RSS Already Has Filters

Scott Karp mentioned that RSS has no value without a filter. RSS already has filters, but most people probably do not use them to their full potential.

  • Your top trusted editors in each category already are human editors / filters. As you go deeper into any category you find more duplication.

  • Many blog platforms allow you to subscribe to an individual category.
  • Yahoo! Pipes (and other similar offerings) allow you to mix feeds together.
  • Sites like Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Google Feed Reader allow you to share items with others.
  • Many toolbar providers offer buttons that update with the latest news from an RSS feed.
  • Custom news search feeds and blog link search feeds make it easy to track keywords outside of your favorite editorial channels.
  • Google personalized homepage allows you to create tabs for different news. I have tabs to track SEO, domaining, marketing, general web memes, news mentions and link acquisition of sites I am currently marketing. By paying attention to the people I trust or the people who are voting for my sites I am probably making the votes count more.

Merging Search Engine Optimization and Domaining

Frank Schilling posts his thoughts on SEO while Brian Provost posts how to turn a .org into a .com:

My strategy for .com domain names has generally been to stash them away and forget they exist. I’ll take my SEO skillset and go develop the .org or .net cousins to build the exact same audience thanks to the overweighting of exact match in search engines, leaving the .com domains in the vault to appreciate.

If you are developing an online brand worthy of attention and can't afford the target .com you probably do not need it. Look how popular Del.icio.us got with their terrible domain name. Eventually they got the .com, but they made that investment after they proved their model worked.
Frank posted that he thought SEOs try to think of how they can game engines

Domainers think: "How can I exist without Google .. if Google blew away tomorrow, how could I guarantee traffic delivery?" .. SEO folks seem to think, "How can I get free visits from the top search engine and if that top search engine ever changes, how can I get free traffic from the next top search engine."

I don't think SEOs just look at Google for traffic. I think some of the best SEOs think of the web more in terms of the Cluetrain Manifesto, viewing the web as a series of markets and conversations, realizing that if they are frequently talked about then search rankings are a by-product of that.

If you are just getting into domains right now and want to develop sites that will get ranked you are far better off buying .org or .net domains, and saving the money the .com would have cost you to spend it on marketing and development of your .org or .net. If you are trying to predict new markets that you expect to become huge you may want to buy the .com. If you want to lock out competition buy all 3 extensions.

Happy Waiter vs Sad Waiter

I went to the city with my girlfriend today. When we ate lunch we were both surprised by how happy the waiter was, then we realized all the waiters were happy. Last night we grabbed a late night snack. We overheard our waiter saying "bus boys taking the tips. need to have their damn thumbs broken."

Both waiters were serving food. Why was one group so happy while the other was so sad? The first was in an upscale trendy part of town that likely tips well. The later was at a Denny's that was so sketchy that they even have Brinks security guards at night. When a person is new to business and struggling to get by they will take just about any business they can get, but as they satisfy those needs they move away from things that inspire thumb breaking anger toward things that aid happiness. Who you work with and for is just as important as what your goals are.

Why Selling SEO Services is Typically a Bad Business Model

John Andrews recently wrote an article about how consumer ignorance and carnival barkers lead to a market that is a self fulfilling prophecy:

There is so much so-called SEO out there, mostly outdated, baseless, or downright wrong, that the accessible information is more wrong than right. A Google or Yahoo! search on SEO topics is ridiculous, for many reasons. Often accurate SEO information is considered trade secret by knowledge consultants, and thus is not very accessible. What appears in front of the inquisitive SEO consumer is mostly junk. This puts the prospective SEO client at a distinct disadvantage, and provides an opportunity for the contract-seeking "snake oil SEO salesman" to close a deal at a good profit, often without realistic accountability or other consumer safeguards in place. But, as the 2001 Nobel Prize winning economist George Akerlof showed in his famous paper "A Market for Lemons", asymmetrical information does much more than that. It actual can destroy the market for true, quality SEO.

Add to the above the following

  • introduction to SEO via spam emails or cold calls from providers who know nothing about the concept of search
  • spammy link exchange emails
  • low quality sites ranking because they are old and links flowed easier in the past
  • a rapidly changing marketplace
  • hosts that scam their customers for an extra $30 a year selling fake submission services
  • search engines that sell ads to the scam services and talk down the value of the high end services

Their is no reason to be surprised at how bad the service selling market is for many SEOs.

There are many other markets where the same type of market develops. In some cases it is even a sub-market of the whole that turns to trash. If your main keywords for your target market include discount / cheap / similar buzz words in your market then you might be selling to an audience that is not worth selling to, especially if your product is expensive or your service is time intensive.

