People pay a lot of money for the chance to change. Often they pay for a chance to place the blame on another party because they were unwilling to change (ie: that diet program didn't work). A large part of the reason why so many prescription drugs are popular is because drug sales pitches convince us that we can change without actually changing, though that is rarely the case. Typically the side effects are just suppressed or played down.

In much the same way that people think a drug will make things better, we are constantly pushed value systems which make us think things like:

• I am too fat. If I weighed 20 pounds less I would be happier.

• I am too poor. If I just had more money everything would work out.
• I am too lonely. If I just had someone that loved me maybe life would make sense.
• I am too shy. If I just had more confidence and talked to more people I could figure life out.

Part of the reason self help programs from people who suffered from the same problem work so well is that they are easy to identify with. The more people believe you felt their struggle or pain the more they will believe that you can help them get past it.

A large part of the reasons that many of these programs never lead to happiness is that they solve symptoms instead of problems. Many of them focus on what not to do, instead of what you should do. Inadequacy is just part of being human, but many companies create products or services which claim cure us of the flaws of being. When we buy into these systems, we are not just buying into the product / program / service, but we are buying into the pot of gold at the other end of the rainbow. The belief that things can be different and better, and the sense of relief that brings. Wherever there is a real or manufactured sense of inadequacy there is a large targeted market.

People trying to change social classes and win approval of established members of their community are also likely to pick up the domain specific language and symbols better because they will feel that learning it is an important sign of sophistication. If you can create things which people new to your industry would consider vital (rules, standards, regulations, ethical guidelines, etc.) naive people will push them until they realize the purpose of them. For example, at one point in time I was sucker enough to proudly display someone else's code of ethics on my site until I realized that all it showed was that I was a sucker ignorant to marketing and my market.

What do you do that makes people feel validated in their quest to change or be validated? How easy is it to identify with your position and spread your way of thinking? Do your customers outgrow that feeling? What do you do next?

If your business model solves problems but is financially inferior to business models that solve symptoms how do you get past that?

What are the most radically worldview changing or inspirational things you have ever done?

Seth Godin recently posted the difference between monopolistic businesses and those which actually appreciate their customers.

If you think about buying more marketing but have holes in the conversion process eventually you are going to get priced out of the market. Sure free samples may be a cost, but it is probably some of the cheapest marketing available, because free samples help you build trust and increase conversion rates by associating your brand with the product your customers want while they are actively looking for it - in a sense it is like an enhanced feature rich version of search. If giving away a sample costs $20 and samples lead to a 10% conversion rate, how does that compare to buying clicks at $2 each and ending up with a 1% conversion rate? If you do the math both of those will lead to a $200 cost per action, but one of them requires you to deal with far fewer people, and will be far more scalable, because any market is limited in size.

Popular bloggers that use their blogs to sell a book (maybe like me) sell many books or ebooks because their blogs keep the attention of potential clients and posts act as free samples. The beautiful thing about selling or giving away information is that there is an unlimited number of new things you can do or say, and an even larger number of ways to restate old thoughts or repackage old ideas. I still have at least a half dozen projects I really want to do soon, and rather than waiting on what to do there is always something I could be doing.

Getting people to pay attention is a cost. People not only convert better when given free samples, but free samples give people something to talk about and link at. If you are trying to build a brand from scratch and sell information then making piracy easy might be the difference between a successful business model and a failed brand that never got much exposure.

Branding and search relevancy are both largely about building mindshare. If you have no free samples, and expect people to take the plunge buying from an unknown source, you are going to need a rather compelling offer or a lot of hype to make many sales. Or you can take the desperate act of trying to win out on pricing, but in most cases that does not make for a sustainable long-term business model. Plus if you build significant trust you not only lower your marketing costs, but you can also increase your prices and expand your margins.

I have sorta let the Directory Archives site go to crap (ie: be poorly maintained) for a number of reasons. I still like many of the better directories (like Yahoo!, DMOZ, Business.com, MSN Small Business Directory, BOTW, Gimpsy, JoeAnt), but outside of the top few general directories and a few high quality niche specific directories most directories probably do not pack much of a punch at manipulating Google's search results or delivering direct traffic. Given the flood of low quality directories, and their lesser value in manipulating search, I have not put as much emphasis on my directory of directories. All the following reasons play part in its reduced priority status:

• Most directories are of limited quality. Building a high quality one is an expensive and time consuming process, and most of the people who have been creating directories over the last few years have not been concerned with quality. Most of them have been selling hollow PageRank to naive webmasters.

