The Complete History of The World, 29,457 Different Ways...

Helium announced the launch of their article marketplace. Arbitrage giant Geosign is on the client list, scooping up automotive articles. Some of the article descriptions show that the goal is to get just enough content to wrap ads around it, in true arbitrage style:

Collect the latest news about Honda (or another car manufacturer of your choosing). Summarize the news. How does this news affect the average Honda owner? Before you write, make sure that you do some research. Take a look at the latest articles on Google News, the latest automotive blogs on Technorati, and any other online sources you feel are relevant. Max 350 word count.

Some of the other publishers are looking for a bit more meat, but all are likely sharing their marketing strategies with anyone willing to take a look.

How They Should Have Launched

If they were trying to make a big splash at launch time they sent the wrong message. They should have done some co-branded marketing allowing writers to publish for traditional media sites, and/or partnered with trusted charities on important issues.

Why You Should Try Helium

The pitch at Helium is:

Real advice from real people-more than 300,000 articles. Why should you waste your time wading through search results when what you really want is the knowledge that comes with first-hand experience?

Do a bunch of underpaid freelance writers on a generalist site about writing filter through the world's information better than Google or other sites that crawl and index the web? Not likely. For example, I just went to Technorati, and discovered this video is currently popular, with 44 people linking to it

How can a closed off network compete with the web as a whole? It is slower and of lower quality, and will always be that way. Plus it has a spamming incentive baked into the pay structure.

Will the marketplace be a vibrant one, or will the site be a noise filled AdSense honeypot that results in watered down content clogging up the search results? With about a half million pages already indexed in Google you would think Hellium should have more than 14 advertisers signed up. Once writers start tracking their AdSense profit-share results and the site starts ranking for more competitive phrases how many erectile dysfunction articles do you think will get published? The same thing will happen to it that happened to Squidoo.

Human Focused Near Markov Chain Content Websites

Content for everyone about everything by everyone websites are going to make search engines more aggressive in filtering how deep they are willing to crawl these types of sites. If they are not, it won't be long until AssociatedContent, Helium, eHow, WeHow, WikiHow, Yahoo! Answers, UK.Answers.Yahoo.com, Wordpress.com (I have seen PR6 automated splogs on Wordpress based on aggressive tagging) and a few other similar sites join Wikipedia, YouTube, eBay, subdomain.ebay.com, and Amazon as Google's top 10 results for everything. And then the newspapers will respond by getting more aggressive with pumping out garbage content. Some deep pocketed domainers may also look at the success or failure of sites like WeHow to help determine their longterm strategy.

What signal does Google want to send? Will Google ever try to regulate how you acquire content? Will any of the content sources eventually be deemed bad in a similar light to how Google tries to manipulate public perception about buying link based advertisements?

Hiring Great Writers

With more people trying to solve the content problem it is getting easier to scale and look large even if you are solo. If you have an arbitrage website or authoritative website and just need backfill content then sites like Helium might fit your needs, but if you are looking for higher quality writers search around for stories about how Gawker got built, search for thought topical leaders in the blogosphere and offer them similar salaries, and perhaps post an ad on Craigslist or the Problogger Job Boards.

If you value your time in the longrun it is cheaper to hire a great employee rather than filter through the noise hoping to find a star.

Discovering the Hellium Experience

I am off to go read about contacting aliens, the truth about Kennedy, debt consolidation mortgage loan, what you need to know to apply for a credit card, how to get an instant approval credit card, uses of Viagra, hypoactive sexual desire disorder, and best places to bet online. All the best bits of the web in one spot. They even have what is spam, but it's not comprehensive enough. There is no mention of Helium. ;)

Ads Are Content: It Doesn't Pay to Separate Church and State

Any independent webmaster who has been making good money on the web for a few years has realized that blending ads in content, or distributing ads as content, is much more profitable than a clean separation of church and state. Jakob Nielson recently wrote about usability research showing that people ignore ads unless they look like content and are in the content area of the page. Once a publisher has enough distribution they claim it is unethical to blend content and ads, but if you look close enough at the publisher and advertiser relationships there are overlaps in virtually every category and on every site. There are numerous well known sites in the search space that would never give me any exposure until AFTER I bought ads at their site, which mentioned me regularly after my ad buy.

Here are a few examples of how ads influence editorial:

Some advertisers get mentioned just because they advertise a lot, while many publishers create content around high profit niches, and others organize their editorial content based on votes and usage data that can be bought (indirectly) through their ad network (think StumbleUpon and Google AdWords).

