Pretty exciting day in search seeing Bing results live on Yahoo! Search results. There were some questions as to what might transfer and what might stay. It seems that generally algorithmically there was roughly a 1 to 1 transfer. Yahoo! is still showing fewer characters in their page titles than Bing does. Site links (listed below some sites) may also use different anchor text. But the core results are the same. The big exceptions to the concept of the 1:1 representation would be vertical search results, left rail navigation customizations & the inline search suggestions Bing does in their search results for popular search queries. The vertical search results & left rail navigation being home grown is no surprise, as many of the features aim to keep you on the parent portal, and that is Yahoo!’s bread and butter. Here is an example of the inline suggestions Bing does (in this example, for “loans”) Instead of inline suggestions like that, you might see the following kinds of navigational cues from Yahoo! There has been some speculation as to if any Yahoo! penalties will get rolled into Bing (or Yahoo!’s version of Bing) & so far it seems like that is generally a no. Of course, that could change over time. There also has been speculation of Yahoo! Site Explorer going away, but it seems it will remain through early 2012 . The Yahoo! Site Explorer team is planning tighter integration between Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center to make the transition as smooth as possible for webmasters. At this stage in the transition, it is important for webmasters to continue using Yahoo! Site Explorer to inform us about your website and its structure so you keep getting high quality traffic from searches originating on Yahoo! and our partner sites – even from markets outside the US and Canada that haven’t yet transitioned to Microsoft systems. To keep things simple, we will share site information you provide on Site Explorer with Microsoft during this transition period. When Microsoft fully powers the Yahoo! Search back-end globally, expected in 2012, it will be important for webmasters to use Bing Webmaster Center as well. The Bing tool will manage site, webpage and feed submissions. Yahoo! Site Explorer will shift to focus on new features for webmasters that provide richer analysis of the organic search traffic you get from the Yahoo! network and our partner sites. Unfortunately some of Yahoo!’s advanced link query operators seem to no longer work (say you wanted to find links to a domain from .gov pages). But you can get such link data (or at least a piece of it) from Majestic SEO or SEOmoz’s Linkscape (also in OSE ’s export feature & eventually their online interface). Some smaller search companies, like Exalead , still offer advanced filters while performing link searches. The ability to search a full web index allows you to do cool stuff you can’t do with just a link graph. I haven’t looked at it yet, but I have heard good things & owe the folks at InfluenceFinder a review soon. When Blekko launches they will have a boatload of free SEO features to share as well. Members of our community have been giving it rave reviews for the past month or so.

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Yahoo! Search Now Powered by Bing

