Last week I got this via email

Hello,
How would you like getting a logo’s (or) icon’s (or) seo report (or)template (or) Banner (or) Article (or) Header designed free of cost for your website. We are giving away these services as a promotional measure for free of cost. In return we need a link at your site for each services at home or internal page(Except link,resources,directory pages).

So to get a new services all you got to do is mail us back with the confirmation of link and the page where the link added for our site. If not interested in any of these offer,and interested to do three-way link exchange,please feel free to mail me back.

Awaiting for your reply,
Jeena.

Notice they were willing to trade just about any web based service imaginable for a link. A shotgun approach, but good for a few links I suppose.

And today I got this, which is a bit of a higher touch and more focused approach.

Hi,
I recently started writing work for ______ as a content writer. I would like to write a guest post related to education/college/online education etc. on your site if you’re interested in accepting such a post. If you are interested, please let me know and I can send you an article for you to look over.

The Deal:
I will write a good, useful posts/articles on education/college/online education etc. specifically for your website/blog, free of cost. But I will need a by-line to build up my writing career. In addition, there will be a link to the ______ site in the by-line. So, it will help all parties concerned.

Sample posts written by me:

• linkbait A
• linkbait B

Both articles were widely read and received numerous links from other bloggers. Thanks for your time and I am looking forward to your reply.
Thanks,
Susan Jacobs

The nice thing about receiving such emails is that if they reference their site and you compete with them you can simply set up a couple link searches from blogs to track down everyone that accepted their offer and then get links from the same sources, replicating their strategies while hoarding your own unique link sources. As a Technorati top 100 blogger or an SEO service provider you also get requests like these from people who do not know you own competing sites. This is yet another advantage of being well embedded into the web: you see new marketing strategies within days or weeks of them emerging.

This is also scary for businesses succeeding based on a low price-point strategy. Eventually a similar product or service will be available free (or with a hidden cost that only reveals itself down the road). You are better off charging twice as much and having half as many customers, as mentioned here:

On the drive to lunch I’d ask Ralph why he wouldn’t fill the order when we were making 20 or 30 percent margins on that ton of glass.. “Because they can easily afford to pay more” he’d say.. “and once I sell that crate it’s gone, it will take 3 months before I get another crate.. somebody else will buy it because it’s a specialty size with low cut-loss”, and if I sell it at that price, next time he’ll ask for another nickel discount.. “

The fact that people are trying so many different strategies to get free links show how powerful Google’s fearmongering campaign against paid links is, and just how detached from reality the idea of link = vote is in a marketplace where everyone either knows that link = vote OR is gamed by someone who knows that link = vote.

Idiocracy is a disturbing movie about marketing leading to a dumbing down of society. In many ways, marketing seems to be heading down that path.

Using Twitter today made me further appreciate something Nick Carr mentioned, that as we use computers more we begin to think and act like computers. Short bursts. Logical but detached. Devoid of context. Always engaged in something, never fully engaged. Doing whatever is in front of us, etc.

With marketing being so easy to implement and measure, and every creator (and their dog) learning public relations, every day the web is becoming a bit more like the Guinness Book of World Records. This corn flake sold for $1,350 and this lady was stuck on her toilet for two years. And both of those stories were featured on CNN!

Content producers are trying everything to be remarkable. Some articles are so long that nobody will ever read them (the top 37,549 way to making money online, guaranteed) are being complemented by marketing strategies that aim to simplify complex topics into emotion driven sound-bytes, likeso:

State officials would not let Pro-Life, formerly Marvin “Pro-Life” Richardson, use his middle name on the ballot when he ran for governor in 2006. Secretary of State officials said the state’s policy prohibits slogans from being on the ballot.

But this year Pro-Life, a 66-year-old organic strawberry farmer from Letha, is running for U.S. Sen. Larry Craig’s seat as an independent. And because his full and only name is Pro-Life, the Secretary of State has no choice but to put it on the ballot.

Brawndo, the fake energy drink from Idiocracy, has actually became a real product. Here is one version of the future of marketing

The First Rule of Marketing

Some people hype transparency as the only effective solution for long-term sustainable marketing success. After they are already successful they can hype such false ideals and get praised for them, which only adds to their misguided notion of marketing. The truth is everyone wants to be influenced, but nobody wants to feel like they were influenced.

