Web 2.0 Is Just So 2008 – ClickZ

Web 2.0 Is Just So 2008 – ClickZ

This is great article. ClickZ often puts out articles to keep in front of the reader, many of them suck. Sometimes a good one comes up, and this is one.

This article reinforces what I have been saying over and over. The new internet marketing is about giving the people what they want. The mystique of the internet is gone, it doesn’t amaze anyone anymore and no one goes on to just aimlessly search and search. If you want to stay relevant, you need to be a destination.  I am not talking about adding a chatroom to your auto parts site, but you need to be a place where people who want auto parts can go to when they don’t need auto parts.

If you cant think of a way to increase your content and add some interactivity, at the very least you need to be out there participating in other ‘networks’ and attaching your personality to your website.  This is a prime example of what is wrong with  so many agencies. They still think that you just need to build the site, maybe throw in some cool flashy doo-dads and then just leave it. That is a recipe for disaster.

Read up on Web 2.0 (I hate that term about as much as I hat the term ‘generation X’) Find out about social networks, social bookmarking, video marketing, article marketing, etc. The one constant is – Content is king, however, as I have said – the name of the game is reputation and interaction. People need interaction, with you, and with each other.

The internet is rapidly becoming another dimension where you can live part time. If you think of it that way, imagine if you lived in a world, alone, filled with nothing but shops, and in the shops there were tons of products but no people, maybe one person behind the register to take your money, but no one there to tell you if what your buying is any good, no one to talk about last weeks game, its just you.  Who would want to live in a world like that?

Outdated marketing methods – the dinosaurs still walk among us

It’s my birthday today. I am exhausted as usual. I’ve been in the office for 40 minutes and already my blood pressure is up. The decisions that are made here are based solely on speculation and outdated ideas. One bad decision after the other and a completely reactive environment. Every suggestion I make is shot down, it almost seems deliberate, like no matter what, go against the employee. More wasted money, more sub-par results.

Without going into too much detail, we are working on a project that is potentially really cool, however my enthusiasm has already been squashed because the way we are going about things is wrong, and I am tired of being ignored. The only reason I would make any suggestions now is to have the “I told you so” opportunity at the end.

I could write a novel on the wrong way to go about things. Whether you are marketing your own business or marketing someone elses, the steps that are necessary to succeed are the same.

1. Know your audience

2. Know your content

3. Know what works and what doesn’t

4. Know when to pull the trigger and when to pull the plug

Today I watch a fairly nice budget slowly get chipped away,  you could do a hell of a lot with $60,000. Let me give you an example. If you are promoting an event that is recurring, say it’s an annual event.  You should set up your marketing methods so that it builds on what you did last year. If you pay attention at all,  you should know that 85% of search marketing is reputation. A site reputation is no different than a persons reputation. To make it simple, reputation is based on age, history, and what people are saying about you. Simple enough right?

So, using those 3 pieces of reputation, which would you ithink would be the best idea?

a. Create a solid website that can be modified to fit the event each year. Build links to it, get reputation through social networking, let the site age, use it to showcase the event AFTER it happened so that the site generates traffic through out the year untl the date of the next event year? Oh yeah, and HOST THE SITE???

or would you think it was a good idea to:

b. Build the main (money site) as a profile page on a social networking site, then promote that website with paid search, viral marketing etc.  I guess you wouldn’t care that since you don’t own the site, you cannot control the uptime, you cannot harvest the email addresses or contact information directly to your database or email list. The paid search you are doing is actually promoting the network that is hosting the page, not the website, so any links that are built are actually pointed at the social network site that is hosting the page, thereby increasing the reputation of that social network (which is already the top 5 website on the internet). I don’t really need to continue here right? It’s obvious why this is an incredibly stupid idea, right? Apparently not.

There is a reason that Carl Icahn says that all CEO’s are morons.  Personally, I am totally OK admitting when I don’t know something, and if I don’t know something, I will defer to someone who does. Never assume you are the smartest guy in the room and there is no room for hunches in marketing. The beauty of marketing is that there is no shortage of stats, plans, metrics and methods that show exactly what you need to do.

Regardless of whether or not you want to be involved in the marketing of your business, you owe it to yourself to at least know what questions to ask.

1. What are you going to do to make people want to come to my site?
2. What are you going to do to get people to stay?
3. What are you doing to make them want to come back?
4. Is there a call to action on every page of the site?
5. What methods are you using to capture visitor information? Just because they aren’t interested now doesn’t mean they wont be in the future.
6. Are you taking advantage of social marketing methods? Do you understand them?
7. Are you paying attention to usability?
8. Are you leaving room to explore new avenues as they become available? Do you keep up with changing technology and trends?

