Facebook is a Sleazy Organization

Facebook recently hired the PR firm Burson-Marsteller to plant a Google smear campaign in the media:

Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.

And why would Facebook run such a campaign?

Confronted with evidence, a Facebook spokesman last night confirmed that Facebook hired Burson, citing two reasons: First, because it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, because Facebook resents Google’s attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service.

So now Facebook is trying to position itself as an advocate of consumer privacy rights?

Seriously?

• Is this the same Facebook that had a class-action lawsuit filed against it for Beacon?
• Is this the same Facebook which stood hand-in-hand with Google AGAINST user privacy?
• Is this the same Facebook where the CEO spoke of his users with the flowery language of dumb f*cks "trust me"?

Yes. Yes. Yes.

The bottom line is this: Facebook is a sleazy organization.

Google is a Sleazy Organization

The above Facebook complaint sounds like the same complaints that came from the old media powers which Google used high power lawyers to steamroll over.

How can Facebook be surprised with Google entering a new vertical by not respecting the property rights of existing market participants? It has been Google's approach to virtually everything:

• trademark (selling branded keywords for sketchy uses with 50,000 AdWords advertisers selling knock-off goods)
• copyright (paying scrapers to steal your content & wrap it in AdSense)
• video (Youtube & Google Video)
• ebooks (illegal scanning)
• etc.

So far Google has only fell flat on their face once: when they challenged the pharmaceutical corporations:

Google Inc. is close to settling a U.S. criminal investigation into allegations it made hundreds of millions of dollars by accepting ads from online pharmacies that break U.S. laws, according to people familiar with the matter.

The pharma corporations are powerful & are in bed with the government. In spite of repeated felonious behavior in marketing their drugs for illegal off label use (which has literally murdered millions of people) these companies can have the government step in and protect their property rights, by having the government enforce unto others the same laws that these same pharma corps regularly break (literally killing millions of people).

Maybe Google is Philosophically Opposed to Property Rights?

Yes, but only when convenient!

Everyone *but* Google should be open.

While Google tramples on the property rights of everyone else, the first sniff of someone operating anything like they do drives Google into black-ops mode & they conduct a smear campaign. Google launched Buzz without warning, but when their feared Facebook was collecting more personal information than they could Google went into black ops PR mode warning against security issues in Facebook.

Remember that bogus "Bing is copying our results" stuff Google engineers did earlier this year? Google later rolled out their content farm update & many of the sites which were torched by Google are now getting more traffic from Bing. What does that tell us? If Bing was putting *any* significant weight at all on Google rankings & traffic then why didn't that carry any weight when Google torched a bunch of websites?

Here is the Google traffic profile for a site that was torched by Panda

And that same website's Bing traffic

Google traffic fell through the floor, while Bing traffic kept climbing. Some sites that were hit by Panda are getting more visits from Bing or Yahoo! Search than from Google.

Conclusion? Once again Google distorts media to promote itself & its business interests, while bogusly smearing competitors with fabricated trash.

Part of why Microsoft's search marketshare is less than Google's is that Microsoft is willing to block sleazy traffic partners, unlike Google. But Google's treatment of their partners is inconsistent. Using "inside voices" Googlers openly explain in plain English how they treat their partners: "we are using compatibility as a club to make them do things we want" - Google's Dan Morrill.

Big Companies Hate Honest Market Innovation

Large companies are largely counter to honest innovation in the marketplace. They are comfortable atop the perch and want to lock down innovation to maintain their current dominance.

Sure the big banks welcomed CDOs, MERS, etc. ... but those were welcomed precisely because they were part of an elaborate scheme of dishonesty and fraud. But the same society which brings us CDOs built on fraud (that ultimately cost you your job, your house, your retirement savings, the value of the currency, etc.) is also a society where dirty corporate whores push to force smaller market competitors to be entirely transparent.

This stuff is literally everywhere. Consider this: Major Record Labels Forced to Pay $45M USD for Pirating Music. Once again, property rights are only important when they are forcing their own rights, but they are willing to walk on the rights of others. Consider the actions of MarkMonitor, yet another seedy Google partner:

I have for years been telling you even if you have no interest in the new gTLD’s you had to pay close attention to the process as whatever rules come out of that process will be attempted to be applied to all existing TLD’s including .com, .net and .org.

This is especially troubling because as you know the new gTLD process has not even been approved yet since the .Net contract is up for renewal, trademark groups are going to push for this new system to take away domains, be imposed on .net

The very domain name of the front organization that is pushing to remove domain privacy is registered using a private registration. ipconstituency.org uses Domain Discreet!