A Marketing Experiment

A few weeks back a friend of mine ran a linkbait announcing the best photography blogs on the web. And then he announced on his other blog that he was trying an experiment in using flattery to build links. I commented on that post

The first rule of linkbait is…

Generally people do not like feeling like they are being examined or influenced by marketing. For that reason I tend not to talk about “lets see how it goes” until after the fact, and rarely then too.

What was the outcome of his linkbait? It was successful, at least for a bit.

But then award winners found out about that other post. In short order Dave was getting comments like

I just think you are completely underestimating how many difficult situations we are put in as high visibility professional photographers, particularly when it comes to internet ethics. Between finding our images on other photographers’ sites, finding our names in other website’s metatags without authorization, getting anonymous comments we have to moderate from envious competitors, and then being part of an SEO experiment … the amount of time I spend on unethical internet situations is discouraging to me.

and all the award winners were emailing back and forth about how the award was fake. So he alienated his target audience and someone even hacked his blog!

When to Mention Your Sites

If you ever wonder why I sometimes talk about marketing from a broad perspective without pointing out my sites and specific marketing strategies employed, this is yet another example why. The only reasons to mention your sites, stats, and marketing techniques are:

1. to drive traffic and help spread viral ideas quickly (it helps if you own a top blogger in your industry)
2. to linkdrop (a href is your friend)
3. to improve your own image (especially good when joining trade organizations or donating to worthy causes)
4. using the media exposure to help build your site’s brand and credibility (as seen in goes a long way for building trust and making it easier to get cited again)

Everything is Gamed

Behind the scenes media gaming goes on everywhere everyday. But it is rarely talked about publicly because it benefits nobody for their customers to feel like they were duped, influenced, and/or manipulated. We would all like to believe we are smarter than that…but we are not. If we were, I doubt we would have hunted down and executed a man our country put in power, and maybe we wouldn’t be angry at this joke. But sometimes the truth hurts. And sometimes lies kill.

Because I own BlackHatSEO.com and spent literally 1 day building and marketing it, a year ago a reporter writing for The London Times decided to do a feature article about me. Hey I rank #1 and own the exact match URL so I must be the guy, right? Well maybe (just don’t ask Matt!)…but bonus good deal for me on getting the feature, other than some of the regretful out-of-context quotes that were attributed to me.

More recently, I was interviewed by a reporter from The Register named Cade Metz in When Google Does Evil, an article about the opaque world of AdWords. In the article I was referenced as a search marketing consultant, and the link points to search-marketing.info.

Had that site not ranked for hundreds of AdWords related queries I would not have been asked to do the interview. But I just as easily could have moved the best content from that site over to this one. I appreciate the citation, but screwed it up on my end 2 ways

• wrong site: anytime featured articles from the mainstream media reference you it really helps if they mention your primary brand
• weak reference point: there are about 100,000 search marketing consultants in the world. As long as thousands of people claim the same thing you do then your claim does not mean as much as it should. Anytime you talk to the media you want to promote a memorable identity. I had an easy identity when I was the author of the SEO Book, but now that I have changed business models I need a new identity statement for the media, and quick!

When you talk to the media do you make sure they reference the correct site? When you talk to the media what title do you claim that seperates you from the rest of your field?

Have Your Say!

Insert your message in the next Brave New Films video for $199 - not that I am saying you should, but 5 or 10 years ago it would have been hard to imagine this level of fan integration into the funding, creation, and promotion of documentaries. Where are we going to be in another 10 years? Will this video get 500,000 views on YouTube? Might this $199 be a cheap ad buy for people looking to appeal to this demographic? At that price point it is almost an impulse purchase for O’ReillyGoesNuts.com or BoneUsFoxRingtones.com.

Fund Anything

Sites like Kiva allow you to loan to business people in the 3rd world, and offers open ratings on past loan payments. If you are looking to make money in the process, outfits like Prosper and MicroPlace might work too. And Fundable allows you to raise funds for any cool projects or ideas.

Why Your Funding Source Matters

Is it cheaper to get funding and buy ads or grow organically from direct support? Getting capital from a VC may get you some coverage, but it is probably nowhere near as valuable as donations from hundreds or thousands of fans. 4 reasons direct support funding from fans is so powerful are

1. they minimize risk and create deeper direct connections
2. participants feel ownership, which creates meaningful relationships and project evangelists who provide emotional support and spread buzz well ahead of your launch
3. people care much more than they do offering free support (to appreciate how non-committed free support is, hundreds of bloggers talked about the launch of Citizendium, and I donated to the project like a day or two later - and was the first donor to the project)
4. successful projects show social proof of value as they pick up momentum

I recently switched the navigation on the SEO Training subdomain to be on the left side rather than the right side. The reason for doing this was that it has folding tree navigation based on where you are in the training part of the site, and having the navigation change over on the right side of the page was probably a bit confusing for some users.

