After much hype Wikia Search just launched with a dummy index. No surprise the launch was received badly. Worse yet, none of the alleged human relevancy tools are available. Wasted opportunity. Google has at least another year of having no real competition.

When someone hits you up with a commercial email you never asked for that is spam. But there are other types of automated communication which have the opportunity to suck, or the opportunity to be helpful. Call customer support for a Fortune 500 monopoly and you will see the wrong end of selfish automation. Numerous third party solutions are dedicated to balancing these selfish relationships.

It is easy to write off fields you don't understand. seo=spam, email marketing=spam, affiliates=spam, public relations=spam. But just because you have never used a technique does not mean that it is spam. In much the same way that communication can be selfish, communication can also be meaningless, or offer the bare essentials needed to be utilitarian. Every channel and every interaction is an opportunity, and every interaction has costs. In the past the welcome email for joining SEO Book said something like this:

!username,

Thank you for registering at !site. You may now log in to !login_uri using the following username and password:

username: !username
password: !password

You may also log in by clicking on this link or copying and pasting it in your browser:

!login_url

This is a one-time login, so it can be used only once.

After logging in, you will be redirected to !edit_uri so you can change your password.

-- !site team

I recently changed it to

Hello !username,

Thank you for registering at !site. You may now
log in to
!login_uri
using the following username and password:

username: !username
password: !password

After logging in, you will be redirected to
!edit_uri
so you can change your password.

-------------------------------------------------------

Please introduce yourself here
http://www.seobook.com/introduction-thread-who-are-you-what-do-you-do
And fill out your user profile. My profile is here if
you want to take a look
http://www.seobook.com/user/aaron-wall
By default your user profile includes a couple Google
gadgets that make it easy to do competitive research.

-------------------------------------------------------

You can read the latest SEO news and participate in the
discussion here http://www.seobook.com/blog

-------------------------------------------------------

Please have a look at some of the featured content
offered on the site, including
http://www.seobook.com/glossary/ - learn SEO jargon
http://tools.seobook.com/ - collection of free SEO tools
http://www.seobook.com/bloggers - the Blogger's Guide to SEO
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml - 101
link building tips

We have many more features in development, and will
release some of them soon!

Have a great day!
-- Aaron Wall, and the !site team

I am sure I can greatly improve it from there, perhaps even offering a 7 day autoresponder series for new members, and a different autoresponder series for people who buy SEO Book.

I recently joined one service that sends daily quick tip emails for the first month. Every third email is an advertisement, and yet somehow as I marketer I have not taken offense to the ads and actually find the emails useful. 2 out of 3 emails offer tips to master topic x, while the 3rd email tells you to buy a product or service in a related market. Each email, based on who sent it, reminds me to use the service I am paying for, which lowers the odds of me unsubscribing.

Some successful marketers can take a basic concept that you would write a sentence about and turn it into a 10 page article 20 minute video. When you are trying to give people direction you rarely get in trouble for making an idea too accessible and too easy to understand. Building trust is a process. After people give you permission you can use automation to help build trust and encourage participation. Or you can ignore a free marketing channel that is easy to set up, while your competitors increase visitor value and take marketshare from you.

The relationship between sales and email is not a 1 to 1 ratio, but the days I spend 6 hours answering email I sell many ebooks. Assuming your offers are compelling and clearly stated, communication and inquiry have a rough correlation for purchase demand. Each of these emails gets a personalized response, but the more you can make your automated marketing feel personalized the less personalized selling you have to do to make sales.

Automation ideas that apply to most online communities and software businesses:

• package information in multiple formats to give people many different paths to reach conversion
• answer common questions on your site so you can point new customers at it and so searchers can find it
• personalize welcome or sign up emails to thank users for joining and highlight featured content (I used to do this for SEO Book orders too, but need to modify the affiliate software again after I upgraded to the latest version)
• use autoresponders that offer free helpful tips and build trust (I need to take my own advice here too, and am hoping to soon)
• store answers to some common emails in a searchable online database like iDevaffiliate does
• create a community where consumers can solve each other's questions
• offer tutorial videos and/or FAQs with any piece of complex software
• create software which allows people to restore default settings
• cross reference complementary tools - as is done by my keyword tool

Product launches that fail often fail because the marketer assumes everyone wants what they are producing rather than giving people what they want in a format they like. Many successful marketers have been throwing away a lot of money for a long time by assuming everyone wants to read the blog.

Guest post by Ryan Durk
For 24 hours on 1/1/08, Google's logo kindly began linking to my site.

Starting New Years Eve, Google redirected all clicks on its homepage logo to a search for the term January 1 TCP/IP. Recognizing the opportunity to receive immense amounts of traffic (and Google's endorsement), I devised a strategy to rank for this term. My site grabbed rankings at 1, 2, 3 and 4 within 2 hours and maintained spots 1, 3 and 4 until sometime Wednesday. As of right now, it has received over 2000 Diggs and 300,000 page impressions of traffic that converts terribly. More on this later.

The project began like any other: analyzing the search engine result page. Wikipedia ranked some mildly relevant content at 3rd and a Squidoo clone had 2 auto-generated pages in the top 5. Beating Wikipedia would be simple considering "January 1, TCP/IP" was nowhere to be found there. Beating the auto-generated content would be more difficult. Adding to my woes, Yahoo! lags behind Google in indexing, so my link: queries on the sites in question returned blanks.