Obviously, there are more but this gives you some idea. Internet marketing is interesting and fun. The ability to be able to modify campaigns at any time, stop on a dime and change directions, tweak and fine tune. There is no reason to fail.

Writing this rant gave me the idea to write up a list of questions to ask a potential search marketing company. I can give you 10 questions that will immediately tell you if the person is full of it or out of touch. I will try to get that up in the next couple days or so.

Google using location for all search results

I can’t say this is a surprise. We have all known that Google presents different results to different people. It used to be the data center answer :

SEO: You are #2 for your top keyword

CLIENT: When I put that keyword into Google I show up on the second page

SEO: Google has hundreds of datacenters so its not uncommon to see different results..yadda yadda yadda

We (me and my peeps) have known that local was going to rule the day for quite a while. I think the structure on that last sentence was terrible. I have known that sooner or later it was going to come down to local based results even for national searches. Google is moving towards all biz all the time. I guess a gazillion dollars isn’t enough.

Lots of talk about Google saying that the keyword tool was going to present commercially viable results, etc. I don’t know its all just buzz to me (hehe get it?), seriously tho. Google should change their motto from do no evil to “anyone who says money isnt everything clearly doesn’t have any”.

No time to get into this location based results, and I have nothing to say that hasn’t been said a thousand times. I just thought I would jump on and say – I told you so.

However, the joke is on me. I left my position as a partner in a local search marketing company to go work for a big firm 367 days ago. Got to give it up to Al Oelschlaeger (I can never remember how to spell his name) tho’, he saw this coming years ago. I hope he is able to capitalize on that before it’s beaten to death.

Good thing all the hit and run Gurus are getting all creamy over auto-blogging, or rather selling the concept to the sucker who was born a minute ago. I’m sure they will get back on the local search bandwagon soon enough.

Auto Blogging : Killing the internet on auto-pilot

If you are here for the 3 free hours of SEO consulting, please read this post. The information is near the bottom.

Disclaimer 1: If I mentioned you in this post – I am not necessarily bashing you. I have a lot of respect for many of the big name “gurus” , you guys either are, or employ master copywriters.

Disclaimer 2: I omitted a lot of links because I don’t care to give any link love to these programs. If I sent them traffic, I may as well become an affiliate. I have not changed any names of people or programs so BE WARNED: If you seek them out with the intention of seeing what I am talking about, you could very well be hypnotized into buying the exact product I am railing on. Their copywriting is that good. Don’t come crying to me when it doesn’t bring you money in a wheel barrow.

If you know me, you know there are some things that I hate: Long scrolling sales letters, excessive up-sells, and get rich quick schemes. I generally don’t like information marketing (even though I have worked it). I – like you – wake up to daily emails that sound something like this (real email excerpt):

WARNING! Ben

You need to watch this video right now.

http://www.anotherautoblogscam.com

It will be taken down in the next few hours
and it’s the most important video you’ll see
all year as it reveals a secret $100m loophole
and how you can use it to cash in big time.

Like $221,555 per month!

Watch it now…

Here is the one that is at the top of my hit list right now. The main reason is that I get a version of this email every other day and the subject line ALWAYS says “ONLY 4 COPIES LEFT!” – I have added COPIES LEFT to my spam triggers..:

Yes folks, the auto blog. With the popularity of wordpress growing daily – because it is truly sent from God, we are starting to see a lot of systems being pushed by the snake oil gurus that claim to be : the next big thing, that involves no money down, no traffic, no list, no experience – hell you can do it from a rented library computer! If you read between the lines, what they are selling is an automated WordPress blog that scrapes the web looking for content and posts it. The latest adds the feature of cloaking text links from within the article to affiliate links, making it look like its a link to another one of your pages. Lord help us. Auto blogs are in a word, garbage. Well not garbage, but recycled junk. The premise is that “its so easy, you can make 1000′s of them with one click”. GREAT! Thousands of websites popping up that contain rehashed crap often un-credited to the original author. These sites add to the giant trash heap that is the internet.

The auto blogging systems are nothing but packaged plugins (which are free) in a semi slick interface, that automates the setup process of WordPress and installs the plugins. They do not address traffic, they do not get attention from search engines, they do not contain quality original content – they are worthless. Well, they are worth a few cents – and therein lies the premise. Create 10,000′s of auto scraping blogs that generate a few cents a day in Adsense revenue or possible a couple bucks off of a zip submit (an affiliate link that pays you a few cents when someone fills out their email and zip code – most often for a free ipod or gas card). Yes I know, new people join the web every day, but does this mean that we have to take advantage of them?

