Web publishing has a low barrier to entry. This is great, because it enables anyone to be a publisher, and to reach a world wide audience.

The downside is that because there is a low barrier to entry, the web is saturated with content!

So, how do you choose topics to write about that stand out from the crowd? How do you stay ahead of everyone else? How do you stay ahead of those who have more time/money/energy to publish than you do? One way, of course, is to work smarter.

In this article, we'll look at strategies and tools that will help you do just that. But before we do, let's take a look at the state of the web..

The Evolution Of Personal Publishing

Personal publishing is in a constant state of evolution.

Take blogs, for example.

At one time, is was good enough simply to link to topics. The first blog, Robot Wisdom, took this approach. However, with the rise of social media, like Digg & Twitter, this approach - apart from a few, long-established exceptions aside - is a dead duck.

Next came the "rewriting news stories" approach. This approach still works, but in crowded niches, every blog ends up publishing the same thing. If you're a late follower in a niche, it's unlikely you'll make much headway using this technique, because it doesn't offer anything people can't get - and aren't already getting - elsewhere.

Next came providing opinion, analysis and context to news stories. This works well if the opinions on offer are new, insightful, and unique. This is the current state of the blogshere, and chances are the top blogs you read take this approach. They address a need in the market - i.e. a need for depth and analysis . I suspect you're already reading less and less of the blogs that either just point to sources or rewrite news stories.

It's not quite as linear as I'm making out, but the point is wish to make is that as content more plentiful, the bar gets raised on the quality level of content you need to produce in order to stand out.

Plenty of new opportunities lie in synergising information to provide readers with the new angles and editorial depth they crave. If you aggregate from different sources, and can spot trends before others do, you stand a good chance of standing out from the crowd.

But how do you do this?

Tools & Strategies

1. RSS Reader

Chances are you already use one. But if you don't, an RSS reader is possibly the single most important tool for article and information discovery. An RSS reader brings information to you. It brings the information to you soon after it is published. It's like having your own personal newspaper which auto-updates every few minutes.

The main advantage of an RSS reader is that you can scan a huge number of sources in very little time. Aim to monitor a lot of sources, across related industry verticals.

There are plenty of RSS readers to choose from. Here are a few to get you started: Google Reader, Bloglines, and NewsFox.

2. Have A Point Of View About Future Direction

Try to form opinions about the way your market or niche is heading, rather than where it is now, then analyse information through this filter. If asked, could you say where internet marketing is now, and where it will be in five years time? What will it look like? What are the stages it will move through to get there?

If you use such a mental filter, you should be able to spot the nuances in sources more easily. The aim is to weed out the tired, repetitive and redundant. Specifically, try to look for the points where people's behaviors start to deviate from an established norm.

Services like Compete and Google Trends are great for spotting these types of changes. There are a variety of sources data can be pulled from, including government, industry bodies, and free secondary research.

Here's a graphical comparison of various Google services. I'm sure there's an article topic in there somewhere ;)

Of course, you need to watch out for bias. One famous example of the problems of biased data was the 1948 election:

On Election night, the Chicago Tribune printed the headline DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN, which turned out to be mistaken. In the morning the grinning President-Elect, Harry S. Truman, was photographed holding a newspaper bearing this headline. The reason the Tribune was mistaken is that their editor trusted the results of a phone survey. Survey research was then in its infancy, and few academics realized that a sample of telephone users was not representative of the general population. Telephones were not yet widespread, and those who had them tended to be prosperous and have stable addresses

This is why cross-checking is often a good idea. One example, in the field of SEO, is keyword data. Some keyword research tools pull data from small, third party search engines, whilst Adwords data might be a more reliable indicator of the numbers of searches on Google for a specified keyword term, if that's what you're aiming to measure.

TrendWatching.com offers a good definition of trends:

A (new trend) is a manifestation of something that has unlocked or newly serviced an existing (and hardly ever changing) consumer need,* desire, want, or value.

"At the core of this statement is the assumption that human beings, and thus consumers, don't change that much. Their deep needs remain the same, yet can be unlocked or newly serviced. The 'unlockers' can be anything from changes in societal norms and values, to a breakthrough in technology, to a rise in prosperity."

Can you spot anything people have recently started doing differently?

One example was PPC advertising. Before PPC advertising came about, SEOs wouldn't dream of paying for clicks. Why would they when they could get them for free?

So, the established norm was a group of marketers who operated on the principle of getting clicks for free.

PPC emerged because there were a group of advertsiers that were prepared to pay per click, rather than spend time, money and effort in the hit and miss field of SEO. PPC addressed a deep need. PPC, of course, quickly grew into a multi-billion dollar industry.

