We had 103 community members sign up in the first 2 days. Which is way beyond what I was expecting! I still have 2 big problems though...

• I still have about 25 emails left to catch up with.
• The subscription button is only charging $50 still and the programmer is not around yet. I shot him an email, and when he gets to it the price is going to jump to $100.

I just wanted to say thank you for reading and thank you again if you joined our community. I hope to keep making this training program better and better as time passes. I am going to try to interview a few people when I go down to SMX to add that to the premium content part of the site.

The Decline of Public Forums

About a year ago I decided to close Threadwatch so I could focus more on expanding this site. The Searchguid forums and site went away, and the domain name was recently auctioned off for $8,655, and it redirects to SEONews.com. John Scott, the owner of V7N, recently announced that he was stepping away from the site, and currently has it up for auction for $400,000 at SitePoint with a $500,000 buy it now price.

The bulk of V7N's earnings come from directory submissions, which is a business model Google kicked in the teeth many times last year. I am not sure how well those revenues will hold up. If you run an Internet advertising based business models selling ads to internet marketers targeting other internet marketers it is a rough rough business model. Outside of the newbie who has not yet got burned, we are generally aware, skeptical, and wary of advertising.

How much information pollution do you find in some of the larger public SEO forums? Will OpenID eventually protect public sites? How can public publishers add enough friction to stop spam without driving away talent?

Why You Know So Much

As internet marketers, we have a canary in the coalmine effect, where many of the trends we pick up on are later felt across the broader market. Why? Because competition is so fierce and there are so many people trying to push so many different scams each day that we get hit from every angle.

We use the web so much that we are more aware of new ad formats, new business models, etc. We profit from accidental clicks as soon as the model appears, and before the media knows we are aware of when and how it changes.

Our Competitive Advantage

The stuff that works in the internet marketing field, porn field, gaming field, or other high paying fields probably works well on the other parts of the web. But as we go, so do the rest of the web, but we typically have a 6 month to 3 year advantage over the rest of the web.

As software gets more sophisticated, spam bots get more sophisticated, membership site proliferate, people become more wary of advertising, and Google tries to keep more of the traffic on Google.com many public forums will die. Increasingly communities and web publishers will have two stores...a public one that keeps the brand represented on the web graph, and a private one which allows the owner to profit from the brand equity, trust, and user loyalty they built up.

Many traditional publishers are still shoving junk down our throats. How could we lose to that?

Laziness is Beyond Your Control

Everyone, at least on some levels, is lazy. I work my ass off, but am still lazy about doing things I do not enjoy doing. If my wife asks me to wash the dishes the hand of God strikes upon me a mean streak of laziness. It is outside my control, I swear ;)

Right now I am trying to write a sales letter, which has made me lazy, and instead made me want to write this post.

Laziness Leads to Productivity Gains

I don't like having to think some things through too much if they can be automated. And so tools like keyword list generators are made.

I recently found a sweet affiliate program in a field where no other affiliates existed. For the right keywords, click value was about $12 a click, and I was paying like 60 cents a click. With under an hour of work, I made hundreds of dollars in daily profit with virtually no effort.

Find Something You Love And Make it Your Own

I just logged in today and saw that my conversion stats dropped to virtually nothing over the past couple days. Odd. So then I searched, and like 10 affiliates (or, more likely, 1 competing affiliate 10 times) launched ads showing for many of the keywords I bid on, with many of them stealing my exact ad copy - word for word. They loved my ad copy and made it their own.

Slimming Profit Margins

Bidding Wars Reduce Profits

So what is the solution? Maybe I increase my bids again. But then they will increase their bids again. A bigger and bigger piece of the profits get shipped to Google, while these clowns and I eventually compete for crumbs. One of the reasons Google does not care if others steal your ad copy (or all the content on your website) is because at the end of the day they know it erodes the value of copyright and creates a bidding war that deposits more money in their bank account.