But now the navigation on the training part is on the left side and I still have the navigation for the blog part of this site on the right side. Should I move the blog navigation to the left side or no?

Potential rewards:

• makes site look more uniform, which could aid usability and be considered important now that we have 3 major subdomains on the site (community, tools, and training)
• this could also make it easier to run seasonal specials and marketing promotions in the navigation area of the blog

Potential draw backs:

• Having the design look different really helps people see when they are in a different part of the site. Blending it all together may undercut that a bit.
• I am quite used to right rail navigation on this blog…ever since 2003! but maybe sentimental reasons have little value here

What do you think?

Using iGoogle or Google Apps you can easily create a page like this, which tracks brand mentions on blogs and other active parts of the web. If you know why people are talking about you then you can create more things they may talk about. If nobody is talking about you then you need to stir up conversation.

How long should I build links for? and when should I stop building them? Both frequent SEO questions, with the answer “it depends.”

Automation as a Non-strategy

Many people are interested in automating as much as possible and doing it as easily and quickly as they can. The problem with replication and doing what is easy are that if it is easy for you to replicate

• it may leave an unnatural footprint
• it is typically easy to replicate
• it leaves you heavily reliant on a single technique that may get cleaned up (like directories did last year)
• if you are working on 30 sites at once you do not get to take best practices learned from sites 1 through 29 and apply them to the 30th site

When Being Lazy is OK

I have sites that I have left virtually untouched for years because they fall into one (or more) of the following categories

• they enjoy a self reinforcing ranking effect
• they got as far as they are going to without significant capital expenditure and opportunity cost that exceeds the potential rewards
• I was just too lazy to keep working on them

Beyond those types of sites I look at link building as a proxy for relationship building.

The Coming Wave of Competition & Creativity

I think when you look at the more creative parts of the web, those foreshadow what the battle for hearts, minds, and eyeballs will look like throughout the rest of the web in the years to come.

Well Marketed/Open Software

With programming you see lots of the high risk heavy capital expenditure business models giving way to lighter, simpler, and more open frameworks. Many of the lighter, simpler, and open frameworks allow users to create plug ins and evangelize the systems. Some even have programmers work on the core. Many also offer free trial versions which reduce marketing costs to ~ $0 and build goodwill. The software companies which are not seen as free and open need to lash out against the competition in an attempt to gain marketshare.

Great Music

Music is another industry undergoing gigantic business model shifts. Sigur Rós is a well known Icelandic group, which created a 97 minute documentary about their homeland named Heima. Then they uploaded it to YouTube and were featured on the homepage of YouTube for a day, along with some of their fan favorite short films. Their documentary got over 600,000 views on YouTube in the last 4 days, and you can watch it on this page for free:

In spite of their success, they are still building links. And if you want to watch the video somewhere other than YouTube it only costs $15 on Amazon.com. On their next tour they could probably double or triple their ticket price and still sell out stadiums, largely because they kept building links.

• Reciprocal links really started getting punished after there were tools to automate link exchanges and link exchange hubs developed.
• Nofollow was a direct response to automated blog comment spam software.
• Directories really started getting punished after there were tools to automate submissions and there were lists of sites to submit to.
• Article directories started getting punished after there were tools to automate submissions and there were lists of sites to submit to.
• A blog called Promote My Site offers a list of thousands of social media sites. And there are plenty of automated submission tools too.

As free and infinite competition erodes the value of weak connections, a key to sustainably selling art is to reach out to 1,000 true fans:

The key challenge is that you have to maintain direct contact with your 1,000 True Fans. They are giving you their support directly. Maybe they come to your house concerts, or they are buying your DVDs from your website, or they order your prints from Pictopia. As much as possible you retain the full amount of their support. You also benefit from the direct feedback and love.

Seth mentioned how Bruce Springsteen built true fans over the years.

Even if you currently do not view yourself as an artist, to still be selling information online in 5 years, you will need to become one. Last September I posted Publishers Will Become Interactive Media Artists, which explains the shift that is taking place.

