A friend of mine that goes by the nickname aojon and posted some of his phat affiliate earning stats on Sitepoint a while ago. He recently launched his new affiliate marketing forums.

If you are a forum junkie you may want to add Wickedfire.com to your list of daily visits. Be warned though that Jon might be a bit rough around the edge and like to curse from time to time. But then again, the world would be a better place if political correctness was thrown in the trash can in favor of fucking honesty. :)

A while ago I wrote about some of the reasons SEO is given a bad wrap in general. Rand also posted today about how being an SEO is like being a plastic surgeon. I think another key issue which is not typically discussed much is the concept of authority and how it plays a role in media influence. If search may have the power to undermine many locally monopolistic publishing companies it benefits those companies to state that search has holes in it and that people manipulate it. Don't trust search - trust us, your reliable honest trustworthy truthful blah blah blah media source.

Circulation is directly proportional to revenue at large media companies. A story about some evil manipulative ____ is doing __________ is easier to spread than a story about how wonderful SEOs are.

Large media companies are owned by corporations with ties to other mega corporations. They have a long history of sticking up for one another even when they are 100% in the wrong, and have went as far as syndicating public relations garbage to the general populous to sell bogus wars.

Television stations present unoriginal sponsored pre-packaged content as though it is original home grown reporting.

Even some school text books and prestigious journals are created or sponsored by ultra biased self-interested companies.

From the Wikipedia public relations page:

Instances of the use of front groups as a PR technique have been documented in many industries. For example, the coal mining corporations have created environmental groups that contend that increased CO2 emmissions and global warming will contribute to plant growth and will be beneficial, trade groups for bars and beer distributers have created and funded citizens' groups to attack Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and tobacco companies have created and funded citizens' groups to advocate for tort reform and to attack personal injury lawyers.

I believe that for the most part unbiased content will grow less and less profitable and decrease in quality and availability as time passes and more publishers are forced to become more aggressive with their monetization efforts. Google's drive for efficiency will train many independent publishers how to replace traditional media. Social networks and media consumption habits will also be heavily tracked and greatly replace the role of traditional intermediaries.

Clearly the current US government is not interested in the concept of free speech, as displayed by their disregard for net neutrality and their relative over-taxation of VoIP:

"The FCC's efforts on VoIP are like trying to solve traffic and energy problems by stifling the rollout of energy-efficient hybrid vehicles, while subsidizing SUVs," he said.

If you are exercising influence to dupe people it is fine if you are already in a seat of power, but if you are not then they want to expose you to make it look as though they are more pure - when it is rarely the case.

As corporations increasingly are able to embed themselves into the genes of humanity and create communication roadblocks while syndicating spin is there a way beyond it all? Will popular opinion be nothing more than people expressing how they are trained to think?

Sorry for all these cryptic rant posts. They are primarily driven from the following elements

• I have a killer flu / strep throat / headache / etc

• Last weekend offered many experiences which made me realize a general lack of purpose and a lack of passion I have been living with for a while, which sucks. I not only saw the passion with which some others live with, but also broadened my perspectives in a few other ways, and that made me feel great guilt for my lack of passions and living less than optimally for far too long.
• I went from being a total failure to pretty successful pretty quick (at least financially), but I feel the learning curve has leveled off to where I have become pretty bored recently, and still need to do a lot of work on the social / physical / mental aspects of life.
• I think it is important to question my own actions and authority MORE than I question anything else. I generally have a distaste for authority, and in the last month I have
  • worked with people who are true mentors (though I feel they think more of me than I think of myself)

  • been mentioned on my favorite marketing blog (thanks Seth)
  • been asked to co-author books by well known publishers
  • been asked to review papers for well known journals (when I don't know shit about peer review processes, etc.)
  • been asked to talk to deans of a couple schools about how I would modify their courses (when I never went to college and only started learning about the web less than 4 years ago)
• That sort of opportunity has gotten to feel a bit surreal when coupled with a feeling of stagnation and lacking purpose.
• I recently started reading A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, and it is probably the most powerful, insightful, and worldview changing book I have ever read. And I am only like half way done with it.
• I have been thinking on some of Chomsky's philosophies
  

  So does misrepresentation bother me? Sure, but so does rotten weather. It will exist as long as concentrations of power engender a kind of commissar class to defend them. Since they are usually not very bright, or are bright enough to know that they'd better avoid the arena of fact and argument, they'll turn to misrepresentation, vilification, and other devices that are available to those who know that they'll be protected by the various means available to the powerful. We should understand why all this occurs, and unravel it as best we can. That's part of the project of liberation - of ourselves and others, or more reasonably, of people working together to achieve these aims.

  Sounds simple-minded, and it is. But I have yet to find much commentary on human life and society that is not simple-minded, when absurdity and self-serving posturing are cleared away.

So enough of my current rants and conditions... How do you fix this? Does the web help? What else is needed?

