Brian Clark just hit a home run with his post about how we let fear harm our productivity.

I want to create more things like The Blogger's Guide to SEO, with the goal of pushing myself up the value chain by creating better brand touch points. I am hoping to launch a big site in the next month and want to add some cool new features to SEO Book.

Many of my projects have went far slower than they should have, largely because I have been far too busy, but also because I have let fear, laziness, and routine guide me toward accepting the needed excuses to wait until tomorrow. Once you get beyond self sustaining it is easy to sit comfortable and make up fake work just to keep yourself busy.

One of my favorite parts about being somewhat well known online is that I get to talk to others that are well known and far more successful than I am, and hear what they think in a way that is unfiltered by the need for professionalism or public relations. Tips, strategies, ideas, motivations, and human flaws unmasked - stuff you just wouldn't read on a blog - because if you did they would lose money for sharing. Unfiltered conversations where people are human and real to a level that inspires me to do better things and curb the fears that hold me back. In the end it makes you more confident because you know you can help others out, they can help you out, and everyone has some amount of fear guiding them toward action or inaction.

At the end of the day, Google and other market participants are not our biggest competitors, we are. Having said that, I might take a break from blogging for a week or two and slow down blogging for the rest of the year so I can start digging in on doing some of those big projects that have been lingering about.

[Update: A friend of mine recommended I read Dan Kennedy's The Ultimate Success Secret, which states that control = responsibility and responsibility = control. If this post resonates with you this book is well worth a read.]

So far this year I have probably come up with at least 4 multi-million dollar ideas. But I am uncertain if the market timing is right and I have the business acumen and finances to make them soar, but I will try. And, to be honest, some of the ideas were not even mine. They were simply extensions of other's ideas and/or flaws to current market leading models...just like what Google was founded upon (though my ideas are far less ambitious than their idea is).

If you are entering a saturated marketplace and do not have a strong USP read rants or research from long time industry purists that are angry with the current marketplace. You don't have to buy everything they say, just take one of their best ideas, give it a touch of framing, make it relevant to your business, and base your marketing and public relations campaign on it.

If they are viewed as a nutcase and written off by the market then competitors will not realize the brilliance of your brand and the strength of the purist angle until you start cutting into the market in a big way. By then it will be too late for them to react, and if they do copy you, then you can use that to further affirm your market leading position. Google said "don't be evil" and everyone thought they were cute and cuddly until they were too reliant on Google to say otherwise. See the goog. Be the goog. :)

A friend of mine sent me a link to The Kept University, a great article about how corporations are increasingly turning universities into cheap biased research labs.

Companies give researchers stock options for conducting research on product development, censor negative reviews, and see a much higher rate of positive reviews. They then use this research to try to push new products into the market. That is about a million times worse than something like PayPerPost, which recently saw many of their bloggers get their PageRank axed by Google.

In one way it makes Google's position seem absurd because many of the "best links" are simply a reflection of these hidden business deals by publishers and the advertisers with the largest profit margins. But you could also think of these types of relationships as a low risk source of clean links, and the type of relationship and reputation building tools needed to sustain profit margins in competitive marketplaces.

When you are new and small you can't afford to sponsor a school, but you can still offer to take a professor out to lunch or offer them free stuff to help build your credibility and push you into a market leading position.

You don't have to own the world to do well, just be a leader in a growing market and ride that growth curve. And if your field does not relate to a school it probably relates to some community or industry organization. And if those do not exist you could create one and build from there.

I am not suggesting that anyone pay people to lie about you, but that if Google doesn't like paid links maybe we should try to emulate how market leaders get and keep their leading market positions offline: pay to get your products in the hands of market leaders and (when possible) don't disclose the sponsored editorial transactions!

Excerpts from The Kept University:

In higher education today corporations not only sponsor a growing amount of research -- they frequently dictate the terms under which it is conducted. Professors, their image as unbiased truth-seekers notwithstanding, often own stock in the companies that fund their work. ...

In the summer of 1996 four researchers working on a study of calcium channel blockers -- frequently prescribed for high blood pressure -- quit in protest after their sponsor, Sandoz, removed passages from a draft manuscript highlighting the drugs' potential dangers, which include stroke and heart failure. ...

In 1996, while serving as a consultant to Microfibres, a Rhode Island company that produces nylon flock, Kern discovered evidence of a serious new lung disease among the company's employees. Upon learning that he planned to publish his findings, the company threatened to sue, citing a confidentiality agreement that forbade Kern to expose "trade secrets." ...

