Some tools exist because they are valuable and remove market friction. Others exist because they are perceived as being valuable, even if they are actually value destroying, or only valuable in rare circumstances.

Valuable Tools of the Trade

Outside of paying for a domain name, hosting, site design, and buying a few links you could create (an ad supported) business online virtually free.

Blogs are easy to post to, easy to subscribe to, and easy to comment and interact with. Keyword tools and analytics services are easy to view and infer ideas and trends from. Searchable email saves time. Google Alerts and feed readers save time and keep you connected with your industry. Many of these tools are free, in spite of offering great value.

Negative Value Software

But there is another class of software that exists long after it is useful or profitable to use, or long before you would need to consider such a solution. Are you still paying for monthly submissions to the search engines? Not all of the solutions are outright fraud though (like monthly search engine submission services are). Even some of the good intentioned tools can still hurt you.

Automated Email

A friend of mine is nervous about launching their first linkbait, and wanted to use this enhanced email software to help automate finding the right people to contact. But until you get some experience in the marketplace you might be paying for value destroying software that hurts your brand.

• One software program my friend bought crashed his computer.
• Another was bought through Plimus. It was purchased, and simply never came...pretty bad after about a half dozen emails and a few phone calls. How hard is it to send an unlock code?
• One of my friends got his account banned by an ISP the first day, when he accidentally misused one such software program. One minute he was doing research, and then he clicked to the next step to refine it, and accidentally ended up sending out about 150 emails in under a minute. Ooooops.

And none of those situations even take into account brand value and risks of a reputation management issue arising.

Automated Bid Management Software

A customer of mine recently asked about what bid management software program made sense to use, as he was new to PPC and wanted to do it right from the start. But if you are new to the game I think you first need to do it by hand so you can understand how it works. If you use bid management software that is optimizing for the wrong things you may end up blowing through a lot of money. It is much harder to learn the ad network + the management tool at the same time rather than learning them one at a time, and in many cases human intuition works better than machines do.

There are a lot of ways to get caught up in the complexities of money saving tools and ideas to where you never do anything. You can't teach a software program, machine, or employee how to do marketing until after you have done it yourself.

Other Backwards Solutions

• Have you seen people pay to be able to resell some sleazy MLM company's junk on a 100% duplicate content subdomain off of the corporate site?
• Have you seen people pay for hosting and CMS services that are far worse than they can get for free from other providers or the open source community?
• Have you seen people using expensive keyword density analysis software this year?

What causes people to buy into such stuff - laziness? lack of research? greed?

What (does/doesn't) Work Well for You?

What tools made your marketing easier? Which ones set you back?

What works well in 2008? What is a waste of time? Twitter? FriendFeed?

Select Distribution

I recently mentioned the Sigur Rós Hiema video, which was featured on the YouTube homepage for a day and probably got about a million pageviews. An SEO Book reader named Satish discovered that after the video built up a lot of viral media and link exposure the video was set to private mode.

Google video, as a DRM service, failed miserably. But providing custom hosting for member videos that can only be viewed from certain sites or for a certain number of views is an easy win for YouTube if/when they decide to do so. Google already owns Checkout, so it should be easy to do after they have the right relationships in place.

I predict that if that limited syndication model is available to the masses, a future media pricing system will allow publishers to offer free video for the first X views and then the videos are turned to private / members only / payment required after they get a certain number of views. All the free views build the perceived social value, while being easy to market since the content is originally free.

Sliding Price Scales Starting at Free

Seth talked about taxing latecomers by making events expensive at the end and cheaper for the first few people. And music is priced this way on Amie Street. It is basically the concept of Piracy is Progressive Taxation flipped on its head - make it free to build awareness until people really value it, then let the irrational herd follow along for the ride.

Word of Mouth is the Best Long-term Marketing Strategy

The free then paid model encourages the creation of remarkable content and ensures artists and authors are paid a fair market value for their best work. And it offers a profound business model strategy because as markets saturate marketing gets more expensive and attention gets more scarce - the easiest way to do marketing is just make it easy to use, consume, and share - and rely on word of mouth to do the marketing. And it is far better than monetizing via advertising because it is more organic, and stems from the web's strengths. As Jakob Nielsen said:

"The basic point about the web is that it is not an advertising medium. The web is not a selling medium; it is a buying medium. It is user-controlled, so the user controls, the user experiences."

When there is an unlimited amount of competition consumers are far more likely to buy what is already well trusted amongst the community.

This Type of Technology is Easy to do

The cool thing about my current content management system set-up is I can control permissions for any article on this site. It could even be automated for certain classes of information (ie: only pages, only blog posts, only book pages, only on newsletters, only on a subdomain, sitewide, etc.) ... it is entirely flexible.

Limitations

You wouldn't want to bait and switch everything you did or you would build up some serious negative karma and some people may not be willing to link at you, but most people will not care or notice. The attention comes and goes, but the links stick. If you turned 10% to 30% of your well loved featured content into premium content I doubt it would hurt your link building much, although your rear end might get sore from your wallet filling up with cash. :)

It turns out the Drupal setup for comments per page leaves the maximum at 300, and our original introduction thread exceeded that...so it is time for a new one. :)

Who are you? What do you do?

Have Your Say!

Insert your message in the next Brave New Films video for $199 - not that I am saying you should, but 5 or 10 years ago it would have been hard to imagine this level of fan integration into the funding, creation, and promotion of documentaries. Where are we going to be in another 10 years? Will this video get 500,000 views on YouTube? Might this $199 be a cheap ad buy for people looking to appeal to this demographic? At that price point it is almost an impulse purchase for O'ReillyGoesNuts.com or BoneUsFoxRingtones.com. :)

Fund Anything

Sites like Kiva allow you to loan to business people in the 3rd world, and offers open ratings on past loan payments. If you are looking to make money in the process, outfits like Prosper and MicroPlace might work too. And Fundable allows you to raise funds for any cool projects or ideas.

Why Your Funding Source Matters

Is it cheaper to get funding and buy ads or grow organically from direct support? Getting capital from a VC may get you some coverage, but it is probably nowhere near as valuable as donations from hundreds or thousands of fans. 4 reasons direct support funding from fans is so powerful are

1. they minimize risk and create deeper direct connections
2. participants feel ownership, which creates meaningful relationships and project evangelists who provide emotional support and spread buzz well ahead of your launch
3. people care much more than they do offering free support (to appreciate how non-committed free support is, hundreds of bloggers talked about the launch of Citizendium, and I donated to the project like a day or two later - and was the first donor to the project)
4. successful projects show social proof of value as they pick up momentum

A couple days ago I posted asking readers to translate The Blogger's Guide to SEO.

So far we already have 5 translations done:

In addition to Bulgarian, Dutch, French, Italian, and Slovakian, readers have already volunteered for these languages: Portuguese (Portugal and Brazilian), Spanish, Russian, Czech, Swedish, Tagalog, Croatian, Japanese, Romanian, Danish, German, simplified & tradisional Chinese, Croatian, Indonesian, Hungarian, and Polish. Are there any other languages where you can help translate it?

My goal is to make this the most widely available document on SEO across every language possible. For each language it gets translated into, I will donate $50 to Amnesty International. The first translation in each language will also be referenced from the original guide, which has a lot of traffic and link equity.