Quick Paydays

PPC affiliate marketing and arbitrage works that way, where you find a payday, hold it for a few weeks or a few months, then someone competes and the profit margins drop, unless you have a higher visitor value it keeps costing you more time to make less, until the opportunity cost exceeds your profit potential, and then you are off hunting for the next big idea. Competitive forces make it hard for this strategy to build long-term value unless you are operating in a small market or are using a technique that is pretty dirty.

Super Affiliate Secrets

One of my friend that was doing well with PPC affiliate stuff got up to about $1,000 a day of profit for an affiliate network. He ran it for about a year, then his affiliate network decided that they would find something they love and make it their own - they cloned his account and he is now making $0 for uncovering all the great keywords for them.

If you don't own the supply chain or have a distribution chain that is hard to replicate your competitors consist of

• other affiliates
• the search engines
• quality scores and algorithmic changes
• the companies you affiliate with
• anyone else interested in the keyword you are buying

SEO Loves Your Profit Margins

This is why I like SEO so much more than PPC. Most people are too lazy to spend years researching their topic, years building a brand, years building links, and years building social and customer relationships. We are afraid of failure, afraid of success, and afraid that we are investing too much in one place. But, if someone sees me ranking in the organic results they can't just clone it unless they know SEO well, and are committed for the long haul. In many cases, knowing SEO well means having capital, time, passion, and a lot of marketing knowledge.

Emotionally Engaged Brand Evangelists

Off the top of your head, how many people or brands in the SEO space can you think of? How many give you some sort of emotional response? How many helped you change your life for the better? Even in some of the most competitive and most saturated marketplaces there is not much real competition.

Thanks for the Laziness, PPC Affiliate Dude!

SEO separates out real businesses from 95% of the people buying PPC ads. The guy stealing ad copy is too lazy to compete at that level. I'll enjoy the logarithmic growth in profits (which have been at least doubling every year) while he keeps stealing table-scraps from Google and other affiliates until his accounts get banned.

Find Something You Love And Make it Your Own!

If you are new to blogs and feeds, I recommend watching this 4 minute video to understand how RSS feeds work, and then spend an hour trying out a feed reader or iGoogle to subscribe to a couple of your favorite blogs.

I had some RSS issues with iGoogle that I think are cleared up now. The upside is that rather than only offering full or partial feeds, we now offer both. You can subscribe to either feed using your favorite feed reader on our feeds page.

If you are a blogger, it only takes about 15 minutes to set up a feed page like mine, and if you get a few new subscribers each month, that creates a cumulative advantage over time. Don't forget to also link to your RSS feed page in the sidebar of your blog.

Google has been getting tighter with their control of their ads, fighting arbitrage with the following changes

• manual reviews, smart pricing discounting (of publisher clicks), and quality scores (increasing the cost of advertising junk)
• improved duplicate content detection
• decreasing the clickable area in many AdSense ad units
• killing sub-syndication of their feed with companies like Ask
• keeping a greater percentage of ad revenue from each click
• requiring advertiser display URLs to match ad destination (starting April 1st)

From this graph you can see the sharp rise of click arbitrage quickly fell off when Google decided to work on fixing the problem.

Yahoo! has turned a blind eye to arbitrage for years. Some people who had strong feeds only saw their arbitrage profit margins increase as the weaker players could no longer compete arbitraging Google traffic. And then Yahoo! dropped a bomb, announcing that arbitrage to their ad feeds is now against their TOS and Parked.com confirmed it.

The biggest distributed ad networks do not want to buy any traffic that is bought directly via similar networks. These companies are cutting their short term revenues in an attempt to make their ad ecosystem healthier. On multiple occasions I have logged into Yahoo! Search Marketing to see a random multi-hundred dollar spend on a keyword that typically costs under $1 a day. I, for one, am glad to see this crap die. But it died a few years too late.

Google and Yahoo want a direct relationship with publishers and merchants. They hate virtually any type of affiliate that is not a highbrow relationship. More power to the organic players, and please static text links instead!