Read this piece on Google & Skyhook and ask yourself if Google is actually open & is promoting or suppressing market innovation.

Small Businesses Typically Can't Act Sleazy

Try getting customer service from Google & you will quickly find yourself in a hall of mirrors. Compare that to the customer service you get from a small company. Sure some small companies may decide they have no interest in supporting freetards, but if you are actually a paying customer you will usually be treated well by small companies because word of mouth marketing is the most important lead channel for many small businesses.

When a consumer or small business owner gets caught (acting like a big business, and) doing something illegal they go to jail. When a big business repeatedly commits serious crimes the wost thing that could possibly happen is a shake up of management. A company has no soul. A corporation can't go to jail.

This is precisely why Google's corporate-first approach to relevancy is bad.

Soon after the Facebook/Google story broke a friend of mine told me they put “facebook smear of google” in Google & they got:

• Image result = Globe and Mail
• Number one result = Huffington Post
• Number two result = TechCrunch (top websites are both AOL properties)
• Number three result = Get more results from the past 24 hours
• Number four result = The Daily Beast – better known as the site that broke the story.
• All other results are a retelling and mashup of the original.

The big publishers complained that smaller sites were stealing their stories. Google made secret arrangements with the Online Publishers Association & now the big companies get to rank at the top of the search results for stories that they stole from smaller outlets.

While small players are desperately fighting against each other for scraps off the table, the pawns have been driven out of the search ecosystem.

All webmasters are equal but some webmasters brands are more equal than others

Society hierarchy has been restored.

Don't be evil, just be corporate.

How to Handle Duplicate Content

Here is a fun webmaster help video from March 10th of 2010, answering the following question:

"If Google crawls 1,000 pages/day, Googlebot crawling many dupe content pages may slow down indexing of a large site. In that scenario, do you recommend blocking dupes using robots.txt or is using META ROBOTS NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW a better alternative?"

The answer kinda jumps around a bit, but here is a quote:

I believe if you were to talk to our crawl and index team, they would normally say "look, let us crawl all the content, we'll figure out what parts of the site are dupe (so which sub-tree are dupes) and we'll combine that together.

Whereas if you block something with robots.txt we can't ever crawl it, so we can't ever see that its a dupe. And then you can have the full page coming up, and then sometimes you'll see these uncrawled URLs where we saw the URL but we weren't able to crawl them and see that its a dupe.
...
I would really try to let Google crawl the pages & see if we can figure out the dupes on our own.

Trust in GoogleBot

The key point here is that before you consider discarding any of your waste you should give GoogleBot a chance to see if they can just figure it out on their end. Then, without updating said advice, Google rolled out the Panda update & torched 10,000's of webmasters for following what was up to then a Google best practice. Only after months of significant pain did Google formally suggest on their blog that you should now block them from indexing such low value pages.

Matt's video also suggested some of the other work around options webmasters could do (like re-architecting their site or using parameter handling in Webmaster Tools), but made it sound like Google getting it right by default was anything but an anomaly. What such advice didn't take into account was the future.

What Does a Search Engineer Do?

The problem with Google is that no matter what they trust, it gets abused. Which is why they keep trying to fold more signals into search & why they are willing to make drastic changes that often seem both arbitrary & unjust.

Search engineers are well skilled at public relations. A big part of what search engineers do is managing the market through FUD. If you can get someone else to do your work for you for free then that is way more profitable than trying to sort everything out on your end.

Search engineers are great at writing code. A lot of what the search engineers do is reactionary. Some things get out of control and are so obvious that FUD won't work, so they need to stomp on them with new algorithms. Most search engine signals are created through tracking people, so they usually follow people. Even when it seems like they are trying to change the game drastically, a lot of that data still comes from following people.

What to Do as an SEO?

The ignorant SEO waits until they are told by Google to do something & starts following "best practices" after most of the potential profits have been commoditized, both by algorithmic changes & a market that has become less receptive to a marketing approach which has since lost its novelty.

The *really* ignorant SEO only listens to official Google advice & trusts some of the older advice even after it has become both stale & inaccurate. As recently as 2 years ago I saw a published author in the SEO space handing out a tip on Twitter to use the Google toolbar as your primary backlink checking tool. Sad!

The search guidelines are very much a living breathing document. If search engines are to remain relevant they must change with the web. Those blazing new paths & changing the landscape of internet marketing often operate in ways that are not yet commonplace & thus not yet covered by guidelines that are based on last year's ecosystem. Individual campaigns fail often, because they are trying something new or different. Off of each individual marketing campaign the expected outcome is failure. However they generally win the war. Those who follow behind remain in their footprints (unless they operate in less competitive markets).

