Seo marketing - Results Oriented Thinking & Marketing Advice for SEOs
Results Oriented Thinking & Marketing Advice for SEOs
Focus on Results & Achieve Them
Cygnus offered this quote on Rich Skrenta’s blog post about PageRank:
I like all the traffic types coming in; in order to get that traffic on a couple of sources I have to jump through a few hoops. Big deal. So long as the requirements cost less than the expected revenue from ranking, I’ll meet the requirements.
As long as something works and is within your personal ethical, financial, and risk boundaries then why not give it a try?
Setting Up a Baseline for Risk Tolerance
Bob Massa published a great article casting aside the hats while looking at link buying from a business objectives standpoint:
SHOULD I BUY LINKS? … Most of the people who ask me that question are the people who least need to worry about the risk. The risk motivating the question being whether or not they may be penalized by google instead of the risk being about going broke.
Logic would dictate that anyone concerned about the risk of being penalized by Google, is actually worried about losing something they already have. In this case sales coming from targeted traffic generated from superior organic placements in the SERP’s. …
But far more often than not, when I take a look at the site belonging to the askee, I see a site that looks like a third graders ransom note. … Little traffic to speak of and certainly no sales to lose. There is VERY little visible investment in design, content or anything else. Yet they brag of the #3 spot they have for a keyword with over a million results like that is all they need for proof of their valuable contribution to the world of online commerce.
The biggest risk to most businesses is that they will never be found and never gain any traction. That is why I found the concept of debating the risk of buying links getting you in trouble 5 years from now a bit intellectually dishonest. If in 5 years you built no momentum and someone can just wipe you out that was not a very good business model.
Bob Massa’s article is also a nice summary of why SEO client experiences are bad unless you have a strong brand and/or are selling to the right clients. If you are going to the effort to market thin affiliate sites you may as well keep the all revenue for yourself, and design to at least 4th grade standards!
Why Trust Another Business More Than Yourself?
John Andrews did a fun comparison between AdWords and doorway pages. Considering the cheating wives offers that AdWords promotes I have to agree with him that Google’s moral superiority strategy is a bit thin.
In a post about domain consolidation Michael Gray wanted an opinion from Google. Marisa left this great comment:
The underlying question is, “Why are we seeking permission from Google to do webmaster things when it’s Google’s responsibility to make their search engine work according to our typical practices?”
Just because Google is the most popular SE doesn’t mean that they can now make the rules. They need to go back to coding their SE to be better than the others rather than spending so much time trying to make us code or setup sites to their specifications.
After Google bought YouTube they integrated YouTube directly into their site and their search results.
Many sites and marketers that are considered spammers by Google only use aggressive push marketing off the start to market their sites because the framework for ranking that Google set up require it. If the “spammers” were given the same head start that YouTube pages or Knol pages will get then they would not need to “spam” to rank. They would just produce the best content and watch it rise to the top of the results.
The Value of Exposure & Feedback
I recently spoke with a mentor who told me that starting about 20 years ago he lost 10 years because he was sitting around expecting everyone to figure out how brilliant he was. His tips and advice likely saved me from making that mistake on some fronts - and saved me a couple years of my life. And while he is considered a guru by many today, what more momentum would have have today if he didn’t lose those 10 years? What if someone would have gave him the speech he just gave me? How much richer would he be? Would I have even been able to afford hiring him for a consult?
If I was not a push marketer a few years ago and I avoided link buying without debating the risks, would I have been able to afford that phone call that will likely save years of my life? Probably not.
Everyone starts off as a push marketer, and then moves toward pull marketing as they gain feedback and get more well known, and build a brand they do not want to risk damaging.
The Next US President is a Bad Marketer
As Frank Luntz says “it’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.” Politics is a game of marketing. Raise money, invest in messaging, and spread the message.
Most of the leading presidential candidates are not running AdWords ads to place a donation message on search result. Given Howard Dean’s experience in raising money online, where they tested and changed page layouts based on donation data, the Democrats ought to know better.
this data, I am buying more display ads for SEO Book than any of the presidential candidates are.
conversational marketing guru to advertise. In a couple hours I could create a campaign for any of the candidates that gets in excess of 100,000,000 monthly impressions and brings in far more than it costs. They are doing interviews on TechCrunch about technology and the web. Why don’t they put their money where their mouth is?
Anyone surprised that Sam’s Club offers SEO services?
I think I am going to fight back by selling Chinese made US flags for 3 cents each. 
• What Is SEO Knowledge For? (Turks.US)
The art of Search Engine Optimization or SEO is viewed as the process of increasing the amount of visitors or online traffic, to a Web site by letting it rank high in the search results of a search engine.
Contextual Web Ads Exploit Weak, Poor, Desperate, and Stupid People
As an advertiser and a publisher I have ad CTR data spanning hundreds of millions of impressions and about a million ad clicks across a wide array of verticals. One of my early opinions on contextual ads and search ads was that people are far more likely to click ads if they are desperate, stupid, or ignorant. While I was flamed for my opinion, this opinion has only been confirmed from talking to friends who have much more data than I do, and Dave Morgan from AOL also confirmed it.
Seth pointed to this post by Danah Boyd, which offers a hypothesis on who is clicking ads:
Based on what I’ve seen qualitatively, my hypothesis would be that heavy ad clickers are:
- More representative of lower income households than the average user.
- Less educated than the average user (or from less-educated environments in the case of minors).
- More likely to live outside of the major metro regions.
- More likely to be using [social networks] to meet new people than the average user (who is more likely to be using SNSs to maintain connections).
The problem with catering to the lowest common denominator is that the people who are clicking the ads
- have less of an ability to buy premium products
- are less likely to do follow on marketing for you to promote your products to other
- are a small minority of your visitors
- are driven away from your site when they click
- each day many ignorant users learn more about the web and click less ads
- the new users coming on the web replacing those who are learning about it are even poorer and less socially connected than those already on the network
In the next couple years there is going to be a major shift in online ad based business models where many publishers push themselves up the value chain. The trend for profitable publishing, is going to include the following aspects
- fewer ads
- ads with more information
- ads that look more like information
- ads tighter integrated into the content
- having a semi-porous brand which allows your free content to do your marketing for your paid content
- in many case selling ads that include personal endorsement, and ads for white label products or house products (often via subscription)
As more premium publishers shift from ad based models to selling white labeled and house products it is going to get harder to buy ads affordably on the clean parts of the web. And the trend has already started. If you look at some of the most popular investment sites you will see that many of them provide free offers for products that lead you into buying a subscription service.
If you are going to monetize your site from a small minority of your visitors it makes sense to build relationships with them and charge recurring if you can. If your only monetize 5% of your audience would rather have $50 a month from them or 50 cents?
