products and websites that logarithmically increase in value as time passes.

In each niche market there are opportunities for a few people to dominate. Many markets related to basic functions related to life and humanity still have zero competition. SEO on the other hand is fierce. Everyone sees Google's stock price and wants to get in on making money cheap as possible.

Dan Thies is the keyword research expert. Patrick Gavin is the link broker. Eric Ward is a site announcement expert with tons of contacts. Jen Sleg is the contextual ads expert. Andrew Goodman is the AdWords expert. Jill Whalen is the content SEO. Kevin Lee is a PPC expert. SEO PR is the company that optimizes press releases. Even writing an SEO book by the name of SEO Book meant that I was joining a crowded marketplace. It took over a year to see significant profits. I am not the best at selling services, but if you do decide to sell SEO services then doing following should help:

• build brand build brand build brand!!!

• niche your services
• try to create services where your pay is not reliant on rankings or other arbitrary figures. get paid for results that matter or get paid upfront and create results that matter.
• do not be afraid to say no to leads
• create other revenue streams to make up for the fluctuations in demand.

Google offers free link AdWords coupons:

• Qualified Google Advertising Professionals receive sets of five credits worth $100 each.

• Non-Qualified Google Advertising Professionals receive sets of three credits worth $50 each.

It also looks like there is a yearly quota of 60 credits. As you sign up more accounts I believe you earn more credits.

You also can link to your qualified profile page, although many SEOs do not see the program as being worthwhile with Google poaching clients from some qualified professionals.

I also find it amusing that the links on the profile page asking these questions

• How can I tell if a professional is really Qualified?

• Who has access to AdWords and client manager account information?

are broken links. hehehe. Shows they must have threw this idea together in a hurry or they must not think much of the program.

Google sure is trying to create a lot of buzz before reporting their quarterly results.

Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) on Wednesday debuted a test service called My Search History that analysts said is a move closer to personalized search, which is widely considered the Holy Grail for the Web search leader and its rivals. source

to use My Search History you must register at Google Accounts and maintain an active account. Ask Jeeves have had a search history tool for a while now and Yahoo! has My Yahoo! for various personalization effects, although Yahoo! seems more focused on providing news and blog feeds and the like. I think Yahoo! is betting on the abundance of information making subscribing to channels much more appealing than searching the web. I believe Yahoo! also allows you to subscribe to Yahoo! News feeds by keyword phrase.

Personalized search allows engines to better understand users to improve search quality and ad targeting. Whoever is branded as the best market solution on that front is going to make a bucket of cash, because keeping your search history and learning the user raises the barrier to switching search providers.

It makes it hard for another search service to be as relevant if you have tons of personal information already locked in a competing service. This data will be hard to export to other systems as well, as importing huge hunks of data will also allow marketers to import large volumes of spam.

I just briefly tested Google's service. It is fairly slick. You can quickly sign in or out and it adds minimal clutter to the Google home page.

From the link in the upper right corner you are brought to a new page. It shows a calender which color codes your search volume on the right side. The left side shows your searches for that day and the results you clicked on. The my history results that you click on also show up in the Google one box area when you search for similar terms using the regular search results.

Some privacy advocates would likely go nuts with this offering. It is all opt in though. I encourage everyone to sign in, search for seo, scroll past the Japanese stuff, and click on my listing.

Presumably some searchers may be able to build up a search history.
As they build it up it could build Google's trust in that user, which in turn could potentially allow Google to use that user feedback to verify search result relevancy.

If Google decides to use this data - which I think they may - the cost of spamming might increase significantly with how they have been going after automated search tools.

I would not doubt this to do a bit more of globalizing SEO. Paying people in third world countries to randomly click certain sites. I am already building a search history today as a prospective SEO tool.

(or how not to be an schmuck just because you are using flash)

• Most sites have at least one goal in mind. It is nice if the phone number looks great, but far better if the merchant site ACTUALLY SELLS SOMETHING OR GETS PEOPLE TO CALL.
  
• Placing all text in images generally is bad usability and SEO.

• Just because a feature is available does not mean it needs to be used.
• Don't disable the browser back button without contacting the merchant and marketer unless you want shot with a shotgun full of rock salt.
• Have enough decency and self respect to create a descriptive page title for each page. Running all the words together is no good. If you a making a site for Bob Ross you may even be able to work Happy Little Trees into one of the page titles, but creating a title like BobRossFlash with all words ran together is just no good. In that case the trees are not happy.
• If you test to see if a visitor has flash and they do not maybe, just maybe a one image error page with an image full of text telling them they are all screwed up is a bad call?
• If your site design is good and the content is of merit some people may want to bookmark the site or pages from the site. Why not embed the flash into html so that the site has multiple pages with unique page titles and textual content?
• MacroMedia has an SDK which makes flash easier for search engines to spider, but flash still lacks content. add some content in <NOEMBED> tags if you can't add text to the page
• If by default you generally screw up all the above (and more) and then want to sell a client SEO services for many many thousands of additional dollars you are dishonest and a thief.

Surely there are more, but I just woke up...

What is your least favorite whamodyne flash design errors?