Now I know people say you should always be nice, but I sometimes screw that up. Most potential business relationship offers are garbage and the guy who accepts every offer he gets is lucky, born rich, and/or likely eventually homeless.

It takes a dumb business person to try to help everyone who contacts them because if you develop any real brand value many more people will want you to help them than you possible can help. Couple that with the easy of communication and the anonymity of the web and it gets easy to feel a bit shitty if you don't do things to filter out the noise and scamsters (and yet I still get astrology websites claiming to be legitimate charities).

Recently I had one person contact me about 5 times a day asking questions like where is the Overture suggest tool. Stuff that would easily pop on the first page in Google if they used the exact same queries as they instant messaged me with. I explained to them that search is there for a reason and my time was limited, but my explanation was to no avail.

Had I not progressively ignored them and gave continuously shorter answers to encourage reading or searching I would have probably got about 50 questions a day from them. Eventually things were not going to do well.

They asked me questions which to me seemed to show they did not even attempt to read my book. In essence they said they bought my ebook, but I think what they wanted was a full time SEO tutor for a one time $79 fee. Sure I answered a bunch of questions but then after a while I told them I couldn't answer any more because it was not an honest or functional business model for me to continue to do so.

$79 is a bunch to pay for an ebook that you don't read, but $79 is not enough for a real time long term ongoing one on one internet business strategy consultation. People create autoresponder lists and write books and build software to leverage their time because individuals only scale so far.

I think the person who contacted me is probably a good person, but I think that even attempting to make myself widely available on IM is probably not a great idea as it makes it too easy to chat away instead of spending time learning.

I have spent a bunch building free tools to help people leverage their time. Some people are not going to appreciate you do no matter what you do or how hard you try though. Likely their expectations are unreasonable, selfish, or (most likely) they do not place much value on their own time and project their valuations on your time.

You still can learn something from clients who frustrate you and site visitors who seem like they don't have a clue. I am not sure if I will launch it anytime soon, but I think there is a good business model to be made by running an SEO Q&A service for a fee. If I did that it would solve multiple problems:

1. If I placed a tangible value on each answer people would value my time more.

2. I still could answer free questions if I wanted to, but would not have to worry about people viewing me as arrogant if I chose not to.
3. Much of the content on this site is not geared toward picking up newbie targeted traffic from search engines because I can't keep hitting the same questions and ideas over and over as I learn more and the industry changes. Most potential customers are early on in the learning cycle, and this blog started after I had already learned for about a year, and that was a couple years ago. By having a feed of nothing but high quality answers to common newbie questions that content would rank great for many queries and likely convert at around 2 to 5% depending on search query and page layout.

Mitch Ratcliff had an interesting post about Why Conservative Blogs are More Effective - they are more inclined to spread a consistent message...whereas liberal bloggers are more likely to slightly change the message to fit their version of the story.

In some markets it may make sense to tell stories in a manner where people use consistent language and anchor text and create a story that they will push far amongst their demographic.

At other times it might make sense to make your post or framing a bit less clear to ensure the anchor text is mixed around a wide variety of phrases and such that the story can appeal to different demographics.

The framing can help determine who picks up what stories and how far they will run with them. It is easier to syndicate spin, hype, and biased information, but it is a balancing act because too much can equate to lowered authority.

Lee Odden interviews Mr. Google AdWords. Of particular interest to me, Andrew speaking on creating his guide to AdWords:

The first one, of course, came out in ebook form in March 2002 and really took off the moment I started selling it. A bit later, MarketingSherpa and many others helped to publicize it. Believe it or not, I'd been working on a comprehensive SEO document for eighteen months by that point, but I kept feeling like the subject was too broad and no one would get excited about it, so I never completed it.

I think I sorta proved there would / could be demand for an ebook about SEO, as many other SEO book authors have, but I would bet that Andrew has made far greater profit by targeting a niche that is prequalified to have money to spend on ads.

Many people want SEO because they don't have a functional business model and are looking for a free ride. Sure there are probably more searches for SEO than AdWords, but probably less buyers. And another thing that hurts the SEO Book concept is that many of the people looking for SEO believe that there is some automated solution that will make them gobs of money. I know I personally bought a bunch of junky SEO software before I bought any books on the topic.

While he did not discuss organic search in deep depth in his book Andrew Goodman's ebook was the first legit book covering the search space that really helped me better understand some of the limitations of SEO as a service. I think his ebook was the first ebook I read where I didn't feel that the author wrote it to up sell me some sleazy garbage software or put me on a list to spam my inbox.

So yesterday on my drive cross country I called back a person who wanted some strategy advice for marketing his sites.

He was creating satellite sites using stuff like spam-brandname-productname.info but putting quality useful articles on those sites.

There are two ways to do well on the web. Create uber high quality channels or create lots of garbage. The people at the top of the content pyramid gain from the additional public relations and linkage data. The people at the bottom gain by appearing relevant for so many random queries. If you are stuck in the middle you are going to get ate up from the edges.

If you are creating garbage you need to keep your costs low - both in attention and in money. If you are creating good stuff you want to have something that is original and one of the best channels in your field such that you can get linked from the experts in your field and even some web experts outside your field.

100 small satellite domains probably are not going to work well at promoting your main channels directly unless they are niched down to be uber unique and/or require essentially no ongoing commitment.

If your field is really spammy you can eventually do well by starting off with one of the least spammy channels if you can keep it fairly low cost until they are profitable, but as the markets get more competitive and become attention markets eventually some of the profits need to be reinvested or you end up losing market share.

I generally steer clear of awards because they seem a bit gratuitous and self serving, but they are great for link building.

Loren recently created a 2005 search awards contest. The awards have been mentioned on most every major search blog and have even got a bit of coverage outside the typical search sphere.

When Loren did his recent contest he ran it past me first and I said that he should re-categorize some of the stuff and add at least one category that could go viral or would be inclined to be talked about.

The category which fit that profile well for me is

Matt or Jeremy: who is more likely to flame you for spamming?

Sure enough both Matt and Jeremy blogged about it.

I have never done a contest to build links, but if I did here are things I would think about

• which people should I run the award ideas past before it exists so I can refine it? This could help improve the contest categories, and it gives those people a reason for them to want to help market it since they gave feedback on it. Plus asking for feedback is a bit more tactful than asking for a link.

• Are there any official sounding endorsements that would make the contest seem official like?
• Who do I REALLY want links from? Those sites should be listed in small categories that really fit there niche?
• Will any of the contestants get pissed if I email them to tell them they are in the contest? If not which contestants should I email?
• Can I make something funny or interesting that people would want to link at?
• Outside of the problem of self selection can I get a consensus on something that generally has no consensus?
• Can I relate this study to bloggers or any niche markets that typically link virally or link with authority?

There are probably a bunch of other good ideas with contests, please let me know which ones you like.