When are are on a lot of mailing lists like I am, you can tell when a new JV(joint venture) has been given out to the big boys because the sales letters start piling up. COME WATCH THIS VIDEO OF A FORMER CRACK HEAD WITH A 5th GRADE EDUCATION MAKE MILLIONS ON CLICKBANK WORKING ONLY 7 MINUTES A DAY FROM THE WEB BROWSER OF HIS 10 YEAR OLD CELL PHONE!”

.. I expect them. Look for the word “auto pilot”.

I just did search of my Gmail account for the word Auto Pilot and I returned 39 emails sent within the past week. Lets see who the names are on the list of senders:

• Rob Benwell – he has been the biggest offender lately with a program called blogging to the bank. I actually bought his info product because I was curious to see what his system was. It was actually a PDF followed by 10 up-sells to more expensive products that would make the information in his PDF easier. Now I am not going to knock Rob Benwell too much, for one reason. I enjoyed reading his PDF. He wrote a 60 page document with very clear directions on how to turn WordPress 3.0′s multi-site feature into a sea of auto blogs. What I appreciated is that he never said it was original, he didn’t offer a product, he merely offered instructions on how to do it, and where to get the free plugins. His report wasn’t too full of bad humor and fluff, I read it on my cell phone over my lunch break. I even went one step further and bought one of his up-sells that had to do with his people actually creating the blogs, that charged me an additional $35 and I saw that was going to be recurring. I was never contacted by his people, support emails went un-answered, I was billed and got nothing for it. So, that pissed me off. I canceled with Paypal and I have been giving away his system to whoever wants it. Rob also has a really annoying email frequency (every 5 minutes).
• Jonathan Leger – He has been around for a long time. He offers some decent stuff. I think he is the one behind the worlds best spinner which actually isn’t bad. Not knocking him, smart guy and gives a lot of good information for free.  Honestly, I should probably take him off this list. (but he came up for auto blogging in my Gmail)
• SENuke – Hell, I paid for SENuke for 2 years. I finally canceled my subscription because the methods it uses are completely dead and produce little to no effect in my line of work which is real SEO. Still, I think those guys worked their asses off on that product and I have no regrets spending $150 a month for 2 years. I liked it for auto creating accounts and the feature of giving a simple rating to how hard it would be to get ranked for a keyword, but all that does is check to see if a Web 2.0 site is in the Google listings. If it is they believe you can grab that spot. Helpful, but not $150 a month helpful. Again, not knocking them. They put a lot of work into that product and I am sure they will come out with other cool stuff.
• Brad Fallon – OK. So this is the reason I decided to write this post. I am used to getting the same tired sales letters from the info guys like Ryan Deiss, Amish Shaw, Kern (he’s a charismatic genius), Alex Goad (His black hat book introduced me to the Blackhat community – I don’t use black hat methods but I am an Exec VIP at one of the big Blackhat boards because there are some really smart white hat guys there too), Blinkweb, HalfAgain, and all the other guys. I usually just delete them because I don’t need that for what I do. Brad Fallon – the Stompernet Guru is a well respected guy. Stompernet , while not SEOMoz by a long shot, is still a cool company with lots of smart people. I was SHOCKED when I opened an email from Brad Fallon last week and the firs thing that jumps out at me is the words BLOG and CLONE. The email from Stompernet on October 19th has the subject line: “How to clone your blogs for SEO and profit (free webinar) … Oh No!.. It’s come to this.

Stompernet has created some cool tools, they have great training discs (I have all of them – I found them in a crate outside my church ), but this clearly looks like another system to cash in on WordPress multi-site functionality. The email reads: “

Hey, Brad Fallon here.

I wanted to let you know that our very
own Faculty Member Wilson Mattos
has developed a rocking app called
“*****” that he is going to be
promoting to the world soon.

The cool thing is you’re hearing about
it before most anyone else.

(It’s good to be an insider!)

