People Tolerate (and Expect) Ads:

As Google's ad network gets more efficient and Google controls more bits, almost everything in any commercial market is going to sell something, subsidize another commercial interest, or have ads on it. To appreciate how much this trend will grow, just read the comments on my post about using custom search engines. Many of the comments are insightful, but almost nobody appreciated that not having ads in your internal site search result was a value add for a commercial site. If you look at blog search results for shower gel you will see Google's version of the web. Google and Microsoft already own in game advertisement firms. With Google bidding billions of dollars for part of the US wireless spectrum you can bet that there are going to be even more ads between content producers and consumers.

It doesn't matter what ads appear on the publisher site if they didn't sell the ads directly themselves. Somehow the publisher is off the hook because they didn't know, and it wasn't Google's fault because the system is partially automated.

Newspapers Practicing Arbitrage

Google killed some of the scraper AdSense garbage, but now arbitrage is going mainstream, with newspapers leveraging their brands to publish thin content from freelance writers. Think of newspapers buying ISP data or mining their server logs and suggesting writers create content about crap that got a lot of traffic when Google featured their story on the homepage in the past.

Newspapers Practicing Automated Garbitrage

The above trend is going to make the most competitive keywords even harder to rank for as there will always be at least one fresh news story about every high value topic.

• This just in...make money with the best forex platform!

• This just in...mortgage rates are at all time lows!
• This just in...online education is more affordable than you thought!

Google has already proved that they don't mind large publishers creating robotic content and building its authority with spammy links. Did you know that BizJournals offers Google searchers a credit card application service? If I posted similar content on this site Google would kill it.

Anyone Can do Public Relations

Beyond the recycled content, the movement will also be fueled by lazy underpaid writers who will heavily rely on social media and others work for story ideas. If you are good at spamming social media then the mainstream media will act as your megaphone without requiring you to hire a PR firm.

When is a Link Buy Legitimate?

Most profitable publishing enterprises are moving toward producing lower quality content. As a publisher, a brand is nothing more than something that allows you to practice arbitrage while appearing that you provide a valuable service. It allows you to get extra exposure and charge a higher rate for your ads.

The only difference between a smart strategic ad buy and a text link sale that Google wants you to report is the publisher's rate card.

As I have watched brands grow and die I have come to the conclusion that the concept of value is an important ingredient in a successful site, but as an editorial content provider, value alone is not enough to grow much past sustainability.

People want to have something they can talk about and share, something they can relate to, and something that inspires them and brings them hope. Emotional appeal is typically far more important than logical appeal. In some cases the hope is for change of things they do not like, but that has three potential outcomes

• the fight is one that will not be won (and the ideas you are fighting against may be gaining ground in other markets)

• change is brought about and the people creating change eventually forget where they came from, walk on other people without care, and become the people they once despised (relevancy comes and goes like the seasons)
• change is brought about and the cause no longer exists

After a battle is over you still have to have something worth talking about and create something inspiring if you are to keep attention and mindshare.

How much money is spent marketing fear to people? Do you need health insurance? Would you still need it if you ate healthy? People gravitate toward their interests for an escape from fear-mongering and other injustices that are baked into society.

Fear is easy to forget, and is a message that needs to be marketed over and over again to cause response. In most cases, spreading fear also has limited upside social potential...it is more commonly used to exploit people, so we learn to tune it out. We take off our shoes before going through the metal detectors, but how many people still sleep on the airplane? I know I do. And people live on the sides of mountains, in fire zones, and where earthquakes are common. I know I do.

Why do award programs work so well? They are easy to relate too and make people feel good. Nearly daily I get emails about how a person quit their job or sold their business because I inspired them and helped them want to go out on their own.

When I think of the most explosive growth periods in brands I have helped build they are typically associated with periods of time when the owner was passionate about what they were doing. That passion attracts people who share it and want to spread it. When I think of the periods that they lost marketshare they are more in-line with the times they lack creativity and passion.

In a saturated market packaging and formatting are often more important than the message. Sustainable value systems change with the times.

As an entrepreneur most of us have many failures before we have any successes. I recently made the Technorati top 100 blogs, but have already dropped to 102, and that position will likely fade unless I can be a bit more inspiring than I have been recently.

If you mimick leading marketing in your filed, then deflect the blowback from the effective marketing onto others who gave you the tips that helped you increase your conversion they may not appreciate that:

We also have inline ads, ala Aaron Wall's suggestion (so blame him if you're angry )

If you have a professional copywriter suggest revising your content, then state that using similar marketing to their past work is below you they may not appreciate that:

Aaron Wall told me his conversion rate after switching to a page format like this has sent his sales skyrocketing to unbelievable proportions. Yes, this saddens me, but it's also inspiring - if they can do it, so can we, right?

Well, maybe. But we've got to be willing to sacrifice a bit of self-respect and dignity to get it done.

Then if you hold a marketing contest, saying anything goes you are bound to raise a few eyebrows

Anything goes, dude. We're looking for the best-converting page, and if you think the best way to get conversions is with flying monkeys and marquee tags, then have at it!

In every market controlling conversations is associated with trust and authority. That is why framing issues, business models, and sales techniques is so important if you want to prove your model is better than competing models. Few people claim their own businesses are bad.

