I used to be a big forum junkie, but have recently cut back a bit. There is still lots of great stuff going on in the forum space though. Lee Dodd, who is serious about monetization, launched Earners Forum last week and it is already in the top couple thousand sites on Alexa.

As part of the launch he is giving away over $15,000 worth of cash and prizes including 5 copies of my ebook. Sign up there if you would want to win a free copy.

Google Checkout launched today. It is a payment system which revolves around Google storing your credit details and making it quicker to checkout at various stores. After having signed up and looked at it all I think this system will likely spread like a weed. The biggest reasons are:

• Google AdWords is the largest online ad market.

• Merchants who use the Google Checkout product will get a little shopping cart badge next to their ads, which could increase their ad CTR and thus lower their per click cost.
• The pricing policy for Google Checkout gives you $10 of free payment processing for every $1 you spend on AdWords.
• Google is a trusted brand.
• Most shopping carts are garbage. This is all about making checkout quick, simple, and easy.
• Merchants are not allowed to change the Google Checkout images. The Google Checkout images do a great job of conveying a fast, easy checkout.

Google uses AdSense as a way to spread their brand across the content portions of the web, but did not have much visibility on highly commercially oriented websites. Web = Google = web is really going to be pounded into people's heads as the Google brand appears on more and more websites. They are the leading monetization network across content sites, and now they have found a way to sneak into commercial sites in the middle of the highly visible conversion process.

This launch also gives Google another data point in the buying cycle, closing the loop from research right on through to purchase. In addition to giving Google a better idea as to the margins and size of a business this launch also allows Google to trust a merchant more based on consumer feedback and transaction history (although it is unlikely they would want to integrate that data point into the organic results too heavily because they would prefer to have an informational bias to the organic results since AdWords already puts commercial results in the search results.

It's pretty nasty how much power Google has right now. To do that in a decade is absurd. This is no eBay or Paypal killer though, as noted by Ars Technica. But in time, as this and similar programs evolve and this is integrated into the AdSense program (or related programs) it helps Google ensure they have the most efficient product recommendation cycle, which should keep them at #1 in the contextual advertising space unless 1 of 2 things happen:

• they lose their market position in search because they are so afraid of manipulation that they drive their results into the void of irrelevancy (and they have been heading down that path recently, but they can get away with it because Yahoo! has not been very good at branding their search and Microsoft is irrelevant and does not even know what a brand is).

• Microsoft decides to spend billions of dollars operating a distributed ad network at a loss to steal market share (although this is not too likely because this would create an arbitrage opportunity which would be heavily abused by people like me)

I may be coming and going this weekend (and my internet connection has been exceptionally unreliable the last few days) but if you want, I am offering $10 off my ebook price if you buy it through Google Checkout. This is a short time promotion (which may end sometime this weekend). I just want to see how this works from the merchant end to see how viable I think it is relative to Paypal. Please note that it may take a number of hours for me to get your ebook to you after purchase as I sleep sometimes (but rarely ;) and my internet connection has not been that great recently.

Update: Order button removed. Thanks to everyone who bought my ebook through Google Purchase.

Here are some more thoughts from my purchase experience.

• Processing the orders was quite easy, but...

• I do not like the idea of Google "protecting" my customers for me. Having them suddenly put a brick wall between my customer's email and my business is not seen as much of a value add from the merchant perspective.
• I do not understand the point of cloaking a person's email address if you give me their name and physical address.
• One of the two people who used the Google email cloaking stuff also had order problems with their credit card not going through.

Who is Google Purchase good and bad for?

• I think it may work well for those who have such a large established brand that most of their traffic is for people already searching for their brand, but then again if you are operating at that scale having Google play middle man with some of your customer emails might suck.

• If you are heavily reliant on search traffic this could put a squeeze on your business. Trusting Google to constantly make the market more efficient when they profit from advertiser inefficiencies is somewhat altruistic for a merchant to do.
• If you are new to the market and are confident in your product quality I think Google Purchase can be a way to make it easier for Google to learn to trust you and understand what other products and services your business relates to, but even then you are self selecting your site to be commercial in nature, which may not be a good since their search results have an obvious informational bias.
• If you do not have a website and are just listing a couple products on Google Base and are in no rush to sell the items then Google Purchase can be useful.

Eventually Google will probably use purchase details, search history, and other information consumption habbits to make their AdSense program a more efficient ad/product recommendation engine (think of the Amazon emails and on site notifications that say people who bought x also bought y).

It might be worth thinking about that as one of their end goals and playing with Google Purchase to see how it works and how you can integrate it into your system, but like anything Google Purchase is just a small step in a direction and they are starting off slow, so I do not think it is a make or break now or never thing for most merchants.

If you are a market leader with a low price point and broad distribution you are giving Google a ton of relevant usage data back to refine their ads, especially when weighed against how little value they are adding to your business.

But they do give you a logo :)

Terrible post title, I know, but recently I have been asked many times over about the general theme of where do I find high quality free easy to get links. But when you are brand new to a network you can't add up all those pieces and expect it to work. Here's why If I know unique and innovative ways to pollute the web for personal profit why would I share them for free with someone who does not have any passion for what they are doing and wants me to value my time at $0 to help them make money?

