This 7 minute and 50 second video is one of the first SEO videos I made. After reviewing it I realize I could have moved the screen around to show a few more examples of the stuff I was talking about. Rather than discussing one topic this video moves around to offer a wide array of marketing optimization ideas.

• Domain name & site design: using a strong domain name helps you look more credible and helps you rank better. An original high quality site design also makes content appear more trustworthy.
• Logo & homepage page title: place your keywords in your logo. Instead of using Paypal as your logo, use something like Paypal payment solutions or Paypal online payments. You can still emphasize the Paypal name while benefiting from enhanced inbound anchor text due to keyword proximity, and some people perceiving your official name as containing the associated keywords.
• Title of articles & filenames: use at least one keyword phrase in your page title and make your filenames descriptive. Doing so will help you build descriptive inbound links. Some people link using your page title as the anchor text, this is especially true if your page title is short and memorable. Many authoritative websites cite sources using the full URL with filename in the anchor text.
• Minimize duplication: mixing up your on page seo, page titles, and meta descriptions helps you rank for a wider net of keywords and makes your rankings more stable
• Leverage your authority: add useful descriptive background text below the fold on high authority pages. Also consider adding more internal links on high authority pages.
• Buying links: when buying them, consider buying links indirectly through payment schemes involving community participation and discussion, such as contests and affiliate programs.
• Syndication: if your content is published on other sites, make sure to reference older posts on your site to drive that traffic stream and link equity back to your site.
• Drunken spelling: if you have a community aspect to your site, don't correct misspellings. In fact, some publishers might even place fake reviews and comments on their sites to help capture misspelled keywords without raising their risk profiles.
• Spammy examples: find reasons to discuss spammy high margin topics on high authority websites by relating them to your core business. If your relation is a bit of a stretch, consider backdating it or finding another way to place the story on a part of your site that does not have thousands of people reading every word.

A few days ago Andy Hagans sent me a link to a 1924 article titled Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men, which has a couple killer quotes in it. The first is how to succeed in business:

That criticism may be justifiable, fo I am mediocre. But the point I have in mind is this: Business and life are built upon successful mediocrity; and victory comes to companies, not through the employment of brilliant men, but through knowing how to get the most out of ordinary folks.

And the second killer quote covers how some people fail to live in reality:

You conceive a big idea, get the whole organization on tiptoes to carry it out, and then you lose interest and go off on a new tangent. You think everybody else's mind ought to function as swiftly as your own, so you are alternately overenthusiastic and over-depressed. One day you carry some poor devil up into a high mountain and make him think he has a chance to become general manager. The next day you blow him up for not doing something which you think you told him, but which you actually forgot. You are always living, in imagination, about six jumps ahead.

That second quote applies to anyone in publishing. Businesses may not need many employees to have reach, but as marketing gets more insidious you need your customers to do your selling for you.

Without clearly communicating ideas designed to spread, few common people will talk about a business, and that business will stay stuck in a niche. That is unfortunate for those business owners, because in many fields the perceived topical authority (and person getting paid well) is determined outside of the niche. Creating value is not about writing knowledge on a page. Value is determined by the actual transfer of knowledge to others.

The web is speeding up communications. As companies and politicians continue to get caught lying and abusing language, we will be more willing to forgive those who make small errors while clarifying topics and making them more accessible to us.

Even if you are a doctor or scientist you can still communicate clearly using small words. Fields dominated by complex words and prose are full of opportunity for common folks to learn them, simplify them, and share them with other common folk. Most people are common in most ways.

The Excessive Demand Problem

About 5 people a day ask me to recommend an SEO or link builder or site designer, but many of the people I have traditionally recommended

• have either quit providing services to work exclusively on their own sites, or
• have long wait lists.

Add that to the increasing complexity of SEO and increasing rates commanded by top experts, and it is hard for me to recommend any specific service provider to readers of this site. There are people offering to pay me good money to do some jobs and I simply do not have enough time to do everything I want...to the point where I probably even accidentally come off as rude to some people, just because it is so hard to keep up with 100 emails every day.

Job Boards Are Your Friend

I recently hired a blogger from the ProBlogger job boards. I was shocked by the quality of worker I was able to find (and some of the potentially great ones that I had to turn away). I also started placing help wanted ads in the SEO Book feed for things like gadget developers and link builders and got great results, but placing job ads in the main feed is a bit selfish.

With that in mind I decided to place an SEO jobs board on SEO Book.com. Currently I am not looking for people to submit advertisements offering services (the web is already full of that) but I am hoping to help people in need find someone to help them out with SEO, link building, site design, PPC, programming, etc.

Warnings

Of course due diligence is necessary when choosing who to work with, but sometimes good things start with a hello, and some of the newer hungry workers do sell their services for less than what they are worth. Don't take risks you can't afford to and never bet against your gut.

Currently the job boards here do not have a feedback module in them, but if the feature becomes popular you can expect me to add many features to help the marketplace get more efficient.