The savvy SEO is a trail blazer who is pushing & probing to test some of the boundaries. They are equally a person who watches the evolution of the web through the lens of history, attempting to predict where search may lead. If you can predict where search is going you are not as likely to get caught with your pants down as the person who waits around for Google telling them what to do next. It may still happen in some cases, but it is less common & you are more likely to be able to adjust quickly if you are looking at the web through Google's perspective (rather than through the perspective they suggest you use).

Google's Noble Respect for Copyright

Google has a history of challenging the law & building a business through wildcatting in a gray hat/black hat manner.

• They repeatedly broke the law with their ebook scanning project. Their ebook store is already open in spite of a judge requiring them to rework their agreements.
• They bought Youtube, a den of video piracy & then spent $100 million on legal bills after the fact. When they were competing with Youtube they suggested that they could force copyright holders to pay Google for lost ad revenues if they didn't give Google access to the premium content. :D
• They sold ads against trademarks where it was generally viewed as illegal and awaited the court's decisions after the fact.
• They tried doing an illegal search tie-up with Yahoo & only withdrew after they were warned that it would be challenged. They later slid through a similar deal with Yahoo Japan that was approved.
• They "accidentally" collected personally identifiable information while getting router information & scanning streets (and we later learn via internal emails in court documents how important some of this "accidental" data collection was to them).
• They pushed Buzz onto Gmail users and paid the fine.
• Google torched UK finance comparison sites for buying links. Then Google bought one of the few they didn't torch (in spite of its spammy links). After getting flamed on an SEO blog they penalized that site, but then it was ranking again 2 weeks later *without* cleaning up any of the spammy links.
• When the Panda update torched one of your sites Google AdSense was probably already paying someone else to steal it & outrank you. Google itself scrapes user reviews & then replaces the original source with Google Places pages. The only way to opt out of that Google scrape is to opt out of Google search traffic.
• Google promotes open in others, but then with their own products it is all or nothing bundling: "we are using compatibility as a club to make them do things we want." - Google's Dan Morrill
• For years Google recommended warez and keygens and serials to searchers, all while building up a stable of over 50,000 advertisers pedaling counterfeit goods. That only stopped when the US government applied pressure, and then Google painted themselves as the good guys for fighting piracy.
• Google is reportedly about to launch their music service, once again without permission of the copyright holders they are abusing.

Those were examples of how Google interpreted "the guidelines" in modern societies.

Google doesn't wait for permission.

What are you doing right now?

Are you sitting around hoping that GoogleBot sorts everything out?

If so, grab a newspaper & pull out the "help wanted" section. You're going to need it!

If you want to win in Google's ecosystem you must behave like Google does, rather than behaving how they claim to & tell you to.

Google's Amit Singhal offered more "clarity" into Google's approach with the Panda update. However I am not convinced that any clarity was actually added, and I think a lot of the questions they ask are to a degree even a bit wrong-headed.

Would you trust the information presented in this article?

Sounds like this is all about promoting perceived authority.

Counter points:

• Did you (or anyone you know) trust this outlet to give you a complete worldview at any point in the last couple decades & end up bankrupt, utterly decimated, or destitute because you followed its advice (on say internet stocks or the housing bubble or using excessive credit because "this time may actually be different")?
• Did your allegiance to this particular media outlet cause you to be more likely to be unbelievably ignorant & ill informed about world-shaping anti-facts used to push things like wars based on fraud? Are there extra trillion Dollars of debt your children must pay interest on & over 100,000 people dead because a news outlet lied to you? And the US government (the largest seat of power & authority in the world today) was also complicit in ensuring American citizens were ignorant going into Iraq.
• A lot of news sites are given additional distribution through services like Google news, which start them from a position of authority (because if you go to search to find something & Google promotes their news vertical right away, then sites in that news vertical will rank highly instantly & accrue backlinks from that early exposure). The education system itself is partly a propaganda tool to teach you to trust an obey authority. If the banking crisis taught us nothing else it should have taught us that many authorities are not worthy of our trust as they act in self interested ways at the expense of the whole.

Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?

Mainstream media sites saw a $1 billion Dollar lift in annual ad revenue from the Panda update. Most mainstream media articles are *not* written by true subject matter experts, but rather by devout generalists who grab a couple quotes to fill out the shallow piece & make it feel more informed.

A lot of the "official" quotes are from officials who represent industry trade organizations. That means those folks support the interests of folks in that trade, even if/when that trade is working against the interest of the common man.