3. Monitor Cross-Industry

Monitor not just your own vertical, but also look across related industries. What's hot and emerging in one market may not have hit your market yet. See if there is a natural synergy between the two. If there is, and no one is writing about it yet - great - you've just discovered a ground breaking content idea.

4. Aggregators

There are a wide range of aggregators available, with new options popping up all the time. Aggregators are particularly good for finding new sources. Try Techmeme, FriendFeed, StumbleUpon, Popurls, Topix, and, of course, the recently updated Google Blog Search.

5. Set Up A tips@ Email Address

Your readers might be a rich source of ideas. Some may also have some insider information that they might not feel comfortable publishing yourself.

Set up a tips@ email address, and encourage people to email you with information. Make it easy for them to do so.

BTW, if anyone does have some insider information they want to share, or answers you need, or article suggestions, please email us at seobook@gmail.com. :)

6. Cultivate News Stories Using Social Media

Start a Digg-style news community for your niche. Try to create communities of people who enjoy mining for information on a given topic. One search-oriented example of such a community is Sphinn.com.

If you don't have the inclination to set-up a community yourself, find existing communities and monitor them.

Check out:

Pligg.com
Sphinn.com
Mixx.com

7. RSS Remixing

RSS remixing is agrregating different RSS feeds into one feed. You can remix each industry vertical, rather than have multiple feeds, which can make it easier to scan.

Add each feed to your reader, aggregate them into the one big feed, the same folder or view, and viola - you have your own niche news mining engine.
Also check out remixers such as FeedRinse, FeedDigest, and BlastFeed.

8. URL Monitoring On Digg

In the Digg search option, choose "URL only" and "upcoming stories". Type in the domain name of any site you want to watch. You should see an orange RSS button in the right hand corner. Click on it and save the results as an Rss feed.

9. Google Alerts

Why search for news when Google can do it for you? For those who don't know, Google Alerts is an email service that monitors Google result sets for the keyword of your choice.

For example, you can monitor when people talk about you or your site, you can keep track of your competitors or industry, and stay on top of breaking news.

Also check out Track Engine. Similar to Google Alerts, Track Engine can be used to identify when websites update, without you having to visit them. You can also set tracking perameters so customise the information you receive.

10. Google Insights

Insights For Search is a hugely useful tool.

You can use it in a number of ways. For example, you can track seasonal trends. This chart shows when interest is highest in basketball. The pattern of interest is a consistent, shape year after year. You could use this information to dictate the timing of your stories on certain topics.

11. Random Stumbling & Association

Sometimes stumbling about in unknown territory can be a great way to get the creative juices flowing.

Another fun option are Oblique Strategies cards.

Try famous quotes. Quotes contain universal truths, which you might be able to apply to your area of interest, in order to view things in a different way.

Image collections are another. Search on various themes, and see what image comes back. Does the image prompt a fresh way of thinking?

Hold multiple, disconnected ideas in your head and see if you can discover a synergy. For example, a famous example is:

• A Red Traffic Light
• A cigarette

This led to the little red mark on cigarettes encouraging smokers to stop smoking when the cigarette burned down to that point, and thereby they could control their habit. More likely, it was a ruse to get smokers to go through a pack faster.

Got any strategies on how to generate story ideas? Add 'em to the comments below.

Further Reading

• Rss Cookbook: Ten Advanced RSS Tricks
• MindTools - Provides articiles and resources on problem solving, ideas and creativity

Rick Schwartz, one of the leading domainers and creator of the TRAFFIC domain conference, highlighted the value of descriptive domains from a brand perspective:

NATURAL BRANDING or BUILD and CREATE BRANDING

This alone is worth the price of admission. Brad told us his story of spending millions and millions to advertise and brand with his original 3 word creative domain name. When he switched and used a fraction of those ad dollars to buy a category killer domain name, he transformed his business. The dollars he was using to brand was now freed up to do other acquisitions and grow his business in a more dramatic way. NATURAL BRANDING may be the simplest way to describe what a great domain brings to the table.

If you have to make people aware of who you are AND what you do then you are going to need to spend a lot more money on marketing than a business which is built around existing market demand.

What is the leading brand of hammocks? If there is not a clear market leader then Hammocks.com would be a nice spot to set up business.

