How long should I build links for? and when should I stop building them? Both frequent SEO questions, with the answer "it depends."

Automation as a Non-strategy

Many people are interested in automating as much as possible and doing it as easily and quickly as they can. The problem with replication and doing what is easy are that if it is easy for you to replicate

• it may leave an unnatural footprint
• it is typically easy to replicate
• it leaves you heavily reliant on a single technique that may get cleaned up (like directories did last year)
• if you are working on 30 sites at once you do not get to take best practices learned from sites 1 through 29 and apply them to the 30th site

When Being Lazy is OK

I have sites that I have left virtually untouched for years because they fall into one (or more) of the following categories

• they enjoy a self reinforcing ranking effect
• they got as far as they are going to without significant capital expenditure and opportunity cost that exceeds the potential rewards
• I was just too lazy to keep working on them

Beyond those types of sites I look at link building as a proxy for relationship building.

The Coming Wave of Competition & Creativity

I think when you look at the more creative parts of the web, those foreshadow what the battle for hearts, minds, and eyeballs will look like throughout the rest of the web in the years to come.

Well Marketed/Open Software

With programming you see lots of the high risk heavy capital expenditure business models giving way to lighter, simpler, and more open frameworks. Many of the lighter, simpler, and open frameworks allow users to create plug ins and evangelize the systems. Some even have programmers work on the core. Many also offer free trial versions which reduce marketing costs to ~ $0 and build goodwill. The software companies which are not seen as free and open need to lash out against the competition in an attempt to gain marketshare.

Great Music

Music is another industry undergoing gigantic business model shifts. Sigur Rós is a well known Icelandic group, which created a 97 minute documentary about their homeland named Heima. Then they uploaded it to YouTube and were featured on the homepage of YouTube for a day, along with some of their fan favorite short films. Their documentary got over 600,000 views on YouTube in the last 4 days, and you can watch it on this page for free:

Update: They set the Youtube video to private. I believe someone also uploaded it to Google Video, but that might be a copyright violation. You can view the trailer below & here is their official website. I liked the Youtube version well enough to buy the DVD from Amazon.com

In spite of their success, they are still building links. And if you want to watch the video somewhere other than YouTube it only costs $15 on Amazon.com. On their next tour they could probably double or triple their ticket price and still sell out stadiums, largely because they kept building links.

It is much easier to get people to impulse purchase a one time $79 product than it is to get people to join a higher value but higher price-point recurring program. When I changed my business model the sales rates changed significantly. Just before changing the model the sales rate for the ebook peaked at an all time high. And just after launch the sales rate for the membership site was even greater than my best sales rate for the ebook, but then sales slowed down a bit. As I refined the some of the marketing strategies, order volume has picked back up again.

The area where sales really dropped off was the areas you would expect to fall most - cold search leads and affiliate traffic. It makes sense too, because when you are selling a membership site you are largely selling trust in your brand, and building trust is a process. It requires more of a presell. Those who are unfamiliar with you will take a lot more to convert than those who have grown to know, like, and trust you over time. Those who have read this site for a long time are much more likely to become members than less qualified prospects who just discovered this site today.

I still have a bunch of ideas for warming up cold leads which I will get to try over the coming months, but some of them requiring sourcing from other providers, and that is a process. The cool thing about changing your business model is that you learn a lot about different sales strategies...it also shows you the different strategies needed to sell different ideas. And it is a bit of a thrill to one day just pull the plug and switch everything. You can try to predict what will happen, but your predictions will usually be wrong. In the shift there will be hidden good deals and hidden bad deals. Just to highlight a couple, out of dozens of them...

• Hidden good deal: when setting up the ability for SEO Book buyers to get a free trial my programmer turned that free offer process into something that required setting up a Paypal subscription. That prevented many non-committed people from joining. Which works out nicely for me as I don't spend more time servicing people who were not really interested in the first place.
• Hidden bad deal: when I emailed affiliates about changing my business model, many affiliates that had no sales or traffic were demanding and rude. A single sentence in that email probably wasted over 10 hours of my life.

I theorized before changing my business model that as a result the customer quality and value of customer interaction would sharply increase while my frustrations with the worst customers from yesteryear would diminish. That turned out better than expected as well.

Some of the people who bought my ebook in the past would buy it but then be lazy, see no results because they did not read the book or do any marketing, and then basically try to get $20,000 worth of consulting out of me for their $79, not listen to my advice when I give it, and then do a reverse charge after sending me a few 15 page emails and wasting hours of my time.