The problem is, you don't get to see who is a whore until *after* they already ____ed you. See for example David Lereah: "Ahhh, so he admits to being nothing more than a paid shill whose mouth was available for a price. How does that job description vary from the Trannies who hang out by the West Side Highway? In my book, not by very much. A whore is a whore is a whore."

Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?

*Cough* Google Video vs Youtube vs Vevo.

Aren't most AP articles by their definition redundant duplication?

How are some of Google's late-to-the-party services like their ebook store or their places pages justified if we seek to minimize redundancy?

Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?

Some sites aim to sell, while others aim to tell.

If a passionate hobbyist desires to share but isn't selling something (and thus uses a quirky site design or a more personal formatting structure) should they be dinged for putting their passion ahead of getting an unneeded SSL certification & paying firms like TRUSTe, McAfee & VeriSign?

Interestingly, sites which display some trust symbols are *more* likely to scam consumers. Being a con man requires abusing trust and confidence. Some of the top brands do just that, over and over again.

Sites which don't go out of their way to sell you something are more likely to be built on passion.

Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?

"Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by school ma'ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world." - Henry Louis Mencken

Further, the error of omission is one that is constantly made in the mainstream media, which is precisely why you have to read fringe rags like the Rolling Stone to get an honest look at how bankers are robbing the country blind. Of course you will read the same article in the mainstream media in 6 or 7 years, after the statue of limitations runs out. And they will sell it as "new" news, even though the story at that point is nearly a decade old.

Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?

I can tell you sure as hell that the auto-generated spam stub pages on the mainstream media sites (driven by services like DayLife or Truveo) which scrape blogs like mine are not driven by passion. You can't program a bot to have "passion."

Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?

Hard to disagree with this point. However, it is worth noting that the mainstream media is notorious for stealing stories.

Further, I have had a client featured in a well read trade magazine where they wrote an entire article on the client. They were unwilling to link to the client's site (even though the client was the only source & entire purpose for the article) because they said they felt it would be too promotional. How warped is it that they will do a photo shoot at your house & make you the feature of an article, yet they are afraid to link because that might be seen as being too promotional!

Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?

This is actually a bit of a bait and switch styled topic. Let me explain. In an ideal world every single page would be great.

But when some brands are above regulation, Google keeps screwing up source attribution & Google creates no-value-add scraper pages like their places pages, if you ensure that every page you make is unique & value add then if you operate at any scale you will likely go bankrupt in the search game (unless you have significant non-search distribution).

Most articles individually are failures that do not pay for themselves. It is the rare success that helps carry the failures. You do not know which is which in advance, but you hope that with some level of effort and scale you are marginally profitable out the other end.

This is how literally all forms of publishing work: online, music, movies, books, etc.

In terms of a money loser, take for instance this article. I am already rather well known, have a wide following, spent hours writing that article, and ultimately it garnered 1 comment & 0 inbound links (once you back out scraper sites, automated links, and links with nofollow on them).

Making things worse, you not only compete against others who will copy anything of yours that is successful, but if Google does decide to whack your site with a penalty then a scraper site (which Google paid with AdSense money) that steals your content will outrank you for your own work. How exactly do you provide a unique substantial value add when Google is paying others to steal & republish your work wholesale?

Things like source attribution issues, brand bias, and Google competing against publishers with scraper pages have a very real and significant impact on profit margins. A good sustainable company is generally lucky to have 20% profit margins. When Google introduced their places pages that scraped TripAdvisor Google instantly redirected 10% of TripAdvisor's search traffic.

Ultimately the above issue with content is not down to cost or effort, but if what you are doing is profitable. If it is not, then it is simply unsustainable.

And even when you are profitable, you can count on Google helping others subvert that position.

On the topic of value add, I have even seen people buying AdSense ads to redistribute 3rd party works, where the only value "add" was lowering the retail price!

How much quality control is done on content?

A lot of the high ranking and much hyped social media networks like MySpace, Friendster, Twitter & Facebook are almost exclusively spam. A couple days ago I deleted over 75% of my Facebook "friends" because I was sick of getting daily email updates about how some dirtbag wanted to promote some autowealth MLM blaster unlimited downstream product on my wall.

That is not to say that everyone I deleted did anything wrong (most of them are likely good people) but there was no opportunity cost to spamming. The spammers who automate drive everything toward the tragedy of the commons. A paywall is perhaps the single best filter for quality, but if you use a paywall expect to deal with a lot of freetard rage & expect Google to pay some folks to steal it.

Google polices the web, but anything goes in their ad programs.

You can see how ridiculous the double standard is by simply considering that Google let their counterfeiting advertisers count grow to 50,000 strong before finally axing them when the US government pressured Google. Bizarrely, Google had the audacity to position themselves as good doers who were cracking down on spammers, when in fact they were taking their own longtime business partners out to the wood shed!

