It seems like the trend toward actually having to provide real value for your web visitors, is gaining bigger wheels and travelling faster.

Between

seeing blog posts by Matt Cutts (Google search engineer) explaining Google’s steps towards ranking sites for honest to goodness value versus other manipulated link-attaining

and …

reading pdfs/emails from guys such as Ken Evoy concerning Google’s continual quest to render SEO techniques a lot less useful to spend time on,

.. I am really starting to see this trend taking shape.

A quote from a pdf emailed from Ken Evoy:

“Frankly, it’s the height of ego and self-delusion for any “outsider” [someone not at Google] to pretend that they know how any major search engine determines what a Web page is all about.

And yet, post after post in SEO forums are all about that. It’s really just speculation, a waste of time“

Finding Jim Edwards’ blog entry about full motion video was the main purpose of this blog entry but I’ll get to that in a second. (what also spurred it is the email from Ken Evoy of SiteSell containined the pdf “TaoOfSBI.pdf”)

I no longer think that just because CJ and Linkshare provide the excellent value that they do in providing a meeting place for website publishers and merchants, that it’s therefore an automatic truism that you can create an automatic revenue-generating place on the web.

Pasting a link with an affiliate ID can be done by anyone with basic knowledge of html and ftp. And even if you do write unique content around that link, this doesn’t exactly provide incentive for a popular or even a major visibly site to want to link to you.

The important meaning behind this: Whatever set of criteria you use to decide what merchants to promote, consider that it might be necessary to go beyond:

  • How much commission they offer
  • How many people are already optimizing keywords for this industry
  • How highly-converting the “look” of the merchant’s site is ( the traffic to your site is what counts in the long run, so that your link is the one that the user has clicked on).

    • In “Working with God” (more of a metaphysical, positive-thinking book than it is religious), Gardner Hunting says to “Count It All As Good”.

    If Google’s changes sound like bad news to Internet Marketers who rely on using all kinds of tactics so that shoppers see their link, then consider this “problem” as something good and necessary.

    Here’s a revenue-producing question:
    What could I do to make someone who sees my site want to link to my site without asking for a link back?

    This provides life-long revenue, even if it doesn’t save you from your car being repossessed because you decided to become Captain SEO-Manipulator for adsense or online-casino affiliate commisions and not concern yourself with other long-term cash flow.

    Your subconscious will produce an answer to this question(the one in bold) - it has to. (a good book for creating ideas by something called Image Streaming: The Einstein Factor)

    Instead of spending hours in Internet Marketing forums and SEO blogs trying to catch a conversation about “what to do to fight this”, just provide value.

    For example: Are you one of those audio/video/pc savants that knows how to connect the back of a laptop to a TV and what adaptors are required to connect this or that SVga or updated inter-galaxian-looking transducer-subDiode video interface to a high def TV?

    Great, scrap that other idea to throw up a web site with auto loan affiliate links, at least for now.

    Instead create an online video showing how to connect a laptop video to a television. Then, in an aesthetic professional way, put up a review of one of those sites ( with an affiliate program) that sell downloadable movies (but go ahead and actually use their service at least once so you are familiar with it).

    Wouldn’t this be the type of site that endears gratitude for such an amazing added value, and thus one-way links? The above is just one of a billion ideas.

    Add a newsletter - write an ebook - actually become a merchant in addition to listing merchant links.

    This , or some other value-producing approach equates, to me, what it means to provide real value and having fun with it.

    You were not put on this Earth to just get people to click on your web cookies before someone else does.

    Put you into your site, and try to make the purpose of future sites: “How many people could I possibly create value for from this site, and get them excited over it”? )

    Think: “Seth Godin”. (The Idea Virus book).
    ( and see King Kong, while you’re at it.. it’s a must)


    Related Links:http://www.search-marketing.info/newsletter/articles/worse-web.htmOn this link, look for Black_Night’s posts , especially the second oneStaying focused: (as if my blog is :) )
    http://www.crazywebguy.com/lynn-terry.htm

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