The problem was that there was no recurring opportunity cost to customers, so many of them felt it was their job to abuse me and treat me like a machine. And so then I started thin slicing to guess "is this a person who I can help or a person who will just waste my time?" but that thin slicing turned off some customers. My wife thought I was slow to respond and I sounded a bit like a jerk when we first spoke. :(

The nice thing about my current price point and member registration is that it is just beyond the impulse purchase range, so I am selling to the right customers. And since it is an ongoing training program, it attracts the type of customers who want to do work vs those who want a free ride or a person to outsource the blame upon. The community has been both fun and rewarding. I have been surprised at how well it has worked out. I just wish I would have been a better listener when NFFC gave me so much great advice back in 2005!

One huge disconnect I still have is that many people who reference this site today are still referencing how great the book is (but it no longer exists as an individual entity, only as part of the training program). The domain name, years of content creation and market participation, and all the money spent on advertising all work to make that well remembered, and I need to work on shifting that...which is probably a lot harder that it sounds.

We spend so much time worrying about public relations, link building, and all kinds of external stuff...that we do not set our businesses up to establish and build relationships, and get the most out of what we are already doing. If you do well with the traffic you already have then you can always invest more in public relations, ppc, advertising, and link building.

Sometimes people think I am a cynic when I mention things like "avoid Google Analytics," but you never really understand how Google perceives the web until they chose to try to wipe you out. Jay Weintraub recently posted about how he was permanently banned from AdWords because one of his employees accessed his company account AND their personal account from the same IP address.

A person who has access to the company's AdWords accounts has their own AdWords account. They are a good employee and don't work on their personal project at the office, but as a good employee they do work on your business while at home. By accessing both AdWords accounts on the same machine, Google decides both accounts are the same person despite their being different. Worst case, the employee breaks the rules with their personal account. The employer finds their campaigns stopped and can't get them back online.

There was a point in time when some people who practiced PPC claimed that it was safer than SEO, but in the face of

• permanent account bans
• falsely linking together accounts
• mystery meat quality scores
• people stealing your ad copy
• Google coming out and directly stating they dislike certain business models

it is certainly a bit harder to claim that PPC is a safe and effective long-term marketing strategy.

Worse yet though, if Google is willing to ban people paying them millions of dollars, what happens to those who publish AdSense ads and are dependant on Google for revenue as well? What happens to those who are dominating the organic rankings without paying their Google tax?

If Google connects up all that data to use against their advertisers, surely they are using the same data to hand out punishment to other parties as well. Just by using AdSense you make your business more reliant on Google (and eventually more likely to be penalized by Google). Just by using Google Analytics you are leveling the competition field for everyone except yourself. And the problem there is that you can't get away with many of the things that your competitors do.

How many emails like this could I send out before my site would get banned?

My threshold and the threshold for Sallie Mae are two different numbers. I wonder if I offer PageRank 6 (and above) bloggers a free membership to my site if they linked to me (like Demand Media does) if I would be deemed a spammer?

As Google's stranglehold on the web grows (Google just closed the DoubleClick deal - giving them access to a lot more affiliate data) the solution to remove yourself from risks associated with Google's influence is to create a business that is not reliant on Google...a brand and a destination. But to do that you really need to ignore Google's advice.

And if you are an end consumer and searcher, you are hosed already. Ads already track you and know who you are, and Google has patents to target ads to leverage and exploit your mental weaknesses:

Examples of information that could be useful, particularly in massive multiplayer online RPG’s, may be the specific dialogue entered by the users while chatting or interacting with other players/characters within the game. For example, the dialogue could indicate that the player is aggressive, profane, polite, literate, illiterate, influenced by current culture or subculture, etc. Also decisions made by the players may provide more information such as whether the player is a risk taker, risk averse, aggressive, passive, intelligent, follower, leader, etc. This information may be used and analyzed in order to help select and deliver more relevant ads to users.

Hat tip to Andy for the link to Jay's post.

• Reciprocal links really started getting punished after there were tools to automate link exchanges and link exchange hubs developed.
• Nofollow was a direct response to automated blog comment spam software.
• Directories really started getting punished after there were tools to automate submissions and there were lists of sites to submit to.
• Article directories started getting punished after there were tools to automate submissions and there were lists of sites to submit to.
• A blog called Promote My Site offers a list of thousands of social media sites. And there are plenty of automated submission tools too.

Google Analytics came out with a novel benchmarking feature which compares your site's performance to other websites in your field. You can see this benchmark data ONLY IF you are willing to aggregate your data into the pool of anonymized data.

The best sites in your industry probably are not using Google Analytics, and those who do are probably not benchmarking against average, so you are essentially benchmarking your site against a random sample of the bottom half of your industry. I guess such a measurement has purpose, unfortunately I fail to see it.

I hope that while so many people are out smelling the flowers, someone is taking the time to plant some. - Herbert Rappaport