Does the article describe both sides of a story?

Mainstream media sources often like to share "both sides of a story" to seem unbiased. But the truth is that media by its very nature is biased toward the interest of advertisers & away from consumers. See, for example, either Manufacturing Consent or the BGH lawsuit.

Further, some well known corporations (LIKE GOOGLE) blackball media outlets that question them in certain ways. Google would never give exclusives to SEOBook & the sites that they do give exclusives to would lose the relationship if they were as blunt as we are.

Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?

Lots of recognized authorities have conflicting funding sources - something that was well highlighted in early Google research, and has been consistently exposed (years or decades after the fact) in the medical space.

Many firms which can "move the market" regularly trade against the advice they give to retail schleps.

Honesty is more important than authority, but then being bland & honest is not quite as remarkable (or profitable) as putting on a coat of spin.

Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?

How would Google's efforts stand up when graded against this suggestion? Why does Google have Google Video, Youtube & Vevo?

Further, most market leaders do have large networks and multiple branded sites for purposes of branding, segmentation, and double dipping in the marketplace. Remember when Bankrate (which already owned Bankrate, Nationwide Card Services, Credit Card Search Engine, Bankaholic, etc.) bought out CreditCardsGuide.com & it got temporarily penalized for the spammy links it had? Well it ranks again & of course since then they have also bought out CreditCards.com. You see this sort of behavior amongst almost any big brand: from Amazon.com to Zappos. (Oh wait, Amazon.com now owns Zappos!)

Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?

A lot of the best content comes from people who are subject matter experts. But those people may have only mastered their subject & may be new to: writing, website design, online publishing, etc.

For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?

Let's put it this way: the media people consume is in part responsible for the current state of health in the US where there is an obesity epidemic. Further, a lot of the leading health authority sites (like WebMD) run special advert sections in their site where it looks just like content but you have to read the small print to see it is an ad.

Going one step further on this front, it is worth mentioning that a number of the large pharmaceutical corporations have repeatedly sold drugs for off label purposes & yet none of their packaging is required to highlight those ill deed they did that have literally killed millions of people.

And let's not forget Google's take on educating misinforming the public about these drugs.

Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?

A lot of "authoritative" sites are simply sites with large ad budgets.

Quick, tell me which company advertises a clever gecko with a British accent. Other than as a mascot (& perhaps alliteration), how relevant is that gecko (or the accent) to their business? Not at all. But they do spend nearly a billion Dollars a year on ads.

Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?

Most articles that do are money losers.

Especially true while Google is funding so much no-cost automated web scraping.

Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?

Held to your own standard, how would Google Places pages hold up?

Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?

A lot of the stuff which is shared is shared precisely because it is ill-informed, controversial, or shares someone's pre-existing biases.

Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?

In the Manufacturing Consent DVD a big media guy highlighted that they like to have a 60/40 split between ads and content. Google already pushes online publishers to do less, even if Google does the exact opposite:

Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?

Aren't print magazines where a lot of the bait and switch headlines came from?

Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?

Do you mean something similar to most magazine articles? Or do you mean the content farms that Google funded & then used as a justification to torch 10,000's of small businesses?

Held to your own standard, how would Google Places pages hold up?

(I know. I know. If what you do looks like what Google does then you MUST be a spammer.)

Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?

This basically excludes almost any user generated content site, with the exception of Youtube.

Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

I'll complain about something I just saw. ;)

While searching for a link for a blog post I was writing today, the #1 Google result (not voted up by social circle stuff) was a Tweet linking to a Hootsweet framed page linking to a music industry site which posts RSS feed content and linked to a BusinessInsider article that referenced the TechCrunch article I was looking for.

If we want to get rid of unneeded duplication & noise then why is Google tying their bonus system to promoting more social media noise? After Amazon.com has done a great job with Kindle why is there a need for Google's ebook marketplace? After Yelp has created a strong community review site (with real editorial expenses) why is there a need for Google Places to scrape & displace its reviews?

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tl;dr

If you look at what actually happens in reality (rather than what folks claim to support in their "ideals") it is anarchy. The bankers stole what they could and moved on. The pharmaceutical corporations create fear-driven propaganda about the dangers of drug re-importation, all the while pushing drugs for off label purposes. Google pays people to steal your content, then tells you to suck it up & it is your fault you are not a big brand.

Anarchy is here.

The only difference is that it is dressed up in suits and fancy language, where people perceive anarchists as like ripped jeans, megadeth shirt wearing, pyro's.