If your solution to the issue of low profit margins in publishing is to aggressively blend low value ads then you are eventually going to fail. As a publisher then there are at least 7 major ways to compete against others who are practicing and profiting from the blend, without being labeled as unethical, or undermining your own growth potential:

  • branding & positioning: create a brand or service that sounds informational and content-like even though it is an ad (think Bankrate, which likely pays virtually nothing to syndicate their ads as content to many major newspapers)

  • free samples: much like Bankrate syndicates information to newspapers you can also allow people to access a lot of value for free, then charge for a deeper access (think Compete.com profiles and their Search Analytics product)
  • segregate: keep your main content stream free of ads, build authority, and create an offers section on your site
  • be pure: don't publish any ads, wait until you have a strong brand, and then launch a better business model than competing channels
  • indirect revenues: use your site to build mindshare, brand awareness, status, and expertise. then cash in on that via indirect revenue streams
  • move yourself up the value chain: instead of selling AdSense or similar related ads, sell one of your own products and services. you can typically place these ads in-line without as much scrutiny or brand damage as blending someone else's ads in your content (see below)
  • free user content: if you can create a platform and rule-set that allows others to build value on your idea while drawing enough of an audience to sort signal from noise you can profit heavily from that (think forums, Technorati tags, Yahoo! Answers, Digg, or Google)

Do you have any additional ideas for profiting from integration without being labeled as unethical?

What Eating a Dozen Cookies Says About Your Personality

Based on a study in the Journal of Consumer Research, Newsweek recently published an article about how the lingering feeling of guilt, or lack thereof, affects forward consumption behavior.

One memorable example of psychological targeting a friend at an SEO conference gave as a technique to exploit the guilt feeling was upselling a computer cleaner announcing that a computer is infected after a person views a porn website, warning how would your boss or wife feel if they knew you were viewing porn sites.

MediaPost just blogged about a survey which concludes that women shopping habits are consistent throughout life:

According to a new online survey of over 3,000 women, ages 18-49, by AMP Agency, how a woman approaches shopping does not change as she grows older, shifts from life stage to life stage, moves from region to region, has children, or moves income brackets. A woman's approach to shopping is very much part of who she is: "it is part of her DNA."

Google has a patent for targeting in game ads based on user psychology. How far those ads get optimized remains to be seen, but creating media which makes it easy to understand and target the psychological flaws of users will become far more profitable as media titans and marketers invest more capital in understanding psychology and behavioral targeting.

Socionomics & The Wave Principal

One of my favorite parts about blogging is that thousands of people way smarter than me read my blog and give me feedback. Recently I was sent a couple links about socionomics and the wave principal.

Information markets influenced by a wide array of marketing techniques and publishing formats are likely also bound by the same sort of wave principals that guide economic markets.

The general trend (online or off) goes something like this...Politicians, corporations, and other powerful institutions abuse language, cook the books, and game rating and ranking systems until eventually the fraud can be held no longer. The bottom falls out of a near perfect market. Then the market gets new guidelines and regulations, which start getting gamed before they are even drafted.

The online world largely reflects the offline world, with a bias toward the edges (as smaller markets can be served online, we are more inclined to follow things that reinforce our worldview, and most modern measures of relevancy are aligned with things that easily associated with signs of bias). Here are some examples of how wave theory applies to search, publishing, and monetization.

  • Companies and individuals aggressively optimize conversion rates until one day that form of optimization goes so far that some consider it fraud, as reported by a guy who was flamed in the last Internet bubble.

  • Every effective marketing method spreads, gets abused, dies down, then is reformatted and reused again under another name, but touches the same emotional triggers.
  • Each new social network is easy to game. After early adopters are ingrained in the hierarchy, the story spreads about how easy it is to game, then the ROI is marginal at best for the latecomers.
  • All the new social networks spread out consumer interest, so now Google is investing into trying to pull it back together.
  • Google trusts links so people buy them. Google starts filtering some obvious bought links and tries to manipulate public perception when they find that they can't do it well enough to put a dent in the link buying market.
  • Most new sites are spammy. Google trusts old sites so people buy them. etc.
  • You publish news of how successful a site is. Either Google tries to kill it or dozens of people clone it.
  • Auto-generated content is getting more sophisticated and trusted sites are pumping out garbage content to monetize their authority, so Google requires more link equity to keep your content indexed.