Recent University of Iowa research concluded that blissfully ignorant shoppers are happier with their choices:

“We found that once people commit to buying or consuming something, there’s a kind of wishful thinking that happens and they want to like what they’ve bought,” said assistant professor of marketing Dhananjay Nayakankuppam. “The less you know about a product, the easier it is to engage in wishful thinking. But the more information you have, the harder it is to kid yourself. This can be contrasted with what happens before taking any action when people are trying to be accurate and would prefer getting more information to less.”

Which is worth thinking about when you aim to sell something. Sometimes the mystery is part of the appeal. Sure you want to answer many common questions to aid the perception of value, but sometimes a vague answer that allows wishful thinking to wonder is better than concrete answers that kill the imagination.

One of the things that holds back many semi-successful people who do not fully appreciate their own value is trying to answer everything possibly before the sale, which focuses too much time and effort on non-customers, while killing the imagination of legitimate prospects.

Update: In the comments NickB mentioned this TED talks video by Dan Gilbert.

• He highlights that unlimited choice, excessive fear, and unrestrained ambition kill happiness.
• We often vote against happiness because we think that given more choices and more time to debate our options we will like the outcome more. For most trivial matters the opposite is typically true.
• Another interesting tidbit is that amnesiacs who did not remember what specific gift they were given liked it more after they were given it (even if they did not remember that they owned it).

Watch this video…it’s great stuff.

One of the things that a lot of thought leaders do is inspire people. It is easy to believe when they give you something to believe in.

I recently stumbled across this page. Although it is just text, to me it seems just as powerful as listening to Barack Obama speak. It is not even the words that matter…it is the underlying tone and enthusiasm.

Sometimes I am a bit too cynical for my own good. Far too often I place principal ahead of growth strategies. But most of that stuff does not matter. The future of sustainable marketing practices is more about creating inspiring stories than about knowing more or blending ads in content better. Which, I suppose, is a good reason to go to the gym every day. The better you maintain yourself the easier it is to be inspiring. Now that’s a holistic marketing strategy.

How can a guy who brushes off his own company’s overtly underhanded and deceptive marketing behaviors care about what others are doing?

What does get me hot and bothered is when consultants and bloggers propose launching such an initiatives solely for influencing search. SEO, like word of mouth, should be a byproduct outcome, not a primary objective. Any brand that plays in this space should be aiming to create value. Do that and the other stuff will follow.

But the SEO shenanigans for the sake of SEO has to stop. If you’re going to play in our sandbox, follow the community’s (unwritten) rules.

Using Steve Rubel’s broken logic, public relations should be a natural outcome of product quality, and nobody should need to hire his firm to create fake blogs. But that is another story for another post.

One day your writing a fake blog for Wal Mart and the next day you are writing the rulebook for blogging. As long as you are consistent that is all that matters. Just keep writing.

You really need to police yourself before talking about how you are going to police others, and before you write off other fields in their entirety.

When I read must we piss in every public fountain by Dan Thies, I thought it was a great post. But at the same time, as an internet marketer you have to be pragmatic. Which is why I was unsurprised when 6 months later StomperNet sent out an email suggesting that readers could

visit propeller.com and open up 10 unique accounts using different usernames, email addresses, etc.

Use free email accounts from Yahoo, Gmail, etc. to open up the accounts.

Repeat the process for each of the 29 Social Bookmarking sites listed at SocialMarker.com

and then the next email claimed

Are they borderline? Yeah! We said they were. We pointed out in the email that you need to be careful when walking the line with social marketing. Do spammers use similar techniques to the ones Jeff outlined? I’m sure they do - Spammers are always on the lookout for new exploits… but they usually don’t need to learn from legitimate marketing teachers to uncover them.

The difference between an ethical marketer and a spammer is a matter of intent. The ethical marketer seeks to profit by providing real value to real individuals. The spammer seeks only pure profit based on the laws of statistics - throw enough people at any offer, and someone will bite.

So you don’t think you are telling people to be spammers when you tell them to set up 10 Propeller accounts? What exactly separates those “10 legitimate accounts” people from spammers? I would love to see an explanation about where that line in the sand is drawn.

If you are sending out an email offer for everything under the sun just because you need to trade publicity to be profitable, are you building a real business or actually providing any real value?

primarily what I got was sales pitch after sales pitch, and “new program” after “new program”, and far too many different forums that offered practically no participation by the original faculty members that were the catalyst to my joining.