With Google making the life of the SEO harder and harder, it pays to add as many marketing strings to our bows as we can. In this article, we'll look at a way to brand and position using stories. Hopefully, if we have a good story, and tell it well, people are more likely to remember us, and more likely to pass the story on.

Are We Special?

Most people think their site is special. But, by definition, few sites in a given niche can be special.

If we target a keyword term, that many other sites are targeting, we'll probably write a similar keyword-loaded page, including the same synonyms, derived from the same keyword tools, using the same headings in bold, in the hope of appearing in the top ten list of pages - which are just like the others.

We may distinguish ourselves by managing to rank in the top three, but, as we know, there are no guarantees we'll maintain this advantage.

We Need Something Else

If SEO is our only strategy, then this will only work if few other people are using SEO. How many niches worth fighting for are like that these days?

Not many.

Generally speaking, the more mature the niche, the more you need something besides SEO. You need to make as much effort to stand out as possible, otherwise people will likely overlook and forget you. There are too many other sites and options.

Let's look at a differentiation strategy based on stories.

Why Use Stories?

Stories are universal.

The human race has been using stories for thousands of years. We use stories because they are informative, memorable, and easily spread to others. Isn't that what we want our sites to be, too?

Every news story is a tragedy. Every religion is a story of redemption. Politicians tell stories, some of which are true! The alternative would be to give people a string of disconnected data and facts. Such data and facts may be 100% true, but they are seldom memorable or easily repeatable. Telling a compelling story is one good way to contextualize information, and make it more meaningful.

A story isn't just words on a page, saying how great a company is, and what products they have, and if you want them, you should "click here". That's surface. Think of "story" as a sub-text, the underlying, perhaps unspecified tale of who you are, what you're doing, and how you can help people solve their problems. This is a form of positioning, and branding, but I find it's helpful to reduce those high concepts down into a simple narrative. It helps bring a lot of different, and sometimes complicated, marketing aspects together.

Everyone can tell a story, especially about themselves.

The Mechanics

Every business has a story.

Take Amazon.

The Amazon is the largest river in the world, which is an appropriate name for a site which aimed to be the largest retailer on the planet. Amazon is huge. Amazon is huge because they took the shopping experience, made it easier, and people loved it. With one click, a customer could order a book, or a DVD, and many other products and have it sent to them. Amazon faced some huge challenges. Just how do you store and ship a vast array of products and still make money? Amazon do massive volume, and use unique, sophisticated tracking and packing systems to overcome these challenges. Amazon's cloud computing service alone has revenues in excess of $500m.

Amazon's story is mostly about "being big". All very well for Amazon, of course, but what about the little guy showing people how to build stuff? There's a story in that, too.

Tim Carter founded "Ask The Builder.com". Tim provides tips for DIY, answers building questions, and provides product and tool reviews. Rather than the home DIY enthusiast going out and buying manuals, or hiring an expensive builder, Tim provides his information for free, and his video's provide depth that printed books do not. Tim clearly cares about building, and the home DIY enthusiast. Tim's gone a step further, and told his life story.

Try boiling your site down into such a story. Once you have a story, you can then flesh out narratives that flow through everything you do, from your graphic design, to your copy, to your approach to customer services.

For example, Tim's story is a "small, personal" story. It is fitting that he doesn't have a glossy, corporate theme, as this would grate against the narrative. Rather, the site is a bit raggedy and amateurish, in a good way. He is providing one-to-one personal help, so it fits that he talks directly to camera. It fits that, unlike Amazon, you know who is behind the site. It fit's the the About Page is a personal history. It's approachable. It's all part of the "small, personal" story. It helps make the site more convincing, and hopefully more memorable, if common themes are repeated.

A story helps achieve focus, clarity and distinction.

How To Construct A Story

If you're having problems getting started, here's a work-plan.

1. Describe Your Brand

What do you do? Make it short and sweet i.e. "Provide advice to home DIY enthusiasts". "Sell books online".

2. Where Did You Come From, And Where Are You Now

How did you start? Why did you start? What did you do before you started? What position are you in now?

3. What Challenges Do You Face?

What problem do you solve? What are challenges have you overcome? It helps if these are the same challenges and problems your customers face.

4. Personify/Quantify These Challenges

Did you overcome people? Organizations? Time? Money? Lack of knowledge?

5. Who Is Your Target Market?

Who, exactly, are you trying to help? Where do they live? What is their time of life? What challenges do they face?

6. What Does Your Target Market Care About?

Security? Being first? Individual care? Low prices? Value?

7. Why Should They Buy From You?

What do you offer that other sites do not?

8. What is your end goal?

How do you know you're completed what you set out to do? What is the measure of victory?