Measuring relevancy and manipulating it are both forward looking and reactive processes. As is creating a self-funding brand in a fast changing market dominated by misinformation and information pollution.

[Update: Great follow up post at Squareoak.]

The Stupidity of Post Only Email Marketing Messages

I recently went to a conference in Seattle and stayed at the Sheraton hotel. Within a couple days of leaving they sent me an email reminding me of their marketing messaging: Don't be a Stranger...Because you don’t just stay here. You belong. Yet when I replied to the message with feedback about my stay, it bounced. I don't remember opting into the email list. Putting my name in an email then ignoring me doesn't make you special. If you don't care for feedback it is best not to ask for it. Just in case Sheraton has a great worker who roams the web, here is my feedback:

  • we stayed only 4 nights, yet got charged for 6 days Internet access

  • we rented a movie, got charged for 3
  • our snack tray was never refilled during our stay
  • my wife and I were unable to be online at the same because you guys do not offer wireless and refused to put a second line in the room

We ordered room service and it was delicious, but all the above stuff was brutal. :)

How Google AdSense Cannibalizes Content Based Business Models

Contextual advertising makes it easy for people who are not good at selling but good at building an audience to profit from their traffic stream. But the traffic stream that contextual ads work best for are search referrals, especially since

  • the contextual ad networks are extensions of the search ad networks

  • regular visitors learn to ignore ads
  • the contextual ads typically have little to no editorial pre-sell

Sorry, You're Done. Thanks for Playing Webmaster

As mentioned on Sphinn, without warning Robin Good recently had his Google search referrals wiped away. In a post about the event he stated:

Google keeps changing and refining its own approach and policies to improve the quality of its results and in this effort, it appears that it may have become more restrictive and intolerant of issues and deviations from the official standards that it didn't bother about before.

The Difference Between Large & Small Publishers

If you monetize via Google's ads, much (perhaps most) of your revenue comes from Google searchers landing on your site, and thus you are stuck with Google's editorial search guidelines, which sometimes shift arbitrarily. In spite of Robin being a premium AdSense partner he was punished without warning. Google does it to their business partners large and small, though typically with more vengeance if the partner is small.

Likely because of Robin's distribution and influence (and the damage it would have cost Google to not fix the issue), Google started ranking his sites again, but that still doesn't change the experience from being unjust:

the fact of the matter IS that GOOGLE CAN and DOES arbitrarily penalize sites without being transparent about the reasons it does so.

Is it right that Google has so much power over my ability to "exist" as an entity over the internet? Isn't this the case, as Fabio Masetti says, of Google being able to play with the same net neutrality issues we fear from large telcos, for by having the mere possibility to switch off any content without official justifications, while asking me to plead guilty before I am even re-considered?

Some of those with a smaller following found their problem never had a chance to be cleared up.

When & Why I Stopped Trusting Google

If you have read this blog for the last month you could probably tell Google recently killed one of my sites as well. While it may have seemed my posts were due to anger, they were more to show how my perspective changed as I discovered and experienced how sleazy Google's business practices are firsthand. I still speak truth, but as my experiences changed so did my understand of truth. I still like Gmail and some of Google's other services, but I am finding it incredibly hard to trust them as a company.

Imagine re-branding a site you built over 10,000 organic links to, only to have Google view it as a deceptive redirect and KILL ALL OF YOUR LINK EQUITY while paying spammers to steal your content.

A single Google engineer can decide to kill the viability of a site because of who owns it. Then they pay people to steal your work. It is a long, drawn out, perhaps endless process to protect work from theft, especially if Google decides they would rather pay a thief to steal your content than to pay you directly. How could they do that without expecting you to speak publicly about how unjust that is?

If I wasn't an SEO they might not have taken vengeance on me so heavily, but because I know SEO, and I shared too much honest information they decided the only appropriate thing to do was to punish me by nuking my site. I respect that perspective, but it doesn't mean that I have any respect left for them.

Google: the Ultimate Parasitic Business Model

The more you trust Google the harder you fall when the day comes that they have a technical error, or one of their engineers is having a bad day and decides they no longer need you.

Relying on them to build your business is like relying on self-destructing genetically modified seeds to boost your harvest.

For a few years maybe the yields are a bit bigger, but then the seed prices go up, and so does the cost of the fertilizer required to make the seeds grow. Your margins keep going down until you are financially insolvent, while the engineering team gets a raise every year.