• Search engines (especially Google) have limited the effectiveness of many low quality links, in some cases not only deweighting the value of low quality links, but if you have too high of a junk to quality link ration they may throw ranking penalties on your site or reduce your crawl depth or crawl priority. The reduced crawl depth and crawl priority (based on low quality inlinks and outlinks and duplicate content issues) also hit many of the directories themselves, causing many of their pages to be deindexed.
• Social sites and consumer generated media add much more context to links than most directories do.
• Social bookmarking sites have limited editorial costs and a huge number of editors, thus they are more comprehensive than most directories are, while having much higher profit margins.
• So many people are blogging that if you can create something legitimately useful and get it a bit of exposure via your own blog or via the social sites then it is bound to pick up many high quality links.
• Improving search relevancy coupled with this additional content makes directories less necessary. Various niche blogs, the Wikipedia, and other authoritative social sites have largely replaced most directories in the search results, thus reducing the direct traffic most directories send to listed websites.
• Using the social sites is often a cheaper and more effective way of building a natural and diverse high quality backlink profile than by trying to build links from some of the lower quality directories. The social sites often lead to many secondary citations.

Rather than just killing off Directory Archives I added a social news and bookmarking section to it, such that it can still be used to help webmasters acquire good links and market their websites. In addition to listing social bookmarking and news sites it also has categories for sites like Squidoo and Work.com.

Yahoo! tends to be a bit more cautious than Google when it comes to allowing trademark related ads. That significantly suppresses their earnings because brand related search queries are often some of the most targeted, most commercial, highest converting, and most expensive keywords. Here is a snapshot of the current search results for SEO Book. Notice that the top 8 organic results link to SEO Book.com. By loosening up on subdomains (displaying them more frequently) and providing a mini site map (called Sitelinks) in the SERPs it makes it much harder for affiliates or merchants reselling a brand to get exposure through the organic search results for the core brand name.

There are two pieces to that, as well.

1. If the top 5 or 6 search results point at the official site searchers have to scroll down quite a bit to find commercial search results outside of the core brand. Rather than scrolling they may be more likely to click an ad.

2. If the search results look highly informational in nature (by being harder to manipulate via commercial bias, and Google over-representing the official site) then merchants are more likely to buy ads.

The brutal part with buying the ads is that sometimes Google shows 0, 1, 2, or 3 AdWords ads above the organic search results. If the organic search results are somewhat irrelevant to the commercial intent of a searcher, those few ads at the top of the search results are going to get a high clickthrough rate. If you are a merchant who is not featured at the top of the results the right rail ads will bring you relatively little exposure. Thus a bidding war occurs for those top couple ad spots, and Google can control how many ads to show above the results to maximize earnings.

If you sell an ebook like I do, it is no big deal if one day your sales are high and the next day they are garbage, but if you run a business with fixed costs, a fixed marketing budget, and many employees then you may be stuck paying whatever it takes to be at the top of the results for brands you carry. The more dependant your business is on search the more they can bleed you dry!

While I used my brand as an example in this post, this brand factor recently played a big roll for a client, who even outranks his manufacturer for their official name in some major search engines, but is forced to pay much higher AdWords rates to get any exposure on Google. If he falls out of the top couple ad slots the right rail sends us like 10% the traffic that the top ad positions do. And I am probably going to have to bid bleed about $5 a click for a while to work that client back into the rotation of the ads at the top of the search results. And then if we knock a competing site out of position that may spur on a budget bleeding bidding war. Companies with a fixed marketing budget (my client has a variable budget based on market conditions) will suffer even worse by having to overpay for traffic until they kill their budget, and then not show up the rest of the time.

If the core brand term is priced out of reach it is important to

• Build enough link equity that your deeper pages rank at or near the top of the search results for long tail brand related queries. This may require investing into placing cheesy linkbait on your site to better integrate your site into the web and boost your overall authority.

• Use enough modifiers and alternate part numbers in your page content to be relevant for a wide array of queries.

My client dominates the long tail, but for that particular brand he carries, most of the queries are for the official brand name. As a Google share owner and owner of a strong brand, I think they are brilliant. As a marketer who has a client getting screwed by their setup, I think a bit less of them. ;)

Also worth noting that Yahoo!'s search results are moving toward a more authority based algorithm, and they are starting to double list many brand sites, so this issue will likely rise again soon enough.

Not sure if this idea exists already, but it would be a cool project idea for anyone ambitious enough to do it. What about creating a social network site that leverages famous poems, speeches, and quotations, and integrated them into the web by allowing submitters to add links to famous text that existed before the web. The links could show

• how the meanings of words changed over time

• how static human nature is
• how politicians lie and lied
• how religious material changes over time
• how bogus and misguided most forms of patriotism are
• whether cultural norms should change
• or anything else you are interested in

There is a lot of marketing potential in history. Google realizes it, and is already exploiting it, but not to its full potential. Invariably traditional publishers are losing control due to network efficiency. Warner is already threatening to sue Google over YouTube, but YouTube just sold for 1.65 billion. I think historical text (and maybe personalized versions of it) is another vertical which is low hanging fruit like video once was.

Part of Google's move toward trying to be the default hard drive for different types of information is such that they can add context to whatever you are doing. Some of that context will be relevant ads, but the other piece of it will be useful related ideas based on other's usage data.

I think the best way to make the wisdom of the past appealing to a wide audience would be by making it interactive and showing how it is relevant to today. Some amount of that can be automated, but given how many people are trying to interpret the meaning of lyrics and how layered great writing is you would think there is a market for adding personalized or opinionated context to historical text.