Answer these questions, and it becomes easy to make decisions about design, positioning, branding, and marketing.

Hopefully it helps make your site more memorable, too.

Insurance is a popular, profitable area for some SEO's. Trying to find reputable insurance for an SEO business is not so popular because many insurance agents do not have the experience to make the distinction between what a web design shop does versus what an SEO or PPC business does.

Prior to entering this business I was an insurance agent and before that I was an underwriter and I still have my agent license (hey, you never know!!). There are policies out there which SEO's should consider purchasing as well as any web design or development shop.

There are a few different policies you might want to consider in this industry:

• General Liability
• Professional Liability (Errors and Omissions)
• Workers Compensation (if you have employees)
• Short-Term and Long-Term Disability

As a business owner, you will have or not have the following conditions:

• employees
• office space
• equipment
• office space where you conduct business with clients and vendors

Workers Comp and STD/LTD

Workers Compensations and STD/LTD are fairly general insurance policies with respect to the policies not really being specific to the SEO business. Here in the US, Workers Comp is administered on the state level. Workers Comp is required in certain situations, depending on your state, so it is wise to check with your attorney and insurance agency regarding what is appropriate for you.

While you only have to worry about Workers Comp if you have employees (actual employees hired and placed on payroll not contracted labor or freelance arrangements) you should consider Short Term and/or Long Term Disability insurance even if you're a solo SEO.

Short Term and Long Term Disability

If you are coming from corporate America you likely had these policies under a group plan (which is why it's so cheap). Essentially, it breaks down as follows:

• Coverage responds if you are injured and unable to work (this doesn't cover sick time and generally excludes maternity coverage)
• Short Term Disability will cover you for a certain period of time (usually under 90 days) at 100% of your pre-tax (sometimes you can choose post-tax) income.
• Long Term Disability kicks in either after Short Term has expired or if you decided not to purchase Short Term at all.
• Long Term will typically cover you at 60% or so of pre-tax (or post-tax if you are given the choice) for an extended period of time.

Wages are usually determined based on your prior year's tax return in conjunction with a current Profit/Loss statement (another reason why you should report all your income!).

Sometimes it makes more sense to get a quote on LTD (as it's cheaper) and just build up a reserve of your own to cover what Short Term Disability would have covered (rather than spending money on premiums and losing it if you never file a claim).

If you advance a claim for either, there usually is a waiting period of a few weeks to a few months while a case manager is assigned to investigate the claim.

Be prepared to get put under the microscope much more than you would if you were part of a large group plan (if you work for a large company as an example) as you are no longer part of a protected herd, but this is where using an independent agent can be help in fending off the overzealous claims adjuster who might see you as an easy case :)

Different policies have different exclusions so it's wise to discuss all your extracurricular activities with your agent as things like sky-diving are usually not covered causes of injury.

General Liability

This is one of the most common forms of business insurance. The meat of what this type of policy provides is:

• Bodily Injury and Property Damage
• Defense Costs while defending a suit
• Personal Injury
• Medical Expenses
• Operations Liability

Most of this coverage is applicable when/if some of the following conditions occur:

• Client is injured on your premises
• Damages to property you are renting to other businesses
• Advertising mishaps (slander, libel, copyright infringement, etc)
• Injuries sustained by others on your defined premises due to the activities and operations of your business

Combining GL with Property Insurance (BOP Policies)

Many times, a GL policy is combined with Property Insurance to make what is called a BOP or business owners policy (BOP package).

Property Insurance is fairly standard and covers things like:

• Inventory
• Equipment (probably computers for most of us)
• Records and Documents
• Buildings
• Other Real and Personal Property
• Lost income due to a covered loss

A BOP is really geared towards business which have an office building, equipment in that office, meet clients on the premises, or rent out space to others.

Neither of these, or the BOP package, cover Workers Comp. A BOP is a good solution for a shop which has a physical location, clients on site, and has inventory/equipment on premises.

Professional Liability & Specialized Insurance

These types of policies is where a chunk of the specialized coverage for an SEO would come from. A BOP policy is meant to cover "products" with respect to liability so as an SEO, web designer, or web developer you'll need more specialized coverage which covers things like:

• Data Storage
• Malicious Code (say your Wordpress site gets hacked and distributes malware or keyloggers)
• Hosting
• Loss of business income (say your host goes down and your client's e-commerce site goes offline, or it goes offline due to an error on your end)
• Data security

Depending on your level of involvement with servers, software, and application development you may want to scale up and get a more specialized policy. Lots of larger insurers sell specialized, broad polices under the name of Technology Insurance or Information Technology Insurance.