Why You Don't Need Google

To maximize Google AdSense earnings you have to place the ads front and center, which scare visitors away from your site, and make people less likely to read your site, trust your site, revisit your site, link to your site, or subscribe to your site.

If you don't plaster Google ads all over your site then your site is likely going to be viewed as being far more credible, and easier to link at, subscribe to, trust, etc. As your industry grows you grow faster than competing sites that use AdSense do.

To appreciate the difference between mediated growth with Google and natural organic logarithmic growth you can compare the sites Google just killed versus the growth in earnings of SeoBook.com. A couple years ago Google created a poor relevancy algorithm that filtered out thousands of websites for their official business names. Even when they filtered out SeoBook.com the site still earned 85% of what it made the month prior, and that is with a business model that sold information on how to rank on a site while that site was not even ranking for its own name!

The point being here is that if you use Google you set yourself at a specific spot on the value chain. If you try to maximize those earnings you prevent yourself from growing as quickly as you could/should. If you move yourself up the value chain Google not only controls less of your traffic, but they also only touch the least valuable portions of it. Unless you use Feedburner Google does not control your brand evangelists.

Should you trust your business to Google? Do you trust them more than you trust yourself? If so, submit a job application.

How to: Buy Links Without Being Called a Spammer

The types of link buys that Google has a distaste for are the links that are exchanged directly for cash. Modify your way of thinking just a little and there are a wide array of easy to buy high value links awaiting your purchase. The key to having a low risk profile is to make the link appear indirect.

Most links occur because of a value exchange of some sort. People link because

  • they find a resource to be valuable
  • they get paid directly for linking
  • they get paid indirectly for linking

Here are 18 indirect ways to buy links without looking like you are on a link buying binge.

Guest Blogging: Have a lot to share but little budget for exposure? Consider saving some of your best content for other websites that have the attention of your target market & offer to guest post for them. If you are looking for more general exposure and can't get onto the A list websites start by submitting to some of the B & C list sites that accept guest posts and work your way up. Services like MyBlogGuest make it easy to find relevant opportunities.

Featured Content:

  • Involve people in group interviews like SugarRae's link building interviews or SEOmoz's industry survey.
  • Create infographics & promote them to your target audience.
  • Create other featured resource content & promote it to those who link at quality resources. Internet Marketing Ninjas is great at this type of content creation & promotion.

Testimonials: Best thing ever. Buy now! ;)

Testimonials help increase sales because they are a sign of social trust. Many content management systems, web designers, programmers, and web hosts offer links to featured clients. Some keep full directories of sites using their services, while other sites, such as Pligg, also allow people using their software to buy an ad on the official software site.

Conferences: By paying to attend a conference and being social there some people may reference you on their blogs. Some conferences also list speakers, post an official list of attendees, and highlight sponsors with direct links. Giving away t shirts or coming up with viral games (such as drinkbait) will get you links.

Association Memberships: Trade organizations tend to have significant global authority and topical authority. In order to push the agenda of the organization many of these list members to show proof of social value. These links are often priced far below their value, and contributing directly to associations is a way to also get significant exposure in front of the type of people who are likely to buy from you and/or link at your site.

Contests: People are competitive animals. Contests like the Mahalo Follow refer a friend program also move the spamming activity away from the source and onto other people, thus allowing the central sites to profit from spamming without being called spammers.

Awards: Even if winning an award has absolutely no value people still like recognition. Winners like to talk about what they have won. In some cases you can even give award winners your product to get them to talk about it.

Donations: Support causes you believe in. Money is the fuel upon which charities can fund themselves and spread their messages. It is hard to call you a spammer for donating money to a good cause. If you get a bit of link equity out of it as a bonus why not enjoy the benefits of good karma? Better yet, you might be able to donate software or services to charities at little to no expense to you. How much is an SEO services by link on a PR8 charity site worth in branding and distribution?

Free Samples: This acts similar to donations, except it is easier to spread to a wider audience without appearing spammy, and if people like what you offer they may review it on their sites.

Widgets: Many embeddable tools (like analytics products, what is my PageRank tools, etc) provide static links back to the original source site. Some companies also provide emblems that their site is hosted on a green host or that they support some other cause.

Sponsorships: Many email newsletters are archived online. If you target a compelling offer to the right audience this may lead to additional links. Services like ReviewMe also allow you to put targeted offers in front of audiences who may help spread the word.