Getting to Self Sustaining

Last year one of my friends couldn't understand why I was willing to heavily invest into marketing a content site that was barely self sustaining, but any market worth being in will require some level of investment to achieve worthwhile returns. If one off marketing expenses triple your traffic then they allow you to spend more on content quality and develop the site deeper. Many people are afraid to risk anything on a new channel. If you are already spending your time working on it and are thinking about it you are already investing...but investing half way won't get you as far as pouring yourself into a project will. If you over-invest and fail in a few months at least you learn something. If you invest to slowly you might just be burning your time and money without even realizing what is going on. You only have so much time and attention, so it is best to leverage it on a few strong channels.

Some types of investment (such as large external ones or ones for poor formatting or bloated infrastructure) are bad because they force you to achieve a certain scale to be self sustaining. Seth pointed to a UK magazine named Pulp that died after its first week:

The magazine had been in development for more than a year and had been heavily trailed on TV, radio and the internet. ... Mr Styles said: "Every piece of research we did, every dummy we created and the concept in all its forms was fantastically received from first to last.

"The industry wanted it, the news trade wanted it, the market was there according to every group we asked - but come the acid test the readers were absent."

They would have been better off launching a website and pouring that print and advertising money into content creation and marketing. That would have been far cheaper and far more valuable than market testing.

The web is so easy to track that you can't spend too heavily without getting good feedback quickly.

As Google and others continue to close off easy opportunity you can't be afraid to invest if you want to see sizable returns. If you are growing rapidly and already are at self sustaining that is a great sign, because when you get more efficient or cut your development costs that cost center turns into a revenue stream. If you are starting from scratch it is hard to compete with nothing unless you are exceptionally passionate.

Google Closing the Window of Opportunity

Danny reported that Google is moving away from listing news articles in a OneBox, and instead places news results directly in the search results. In the past these pages would require building up significant trust criteria (linkage data, etc.) before being considered for a top organic ranking, but now their editorial inclusion in Google news is giving them a free pass to a top ranking for relevant search queries. This helps Google in 4 major ways

  • Google is far from being the top news site, so this allows them to arbitrage the value of the news vertical using their core search results, while still keeping the search results relevant.

  • This allows Google to put ads against their news products, which they have yet to attempt at News.Google.com.
  • This allows Google to funnel more traffic to trusted content sources, and thus help subsidize the content creation costs, while making those sources more addicted to Google's traffic.
  • Overrepresenting fresh trusted editorial content sources in the organic search results gives the organic search results an informational bias, allows Google to start working to depreciate their weighting on fresh blog stories, and lowers the value of small focused commercial sites (unless they are of a high enough quality to get press coverage).

Webmasters owning niche or seasonal sites that enjoyed temporal exposure will discover there are fewer traditional top 10 results that are open for the taking, because fresh news stories will fill in a few more slots.

In Addition, Google just announced web history, which allows you to search through documents you viewed in the past. Web history will help improve search personalization. If web history also directly becomes part of the organic search results then sites which can afford to spend a lot on advertising will also have another advantage over smaller sites.

Say it Isn't So Joe(Ant)

I have always been a big fan of JoeAnt.com. So sad to see so many thin affiliate sites in the recently added box, and then get a second round of shock to see AdSense top and to the left on the individual category level pages. What leads webmasters to demote their hard build sites into a status of irrelevancy?

This is why I realized actively updating a directory list was fighting a lost cause. Over time they all go downhill. Automation and AdSense killed the model.

AdSense ads are Gay.

How would an editor feel after seeing all their listings dropped below a huge AdSense block with irrelevant gay quiz ads?

The Thin Content Model

Many people who took advantage of past inefficient markets are thinking that cheap, free, or social content is the next angle. But the idea is already saturated. Even Tim Armstrong, Google's VP of advertising, launched a thin content play. Andy Hagans has a great post about why the lure is much greater than the potenial rewards. There are new angles to the thin content that add context and value, but those are generally not something that can be leveraged across a portfolio of sites. eHow ranks so well because it was well researched around making money, and gained significant link authority back when it was easier to get links. Given the current market paranoia and the unnatural link patterns on the web it would be much harder to create an eHow today.

I think the best way to leverage content would probably be to buy out a unique source that is not monetized to its full potential, like a dying media company.

How Google Killed Affiliate Marketing

Rumor has it that eBay just bought the web 2.0 toolbar company StumbleUpon, which helps users stumble into new and interesting pages based on the votes of friends and others with similar interests. THE SAME DAY that rumor came out Google added a toolbar feature which recommends websites you might be interested in based on your recent search queries.

Competitive Intelligence & AdSense Funded Startups

Google's biggest advantage over their competitors may not even be the cheap computer cycles. It is probably consumer trust. StumbleUpon only had to raise $1.5 million in funding before being bought out, largely due to low cost structure, but also because they turned stumbles into unmarked ads, offered a sponsorship based model, and published AdSense ads on their site.