Over the years these policies have developed to cover more and more specialized areas of tech insurance. In the beginning they were mostly geared towards straight IT companies but now cover all sorts of tech groups like:

• Web Designers
• Web Developers
• Consultants
• Outsourced Applications
• Hosting Services

Be Up-front

Our industry is no different than any other, lots of snakes. If you are engaging in some kind of off the wall activity you really need to tell the agent. Tell them exactly what you do, if you are doing things that your state or other states consider illegal (fake reviews for instance) then don't expect your policy to respond to such things.

It's no different than getting a homeowners policy while saying you don't have a Pit Bull, even though you have a Pit Bull (which are excluded by all standard insurers), then expecting coverage when your Pit Bull bites the neighbor.

While the agent may not understand the nuances of the business, you are typically good to go if you take the time to fill out the application completely and accurately.

Why Use a Local, Independent Agent?

Most folks you get in the call centers of GEICO or Progressive are salaried or hourly employees, they don't live in your community, and they really don't care to get you the best deal (they can only give your theirs).

Having a local agent gives you access to more markets, someone close by to help you fight any injustices the carrier may try to perpetrate on you, someone who is making a living selling policies in a local market (less likely to burn you as they care about their reputation), and someone who can help insure all your personal and business needs.

A call center rep, if they are on commission, generally wants to churn and burn through the calls and probably won't meet with you face to face to go over anything and answer all your questions (or get answers). Plus, most local agencies need help with web marketing so it could be an easy in for you!

What Do You Need?

Scenario 1 (Work from home, no employees)

Get a business endorsement on your personal homeowners policies and schedule your equipment if you need to (might not need to if you have warranties in place already). This will also make your home office deduction look more official to the IRS.

Get a Professional Liability (E&O) policy and look into a specialized Technology policy depending on your business model. Consider STD/LTD insurance for lost wages if you can't work.

Scenario 2 (Home office, external office, no employees)

Same as above but add in a BOP (General Liability and Property Package) which is probably required if you are renting office space anyway.

Scenario 3 (Home office, external office, employees)

You should check with your attorney about how you are defining employees and if that means they are actual employees versus free-lancers or contractors.

You would want to look at a BOP, Professional Liability and/or specialized Tech Insurance, and Workers Comp if required as well as employee benefit/insurance packages for things like STD/LTD.

Insurance is Boring

Yes it's boring but it's worthwhile for most of us from a cost/benefit standpoint (or legal liability standpoint). Solid, legal contracts reviewed by attorney's are also HIGHLY recommended.

Make time to sit with some local agents to really go over your business and your business activities. It's a really soft market right now for business insurance, especially small business, so agents are going to be more than happy to sit with you and go over what they have to offer.

Why Contracts are Important

There are many contracts available online, for free and for a fee. These contracts, even ones from places like LegalZoom have not been reviewed for your specific business by attorneys in your state.

A contract is no good if it's not enforceable. You can probably expect a fee for a good attorney to review your contracts, and make any necessary changes, to be in the high hundreds of dollars or low four figures.

There is a cost certainty to the cost for an attorney to give you the green light on a set of contracts (though, for really big deals you might still be wise to get a contract specific to that deal) but there is no cost certainty to the legal liability you could face if your contracts are essentially worthless in a court of law.

Another thing you'll want to watch out for is a client who tries to give you unlimited downside from a liability standpoint (in the contract) but severely limits the upside to your fees. You might be willing to take on the risk of downside so long as you are getting a decent %, or a few % points, of the upside on the deal. This is another case where an attorney reviewing the contracts can be well worth the cost.

Choosing the Right Business Entity

Your insurance policy is mutually exclusive from your business entity. If you are a sole-proprietor your personal assets are at risk even though your insurance policy covers defense costs. Choosing the right entity is another way to insulate yourself from liability.

In most states a single member LLC up to a full-blown corporation (and everything in between like a multi-member LLC, S-corp, and so on) will insulate your personal assets (home, savings, future personal earnings) from legal liability, whereas a sole proprietorship will leave your personal assets exposed.

The combination of a good insurance policy and the right business entity will cover defense costs (on a covered event) and protect your personal assets. Choosing the wrong set up can be financially disastrous.

The policy will cover defense costs if a claim is covered but if it is a frivolous lawsuit, or something personal, you might have to defend yourself. This is where having the right entity is key because your personal assets are not at risk even though you are probably going to incur your own legal costs.

The best way to protect yourself is to insure and to pick either an LLC or a corporation of some kind. Choosing neither, or one but not the other, can leave you and your business significantly exposed to liability.