The New England Journal of Medicine warning that drugs like fen-phen could have potentially fatal side effects. But the same issue contained a commentary from two academic researchers that downplayed the health dangers of fen-phen . Both authors had served as paid consultants to the manufacturers and distributors of similar drugs -- connections that were not mentioned.

If everything becomes free then hidden costs will pop up everywhere. It is so much cleaner if it is all out in the open, but some people don't think of the alternative before trying to force their view of the world upon it. Cheers to the rise of paid content as free content becomes more polluted.

In a few years search engines will wish their problems were as simple as spotting paid links.

When launching new tools or information products it helps to create a professional logo that people can spread around. But sometimes you are short on time or just want to get the idea out the door. Even if you don't have a lot of time or money you can still get a logo that looks good.

When launching the Blogger's Guide to SEO and the Website Health Check Tools my designers were busy, so I went to Istockphoto to buy a few illustrations, resized them, and then added text to them. 10 minutes work with Photoshop (download a free trial version here) and I had decent looking logos. Even the little widget pictures on my homepage were part of a $10 image set.

There is a lot of text on the web, but most of it is not branded with imagry that helps people remember it. When many people are pitching / selling / spreading the same stories and ideas, it helps to create something that is easy to remember. Naming is a large part of that, but creating a logo that reinforces helps too.

Older Marketing Techniques

When the Google Florida update happened in 2003 I read about 5,000 forum posts, tested a few of my sites, and wrote an article based on what I saw. That article got to be quite popular, but that popularity faded over a month or so, but I wanted my 15 seconds of fame to last.

When that article started spreading I went around asking high authority sites which linked to competing sites if they would be willing to link to my site. Some of the most effective techniques used were

• using hub finder to find sites linking at multiple competing websites, and suggesting listing a few more sites (in a list including my site)
• contacting people who were still linking at a competing site that was moved, letting them know that the site had moved

Site's like the HTML Writer's Guild would generally say no to a link request from a guy like me back then, but because of that surge in popularity they were like "oh you are that Aaron...we will get you link up today". As soon as that happened once I decided to go on a link request binge. The great links rolled in and I was like SWEET.

Image from southpark-world.net

While some SEO sites never recovered, mine grew in authority due to the flood of high quality links, and within a few months my rankings were better than ever, and I had high authority recommendations from trusted organizations.

Ageless Marketing Techniques

If you are featured on Oprah or have the chance to interview Oprah make sure that is featured on your site. The same is true if you are featured in the mainstream media.

Newer Marketing Techniques

When I recently published the Blogger's Guide to SEO I launched a multi-pronged marketing campaign.

• The idea was tailored to a specific audience.
• I created a custom logo for it so it was easier for people to have something to share and to make dedicated posts about it.
• I blogged about it on SEO Book and asked about a half dozen friends if they could mention it on their blogs.
• I linked out to Lee Odden's list of blogs. Without even asking him for a link, he decided to reference it on his blog and spread it to his network of over 400 Facebook users.
• I had a ready made AdWords campaign set to target blog related stuff. The same day the article was released someone searched Google for blog, clicked on my ad, read the article, then bought SEO Book. And that ad campaign is also seen on many blogs.
• I guest blogged on Compete.com about making money from blogs.
• A great friend of mine submitted the story to StumbleUpon. Social media is no longer an every man for himself game.

What you really want to do when launching a good idea is to saturate the market with your idea as fast and hard as you possibly can such that it looks organic, yet gains the benefits of push marketing from years past. The story got to #1 on the Del.icio.us popular list, made the Sphinn homepage, and had Digg not deleted it the story would have made the Digg homepage. Hundreds of links are still rolling in.

Marketing Deficiencies

What could I have done better?

• I did not make the idea community oriented enough by asking x bloggers to give their top tip for doing SEO for blogs. Asking for data from a bunch of people to help them feel affinity toward and ownership of the idea to make them more likely to help market it.
• I could have done a few more guest posts on other sites.
• I could have built up the launch by writing relevant related entries on SEO Book asking for what people wanted.
• I could have embedded a bit of controversy in it.
• I forgot to email people subscribed to my old newsletter. Sending those thousands of people that update could have helped get it a bit more of a bump in traffic.
• I could have participated on some well known forums to have them help market the site.