Jon Glick is one of the leading experts on search, having literally both wrote the code at leading search engines and later becoming an SEO professional. I remember speaking with him in 2004 at the Ghost Bar in Las Vegas and it was perhaps the most fascinating conversation about search I have ever been part of. I have wanted to interview him for years & just recently was able to. In some past interviews (like this one ) you have highlighted how Google’s key strength is perhaps brand rather than relevancy. After seeing Yahoo! bow out of the search game do you still hold that same opinion? What do you think of the Bing brand? Brand is still Google’s strongest competitive asset in search. It means that to get someone to switch you have to be significantly better than they are, which is a tall order. Bing is the first search offering from MSFT that is in the same league with Google, so it’s more about branding and positioning than objective quality at this point. If Bing was a standalone brand they wouldn’t have a chance, but it has the advantage of default positioning in IE, so for now it just has to be close enough that people won’t swap it out. Over time Bing may evolve some interesting differentiation from Google, but that’s not really the case right now (at least it seems to be pressuring Google to experiment/innovate a bit more). It’s been quite a while since using a MSFT product was “cool” and Bing has that drag on its brand. Some of the new upstarts entering the search game believe that perhaps the thinning of the herd is creating an entry opportunity? Have you checked out Blekko yet? Any other new general search projects interest you? Google rose to prominence during the dot-com bust when the existing players were quite disinterested in search, since at the time (pre-PPC) it was money loser. Search is so ridiculously lucrative right now that any promising technology that starts to get traction or buzz is likely to be quickly acquired by one of the major players as a blocking measure. Google’s rumored attempt to acquire Cuil for $80MM pre-launch is an example. There is an opportunity, but it’s more about getting bought out for a sweet price than taking down the SEs. There is also so much manual tuning in search these days that even a great system will take a lot of effort to return great results. “Plumber OR Pipefitter” is a Boolean query, “Portland OR Plumber” is not, and someone’s got to build code to recognize that. This is where the existing players have a huge legacy advantage. Looking at new search technologies I’m very cautious about those that ask users to do more work in return for better results. Search is a low-intensity activity that people don’t really want to learn or spend time on. This is where an approach like WA (that Bing is also aiming towards) looks interesting. We’d all like search to be like the computer from Star Trek that gives you back exactly the answer/data you ask for. The complication with this, beyond the technical issues, is what benefit it has for the webmasters (i.e. why should I let you crawl/index my site). Current SEs take your data for their use, but provide traffic in return, which an answering system would not. You are one of the few guys who literally wrote the relevancy algorithms & then later worked in the SEO space. Do you consider the roles to be primarily complimentary or adversarial? So is SEO good or bad for SEs? On the whole I think it’s a benefit for them. From an algo perspective it’s a lot easier to determine the intent of a well SEO’d page. The SEs give webmasters a lot of tools and encourage them to use them because it makes search better. 301 your pages so we know where the content went, let us know what parameters don’t impact page content so we don’t get caught in robot traps, tell us what language your page is in using the metatags so we don’t have to guess, etc. If one of these tools ends up being a net negative, SEs can always change how they treat it (NoFollow), or just start ignoring it all together (Keywords MetaTag). This is not to say that a lot of work doesn’t have to be put into removing spam and factoring out overly aggressive optimization, but it’s a lot less than what they’d need to do if no one SEO’d. Given your experience on both sides of the table, do you feel that ranking great in other search engines is like stealing candy from a baby, or is it still hard? What aspects of the SEO process do you find most challenging? For SEO-ing established businesses it’s not a slam dunk, but it is still possible to generate very strong returns. At Become.com we have dozens of people working on SEO in a very organized manner and paybacks on investing effort are better than almost any other aspect of our business. The challenging part is the innate volatility of SEO and the fact that ultimately the SEs control our destiny. You can put together a great growth plan, and then watch an algo update like MayDay shred it. For the spammers, it’s like stealing candy from a sleeping Doberman. It’s easy until the Doberman wakes up. Does your experience allow you to just look at a search result and almost instantly know why something is ranked? If so, what are the key things SEOs should study / work on to help gain that level of understanding? I wish. There is always some pattern recognition that comes from experience (i.e. this is a collage site), but there are so many nuances in the code and off-page stuff that it’s not always instant, you just get better at knowing what to look for. The real learning comes from looking at pages that are ranking well for no obvious reason and seeing what they are doing. It’s no secret why apple is #1 for “ipod nano,” but what is that site I haven’t heard of doing right to get the #5 position? Also if we see a competitor suddenly see a step-function traffic lift we look to see what they changed/added that the SEs seem to be liking. Back in 2006 you highlighted the rise of some of the MFA collage websites. In 2010 content mills are featured in the press almost every week. Are you surprised how far it has went & how long it has lasted? I think Google actually likes folks like Demand Media. What they are doing is seeing where GG’s users are looking for something and not finding it, then plugging that hole. It may not be the Pulitzer Prize-winning content, but it allows users to find something and thus makes Google more useful and universal. When better content comes along those pages will slip down, but they serve a purpose in Google’s ecosystem. Collage websites (stitch sites in Yahoo! parlance) are another story entirely. They add virtually no value and are pretty much spam IMO. The difficulty is in detecting and eradicating them as fast as they can be robo-created. You mentioned looking at the aboutness of a site for Become.com when judging links. Do you think broad general search engines care about link relevancy? Personally, I have not seen it have much of an impact, which is a shame. I think the main reason is that it is quite difficult for general SEs to judge which site relationships are meaningful, and which are not. For example, a golf course might get links from a real estate site; golf and real estate might be classified as very different verticals, but the links are quite relevant because the real estate agent is pointing out one of the benefits of the community. As a result link relevancy has become more about avoiding bad neighborhoods (3Ps, link farms, etc.) than finding good ones. How important do you think temporal analysis is in judging the quality and authenticity of a link profile? It’s certainly a red flag if a site gains too many links too quickly. The same is true if the profile of the links looks unnatural. If all your new links are coming from PR3-PR4 blog sites, something’s off. If bloggers are suddenly that interested in you wouldn’t a lot of PR0 comments exist, FB mentions, tweets, and a few higher PR press mentions? At Yahoo! sites that got a sudden upsurge in inlinks were classed as “spike” sites. Legit spike sites (ex. the website of some unknown who wins an Olympic medal) have typical hallmarks like temporally-linked mentions in media sites that you can’t buy access to (AP, NYT, Time, etc.). The spikes that are blackhatted look totally different. In an interview a couple years ago Priyank Garg mentioned Yahoo! looked at the link’s location on a page. Do you feel other search engines take this into account? All of the major SEs have been doing boilerplate stripping for a while. They recognize footers, rail nav., etc. and look at those links differently. Also, SEs will only follow a limited number of links per page. They typically collect all the links, remove the checksum dups (note: if your links vary by even one parameter they will not be deduped at this phase), and follow the first N links from the code. None of the SEs will say exactly what N is, but it’s probably somewhere between 75 and 300 links (Google recommends you have