A True Story About Me

I met my second SEO customer ever on a jobs board at an SEO forum. I only charged him $300 back then to rank his site. That customer ranked #1 in Google, sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of merchandise, sent me a large Christmas bonus, became a great friend, and was the first person to review the first copy of SEO Book. He has since sold that top ranked website, but he and I have started working together on other projects. Hopefully others meet and have cool stories to share from the job boards on this site.

One theory of web marketing starts off with controlling cost. Where you try to find what works right now, and do exactly what is needed to get to the level of success you want to reach. The theory sounds valid, but...

• By the time something is common knowledge, its value and effectiveness has decreased and is heading lower.
• The markets are shifting. Tomorrow's marketplace is uglier and more competitive than today's marketplace. And it has lower margins for average players too!
• Those who invest in building real assets are going to eventually beat you. And their success is self reinforcing.

Investing & Adding Value is Better Than Being Cheap

Rather than thinking of how to control costs while growing a web business, it is better to spend that same time, energy, and focus learning how to create value and how to get people talking about how valuable your widget is. When I was new to the web I kept my reported income far lower than it should have been because I kept reinvesting in learning and marketing, even when I was heavily in debt. Some of the spend was a waste, but I know enough to compete in many markets with minimal investment.

How to be Cheap

Two months ago my mom told me she wanted to create a new blog about Diverticulitis, a topic effecting my grandma. With no warning, that afternoon I...

• learned how to spell the word Diverticulitis (2 minutes)
• used WordTracker's free keyword research tool (2 minutes)
• bought my mom a $6 domain at GoDaddy (2 minutes)
• spent 5 minutes aligning the DNS, hosting her site at Dreamhost, which allows unlimited sites to a $7 a month account. I recently created a 5 year account for a friend and only spent $300 for 5 years of hosting!
• set my mom up with a default Blogger template (5 minutes)
• created a cheesy logo (that took me 5 minutes to make using low end $50 logo design software I bought years ago)
• modified the CSS file to match the logo (5 minutes)

My mom wrote 10 blog posts that took her ~ 5 to 10 minutes each, and a week later I spent 5 minutes and ~ $80 submitting it to a couple directories.

A few months ago I bought a domain name for $2,500. Last month I was offered $17,500 for the domain, and not too long ago the same guy paid over twice that for a similar but worse name. If he offered me that much I might have sold, but unsolicited offers are typically on the low side.

Today I was sent an unsolicited $500 offer for my mom's new site. Why? Because the site already ranks in Yahoo and Microsoft. If I spend a few hundred more the site will likely compete in Google too. My marketing knowledge was expensive to acquire, but everything else was good enough to compete for cheap or free (at least in that market at this moment in time).

The reason this story is remarkable is because people were willing to buy such a small site when it was so new. In two months the site was conceived, created, competing, ranked, and someone already made an offer on it. Two months ago that same domain name was $6.

Everything is Becoming a Commodity

It started with the average travel broker, then it hit classified ads and regional monopolies like newspapers, and it is working its way toward your industry. Just look at all the above web industries listed that are free or nearly free. Due to more efficient markets, automation, outsourcing, and the need to compete on an open marketplace, the margins for almost everything needed to compete on the web are heading toward zero.

My mom's new site competes on about $100 of investment, but in a year or two that domain name might have cost $500, and a couple more competitors entering the field might have pushed the marketing costs to $1,000. A year or two later the domain name might have been $2,000 and the marketing costs might be $10,000.

Don't Become a Commodity

The three solutions to the commodity issue are

• use new technologies to create and publish the DIY tools and information that will commoditize other businesses competing in your space
• build your knowledge in related fields that interest you, such that you can add value to multiple points on the value chain. Google is search + ads + documents + hosting + syndication + etc etc etc. I know a bit about SEO + SEM + marketing + branding + conversion + domaining + etc etc etc.
• Invest to build your awareness and brand (build mindshare and distribution) to where you are not considered a commodity. Create enough of an abundance of demand that you chose who you work with.

Unless somebody is talking about you or consuming your stuff right now you are becoming a commodity, although you may not realize it yet.

If your Google AdWords quality score is too low, Google will allow you to compete in the auction with reasonable ad pricing ONLY if you give them your conversion data:

The arguement from my representative was that your pages are terrible so if we can’t see how well you convert our users then we will need you to pay $10.00 per click to make up for your low QS (my average keyword price was $2.75 at the time). That of course would have put me out of business.

Once I caved and allowed them to snoop on my conversions they allowed me to keep buying at or near my original keyword price.

If your copyright content is being uploaded to YouTube, Google will protect you if you upload your copyright content to Google:

I see a monetization in the works.

a) All of the big companies will make the effort to supply Youtube with good qualities of their videos. Movies, Shows etc.
b) YouTube gathers all that stuff, and builds the largest database of top quality videos.
c) Youtube offers the media companies to enter into a partnership. “Hey guys, you already have the stuff uploaded…why not sell the premium content to our millions of users?

If people are scraping and stealing your content Google will eventually allow you to rank for your own work if you sign up with Google Webmaster Central and register your copyright work.

After all your sites are registered with Google, how easy will it be for them to force compliance on smaller webmasters? Given the indiscriminate attitude exhibited when Google recently hand edited PageRank scores, it seems there is good reason to not register with the borg.