Here’s what it does: it actually clones
WordPress sites with a few pushes of
a button:  content, plugins, everything

• Brad Fallon (cont.). I don’t have time to go to webinar sales pitches. I barely have time to go to educational webinars that I really need, but I think the subject of this email is pretty clear about what we would find. A Pitch-fest for a tool that adds a simple line of code to the WP-config file, maybe installs some plugins. I don’t want to speculate too much because if I am wrong, I don’t want to be THAT wrong, but I think I am pretty close. I usually just delete these kinds of emails, but so many people hold Stompernet in such high regard – hell, I have even put it on a resume – that I was really surprised. I responded with a simple one line email: “Oh Brad.. You too?
• Chris Freville recently sent out a sales letter that was pushing another auto-pilot scheme for traffic that would flood you with free traffic etc. etc. His sales letter was REALLY good, this was for an application by Russian Programmers (of course) – who would think that a couple programmers from Youngstown Ohio had cracked the Google code?!?! He had all kinds of clickbank screen shots (I still cant believe people fall for that), but what he did have was a nice HD video of himself (I think it was him) pushing his product. He had all the hot button words and his copy-writing was first rate. He touched on all the problems, related to every issue that a new marketer has faced, and really portrayed some major enthusiasm. I like to keep up with what people are up to and I am willing to shell out the occasional $37-$97 to find out. So I bought in. Here is the email that I received:
  Hey Benjamin,Congratulations on securing one of my beta tester copies of
  Stealth Profit Machines software.Here is the access link again:

  http://www.stealthprofitmachines.com/tha555hddn80prdx2010release/custprodmain.htm <– Yes folks that is the real link and I am guessing you can find everything I purchased there, but that would be immoral to download something I paid for and there are only 500 copies being sold

  You’ll notice there’s a number of extra goodies added to the
  download area!

  Why?

  Simple. I like to over-deliver! Keep a look out for even more
  bonuses to be added in the coming days.

  Cheers,

Chris

• Chris Freville (Cont.) – I downloaded the software, opened it up. The purpose of the software is to create auto blogs in seconds. What it does is login to your Cpanel account, install WordPress, install 2 common WordPress plugins, and install its own plugin. You then give the blog keywords and it goes out and scrapes article directories for articles that match your keyword. You associate a keyword with an affiliate link and it automatically inserts it into the article text but masks it so when someone mouses over it, it appears that they are going to another page on your site. That’s it. Is this a time saver? Sure, does this generate traffic? NO! His sales letter was ALL ABOUT TRAFFIC. This software does NOTHING to generate traffic.  I should also mention that when I tried it, I was inundated with error boxes which spawned so many times I had to ctrl-alt-del to kill the process. It only actually worked once, kind of, but I had to use it on a previously installed blog, and the best part : the articles were already loaded with the authors links! I’m not even going to touch on the fact that you are giving your hosting panel login information to a piece of software that calls home (contacts its owner). I should point out that 2 minutes after I bought it, a day before I even downloaded it,  I sent them an email:
  Hi Chris,
  No offense, but this product is not worth $37 to me. You have automated WordPress installation and a couple plugins – Your sales pitch is good, good enough to get me to fork over the $37 but I am pretty disappointed. WPpost robot or any number of other auto-poster plugins + a cloaker+ and SEO links = same thing.
  If you had included a multi user function to mass produce blogs and manage them from one spot, that might be a bit better.
  I know there is no easy button and the best way to make money is by designing a product like this and getting a good list, but I would be very appreciative if you refunded my money. I am not going to use this software for anything. Your letter is a bit misleading because you talk about traffic and nothing here does anything to generate traffic. Just a lot of junk blogs sitting online doing nothing.
  I would appreciate a refund. Thanks a lot!

  Ben

No response. Surprised? No.

I could continue on for days about auto-blogging and what an incredible waste of time it is, but I have to get back to my real job. I am a search marketing and traffic specialist for one of the fastest growing tech companies in the country. We produce valuable content, generate valuable links, and create sites that will not only make millions of dollars, but they will be here in 50 years. Auto-blogging is nothing more than spam – don’t fool yourself. The logic behind spam is that the conversion rate is less than a 10th of 1%, but when you are sending out hundred of millions of emails, that’s good money. Auto-blogging is really no different. You are flooding the web with useless content that had been rehashed over and over.

I know that some people go into auto-blogging with the idea of automating the tedious tasks and creating original content and syndicating it, but let’s call a spade a spade. It’s another bullshit “easy button” and like most things in internet marketing, it is not a way for someone with no online experience to make money. I love the fact that all internet sales letters mention that “aren’t you tired of throwing away your money on useless gimmicks and systems that don’t work?”.

These marketers are laughing at you. Seriously laughing at you. Money making schemes always boom when the economy tanks and it really hurts my heart to think about how many families are out there right now, out of work, struggling to pay bills and looking for ANY way to bring in some money. $37 is a lot to them – $37 can buy you a weeks worth of groceries if you are frugal. $37 can be a cell phone payment or a payment to the electric company.

