While I signed up nearly a year ago, I just recently started using Twitter. As a marketer I find it both interesting and fascinating...as it is more transparent than most social networks are. People often write back and forth using @username when they want to send another person a message, which sometimes draws you into other conversations. And since everyone you follow is someone you know or related to someone else you know it is really easy to get pulled in. And the social pressure of being associated with everything you do (no anonymous domain registration here folks) prevents Twitter from becoming a spam filled mess. Maybe there is some way such a system could be applied to search?

People can subscribe to get short blurbs from you (and whoever else they like), and the system is almost instantly self-correcting. It is the complete opposite of email spam hype marketing - if you want off the list you get off the list. If I were to spew nothing but hollow hyped up marketing messages nobody would subscribe (and many would unsubscribe). Conversely, if I help give people a laugh (and share the goodness of pearl drink worldwide) people subscribe. Next to peace and SEO, pearl drink is the best thing you can spread.

Ok...back on topic, so where was I.... I recently started using Twitter. From a social network and marketing standpoint Twitter is worth checking out and understanding. If you would like to check it out you can sign up here, and if you want to follow me, I am awall19.

Here are some of my favorite Twitter feeds: webgirl, Graywolf, Rae, Copyblogger, Mike McDonald, Chris Winfield, ChrisG tamar, Stuntdubl, Lee Odden, Barry, Debra Mastaler, Todd Mintz, Vanessa Fox and Danny Sullivan.

Henry Rollins is using Twitter too!

And by far, Neil Patel is out in front on the "people subscribed to" list, with over 8,000! I think (once he finds time to) he will finish up writing that final blog post about stopping everything else in favor of reading Twitter 23.9 hours a day. ;)

• Great interview of Ken McGaffin about keywords and market research.
• Free open source link analysis tool from Patrick at Blogstorm, which shows how many links point at each page of your site. Using it does require setting up a MySQL database, but it is quite easy to set up and use.
• Brian Clark wrote another great post about the trend toward membership sites. He mentioned our humble site, and tomorrow he is going a case study call with me...I hope that goes well. :)
• John Andrews has a great comment on Sphinn about marketing strategy, and what you can learn from industrial strength black hat spam wrapped in a public relations cloth.
• SEOMoz Survey - they surveyed a couple thousand of their members and readers and shared the results. Part of what is so interesting is not just all the data, but how good a job they do at presenting it visually.
• YouTube launched their insights video analytics product, which allows you to see how many times a day people view your videos. Many of my videos get a hundred or a couple hundred views a day. Putting that in the context of how expensive it is to buy traffic makes me want to create about 100 more videos. $20 worth of trafic * 100 videos = $2,000 worth of daily traffic. Being on YouTube you don't have an optimal conversion process set up, but they could be branded with intro and outro ads...and should be able to create at least a conversion or two every day.

Introducing Answer Sniper

I just came across AnswerSniper, a $147 software product created to help you find open questions to answer on Yahoo! Answers by keeping you up to date with the latest open questions for keywords you select. Can you imagine paying for software for the privilege of finding questions that need answered, and then trying to be the first person to answer each of them?

If you are committed at that level, why not just create something like AskDaveTaylor.com or your own forum so you at least build content, brand equity, and a traffic stream you own in the process?

Worse yet, on Yahoo! Answers you are not answering questions in a small community where you can build a strong personal brand, but on a huge network where it would take a serious time investment to build a personal brand. Just doable perhaps, but probably beyond the opportunity cost for most folks.

What is even more absurd about buying such software is that Yahoo! Answers offers RSS feeds of new open questions (open SEO questions), so all you need to do is subscribe to the feed to get notifications of new questions. Want to track multiple keywords? Use Yahoo! Pipes and/or subscribe to multiple feeds.

Maybe there are more features I do not see or some things I am not fully appreciating. Do you think AnswerSniper is an unneeded product or a testament to how saturated the web is becoming? Or both?

The Yahoo! Answers Pollution Problem

About a year ago I answered a few questions just to get to a second level rating and learn what the site was like, but many of the top selected answers are people working inside the same companies who asked the exact same questions. And that pollution is only going to grow, especially as more internet marketers create internet marketing products focused on Yahoo! Answers. Plus the link equity keeps getting spread thinner as more questions are asked AND the average quality of the service drops due to pollution by marketers - those trends do not bode well for the long-term viability of Yahoo! Answers as a traffic source.