Not really SEO related, but I got back from Bonnaroo, and have to say it kicked ass. My favorite reason to go to big festivals is not just to hear the music, but more to see the human interaction and the display of passion associated with it. Sure some marketing agencies can push garbage on the radio enough to get some people to like it, but you don't get to the level of a group like Radiohead without having some real passion behind what you do. I think art is one of the hardest things to market, and even harder to keep producing with the same high quality and authenticity after success had produced a feedback loop that heavily influences the artist's life and work.

How does Radiohead stay fresh after over 800 shows? Never playing the same set list twice. They played 28 songs at Bonnaroo.

A few of my favorite Radiohead songs

Fake Plastic Trees (live @ Glastonbury 2003)

Karma Police

From the Bonnaroo set

Lucky

Jonny Greenwood is known to play guitar so aggressively that he had repetitive strain injury in his right arm and had to wear an arm brace for playing. Thom Yorke has broke down crying after recording a song. On top of being absurdly talented and working hard they also display more emotion than most would dare do.

Their blog kicks ass and this post sums up why I think they are so successful:

im not supposed to put any of this here. so thats why i am.

I think Marc is a great guy and am sure he had great intentions when he created the Isulong Seoph contest, but getting manually comment spammed 10 or 15 times a day gets old.

When blogs were newer and I had less brand value I am certain I was probably a bit of a blog spammer too, but you have to use effective techniques while they are effective. I don't think you are going to win an SEO contest today by manually blogspamming garbage comments on a blog that uses nofollow and is getting hit by 100 other people using the exact same spamming technique. Weather or not something is spam is entirely up to user perception, but you have to think that I am going to know when an SEO contest is going on. The tolerance for spam and the ability of spam to go undetected is probably roughly about inversely proportional to the frequency the person being spammed is exposed to that type of spam.

From this point forward I am going to just file anyone's comment signed with Isulong Seoph straight to the junk folder without even reading it (same goes for if they have made up contest words in their URL). Not trying to say I am better than anyone (and I am sure I did some manual blog spamming back in the day) but you have to use effective techniques while they are effective.

Today there is soooooooooo much spam opportunity out there:

• Google over-trusting subdomains

• MSN trusting just about any type of spam you can think of ;)
• Wiki links and indirect wiki links
• tagging, community, and social sites
• other types of sites where you can create profiles without seeming overt
• large ecommerce sites trying to integrate user feedback and guides into their sites
• a few others I won't name

Then of course you got all sort of the more traditional spamming opportunities still available.

The fake words are boring AND make an obvious footprint that makes it easy to detect many types of spam. Whoever holds the next contest should use a real word. See who could be the first person to rank number #1 in Google for spammer. That would be a bit more challenging though, since it would require them to beat one of the original blog spammers.

While I would describe myself as financially secure and profitable I still am a bit wet behind the ears on business partnerships. These are some of the general attributes I found in partners in good business partnerships. I think I have had about a half dozen great business partners so far. Here are brief descriptions on some of the things that made some of them great.

Hey Asshole! If a person is willing to tell you that you are a piece of shit or that you are screwing up it is much easier to trust them and their motives than the average person email spamming you with the Joint Venture opportunity of your lifetime. If they are willing to be blunt and honest with you then you have to respect that. I found at least 4 great business partners this way.

Questions Authority: When people are willing to ask but why they not only show the courage to tell you when you are full of crap (and thus help you make better ideas) but they also are going to be more likely to find other ideas that help you out-market the competition or find holes in relevancy algorithms to outmaneuver the search engines. Where conventional wisdom is wrong great profit potential exists.

Most authority systems are hypocritical garbage designed to increase the wealth or power of the authority figures or rule makers. If you are willing to look at them from that perspective it is much easier to find potentially profitable opportunities and algorithmic holes.

Believes in You: One of my friends quit his job and is working full time building out a website for me. Behind his computer on the wall he actually wrote the word FOCUS in big black marker. After about a month of consistant growth yesterday was the first day that the website paid over 100% of his living costs (including his somewhat expensive home mortgage).

Focuses on Automation: It depends on your business models, but if people think of the scalability or ease of replication of a business model at launch that is going to typically lead to a much higher profit yield than a person who starts creating before they think about profits or automation.

Has Different Sources: Their sources may be their own experiences or channels that are not typically read by most people in your market, but generally if people can pull value from sources that are generally overlooked in your industry that is a good sign for the value they can create.

It is hard to make money doing the exact same thing everyone else is doing.

History of Execution:
One of my hyper-successful friends and business partners recently said

I do think it is all about execution though and we will not be out executed.

Having too much confidence can be a bad thing, but if you have partners that have shown the ability to follow through it is a great sign to hear them that confident.

Excitement: A person who feels they just deserve to be successful may not add much value to whatever you are doing. A person who is hard working and excited may not realize their value an / or can be trained to produce valuable work, and will be much more malleable than someone who is already stuck in their ways.

What attributes do you look for in a business partner?