Some marketers aggressively email spam people to promote their best ideas, thinking no harm could come from it. If you do not take the time to personalize emails and actually visit the sites you are emailing then you probably going to send someone like me an email, and there is a 5% chance I will blog about it. If I blog about it, I am probably not going to be talking up the product. ;)

DietsInReview.com recently launched their celebrity weight loss calculator. I was sent a bulk unpersonalized email containing the following tip

The tool is specifically un-branded so it can blend with your experience. All we ask is that you post the entire code which contains a link back to our site.

Their site has a great growth chart. They come up with great marketing ideas. They are clever with SEO. And they are too lazy to connect the pieces without untargeted email spamming. Silly. Spend $10 an hour hiring someone to send out the emails if you are too lazy to do it yourself.

If you are reactive to blog feedback (like they were here kimkinscontroversy.com/2007/09/25/kimkins-affiliate-spotlight-dietsinreviewcom/) then why not be proactive in creating meaningful relationships in the community? No point putting great ideas on churn and burn sites, and no point burning relationships with leading editorial voices in your market if you are creating a longterm site.

As Frank Luntz says "it's not what you say, it's what people hear." Politics is a game of marketing. Raise money, invest in messaging, and spread the message.

Most of the leading presidential candidates are not running AdWords ads to place a donation message on search result. Given Howard Dean's experience in raising money online, where they tested and changed page layouts based on donation data, the Democrats ought to know better.

Few candidates are buying display ads. Given this data, I am buying more display ads for SEO Book than any of the presidential candidates are.

You do not need to be a conversational marketing guru to advertise. In a couple hours I could create a campaign for any of the candidates that gets in excess of 100,000,000 monthly impressions and brings in far more than it costs. They are doing interviews on TechCrunch about technology and the web. Why don't they put their money where their mouth is?

The year is almost out, and tax time is just around the corner. Here are some tips for SEOs and web marketers on how to lower your income by increasing your expenses.

• Donate to Charity - want to do some good? Why not donate some cash to a good charity?
• Domain registration - make sure your domains are registered for at least 5 years.
• Buy a better name - does your domain name suck? Now is the perfect time to buy a better one.
• Hosting - have hosting bills coming up soon? Pay them early.
• Directory registration - if any of your good sites are not yet listed in BOTW, Business.com, JoeAnt, or the Yahoo! Directory then submit before the year is out
• Yahoo! Search Marketing - if you are a big user of Yahoo Search Marketing you can pay a few thousand extra in advance
• Affiliates (& other Marketing Costs) - do you have payments that are typically done on the first of the month? Consider paying them early.
• Website design & custom programming - need new features or a fresh look to take your website to the next level? Make that down payment made in the next couple days.
• Software & tools - thinking about trying out a piece of software? Now is a great time to buy.
• Sell loser stocks - did you buy CountryWide at $45 earlier this year? Get the writedown you deserve.

What are your best tax tips?

Search is so consolidated that it is uncomfortable being an SEO. If Google decides to profile you or kill your sites there is not much you can do, especially because Yahoo! and Microsoft are losing marketshare month after month. Why are Yahoo! and Microsoft losing marketshare? Their bad marketing coupled with Google's good marketing:

The toolbar has NEVER given anyone any real information. BUT, it has given the world a perception that whatever Google ranks that must be right. It has also helped to give Google millions of devout followers and millions more who are willing to give access to a lot of private data just to see a little green go a little farther to the right. BRILLIANT. So brilliant in fact I have never understood why MSN and Yahoo haven’t done their own white paper and give away a little blue bar to "prove" it works. BUT, that is why Yahoo and MSN seem to be losing market share. Not because their results aren’t as good. It is because they aren’t as good at marketing. I don’t begrudge Google for that. I admire them.

To appreciate how bad Yahoo's marketing is, consider the following:

• Overture Keyword Selector - their public facing keyword tool is unreliable and does not even promote their own brand or their own network on it.
• Want to sign in to Yahoo search marketing? Go to sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com. Yup...2/3 of the companies revenues come through a subdomain of a subdomain.
• Yahoo powers millions of domain landing pageviews every day, and are afraid to put their brand on it, all while Google puts their brand (and typically search box) on everything they touch.

Anyhow, this is Christmas and this is supposed to be a happy post. And I am happy, because Wikia Search just launched in Alpha, and plans to publicly launch on January 7th.

Given that the difference between Google and Yahoo is largely one of marketing, and given that Google has been doing more manual editing of the search results, that lends credibility to Wikia's human search model.

What happens when Wikipedia has a "search powered by you" box promoting an engine other than Google on every page of Wikipedia? Does Wikipedia keep ranking #1 for everything? Does this create another viable search channel for marketers? Does this competition make Google less arrogent and harsh in their webmaster relations department?

Here is Wikias' whitelist, and here is a blog tracking Wikia's progress. And here are some of Google's human review documents that were leaked a couple years ago.

In the past many Google penalties were blatantly obvious. You either got traffic or you did not. But as time has passed penalties are getting blurrier, meaning your site can be penalized and still get traffic from Google. Some traffic reductions are due to competitive market forces, some are due to algorithm changes, some are due to automated filters, and some are due to penalties. If you are new to the market (and in some cases, even if you are experienced) it is hard to know which problems, if any, are holding back your ranking potential.

A friend just told me about how his Google traffic went way up after he spoke with a Google engineer, but he didn't want to talk about it publicly. I wonder how many other people are just like him, but don't speak about it or don't know they are penalized? And then I think back to the ban of the official AdSense blog, Brian Clark's PageRank hit, and Sugar Rae's ranking woes, and have come to the conclusion that spam fighting has become more of a shoot first and ask questions later game. They do not make a lot of mistakes, but when your site is just a number, it hurts pretty bad.

From a marketer perspective this shoot first shift is an important one which requires a few things of online publishers hoping to keep their businesses profitable:

• Track your traffic using analytics tools, such that you know if/when something goes wrong, can prove it with hard stats, and can research it more specifically.
• Publish at least 2 or 3 sites in different markets to give yourself additional data points on whether the issue is site specific or not.
• Use public relations and viral link marketing where you once used link buys. If you are still renting links try to make them covert, and offset them with many natural links.
• If possible package your offering as a service, so that you can justify charging recurring, and/or create an affiliate program. These make your income less reliant on search engines.
• If nobody cares that the site is missing there is no harm nor foul. Build up enough social significance that you can cause enough noise if/when something goes wrong such that Google gets enough blowback to fix the issue quickly.