The issue in not just an issue of being someone else's user generated content versus becoming a destination, but also an issue of supply and demand. There is a lot of supply of low quality content. And there is a lot of demand for the much more select high quality content. And for Google to keep their market position they need to keep getting better at understanding which is which.

Right now a lot of weight has been put on domain trust, but as more sites add user generated garbage to their sites, site authority driven algorithms will require a lot of algorithmic refinement or manual intervention by the search engines.

As the web gets more competitive the answer to sustainability is not more content, but deeper content. In the time it takes to answer 100 Yahoo! Answer questions you could write 10 blog posts. In the time it takes to write 10 blog posts you could write 1 feature. And 5 years from now, content like the Blogger's Guide to SEO is going to be worth far more than 100 of my average blog posts. In a month you will not remember reading this post.*

It is hard to build a lasting brand that changes with the market if you are a username on a large heavily polluted site.

* If you do, leave a comment one month from today and prove me wrong. ;)

Everyone who is popular gains detractors along the way. And detractors tend to flock together and vote for other people who share their opinions. That trend virtually guarantees any valuable brand will have dirt ranking somewhere in the search results. The more valuable the brand gets the more people who will gun to unearth the dirt.

With so much competition for attention, many publishers believe they need to offer bold predictions quickly in order to be remarkable. And when those predictions go wrong people are creating documentaries about how wrong you are. Jim Cramer recently mentioned that Bear Stearns was fine right and talked about how unsophisticated the naysayers were (and how they never did their homework)

Days after Jim said Bear Stearns was fine, they were bought out for pennies on the dollar. Not only does Comedy Central offer their take, but other mini-documentaries and flames have appeared

The Daily Show

Fox Business Ad

If you are a publisher and your business model requires you to find new customers every day then you need to keep competing for attention. In many markets that will put you in a Jim Cramer-like position where you end up making some bad calls that cost you a lot of money in the long run.

Last week I got this via email

Hello,
How would you like getting a logo’s (or) icon’s (or) seo report (or)template (or) Banner (or) Article (or) Header designed free of cost for your website. We are giving away these services as a promotional measure for free of cost. In return we need a link at your site for each services at home or internal page(Except link,resources,directory pages).

So to get a new services all you got to do is mail us back with the confirmation of link and the page where the link added for our site. If not interested in any of these offer,and interested to do three-way link exchange,please feel free to mail me back.

Awaiting for your reply,
Jeena.

Notice they were willing to trade just about any web based service imaginable for a link. A shotgun approach, but good for a few links I suppose. ;)

And today I got this, which is a bit of a higher touch and more focused approach.

Hi,
I recently started writing work for ______ as a content writer. I would like to write a guest post related to education/college/online education etc. on your site if you're interested in accepting such a post. If you are interested, please let me know and I can send you an article for you to look over.

The Deal:
I will write a good, useful posts/articles on education/college/online education etc. specifically for your website/blog, free of cost. But I will need a by-line to build up my writing career. In addition, there will be a link to the ______ site in the by-line. So, it will help all parties concerned.

Sample posts written by me:

• linkbait A
• linkbait B

Both articles were widely read and received numerous links from other bloggers. Thanks for your time and I am looking forward to your reply.
Thanks,
Susan Jacobs

The nice thing about receiving such emails is that if they reference their site and you compete with them you can simply set up a couple link searches from blogs to track down everyone that accepted their offer and then get links from the same sources, replicating their strategies while hoarding your own unique link sources. As a Technorati top 100 blogger or an SEO service provider you also get requests like these from people who do not know you own competing sites. This is yet another advantage of being well embedded into the web: you see new marketing strategies within days or weeks of them emerging.

This is also scary for businesses succeeding based on a low price-point strategy. Eventually a similar product or service will be available free (or with a hidden cost that only reveals itself down the road). You are better off charging twice as much and having half as many customers, as mentioned here:

On the drive to lunch I’d ask Ralph why he wouldn’t fill the order when we were making 20 or 30 percent margins on that ton of glass.. “Because they can easily afford to pay more” he’d say.. “and once I sell that crate it’s gone, it will take 3 months before I get another crate.. somebody else will buy it because it’s a specialty size with low cut-loss”, and if I sell it at that price, next time he’ll ask for another nickel discount.. “

The fact that people are trying so many different strategies to get free links show how powerful Google's fearmongering campaign against paid links is, and just how detached from reality the idea of link = vote is in a marketplace where everyone either knows that link = vote OR is gamed by someone who knows that link = vote.