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Jon Glick Interview

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics - Disreli We get presented with graphs and statistics every day. “Most SEOs think keywords in the title tag is an important ranking factor.” “Spending on search to rise by $10b”. Ever get that feeling that what you’re being presented with sounds plausible, but the conclusion just doesn’t make sense? Here are a few common ways people try to pull the wool over your eyes with statistics. Some you’ll be familiar with. If you’ve got more, add ‘em to the comments 1. Built In Bias The sample data supports an obvious agenda. For example, a company is hardly likely to show a graph that shows their product has produced negative results. Try to determine the bias of the person or organisation presenting the data - “what would they want me to hear”? then ask yourself: “what data are they not showing me?” 2. The Average The media loves to state “the average”, then neglect to tell you which average they are talking about. For example, the average house price for an area could both be 500K and 200K, depending on what type of average is being used. They could be referring to either the mean , the median or the mode . They often mix these up, depending on what conclusion they want you to reach. 3. Inadequate Sample Size 20% of web designers make over $1M. That may be true if the sample size consisted of ten highest earning people in the industry, and two people just happen to have had a great year. But what if the sample size is all those who practice web design for a living? The outcome may be somewhat different. 4. Meaningless Differences A difference is only a difference if it makes a difference. Potential employee Jill may have an IQ of 120, and potential employee Jack may have an IQ of 118, but does that really mean anything? What if Jill has an attitude problem, and Jack is a great conversationalist? Who would be the better hire? 5. Oh My God! Al Gore loves this one. The graph that shows some astonishing change in the status quo. The impression is one of significant movement and is meant to shock an audience. However, if the chart appears in a different context - say, over a longer time period - the rise may not look all that unusual. You often see this in stock price quotes. You could also change the measurement into smaller units, thus making any movement in the graph look even more impressive. 6. What You Infer Is Up To You If you can’t prove what you want to prove, prove something else and pretend they are the same thing. Often used in the alternative medicine industry. They may not be able to prove that their natural products cure cancer, but they can say that the plant extract has been used by some remote tribe, and they have a proven historical low incidence of cancer. 7. Post Hoc A study found students who smoked got lower grades. The fallacy of one thing not following the other i.e. smoking doesn’t cause bad grades. Frequently, other factors are left out i.e. the students who smoked also tended to be party animals. Look out for correlations that happen by chance. 8. Data Precision Quoting specific numbers, especially including decimals points, can look authoritative. “Real estate values up 4.95%” Why would someone be so precise if they didn’t know their stuff? The numbers can be wild guesses, but accuracy gives an air of authority. General Tips For Spotting The Lies Ask “who says so?” Are they likely to be biased? If experts are cited, check to see if those experts actually agree with the conclusions. Often, they do not. Ask “How do they know”? Is the sample size really large enough, or relevant enough, to draw conclusions? Look To See If They Change The Subject. Look for a change between the raw data and the conclusion. Does one follow the other? For example, more reported incidences of crime do not necessarily mean there is more crime occurring. Ask “Does this make sense?” - are they trying to blind you with numbers? If the conclusion just sounds wrong, look for a disconnect between the data and the conclusion If you want to delve deeper in to How To Lie With Statistics , grab the little book of the same name. It’s getting a bit dated now - it was written in 1954 - but the advice and examples are great

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How To Lie With Statistics

Humans have always been fascinated by the night sky. And Googlers are no exception. Over the years, Google engineers have used their 20 percent time to create Google Sky, Moon, Mars and most recently Google Sky Map for Android . This handy app, built by engineers in our Pittsburgh office , turns your Android-powered phone into a live map of the night sky. You just point your phone to the sky and it gives you information about the stars and planets that you’re looking at. Since we introduced the app a year ago, Sky Map has been downloaded more than 5 million times. On Sunday night we had a wonderful opportunity to share our passion for astronomy with our community in Pittsburgh at the Deep Sky Urban Star Party , held in the abandoned swimming pool at Leslie Park in Lawrenceville . We loaded up a bunch of Android phones with Sky Map and joined the Amateur Astronomers Association of Pittsburgh —who brought along their telescopes—and several hundred local residents for a night of stargazing. As a Sky Map engineer the biggest thrill I get is when we get emails from people who have used our app to show a planet to their children for the first time. At the Star Party we were delighted to have the chance to show people around the night sky in person. It was great to meet so many people who were both excited by astronomy and interested in Google’s technology. Thanks for all of your ideas for new features, and a big thank you to the Leslie Park Pool Collective and all involved for organizing such a fun event. Photos by Jason Parker-Burlingham Posted by John Taylor, Software Engineer