Almost every internet marketer explains how other people are spammy, but what they do is somehow legitimate. When I was new and naive I may have bought that crap, but how can people claiming thought leader status still be dishing out such blatant lies in 2008?

I see that as silly. Techniques are either effective or they are not. And they carry an associated risk level. I chose to be technique agnostic because it is the only way you keep learning and keep growing faster than the market. Sometimes you only learn to appreciate the opportunity cost of risk after you get a site burned. But then it factors into future decisions.

At least once a month there is a story about how someone got caught spamming. The Guardian ran a story about how Matt Inman got over 100,000 links to a payday loan site by adding links in viral widgets.

That story did not appear because somebody spammed, it appeared because the marketing was so aggressive and overt. Anytime you have thousands of people embedding something someone is going to notice it. If it was done on a smaller scale it could have lasted for years. A few years ago, for about a 2 year period, one of the top ranked mesothelioma sites was there based on links syndicated with web counters.

Forbes sometimes writes stories about how SEOs are spammers and stories about how Google is clamping down on spam. And then they publish a bunch of cheesy lead generation pages on their site that are linked to nearly sitewide via a dropdown box that hides the links.

Do publishers need to keep content and ads separate to be legitimate, as demanded by this random commenter on a story about Ron Jackson working in a domain start up? No they don’t. That is just the lie the media needs to push to be viewed as credible. Almost every popular website does reciprocal promotion and has editorial guided by their business interests. But when people can’t follow their own advice and create profit, or they need to lie to just to make a buck, they have headed down the wrong path.

I enjoy helping people. But how I was doing it via endless emails was not working. I was worried that I might get some blowback when I changed my business model, so I could offer higher customer value. But largely the reaction was positive. I got numerous emails like this:

I have admired you and your work for a very long time, and not just that, but also your honest no-hype, no-crap approach to doing business online.

it’s been my observance that some aspects of SEO and also ‘net marketing’ are so sleazy that it’s not to be believed. even some people who started out ‘legit’ and made a bit of a name for themselves now have seemed to let themselves get sucked into the hype and associated with some less than ethical behaviours all to make money.

you know what is kind of funny? i keep encountering all these so-called experts, some in person, but most online, and i always ask them: “hey, did you get that book from Aaron Wall? you know, the SEO Book. what do you think of it?” and you know what? almost none of them have bought it. some of them even ask me, ‘Aaron who?’. for me, you set the standard, so i find it really odd.

One member instant messaged me telling me “the community is like heaven for SEOs.” I have learned a good bit from the forums too. I am surprised how well it has been working out so far. Are some of the suggestions considered spammy? Of course. Use the right tool for the right job.

Back to that topic of identifying spam. If you replaced the word spam with the word profit you would better understand how and why it is policed. Matt Inman’s spam simply consisted of using push marketing, viral marketing, aiming it at a large audience, and embedding promotional value for other company assets in it.

When Google partners with large political parties are they actually looking out for your best interests? Google is using push marketing, viral marketing, aiming it at a large audience, and embedding promotional value for other company assets in it. Hmm. Sounds familiar.

Do you have a health records problem? Or is Google solving a marketing problem, helping pharmaceutical corporations push drugs at you based on your genetic flaws? If they are doing push marketing for large established bodies how can they expect anyone else to compete with them without using push marketing?

Build it and they will come…to someone else’s site. Be aggressive and use push marketing, or earn 25% of your real market value. Almost everyone who tells you not to spam does not listen to their own advice, or changed their outlook AFTER they got a market leading position. But they didn’t get where they are by following their own advice.

I get hundreds of emails a day, and am always behind on email. Recently I sent out emails to affiliates letting them know that I was changing my model, and let high volume affiliates know that I wanted to give them a free limited trial so they could see what they are selling. It only makes sense to have your best affiliates know what changed.

In response to my email to 3,000+ affiliates, my email load sharply increased. The people who were top affiliates typically sent an unassuming email “not sure if I am a top affiliate but I would love to take a look.” At the same time hundreds of affiliates who had 0 or 1 sale ever (some even with 0 clickthroughs and 0 ad impressions) considered themselves high volume sellers and demanded a free trial. Friction. Uggg.