To be fair, some of the people who asked me were also paying customers, but the reasons I don't push the get as much as you can free without thinking angle are:

• if you are doing the work for a client and your client has no marketing budget and/or values your time at next to nothing then they are a client worth firing. if they want marketing to be free they should do it on their own dime and time.

• I think to be good at profiting from algorithmic holes you have to have an analytical mind that is good on picking up on patterns. If you can't identify the obvious algorithmic holes by looking through the search results or looking at this then I am not certain what I can tell you that would help you.
• as time passes more and more of the easy money market is getting chewed up by vertical integration
• most sites that are marketed in that "all I can get for free that is easy" manner are low quality sites
• many people market sites in that manner and leave obvious trails of where they have been
• search engines probably notice some of those patterns ;) ... you are the company you keep. Sometimes less is more.
• it may take a year or more to rank if your market is competitive. it may never be attainable if you are not focused on trying to create value
• it never builds any tangible value. you don't catch and pass the competition just by following them.
• if you do well and your work is easy to replicate then many others likely will.
• if your work is easy to replicate a program will probably replicate it thousands of times over, so in essence you are valuing your own time as being worth less than that of an automated software program. is that any way to live?

You can't do well long term just going after the holes unless you know how to spot them and predict them and quickly capitalize on them yourself.

Switching Costs:
While the only 1 click away theory is a nice theory there are real switching costs to changing web services. the same can be said of finding new people / channels worth regularly reading or linking at.

Finding / Creating Unique Content:
If you are trying to build from scratch you need to be conceptually unique, not just textually unique.

If you take the time to look outside the typical sources that most people in your vertical scour over then there is a ton of low hanging fruit for creating / recycling / inspiring ideas

There’s something exciting about coming to musicians when they’re just names, when you’ve no idea who Derrick Harriott looks like, or what his reputation is - considered naff by real dub fans, maybe ? Derivative ? Or maybe ground-breaking ? I know the Stooges were ground-breaking - maybe that’s what has been putting me off. The weight of knowing already how good it’s meant to be. With this compilation, I’ve just ploughed through all these faceless names, liking things I probably shouldn’t (covers of soul songs! Spanish guitar solos!) and maybe finding nothing I like by the supposed classics

Sites like Del.icio.us, Digg and Techmeme surely have a techy slant to them, but they surface ideas that interest people daily. Sure some of them will be spam, hype2.0, or garbage, but occasionally some of them will be interesting, and give you ideas of how you can related your site to the link rich populous. Even casinos are doing a good job of it.

People in other countries living on more or less money may be willing to do a lot of work for what you consider next to nothing due to the associated purchasing power parity.

In Shoemoney's interview of Lee Dodd (also congrats on the recent addition to the family Jeremy) they both stressed the value of holding contests or creating user badges as a way to leverage perceived value or create value out of virtually nothing. While being rather poorly set up, recent award programs have done exceptionally well.

Google may not even realize how screwed up their search results are because they hold a flawed or blinded perception of value and they ignore important feedback. All search algorithms are just a way of interpreting or perceiving signs of value. Building a real brand requires creating a perception of value. To profit greatly you either need to build a brand, find flaws or underpricing in other's perception of value, or predict how markets will change and have the guts necessary to place a bit bet on your intuition.

To sell for the cheapest price there are usually hidden costs, like: accounting fraud (Enron), increased risk of prostate cancer (possibly rBGH - makes me not want to drink milk at all), not listening to customer complaints (Google search quality, Paypal account reps for people who do $100,000's in Paypal transactions each year), poor customer support (Verizon DSL, Verizon DSL, Verizon DSL, Verizon DSL), etc.

Sometimes those hidden costs cost you far more than you make from them. People tolerate stuff for a while, then eventually a consumer creates a (yourbrand)sucks.com site or two and suddenly you are worried about what one irrational person does, when the irrational thing was expecting nobody to notice or mention your hidden costs, business warts, etc.

And the product price point matters too because your price point not only determines how many units you will sell, but it also helps determine how much support you can give with your offering, and the average quality of your consumer. Aim for the low end and that is just what you will get.

Telling a story about the value of your product and then adequately pricing it or overpricing it while following through on your offer is a much better way to profit than to fill your product with hidden costs and screw people over.

I just finally got unsick today (what are the odds of getting sick at a concert crammed with 80,000 other people hehehe), so I will be catching up on email tonight.

What are some easy perception of value points you could be using to create business models or authoritative linkable content that will make search engines and/or people more likely to perceived your site or business as being important?

The number of conferences and other obligations I have been dealing with have overwhelmed me, so I decided to create a calendar of marketing and SEO conferences. It is updated through the end of 2006, although I am uncertain to when WITS is. If I missed anything please let me know and I will add it.

The calendar is heavily focused on search and marketing. It will also list a few of the techy conferences like Web 2.0, Gnomedex, and SXSW.