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Stargazing in Pittsburgh

This month, Googlers around the world participated in GoogleServe—an annual event in which Google employees take a break from their day jobs to re-connect with local communities and give back through service projects. Over 6,000 Googlers from 65 offices in 27 countries spent time in activities ranging from helping the elderly get online and consulting with organizations on their social-media strategies to tidying up public parks and playing with dogs waiting to be rehomed. GoogleServe began in 2008 as an employee-driven initiative and is organized almost entirely by volunteers. For the 2010 event, we partnered with hundreds of community organizations, schools and governments to help meet local needs around the world. Here’s a taste of some of this year’s projects: We tilled soil and planted seedlings at Gaining Ground in Concord, Massachusetts We packed food bags for families living under the breadline at Resala in Cairo, Egypt and delivered meals to the needy in San Francisco, California with the Salvation Army We trained senior citizens in Dublin, Ireland and Santa Monica, California to engage more effectively in the online world We cleaned kitty condos in Milpitas, California at the Humane Society of Silicon Valley and repaired a road leading to the animal shelter at Tier-Asyl Hübeli , in Zurich, Switzerland We cleaned rooms, tended gardens and helped out on art projects at Singapore’s Association of the Visually Handicapped We repaired playground equipment in Hamburg, Germany, painted classrooms in Johannesburg, South Africa and folded 1,000 origami cranes for sick children in Tokyo, Japan Check out our album below to see some of our employees and partners in action. And if you’d like to join us in service to your community, websites like All For Good can help you find volunteer opportunities near you. Posted by Seth Marbin, GoogleServe Global Director

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GoogleServe 2010: Celebrating community service worldwide

A popular question on our Webmaster Help Forum is in regard to best practices for organic link building. There seems to be some confusion, especially among less experienced webmasters, on how to approach the topic. Different perspectives have been shared, and we would also like to explain our viewpoint on earning quality links. If your site is rather new and still unknown, a good way marketing technique is to get involved in the community around your topic. Interact and contribute on forums and blogs. Just keep in mind to contribute in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site. Just building a reputation can drive people to your site. And they will keep on visiting it and linking to it. If you offer long-lasting, unique and compelling content — something that lets your expertise shine — people will want to recommend it to others. Great content can serve this purpose as much as providing useful tools. A promising way to create value for your target group and earn great links is to think of issues or problems your users might encounter. Visitors are likely to appreciate your site and link to it if you publish a short tutorial or a video providing a solution, or a practical tool. Survey or original research results can serve the same purpose, if they turn out to be useful for the target audience. Both methods grow your credibility in the community and increase visibility. This can help you gain lasting, merit-based links and loyal followers who generate direct traffic and “spread the word.” Offering a number of solutions for different problems could evolve into a blog which can continuously affect the site’s reputation in a positive way. Humor can be another way to gain both great links and get people to talk about your site. With Google Buzz and other social media services constantly growing, entertaining content is being shared now more than ever. We’ve seen all kinds of amusing content, from ASCII art embedded in a site’s source code to funny downtime messages used as a viral marketing technique to increase the visibility of a site. However, we do not recommend counting only on short-lived link-bait tactics. Their appeal wears off quickly and as powerful as marketing stunts can be, you shouldn’t rely on them as a long-term strategy or as your only marketing effort. It’s important to clarify that any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort. There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site’s reputation. Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they’re likely to have no positive impact on your site’s performance over time. If your site’s visibility in the Google index is important to you it’s best to avoid them. Directory entries are often mentioned as another way to promote young sites in the Google index. There are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. But there are not many of them in proportion to those of lower quality. If you decide to submit your site to a directory, make sure it’s on topic, moderated, and well structured. Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes. It can be a good idea to take a look at similar sites in other markets and identify the elements of those sites that might work well for yours, too. However, it’s important not to just copy success stories but to adapt them, so that they provide unique value for your visitors. Social bookmarks on YouTube enable users to share content easily Finally, consider making linking to your site easier for less tech savvy users. Similar to the way we do it on YouTube, offering bookmarking services for social sites like Twitter or Facebook can help spread the word about the great content on your site and draw users’ attention. As usual, we’d like to hear your opinion. You’re welcome to comment here in the blog, or join our Webmaster Help Forum community. Written by Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist, Dublin