Web Directory Submission: An oldie, but an easy one to do. Here is a list of some of the better ones. The editorial guidelines are not as stringent as we are led to believe, and here are tips for getting the most out of your Yahoo! Directory submission. If you like video content here is a video about submitting your sites to directories.

Affiliate Programs: Even if affiliate links do not provide direct link juice, good affiliates still send a relevant stream of traffic to your site. Some affiliate programs also 301 redirect the affiliate links to the end merchant site. Affiliate programs allow clean companies to profit from the dirty parts of the web (think AdSense or Mahalo Follow).

Social Media: Partner with someone who enjoys writing junk for sites like Digg. If you are too lazy for that, StumbleUpon ads allow you to target ads to specific groups on StumbleUpon, and there are a number of Digg spamming services on the market. Here are some tips for link baiting.

Google AdWords or Other Ad Buys: You can buy ads and send targeted traffic streams to your linkworthy content. You can do it one keyword at a time, or target ads to specific websites. In some cases businesses get organic links just because people are talking about how often they see their ads, plus top of mind awareness leads to more usage and more links.

Link Out to Egomaniac Bloggers: This is a way of buying links by paying with your attention and distribution. People like getting mentioned, and are more likely to link to people who agree with them. Seth Godin linked to my blog again a few weeks ago and when I saw he mentioned my site (even if only in passing) for some reason that made me happy. Insightful blog comments are also likely to make a blogger want to talk about you.

Blog Carnivals: Blog carnivals are where a group of bloggers all talk about a topic and mention everyone else in the ring. These amount to a big circlejerk. If your site is legit and a market leader there is no need for this sort of stuff, but if your site is new in a saturated field doing this might be helpful. Plus others in the blog carnival may end up adding your site to their blogroll or talking about you again on their blog.

Press Releases: Do it too often and it looks cheesy, but some mainstream media outlets like CNN syndicate press releases, while others may choose to interview you based on your press release.

Hire Them / Buy Their Brand & Site: If someone already has a large following but is not monetizing it to the full potential consider hiring them and letting them help you build a more profitable business. You can also look for under-performing sites to buy. If someone is outside of your financial reach you may still be able to leverage their brand by interviewing them.

What is the Advantage of a .org Domain Name?

In a world dominated by .coms an ad agency decided to promote a financial services company as being different by highlighting the .org in their name to show their non commercial / non-profit nature. 99 times out of 100 a .com is better than a .org, but if you can get a name that costs a million for the .com and only pay a few grand for the .org version and then add $998,000 of marketing to it I think the .org comes out on top.

Using a .org can also make your business look more trustworthy if you are offering a free service and/or are a quasi non-profit. A large part of the current price differential between .com, .net, and .org names is that those who are the biggest domain buyers do not have much development talent or intent to develop them. As a PPC lander page it is hard to earn much as a .net or .org.

Defending Your Site Against a Google Proxy Hack

Dan Thies published a post about how people have been hacking Google's search results using proxies to get the original sites nuked as duplicate content. He also explained how to defend sites against the problem using free PHP scripts developed by Jaimie Sirovich. Dan Thies stated he thought many of the proxy hijack accidents were not accidents at all:

Of course, not all proxies are being run by innocent people for innocent reasons. Some of them are actually designed to hijack content - to deliver ads, etc. Some people want to steal your content, and they want the search engines to index it. In fact, I would not be surprised if a large part of the overall problem isn't caused by such people firing links at their own proxies.

I have seen numerous sites die to proxy hacking, and this is an issue Google has known about for over a year.

Yet another reason hand edits at Google coupled with Google paying AdSense scrapers to steal your content makes Google a pretty dirty company, especially when you consider their unofficial stance on copyright:

Your name can not be stripped and no one else can claim credit for it. That is credit, reputation is a non renewable resource. It can not be replicated. It can not be copied. To the degree that someone takes credit for your stuff, that's the degree to which you lose credit. It is always proportional.

When Google goes so far as trying to police link exchange and link buying why don't they do a better job policing AdSense? If they want to clean up their search index the easiest, most scalable, and most robust way to do so would be for them to worry about their own network, and stop paying content thieves via AdSense.

Bob Massa Starts Blogging

An SEO older than dirt by the name of Bob Massa recently started an seo blog. Peter DaVanzo also started a new blog on link building, and Teeceo started a blog on programming and SEO.

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