Few people think of the Google Toolbar as spyware if it is marginally useful. Stop Badware, the non profit reporting on spyware, is not likely to make a report criticising Google's Toolbar or search helper redirection so long as Google is their lead corporate sponsor. The attempt to portray honesty and openness is sometimes more important than being either of them.

Rand recently created a landing page contest, but the problem with this sort of contest is that the very act of making noise increases sales, but it also makes your traffic stream dirtier and less consistent. After Brian Clark rewrote my salesletter he quickly became one of my top affiliates. His reach and brand increased my reach and brand, but it also led to many others writing about me, and more people searching for my brand...some of those traffic sources were really clean while others were less so...perhaps less interested and more driven out of curiosity or following what was popular at that point in time. Plus those that were pre-sold on Brian's site probably didn't need any salesletter at all to convert. The fact that he wrote it made his readers convert exceptionally well though because his copy is in tune with his readers, and they already trust him.

I had to wait on testing the results because I had too much temporal noise around my brand to provide accurate short term testing results. Inadequate data sampling provides inconclusive data. Even A/B split test results that are allegedly 95% certain are wrong 1 out of 20 times.

As John Andrews stated landing pages are only one part of the marketing mix. It is hard to track conversion for high touch and high trust products or services using multivariate testing while allowing others to write your conversion copy. Unless they write your ad copy, a sales letter, conversion funnel, and bonus offers that are consistent with your brand they are throwing darts at a wall. It may create conversation, builds your reach, boosts your brand exposure, give the perception that you are open, and can give you a few good ideas on how to improve conversions, but likely the test will bear false results, especially since brand positions and sales techniques are so temporal and few people willing to write free copy understand all the nuances of effective sales techniques.

If your are going to "sacrifice a bit of self-respect and dignity" you might as well get meaningful results out of it Rand. ;)

I recently installed the new business edition of Google's custom search engine. It took about 5 minutes to set up and will likely pay for itself many times over. You can use it by using the search box in the right rail. Google's custom search engine is easy to customize, fast to implement, works across multiple domains and is cheap. It only costs $100 a year for up to 5K pages and $500 a year for 50K pages. It also allows the owner to see search frequency and your most popular queries.

Rather than doing Google site specific searches, now I can see Google flavored results customized to my site right from my own domain. If I am searching for something on my own site and can't find it, the odds are pretty good that I am not going to show up in Google's global search either.

Using Google's search will likely also help you figure out how well they trust different pages on a site or a subset of sites, as it likely factors in link popularity and other off site relevancy measurements (unlike most site search services). If your site is easier to search it is easier for you and others to cite your archived content.

Using search results with the same format as Google's will also show you how compelling your documents look to customers on Google, from a searcher's perspective. Some consumers may also view your business as being more Google friendly if you use a Google site search service. Their awareness of and affinity toward Google's brand may help increase your conversions.

Google recently announced they are offering an ad free search service to small businesses for as little as $100 a year. They are also rumored to be working on creating a mobile search offering to search for ringtones, cell phone games, and other high margin cell phone services:

With the new system, users would search for a piece of content -- such as ringtones -- and would get back a list of companies that provide it, with links letting them easily purchase the material. Eventually, Google would charge companies for high placement in the search results, much as it does with "sponsored links" on Web search, the people familiar with the company's plans said.

If this proves effective, why wouldn't Google create search services for real estate and student loans? Off the start they likely wouldn't be any dirtier than those markets already are.

The local sites (or other niche sites) that die are the ones that don't have a supportive community...the ones that can roughly be described as data. But as you move your site away from data toward community building and user experience you increase its marketability, profitability, and longevity.

John Scott recently said

when the Internet becomes a community more than a marketplace, the community oriented merchants have the advantage.

Most general music lyric sites will lose over 90% of their traffic and value in the next 2 years. Niche value add sites like SongMeanings.net will increase in value.

Some newspapers are fighting off their own irrelevancy by publishing more ads, and becoming more irrelevant. The reason WSJ.com is worth $5 billion is because it will be one of the last newspapers surviving after many competitors are marginalized. Its brand and business relationships make it unique.

The next step for search is moving away from age and citation based trust toward user satisfaction based rating. In a recent interview Jakob Nielson said:

Of course, the big thing that has happened in the last 10 years was a change from an information retrieval oriented relevance ranking to being more of a popularity relevance ranking. And I think we can see a change maybe being a more of a usefulness relevance ranking. I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs. They’re not going to be very useful or substantial to people who are trying to solve problems. So I think that with counting links and all of that, there may be a change and we may go into a more behavioral judgment as to which sites actually solve people’s problems, and they will tend to be more highly ranked.

Part of that will include collecting user feedback and personalizing results. For the commercial parts of the web, much of this will be done by search engines pushing more aggressive ad units (while using non-ads to test how far they can go), licensing content from premium publishers, and making more transactions direct to funnel traffic internally while minimizing the downside of bait and switch marketing. If Google controls the transaction they know the lead value AND the customer satisfaction stats. If something that was once good becomes spam Google controls distribution and monetization, and can kill it without a second thought.

If you are in a market that is likely to get commoditized what does your site do that makes it more than just data?