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Quality links to your site

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “ Google Apps highlights ” and subscribe to the series. - Ed. Over the last couple of weeks we introduced several new features to Google Docs, and made updates to Gmail, Buzz and Blogger. The Google Apps Marketplace expanded, and we brought many new businesses and schools onboard. Here’s the scoop: New Google Docs editors rolling out to everyone Just a couple months ago we started previewing Google Docs’ new editors for documents and spreadsheets , and on Monday we began turning on these faster, more feature-rich editors for everyone. In new documents, you’ll see character-by-character real-time collaboration, a ruler for custom margins and tab stops, and the files you import from your computer will be much higher quality. The new version of spreadsheets is faster, and includes a formula editing bar, cell auto-complete and much more. If your university, employer or organization provides you with a Google Docs account, you’ll start seeing the new editors by default in the coming weeks, too. New sharing settings in Google Docs Just yesterday we launched a streamlined way to share your files more easily in Google Docs. You can set a document, spreadsheet, presentation or drawing to be “Private,” available to “Anyone with the link,” or “Public on the web,” and then customize who has access by inviting specific collaborators. If you’re using Google Docs at work or at school, you’ll also see options that make it easy to share your files just with other people within your organization. Learn more about the new sharing options on the Google Docs blog . New features for drawings in Google Docs We introduced several new features for the drawings editor in Google Docs, too. Now you can center objects on the page, resize your entire canvas, view thumbnails of your drawings in your doc list, search across your drawings by text contained within and quickly view a list of handy editing keyboard shortcuts. We also added the ability for you to share drawings in the Google Docs template gallery , so other people around the world can use your creations. Blogger Template Designer available to all Back in March we introduced Blogger Template Designer in Blogger in Draft, and last week we made it available to everyone. You can choose from more than 19 stock templates and further customize your design with hundreds of free, professional background images, custom color schemes and pixel-perfect layout manipulation. Customizing your blog and making it “your own” is now much easier. Google Maps previews in Gmail and Buzz Last week, we added a new Labs feature in Gmail that automatically displays a Google Map below messages that contain street addresses—saving you the trouble of copying and pasting of addresses from Gmail to Google Maps. You can enable this feature and many others from the Labs tab under Gmail Settings . Google Buzz also integrates Google Maps now too; when your buzz includes a Google Maps link, you’ll automatically see an image of the map that you can choose to include in your post. Apps Marketplace For the businesses, schools and organizations using Google Apps, cloud-based functionality continues to expand through the Google Apps Marketplace. There, developers around the world can offer business- and process-enhancing apps that seamlessly integrate with Google Apps. The Marketplace has everything from accounting applications and CRM solutions to marketing automation and project workflow tools. Last week we added five new applications , and this Tuesday we tacked on over a dozen more . Who’s gone Google? We’re thrilled to welcome Brady Corporation , a globally distributed safety and security products company with more than 7,000 employees and 90 globally distributed business locations, to Google Apps. Cost savings were a factor in the decision, but Brady’s IT team chose Google Apps to simplify their worldwide IT operations, to streamline the integration of future acquisitions and to offer employees advanced sharing features like real-time collaboration. In addition to the big guys, tens of thousands more small and medium size businesses have also gone Google since our last update, including Hiatus Spa + Retreat , Goble & Associates and Método DeRose Matosinhos . Welcome! And school’s out for summer, but many colleges and universities are using the quiet months to reinvigorate their student technology. Sonoma State University , Meharry Medical College , Tokyo Keizai University (translated), Santa Fe Community College , Great Basin College and Colby College are all going Google. Whether your company or school has already gone Google or if you’re just starting to contemplate the move, tune into our live webcast next Tuesday, June 22 at 9:00 am PDT to hear more about the improvements and new features we’ve added to Google Apps during the first half of 2010. For more details and updates from the Apps team, head on over to the Google Apps Blog . Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

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Google Apps highlights – 6/18/2010