As the web gets more competitive and generics get established as category leaders there will still be a need for specific brands to differentiate between services, but if you are part of the 99% of small business marketers lacking a large branding budget then buying a category leading domain is an obvious sustainable competitive advantage over other businesses that are in the same position you are. Every market has to have a winner...may as well be you. :)

Pricing a Link

When trying to understand the value of a link a variety of factors can be considered, including:

• PageRank / link equity
• anchor text (if you can influence it to align with your keywords that increases the value significantly)
• link location (inline links are more likely to be trusted than links in the footer of a page near a bunch of other obvious paid links)
• direct traffic the link sends
• site quality & brand exposure
• endorsement value (if any is given)

Risk Tolerance

Some links (bought links on SEO blogs, paid links near pharmacy/porn/gambling links) are almost certain to get your site noticed in the wrong way.

Large brands can get away with being far more aggressive than thin affiliate sites can.

Many people who heavily rent links still have not exhausted other cheap and easy link building strategies they could be using.

The Bottom Line

In some markets you need to own a billion dollar brand, have an old site, or rent links to compete. In other markets link renting may pose an unnecessary risk.

The most important aspect of link renting is the one people rarely talk about - the actual value to your business. To determine that you need to analyze not only the quality of the link, but also

• where you are
• where the competition is
• what is needed to bridge that gap
• any potential risks associated with the link buying

Along those lines, I thought it would be good to compare a couple sites to each other, to demonstrate how widely the value of links can spread.

Rich, Average, Poor

$17,000 Per Link

BankRate recently bought CreditCardGuide.com for $34M and it had about 2,000 inbound links on the day of purchase. BankRate may have overpaid for that site, but Rafael David made at least $17,000 per link to his website!

Think about all the crazy public relations stunts you could pull and make money if you got paid $17,000 per link! You could pay an entire town to tattoo your brand on their foreheads...or maybe do something a bit more tasteful than that. Where links are hard to get and lead value is high you can afford to pay a lot for links.

But BankRate was not just buying links, they were buying traffic and rankings...a set of links that fit the criteria needed to get a lot of organic Google search traffic. If Mr. David would have acquired half as many links he might only have 10% the traffic and his site may have sold at a much smaller multiple. When selling a site your base and your growth rate both feed into the multiple you can sell a site for.

In media stories about buying the site, Thomas R. Evans, BankRate CEO, said they bought the site largely because of its Google rankings:

"As an affiliate of Nationwide Card Services, which we acquired this past December, we have worked with CreditCardGuide and have been able to watch their growth and momentum firsthand," stated Thomas R. Evans, President and CEO of Bankrate. "CCG has done a great job of developing its organic traffic and ranks highly in a number of important credit card search terms. Adding more direct, high-quality traffic to our credit card business will grow our revenue and improve the margins in this important category," Mr. Evans added.

Affiliate Rankings: Strong Cashflow or Break Even

Some of my friends have affiliate sites that do anywhere from 0 to 10 leads a day at ~ $30/lead. They rank well enough to get good traffic, then their rankings slip. And they keep bouncing back and forth. Buying just a couple strong links could take a $150/day average earnings and boost it to $300...thus yielding a monthly return of $4,500.

If you are an affiliate selling the same crap that all the other affiliates sells, you will see that most the search traffic goes to the top couple ranked sites. As an example, one of my friends saw their Google ranking go from #3 to #2 for a huge phrase that is most of the site's traffic...and their overall site traffic (and profits) went up 50%. If a company is primarily search driven and is in a high value niche they can see huge returns from just a couple quality links.

When you think about the opportunity cost a site making $150 a day might not be worth running. But every dollar it makes over its baseline is profit that can either be used to reinvest into quicker growth or fund other projects.

$1 Per Link

Some SEO and technology blogs have hundreds of thousands or millions of inbound links. For such authoritative sites the average value of each link might be less than $1.

If the competition has 1 million links and you only have 50,000 you might not get enough traffic for the site to be worth maintaining, especially if it is in a saturated market with limited traffic value.

Example Charts

Across Industries

These values are a bit arbitrary, but this chart does a good job of helping conceptualize how the value of links can change based on your vertical, your business model, and the associated lifetime customer value.

Within Industries

The value of links not only depends on what vertical you are in, but also on how you monetize your website. For instance, a ticket broker can earn more per link than a sports blog can.

Disclaimer: keep in mind that the above charts were more for showing examples of relative values than to offer a formula for specific link prices...every situation, every site, and every link is unique.

Link Marketing Strategy

Survey Your Position (and the Competitive Landscape)

If you don't have any organic links then it is going to be hard to buy your way to the top in competitive markets, especially if competing sites have strong advertising and brand budgets.

The key to understanding link buying is understanding the upside potential and how many links are needed to get there. If you are in a saturated market with limited cashflow and are ranking on page 37 at #362 then should you rent links? Probably not. You would be better off investing into awareness, branding, publicity, and developing organic links first.