So then I had to tell those people no, and that the launch was going better than expected, and I wanted to ensure I was able to keep up with current community members. One of them told me that they were going to use something that sounded to me like “creative spammy marketing” to sell my ebook and I said that I preferred they did not. They responded saying that I am an elitist. In a short email exchange that person went from “a long time fan” to a person who “would never listen to anything I said again.”

The problem is that it is easy to be misunderstood via email. And as soon as people pay you anything or establish any type of relationship with you, some feel they own you. Email is great for sending personalized messages to a few people to help get feedback and spread important ideas. Email is also good for mass-emailing people via autoresponders that do not get responded to. But email is not good for establishing lasting relationships with many people.

To be fair, I owe a lot to email. The first version of my sales letter was reformatted by a customer who liked the ebook so much he wanted to help me sell more of them. And the ebook itself was formatted nicely by another customer who I did a bit of consulting for in a work trade. And I met my wife via email before our first phone call. So I owe a lot to email. But not too many deep and meaningful relationships can not stem from emails when you have hundreds of people emailing you every day.

Any time your business model contains recurring access to you for a one time price, if you are a decent marketer, you will create more demand than supply, and eventually you get burned out by people asking 15 or 30 questions at a time. When there is no opportunity cost to keep asking people do.

A guy who was profiled in an “internet marketing success stories with multi-millionaires” book asked me about 100 questions via before I told him enough was enough. The same guy sold information as the main piece of his business model. I asked him if he valued his own time at $1 an hour, because if he did I could use some of it. I got no response. A year later he wanted to buy “affordable and reasonable” SEO services from me and I told him no thanks. I would not ever refer him to anyone because he was so selfish in our prior relationship.

It eventually got to the point where people were asking me so many questions to where I was getting emails like “where is adwords” and I would just send them a link to the associated search result. And some people who bought the book would never subscribe to updates but email me 5 times a year asking for the latest version. 5 emails a year adds up when you have to verify each account and 1,000+ people are doing it.

As more and more information gets commoditized the value of weak, quick, and fast relationships loses value. And if you have 20,000 customers who have no opportunity cost in asking you lots of questions, many of them will treat you like a search box. But since the seller is not an algorithm that does not work out to well for sanity. And if you send out too many emails it starts to feel like you are a high volume email deployer

The good news is that as the web ages and the market suffers further information pollution, the value of reliable trustworthy advice and quality service goes up. But to provide lasting quality service you have to charge recurring.

Here are some email hacks I have come up with to lessen email load…

• Automatically have your newsletter subscriptions archived and tagged…read them when you have time to.
• Unsubscribe from anything you do not read in 3 months.
• Do not provide email support for free stuff. Make them post feedback to your site.
• If people are really nasty and are not yet your customers do not respond to those emails. At best they waste your time. At worst, they waste your time, do a reverse charge, AND may put you in a bad mood.
• Do a quick pass through and wipe out anything that looks like spam.
• If you have common answers then prewrite templates for them and use cut and paste, modifying each slightly.
• Answer emails that are closely aligned at the same time.

The Decline of Public Forums

About a year ago I decided to close Threadwatch so I could focus more on expanding this site. The Searchguid forums and site went away, and the domain name was recently auctioned off for $8,655, and it redirects to SEONews.com. John Scott, the owner of V7N, recently announced that he was stepping away from the site, and currently has it up for auction for $400,000 at SitePoint with a $500,000 buy it now price.

The bulk of V7N’s earnings come from directory submissions, which is a business model Google kicked in the teeth many times last year. I am not sure how well those revenues will hold up. If you run an Internet advertising based business models selling ads to internet marketers targeting other internet marketers it is a rough rough business model. Outside of the newbie who has not yet got burned, we are generally aware, skeptical, and wary of advertising.

How much information pollution do you find in some of the larger public SEO forums? Will OpenID eventually protect public sites? How can public publishers add enough friction to stop spam without driving away talent?

Why You Know So Much

As internet marketers, we have a canary in the coalmine effect, where many of the trends we pick up on are later felt across the broader market. Why? Because competition is so fierce and there are so many people trying to push so many different scams each day that we get hit from every angle.

We use the web so much that we are more aware of new ad formats, new business models, etc. We profit from accidental clicks as soon as the model appears, and before the media knows we are aware of when and how it changes.

Our Competitive Advantage

The stuff that works in the internet marketing field, porn field, gaming field, or other high paying fields probably works well on the other parts of the web. But as we go, so do the rest of the web, but we typically have a 6 month to 3 year advantage over the rest of the web.