Why Popular People May Seem Negative to Some I was chatting with a friend today about one of our projects and he mentioned how he stopped liking a few other internet marketers recently due to their negativity. Him stating that gave me a bit of internal reflection, and I think it comes down to a few things… When people get from a certain level of success to say 5x or 10x, many may feel guilty about making the money and become negative about others to justify their own behaviors (after all, in *many* cases, when you grow income beyond a certain level it can require either moral flexibility and/or the ability to sharply change your internal values). Some people forget where they came from and become arrogant. Market forces force you to value your time. If you don’t the market will set it at $0. And so (the people they used to help for free) they now tell to screw off simply because their time is valued more and they keep having less of it to spread around to a larger pool of people. This is also a learned behavior because the neediest people are often the laziest, rudest, and least appreciative. If a person is not willing to pay you for your time they simply DO NOT VALUE IT. That third point is worth thinking through from an economic perspective. The law of marginal utility states that the first x is worth more than the second x (be it Dollars, hours of free time, video games, pieces of food, etc). But if you are becoming abundant in one resource (cash) and scarce in another (time) the impact on the required rate of conversion is multiplied…not only is your time worth more, but even at a higher price you still have less of it to spread around. I look to pass off some consulting projects I would have loved to have done years ago just because I have no time. (Or perhaps I lack the creativity to be able to derive sufficient yield from those projects). And, at the same time, in spite of having plenty of money to hire them I have been rejected as a potential customer. Rejection sucks, but trying to please everyone is a sure path to failure. What is Popularity? In Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody he described popularity as basically being an imbalance between the attention you garner and the attention you can give the market. Sure you can reach out to a few dozen people. A few hundred? Maybe. Thousands? Not a chance. You Can Never Give Enough In this interview Bob Dylan talks about how he can never do enough, and how the media distorts a lot of what he does in a negative frame: On a micro-level, consider how a person who suddenly became popular may have been happy (and excited) to do an interview or 2 felt after about a dozen AOL robo-reporters contacted them in a single day. Suddenly it doesn’t feel as exclusive, important, or exciting. Wait a week or 2 and see that 90% of the interviews they did never got published and it feels at best wasteful. And people who are popular (even in small niches) have people try to give them false complements and try to goad them into doing free work. That is part of the reason I love our current business model. I can respond with “Great question. Feel free to ask that in the member forums!” It not so subtly tells them that if they value my time they are welcome to it, and if not then they are not. Does the above always work out perfectly? Not always. I have been told I was rude from people who had questions about things with our site (and were alleged potential customers) but most of them were from people who were too lazy to read the publicly accessible information BEFORE trying to dip into my time. If someone needs a lot of your time to become a customer they are not likely to become a customer. And if you sell consulting then they are likely going to waste a lot of your time if/when they actually become a customer (as they will be the type of person who reads nothing, ignores responses, and has about 40 questions in their first day). *(Perhaps the only exception to that is large slow moving corporations which need a sign off from many people. But even then I never do RFPs just because it means you are being shopped and they are not serious about hiring you). Just a Quick Question … (or 10) You have to filter or else you are valuing your time at nothing. This is especially true if you run a small company and have heavy load on yourself day in and day out. The big issue with email (especially with non-customers) is that you can never give enough. Even if you give your time away for nothing many of them try to use the “just one more quick question” approach. A recent freeloader asked “what do you recommend for an internet business?” and my response was “sell your time and expertise to people who value it enough to pay for it, and forget the rest of em.” And he got the message But while mentioning the above about the perceived negativity of some other internet marketers to a friend, I wrote “the thing is, if we didn’t chat and you didn’t see me helping on the forums and just read my blog, sometimes I would sound quite negative right?” A person who read the last dozen blog posts but didn’t know the background context on Mahalo would certainly think that way. But those posts were