If you are in the top couple pages and are in the game then renting a few links could help you achieve an explosive return on investment.

All Advertising Has Some Fat on It

Many links that you buy or rent will be filtered algorithmically and have little to no SEO value. But if they help you achieve a positive return on average within an acceptable risk profile then the purchase is worth it. That is how I always viewed directory links. Before Google whacked them I used to submit to about 100 of them. Maybe only 40 or 50 counted, but in aggregate the ROI was still there. Now I may only submit to a half dozen or dozen directories, but in aggregate the ROI is there.

Do you have a brand? If not, your site is part of a "cesspool." In AdAge Google's CEO Eric Schmidt explains the AdWords quality score and organic ranking algorithms in laymans terms:

The internet is fast becoming a "cesspool" where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted.

"Brands are the solution, not the problem," Mr. Schmidt said. "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool."

"Brand affinity is clearly hard wired," he said. "It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component."

The key to understanding the above is to appreciate that not only do the large brands have more money and more exposure, but they are less likely to be policed if they do the same thing that a smaller webmaster does. It is why a billion dollar company's affiliate program passes PageRank and my affiliate links do not.

Simply put, big brands should spam. Smart people like you, who read the algorithms as a profession, already knew this, but a large segment of publishers think search is mostly trickery and voodoo.

Build a brand and buy links. If your brand is big enough you most likely will not get policed out of the search results. It has been that way for years. If only the AdWords support team or Matt Cutts spoke with Mr. Schmidt's level of clarity!

I started a blog on search engines in 2002.

In those days, the idea of blogging about anything other than politics, or blogging, or what your cat had for breakfast, was new. In fact, the idea of blogs was new. Most people's reaction to the word blog was "huh"?

I quickly built up an audience, and links, mostly because I had first mover advantage, and I threw in a few social media basics. It certainly wasn't rocket science. But, at the time, I was doing something unique and "remarkable", in the Seth Godin sense of the word.

Fast forward to today, and the landscape is very different.

There are thousands - perhaps tens of thousands - of blogs on search, and most of those go unread. A blog on search is no longer remarkable.

Unless you have first-class insider information, and can produce it on a regular basis, I wouldn't advise anyone start a generalist search engine blog these days. The low hanging fruit is gone, but there are still easy pickings in other areas, it's simply a matter of finding them, identifying your strengths, and exploiting them.

How Many Blogs Are Out There?

This years "State Of The Blogsphere" report indicates there are around 133 million blogs, and they are only the blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002.

Even if we assume that half of those are spam blogs, or cobweb blogs, that's still a lot of "personal journals". Are there 133 million readers?

ComScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)
Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US
Facebook: 41.0 million | MySpace 75.1 million
Total internet audience 188.9 million
eMarketer (May 2008)
94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users)
22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%)
Universal McCann (March 2008)
184 million WW have started a blog | 26.4 US
346 million WW read blogs | 60.3 US
77% of active Internet users read blogs

Would a generalist blog do well in such a market? It could, but it's highly unlikely. Such deep markets tend to favor a niche approach.

So, instead of a blog on search, one strategy might be simply to go deep on one aspect of that market. How about a blog on the mathematics of search engine algorithms? Or search marketing for a specific region? Or search marketing in one industry vertical, such as travel?

How To Find And Test A Niche

First up, read these posts:

• Market Research Using Google Adwords
• Innovator, Imitator or Idiot
• Targeting Niche Markets

Once you've decided on a niche, you can further test the validity of your idea, and your approach, by asking questions.

One formalized way of doing this is called a SWOT analysis. It's a high-brow marketing term, but the idea is simple in practice. Swot stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

Make a list:

• Strengths - why do I do well?
• Weaknesses - What do I do poorly?
• Opportunities - What upcoming trends fit with my strengths? What am I doing now that could be leveraged?
• Threats - What internal problems do I face? What external problems do I face?

You then detail how you can use each strength, how you can improve each weakness, how you exploit each opportunity, and how you mitigate each risk.

Simply going through such exercises can open a world of possibilities. It is important to write it down. I find the simple act of writing something down seems to make an idea less abstract and more concrete.

One of the big threats in the blog world is the low barrier to entry. Anyone can start a blog within minutes.

Ask yourself how will you stay ahead of the person who starts in the next hour? The ten people who have started by tomorrow? The hundreds of people who have started by next week, not to mention the big, established names who already have a dedicated share of an audience that isn't really growing.