As software gets more sophisticated, spam bots get more sophisticated, membership site proliferate, people become more wary of advertising, and Google tries to keep more of the traffic on Google.com many public forums will die. Increasingly communities and web publishers will have two stores…a public one that keeps the brand represented on the web graph, and a private one which allows the owner to profit from the brand equity, trust, and user loyalty they built up.

Many traditional publishers are still shoving junk down our throats. How could we lose to that?

I still need to work on making the sales letter better, but it is hard to have an optimal sales letter until you get a good bit of consumer feedback. Here is the sales letter for anyone wanting to join our private community and training program.

If you prefer to skip the sales letter and go right to the buy now you can find the ordering instructions here.

Our pricepoint is $100 per month, but the first 100 people to subscribe from this point on get in at $50 per month. We already have a few hundred members in the forum from people I invited to help get it started.

So I am beta testing setting up the SEO Book community and training program. A couple issues have come up so far, but generally stuff is looking pretty good. I am still working on fixing a couple details, but to get a preview of the training part you can go here. I am hoping to do an official launch in the coming week unless something major comes up.

As time passes I intend to make the training program richer and deeper and add lots of videos and other content to it. But you can kinda think of the online training program as being a high quality editorially controlled Wikipedia of SEO information, complete with an interactive community forum.

I got a bit of flack via email about saying that Google and Yahoo! were killing off arbitrage. I think, more accurately, I should have said something like they are trying to kill off most forms of garbitrage and click to click arbitrage…the type of stuff where there is no value add AND the affiliate has no brand.

CJ just announced that Yahoo! changed their policy and is allowing affiliates to direct link to merchant websites. From the most recent Commission Junction newsletter:

After more than six months in the making and much customer feedback and testing, we are pleased to announce that Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) has recently updated its editorial policies and will now allow U.S. publishers to direct link to their advertisers. In the past, YSM’s editorial policy prevented publishers from linking directly to their advertiser partners and required that traffic be sent first to the publisher’s Web site. The new policy eliminates this restriction and opens a much broader search marketing opportunity for publishers.

After you look at the fallout of recent changes, it appears many thin arbitrage sites still are fine advertising, but the ones that are still doing well are typically associated with larger brands. The following arbitrage sites are still bidding on a wide array of keywords

• Business.com is still advertising for many keywords with Google ads aggressively integrated in the results.
• While Ask.com lost their sub-syndication feed, they have arbitrage search results with 15 ads and 5 organic results
• MonsterMarketplace is still getting strong traffic.

A few of the other big arbitrage players like FindStuff.com and Toseeka.com and some other MeziMedia/ValueClick sites still seem to be directing ad traffic to their sponsored search results.

Google and Yahoo can not clean up all the arbitrage at once because that would have hurt the ad networks too much. They started with many of the more open and potentially abusive relationships and will work to keep elevating the value add of partner sites by bringing more content directly into the search results. Consider how aggressively Google integrated local results in their organic search results and that Google is now testing displaying video ads in their search results.

Google has been getting tighter with their control of their ads, fighting arbitrage with the following changes

• manual reviews, smart pricing discounting (of publisher clicks), and quality scores (increasing the cost of advertising junk)
• improved duplicate content detection
• decreasing the clickable area in many AdSense ad units
• killing sub-syndication of their feed with companies like Ask
• keeping a greater percentage of ad revenue from each click
• requiring advertiser display URLs to match ad destination (starting April 1st)

From this graph you can see the sharp rise of click arbitrage quickly fell off when Google decided to work on fixing the problem.

Yahoo! has turned a blind eye to arbitrage for years. Some people who had strong feeds only saw their arbitrage profit margins increase as the weaker players could no longer compete arbitraging Google traffic. And then Yahoo! dropped a bomb, announcing that arbitrage to their ad feeds is now against their TOS and Parked.com confirmed it.

The biggest distributed ad networks do not want to buy any traffic that is bought directly via similar networks. These companies are cutting their short term revenues in an attempt to make their ad ecosystem healthier. On multiple occasions I have logged into Yahoo! Search Marketing to see a random multi-hundred dollar spend on a keyword that typically costs under $1 a day. I, for one, am glad to see this crap die. But it died a few years too late.

Google and Yahoo want a direct relationship with publishers and merchants. They hate virtually any type of affiliate that is not a highbrow relationship. More power to the organic players, and please static text links instead!