made out of love for the industry. You just need to share the love to understand it. Deciding what goes where bit is also where selling information becomes tricky. There are tips worth 3, 4, 5, or even 6 figures (based on results) that have been shared in our community. And I have also shared many such tips on the blog here too. But it is tricky to figure out what to post where. You want to post enough publicly to maintain relevancy and audience and awareness, but you want to keep a lot of your best tips private so the people who are paying you get far more than their money’s worth. That is the only way to keep subscribers happy. And it is far more efficient to keep current subscribers happy than it is to churn through a ton of members & hunt for more. It is amazingly hard to have enough time to keep learning, come up with original stuff, and keep adding value in a saturated marketplace for a few months straight. And it is infinitely harder to do it for close to a decade. But we try our best, in spite of the fact that expectations from us and pressure on us never lower. When Doing Charity Work… Once you go from helping everyone because you think you have to & feel it is your duty … to a person who realizes 95% of people are useless (and won’t even listen to the advice they claim to NEED, but need for free) … well it makes you more cynical when helping the needy and resource-less, and keeps you focused on productively spending your time on the 5% who do matter There is a large segment of people who think they can act like dirtbags just because you are a small business, but trying to help those types of people will just pull you down rather than lifting them up. Their lack of perceived value in others is a reflection of an internal perceived lack of value. The best marketing techniques are often a reflection of the passion of a business owner. Its very hard to make a career out of providing marketing services to people who lack self-esteem (unless perhaps you are selling a get rich quick package). The fact that you cant help everyone forces you to filter. And if you want to do charity work you may as well monetize your time at market rate then use some of that income to feed a bunch of poor children in the third world, rather than give your time away to pikers who don’t value it. Insecurity / Peter Principal Many people who are successful are not any smarter or more gifted than everyone else. They are not superheros. In most cases they just work harder and are more focused. Timing helps too. And in some cases if people become popular too quickly they may fear that their reputation has got ahead of them. Any time they interact with others is some level of risk of being exposed. And if they interact with people quickly and hastily then those people will be far more likely to misquote them or try to tear them apart…so sometimes it is better to be non-responsive than to respond, especially when the opportunity offers little to no upside to counterbalance the associated risks. A relevant example: Bullying Freetards One time a guy on Twitter complained about our conversion flow and he was too lazy to click the “don’t show again” link on a pop up…while being too lazy to click that link he was willing to go to the length to write a feature attack post on his blog. Another time on Twitter a girl threatened that she would no longer recommend our site because we require people to set up accounts to download our free tools. I explained that the email option is primarily so we could give the people who would potentially care to convert another path / chance to. But she stated that I needed to state what all promotions I intend to email for the next x months/years upfront to collect an email. Meanwhile you can’t buy a server from her company without going through multiple high pressure sales calls with multiple final offers, etc. Freetards *always* demand more transparency from you then they provide themselves (or offer at their place of employment). After reading a post on why I thought making Google Chrome SEO extensions was a bad idea that would cost me money while providing 0 yield one guy wrote a blog post about how evil I am for only offering Firefox extensions. He then explained how he thought all SEO stuff should be free. Meanwhile he is a programmer who has done exactly nothing useful for the SEO industry and has already heavily wrapped his blog in cheesy ads, promoting some of the very paid tools he stated should be free … (and the ads were often promoting the scammiest end of the market, too). Summary Lots of great things are free. And its awesome that there are so many cheap or free options. But figuring out how to combine them all into something profitable is valuable. Having the courage to invest heavily (in marketing, in education, in content, etc.) is crucial in a market saturated by noise. Food and rent are not free, and neither is our time (when you consider that we all eventually perish). When some people filter out noise they may be seen as negative, but in most cases if you were in their shoes you would probably do the same things they do.* * Except for the cheesy mo-money rapper photos. Nobody likes that crap. NOBODY