Tough call. There are no easy answers to such a question, as it really depends on your individual strengths and weaknesses, which is why asking questions like these can provide valuable insight.

Philip Kotler, a renowned marketing guru, suggests asking the following questions of any new business plan or idea:

• Does this strategy contain exciting new opportunities?
• Is the plan clear at defining a target market?
• Will the customer in each target market see our offering as superior?
• Do the strategies see, coherent? Are the right tools being used?
• What is the probability that the plan will achieve its stated objectives?
• What would you eliminate from the plan if you only had 80% of your budget?
• What would you add to the plan if you only had 120% of your budget?

Those last two might seem a little odd in this context, but they certainly are applicable. What would you do if you had more of a budget to promote your blog? Would you spend it on advertising? If so, where, specifically, would you spend it?

Asking these questions can suggest all manner of options. By pretending you have more of a budget, you might identify great advertising partners, but because, in reality, you might not have this budget, you could instead suggest you write guest articles for them, and thus achieve much the same result.

SEO For Blogs

The latest shift in SEO, as Aaron details in Social Interaction & Advertising Are The Modern Day Search Engine Submission & Link Building, is towards relationship marketing, which is why SEOs are increasingly adopting marketing and PR strategies in order to operate more effectively.

Let's face it - SEO for blogs is a cakewalk. Blog software, such as Wordpress, is already search friendly, right out of the box. If you want to tweak it further, there are a wealth of available tools and instruction. Anyone can do it, and that's a problem.

But it's not really about the tools. It's how you use them. The key part to success in doing SEO on blogs is the way you interact.

Specific Strategies To Consider

Quote And Link To Popular Bloggers

Apart from the obvious potential that a blogger will follow inbound links back to their source (you!), meme aggregators, such as Techmeme and Google Blog News, are becoming more prevalent.

These sites aggregate similar conversations together. Simply by talking about what others are talking about, and adding to the conversation, you might get a link and/or attention.

Leave Valuable Useful Comments On Popular Related Blogs

Go where the crowd already is.

For example, I follow most comments in these blog posts back to the authors, and if they have left a site name, I check it out.

Most are then added to my RSS feed reader.

Write Articles For Other Popular Blogs

Think of this as advertising. Advertising costs, and in this case, that cost is your time. The benefits of contributing editorial can be fantastic, however, as you can reach a large, established market quickly.

Create Community Based Ideas, Ask For Feedback Before Launching

This is cheap and cheerful market research. You also give your audience an opportunity for buy-in on the outcome. If the audience feels they are part of the process, they are more likely to accept it, and even promote it.

Add Value To Ideas So People Reference You When Talking About Them

Besides the obvious link benefit involved, it is also great for your brand. Your name becomes your brand, and the more people mention your name, the further your brand spreads. Seth Godin is a master at this, and if you aren't reading his blog already, you should be.

See! It just happened. Twice, in this post, in fact.

Actively Solicit Comments And Reply To Them

One over-looked value of comments is that people are providing crawlable, unique content. Usually I find the more contentious the post, the more comments you receive. So don't be afraid to stir the hornets nest every one in a while ;)

Encouraging Contribution From Others And Highlighting Their Contribution Builds Community

The best situation is win-win. Are you giving your readers and community members a chance to do so?

This is one of the reasons I think black hole SEO is short-sighted, especially for community sites and blogs. It doesn't allow others to win, too.

Network Offline At Industry Trade Shows

I once worked with a guy who had been a very successful investment banker on Wall Street. He says he ignores the University qualifications and information in the public domain, as the real business world works on inside information and who you know. There's no doubt that the best place to get insider search information, and great contacts, is in the bars between conferences.

Every community has an epicenter - a group of people who most others take a lead from - and that epicenter might be as small as three or four highly influential people. Those are the people you need to talk to.

Don’t Be Afraid Of Controversy

If you gain mindshare and authority, some people will hate you for it.

This is related to my "stir-the-hornets-nest" point above. Once you start getting attention, you also become a target. You have little choice but to go with the flow, and keep in mind you cannot please all the people, all the time. Sometimes, it even pays not to please them. People are more likely to engage if they feel passionate, and especially if they passionately believe you are wrong!

Reminds me of a great quote by Oscar Wilde: "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about!"

Further Reading

• The Blogger's Guide to SEO
• How To Do SEO for Blogs, Members Area
• Wordpress SEO, Yoast
• 30 Tips for Marketing Your Blog, Toprank
• Blog Marketing Strategies (and How to Measure Them), Clickz
• Blogs and self promotion, Seth Godin
• Purple Cow, Seth Godin