Google can buy out or clone any service that threatens their ad market and media dominance.

Asset Pricing & Public Relations

Since StumbleUpon was an AdSense publisher, Google saw their growth rate, and had better market data as to their value than eBay possibly could have. As soon as they started talking about sales, Google could make the best offer, or decide if it was just cheaper to clone something in-house, then overshadow competing news by adding the feature to the Google suite ahead of the buyout news.

Advertising leads to exposure, which leads to more exposure, which leads to market dominance. Now Google is recommending content. Maybe those same content sites chose to advertise with Google from time to time, or maybe they syndicate Google's ads and convert well. If you were Google, and you were recommending ads and content based on earnings wouldn't that lead to recommending biased content that converts?

Trademarks & the Sketchiness of Relevant Recommendations

Google maintains that they are legal with their keyword based ad targeting. Judges struggle with the cases:

"The large number of businesses and users affected by Google's AdWords program indicates that a significant public interest exists in determining whether the AdWords program violates trademark law," Fogel wrote in his decision.

Maybe they are legal, but when you get to content websites or contextually targeted ads you can't be certain why Google is displaying an ad. Is it site targeted? Page targeted? Geographically targeted? Automated based on a keyword and trademark in the page title, or personal character flaws, or conversion data?

Arbitraging Your Brand One Click at a Time

With pay per action ads Google turned the link into a virtually unmarked ad unit. They will likely control distribution based on how much revenue an ad makes Google. If you buy distribution from lead aggregators, and they buy Google CPA ads, their ads may be automatically targeted by Google against any media mentioning your company, at first you will think these aggregators are doing a great job, and you might even pay them a higher commission. But then you may start to notice fewer direct inquiries.

Upon further inspection some of these lead aggregators use domain names similar to your brand, like VillanovaU.com, and their ads appear on just about any content related to Villanova. Eventually you realize that you are best off brokering a deal directly with Google, so you do.

Introducing Google Tax

This is how Google will kill many mid market players and get a piece of the action for most large businesses. They will keep automating recommendations and arbitraging against your brands and trademarks until you decide to broker an ad deal directly with Google, and if you don't give Google a big enough cut they will just recommend an arbitrager, some high converting currently hot scam, or a competitor of some sort.

Affiliate marketers funded search and showed business the value of search before getting pushed around by ad quality scores. The lead aggregators will show businesses that they can just work directly with Google. Off the start the numbers will look great, and they will keep doing well until direct inquiries gradually decline as the Google Tax is applied.

I think Werty was the person who coined Google Tax, while he was between paintings, working on his garden.

Changing Business Models

So I am starting to be a bit more honest with myself about the lack of value of my current business model. My price point puts myself rather low on the value chain. As the field of SEO has grown and my share of voice has grown I have attracted far too many wankers. Many of my customers are amazing people (I have met, became friends with, and learned from many of them), but it only takes a few bad ones to sour my mood. And it isn't fair for my girlfriend to have to put up with me being pissed off at wankers. For example, in the last 5 minutes I just got the following:

a blog comment from Whaterver@hotmail.com, stating

Not the only SEO book on the planet, just check out Chapters. If your SEO book were so good, why would I have to drill down four pages in a Google search to find it? Crap

a phone call about from a customer (not my customer, someone else's) asking me about why her site designer and SEO were fighting and if there was some independent ethics verification body

a refund request complaining that my book was too good

and this comment from a prospective customer

if this book doesn't help me the way i want it (= dramatic increase in traffic as determined at my discretion --- what is my guarantee i'll get my money back?

This wanker exposure is not uncommon either. In spite of making my phone number and email address less accessible I typically get to enjoy about 10 to 20 wankers a day. Some I ignore, but even when I try to do that, these people still make my outlook on humanity and the human race a bit bleak.

The people buying PPC stuff are already looking to spend money, but many of the people who are attracted to SEO are attracted to it because they are lazy, want a free ride, and refuse to add any value to the world around them. This is exactly why the target market for a PPC book is so much nicer than the target market for an SEO Book.

As search gets more complex and changes faster (you could write a 500 page book on just AdWords, let alone organic search) my job is to push traditional marketing principals rather than SEO loopholes because that is less risky and delivers more real tangible long-term value. Also, it is hard to write a book that is fairly comprehensive, up to date, applicable to the spectrum of readers, and easy to understand. I am thinking I need to change my business model. Potential changes may include any of the following

  • selling nothing on this site (though I would still update my ebook for a while if I did this)

  • increasing price point to $299 to filter out many of the wankers
  • charging recurring fees to new customers
  • selling a recurring newsletter instead of an ebook

Not sure when I will change my business model, but the sooner the better. What would you do?

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