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Why Many Successful People Become Jerks

Of course all ranking systems are biased and whatnot (I get paid to influence Google’s search results & even within the realm of academia colleges try to game the US News & World Report rankings ), but I love all the kind comments from our community members here . Thanks guys

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Invesp for the win

In the past I have vented email frustrations in many ways (and truth be told I am still way behind on email to this day) but I thought it would be worth sharing why forums are a way better business model than personalized emails for helping people. I am not sure if all my thoughts and analysis are 100% spot on, but this is why I like private forums so much. Instant Feedback on Value Perception One of the first reasons is that you instantly have a yes/no answer on if the person values your time. If you are answering questions via email then the transition to paid support via email gets to be a bit weird…with people pushing for as much as they can possibly get for free, and you being the bad guy if you charge. By deciding to answer virtually no questions via email you help them understand that your time and your knowledge *ARE* your business model, and that if they value them they can pay for them. Sure you can answer questions on if you might be a good fit, but anytime you here something that starts off with “have a quick question” followed by some very specific requests about their exact situation and website then that person will rarely convert….they are just trying to squeeze as much free information as they can. Reciprocity = No Pikers Please! A second major advantage of running a forum vs trying to help people via private email is that it filters out the pikers. Back when I would try to help people via email, I would get lots of questions like these… Hi Aaron I want to do something really spammy that could easily generate 6 or 7 figures of income. I want you to guarantee it will work, (and to be able to cast the blame on you if it does not). Hi Aaron Google just banned our site. I gave you $79. Fix it now. Hi Aaron I bought your book and was too lazy to read it. But since I gave you $79 I need to see at least $100,000 in returns. Map out my strategy. Oh and I have a $0 budget…as I already spent my $79. Hi Aaron I have a spammy direct marketing 1 page salesletter website that I need to rank #1 for “mortgage”. I have no budget and am unwilling to improve the site or add value in any way possible, but this is no problem since you are an SEO. Hi Aaron I don’t have very much money (or knowledge for that matter) but I took on some clients that I am charging a lot of money to and I need you to do the work that I am charging them a lot of money for. Now most people wouldn’t be quite as direct as the above…there would be flowery language to try to cloak the bluntness and absurdity of the proposition. But the cool thing about our current business model is the above people have disappeared from the equation. We can point people right to their areas of need if they are in need, and the people who would have the never-ending general stream of irrelevant questions don’t exist. And the people who are reselling services (but want you to do ALL!!! the work) don’t exist either. I think the reasons for those are mainly reciprocity. The person who is a no value add vulture will presume that others are just like them, and would be afraid to mention specifics in a community (where others see it). And if they are too generic then the answers can’t be as specific as they otherwise would be. The person who is too lazy to study would be too embarassed to ask the same questions over and over again without listening to your answers. And those who ask for general reviews are highly receptive toward feedback. There is the community element of it, to where if a person asks you to review their same site 4 different times and they haven’t done a lot of the tips from review #1 or #2 people will tell them about it. Another such example of the type of piker (who was around in our old business model, but no longer exists today)… one guy emailed me about how broke he was and how he needed his spam hype garbage single page salesletter sites to rank and he had already paid $79 for my ebook… etc etc etc The SAME GUY was in a book my wife read a year later as a case study of a self-made internet multi-millionaire who made his money doing info-marketing. So he was a fellow info-marketer and he wanted 10+ hours of my time for under $80. He didn’t like it very much when I told him I could use some $8 an hour help in his profession! Answers With In Depth Context Via email people sometimes try to quite literally write chapters to me. And OFTEN then don’t even listen to my responses…so it just ends up going astray. People don’t respect what they don’t pay for. They usually start off with “a quick email” but after 3 or 4 hours of work on my end the perception of “quick” often changes. With email the only way to respond to email overload is to be short (and maybe sometimes blunt). Such interactions often lead to more confusion and/or some incorrect assumptions where people feel insulted in such. The community setting of the forum prevents that issue for me. Out of close to 100,000 forum posts we have only had anyone feel insulted less than 5 times (so far as I am aware anyhow, and I read every post). The interactive dialog ensures questions get not just answered, but understood. Further, sometimes you are good at explaining something to person B but not so good with explaining it to person C. But if person B understands you then sometimes they can do a better job of conveying the issue to person C. Have a Lotta Help From My Friends Since the forum is closed to the public the incentive to spam it is lessened, while the quality of membership is increased (because people pay to be there). There have been technical topics covered in the forums where I am not the right guy to answer them - AT ALL. And, because our community is diverse and has lots of helpful members, the people asking those questions get much better answers. And since many people are there questions are typically answered far faster than a person can do via email. And as people invest more time into participating they only want to help more. Putting people in a social setting really helps the user/abuser types self-select out of participation whereas those who realize that they get more when the give more and participate more are able to learn so much more from it and get a great bargain, creating a virtuous cycle. A Searchable Database of Answers Over time the forums get better at collecting questions and answers in a variety of formats…which makes its internal search become more relevant over time. Selling an Interaction With my old ebook model I was selling something that could be copied. With the new model there is always change happening and always new things to talk about…so it is selling more of an interaction than a static product, and people only pay as long as they find value in being a member. Less Reliance on Search Anytime you have recurring subscription income then you are not so reliant on using search and other forms of push marketing. Sometimes just giving a really good customer experience is enough to help market your website. And the Negatives? There are not a lot of negatives to private forums as far as I see it, but there are some things worth thinking about, as no business model is 100% roses. The first big risk is not hitting a critical mass. If you do not build it out to self sustaining then anytime someone joins they feel like they made a bad decision (since there is no/low activity). Back when I had my ebook model I remember taking a two week European vacation. While I can still travel, it is much harder for me to unplug because there is work I have to do everyday. And it is tricky balancing what to do. Shall I participate heavily in the forums, write the newsletter, work on planning out some new SEO tools, create more training modules, etc. There really is an endless array of things to be done. In some cases maintaining account permissions can be time consuming as well…especially if you discount the time it can take and under-price services. A couple ways to get around it are to try to charge enough to limit your size such that you don’t have to worry about it too much, hire on help, add a support section to your site, and try to get people to sign up for longer periods of time. The last tricky part is managing growth. If you grow too quickly it could lower the utility and quality of your site. If you grow too slowly then you risk the site fading into an eventual obscurity. How can you grow too slowly? Every type of membership site has a growth rate (and things that influence it) along with a decay rate (and things that influence it). If you are not improving the value of your site then eventually the decay rate overtakes the growth rate. So you keep needing to try to add more value. Some people try to make membership sites seem like a set and forget revenue stream. If they aim to offer real value that can’t be any further from the truth. The tricky part then is trying to maintain or grow the earnings of the business while also trying to maintain or grow the quality of the members. It can be quite challenging because most things that inspire quick growth also lead to a higher churn rate. And if you focus too highly on customer quality you can end up missing some of the better potential customers in the beginner portion of the market. That is a big mistake because the beginner piece of the market is typically the biggest market segment in most markets beginners tend to be more likely to spend (it is easier to deliver perceived value to a person who is unaware of everything that is out there than to a person who knows their options quite well, and this is especially true in markets with many software products) the people who are experts today were once beginners (and are likely sticking with learning from many of the people they took too when they are beginners)

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Why Private Communities Work so Well