Note: I should have scrutinized the Google phrase-match SERP. Considering that the auto-generated sites had incoming links with "January 1, TCP/IP" in the anchor text a little digging would have turned the inlinks up.

Not knowing where those links came from wasn't a major issue, particularly because they couldn't have been more than a few hours old. Additionally, I could leverage an authoritative domain and ping for backlinks. I chose Blogspot.com because it met this requirement, because it can handle the traffic, and because it allows AdSense.

But blogging and pinging aggregator services wouldn't be enough. The site had to hold on to the SERP. Topical blogs with authority and blog farms posed substantial threats, and I had no immediate way to gain indexed authoritative links. And I was working against the clock.

The plan:

• Step 1: Register http://january-1-tcp-ip.blogspot.com. Write an SEO'd article and upload.
• Step 2: Social bookmark.
• Step 3: Circular SEO/SEM a la Digg-Google-Digg: Why the site ranked #1-4 for the term Google linked to from its homepage

Circular SEO/SMO:

The idea was to rank Digg itself. Making the bookmark popular would increase Digg's inlinks to it and hopefully grab Digg members off of the SERP. If Digg ranked high, Digg members would Digg it out of vanity/curiosity (or at least a small percentage would). Digg's trustrank, freshness, relevance and authority would keep the bookmark at #1. I just had to get the bookmark in the top 5 and the Digg users would take care of the rest. After social bookmarking the bookmark itself, it grabbed rank 3 for the term and made the Digg front page 3 hours later. Google's immediate indexing of Digg's internal links was all that mattered, which increased as users Dugg the site.

In short, Digg members found the bookmark by clicking the Google logo, which was ranked so highly because Digg members found the bookmark by cl… And in the middle of all of this was the real target: the average Google searcher wanting to know why Google was endorsing "January 1 TCP/IP" SERP.

Four Listings:

As a side-benefit of using Digg and Blogspot, I had some domain-level authority to play around with. I wrote another article and added a link with the keyword phrase in its anchor text. Pinged it and voila, ranks 1, 2 and 3. After Digging the new article I held the top four links for the target keyphrase.

Copycats:

If you spent some time on the SERP yesterday, you saw sites like "january-1-tcpip.blogspot.com", "january-1-tcp-ip-123.blogspot.com" and "january-1-tcp--ip.blogspot.com," none of which were created by me. The pages are hosted on Blogspot since my work with Digg established blogspot.com as a relevant domain for the keyphrase, which helped them rank in the top 10. Additionally, an SEO was occasionally able slide into rank 2 by persistently adding new Digg bookmarks optimized for the keyphrase.

Monetization:

The site received over 300,000 unique hits of traffic converting at below half of a percent.

Mistakes:

1. Not using the traffic to promote other sites.
2. Writing for Google and not the users. This bookmark had the potential to become the number 1 most Digged of all time.
3. AdSense: non-optimized layout, using AdSense at all.
4. SERP defense. I mentioned the site had rankings 1-4 but now only has 1-3 (or 1,3,4 depending on the data center).

The result of clicking on the Google logo:

Jim Boykin announced the launch of his Internet Marketing Ninjas training & SEO tools. His price point is not cheap, but he opened up his internal tools and flew all over the country to interview many experts to create a quality product.

The web levels the playing field, allowing individuals to compete with larger corporations, largely through the smaller players making dirt public and launching viral marketing campaigns around issues. Because there is a publisher publishing every opinion and angle, it is easy to discount just about everything, especially attempts for new market participants to become remarkable.

Gawker announced they are shifting their business model from quanity to quality:

Where there was a shortage of attitude and commentary, there's now a surfeit. And what's in heavy demand, and short supply, is linkworthy material, by which I mean a secret memo, a spy photo, a chart, a well-argued rant, a list, an exclusive piece of news, a well-packaged find.

With them determining quality based on the ability to garner links and pageviews, do you think that is going to improve content quality, or just cause more mud slinging and noise? The easy way to get more page views is controversy, as pointed out by Scott Karp and Scoble.

2008 will probably be a nasty year for online content quality, as the true flaws of PageRank and the selfish nature of bloggers with new found power shine brighter than ever, feeding off one another. Blogs that once acted as hubs spotting good ideas and sending visitors to them will now take your best ideas, reformat them, add a bit of original content, drop the attribution, and get the pageviews they need to get paid. Where they once linked at your new content look for them to link back to their recent greatest hits from 2 days ago. Every post builds off the last. Every blogger for themself. :)

Google has Knol. Wikipedia has Wikia search. Yahoo has answers. Mahalo has how tos. Topical channels that highlighted content will get greedier with links. Virtually every clean traffic source is trying to become the end destination too.

People will eventually get sick of controversy and traffic hoarding the same way we became banner blind. Anyone just getting started out might be able to make some moves into the market with controversial content, but for those who are already established the key to future growth will be going back over your old ideas, refining them, making them more accessible, and producing them in better formats. 10 pieces of anchor content will pull a site further along than 1,000 me too posts. And linking out will still help too, assuming you pay your content writers based on something other than pageviews.