There is nothing wrong with being an entrepreneur, its admirable. There is something wrong with making bold bullshit statements that a piece of poorly written software is going to change your life. If you do this, you should be ashamed of yourself. If you do this and are reading this, you are probably laughing at me too. I don’t care. I make a lot of money, the old fashioned way.

Unfortunately, the people who are searching the web for ways to make money are not going to find this blog post, my warning will not reach them. If anyone reads this blog post it will be other SEO pros or the narcissistic info marketers who are Googling themselves. There are a couple things I can do that might be able to help.

1. I will give 3 hours of completely free SEO coaching to any small business owner that would like some help. No strings, no up-sells, no catch. If you need some help with the fundamentals of getting your website found, I will give you 3 hours of my time. I can teach you more in 3 hours than you will learn from any $2000 seminar or b.s. marketing product.

2. I am going to contact my college friend at the FTC to look into the claims and statements being made by these guys selling these products. I know there was a bit of a scare a couple years ago with compliance issues and the use of fake testimonials, but I have noticed that people have gotten lazy recently. I have spotted a few clear violations.

3. I will speak to a very close friend of mine who is one of the countries top attorneys to see if there is a possibility of a class action suit against a couple of the major offenders.

I will close this with a true story from my past. I worked in the adult business from 1996-2002. A random occurrence landed me a job at Xpics publishing in Lake Tahoe, the dominant company at the time. Xpics was re-billing credit cards for $60 million dollars a month and had created an empire that was truly amazing. Back then you could put a banner for them on your site and get paid .27 a click for a raw banner click.

I had NO idea the amount of money being made by these companies – had I known I would be a multi-millionaire several times over right now, but the owner was REALLY good at keeping us in the dark. We were just having fun.

Anyway, this job taught me many amazing things and I witnessed – and occasionally was part of – the birth of some life changing technologies – the pop up console is a good example (read about Brian and his attempt to patent the popup). As soon as I figured out how much money was being made – and how underpaid I was -  I bolted, and went to a new company in Santa Fe where I was paid a much better wage ( i still have regrets every day that I didn’t know what I had at the time).

Part of my job was going to trade shows and conventions. The trade shows were identical to every other trade show except it was full of naked women, tanorexic GQ guys, and the old-school super shady pioneers of the business. The first trade show that I actually had a booth was IA2000 in Miami. I remember that trade show for several reasons, one being approached by this guy who said he had the next best thing for payment processing – gold, turned out to be e-gold which is a story all its own.

The other thing I remember was that there was an old couple walking through the crowds, they were much older than the other attendees – probably 70s. They looked really out of place, not nervous, but definitely overwhelmed. They came up to my booth to see what I was pushing, which at the time was a non-adult program called sports clicks that fell flat a few months later. I asked what they were doing there and they told me that they had just recently retired, didnt have a lot of money and had heard on the news that the adult business was making new millionaires every day. They said that they were thinking about cashing out their entire retirement account and trying to make money in the adult business, but they didn’t know how and were looking for advice. I could have done several things at that moment.

1. I could have pushed my program on them, would have been easy – get paid for clicks to my sports website, we even buy raw exit console clicks and garbage traffic.

2. Offered to help them come up with a viable plan on how to make their money, make money.

3. Told them I had a company of my own and would happily let them invest in it, then stolen their money.

4. Told them that this business was not for them, its much harder than it looks. Everything is easy except one thing: getting traffic and thats where the money is

5. Ushered them to the door and told them to get out and never come back.

I wish I chose #5, but I didn’t, I chose #4.  I told them all the various facets of running an adult site (back then bandwidth was REALLY expensive), and that I can pretty much guarantee that they will lose all their money- either slowly- or all at once. I talked to them for about 45 minutes and they seemed to listen. Unfortunately, that was a huge convention and the adult world is full of the best pitchmen on the planet – the online porn biz created  methods that are just now coming into play on infomercials and webmarketing. I would bet that before they got to the door, someone got to them and told them they had the “easy button”, just click it, sit back, and watch the money roll in.

The idea of the free SEO consulting occurred to me as I rambled off this post, I will put up a page with the details in the next day or so.

Have a great day.

Sidenote: It’s funny. I am scanning my email for a sample sales letter text to fill in at the top of this post and I see two emails, one from Jason Katzenback and one from Comment Kahuna – both have the same theme – GOOGLE HATES BLOGS! pay us some money.  Imagine getting this email 2 days after spending $500 to have some chucklehead tell you why Google LOVEs blogs?!?

Next Page »