Lye soap or made from potassium hydroxide, sodium hydroxide etc?

Vegetable oil or animal fat?

Hot or cold process?

Mixed with titanium, nickel, aluminium or silver?

Sand, pumice or some kind of more modern substance for exfoliation?

Just perfumed? Essential oils? Plant extracts?

I doubt you will find much of the technical details about soap manufacture on product labels or the purpose of ingredients.

There are real differences in ingredients used, but the biggest difference is the marketing & packaging.

If something is sold as soap there is a high chance it will get your hands clean.

The soap that gets your hands clean is the one you actually use

It is also quite likely if an affiliate set up a website to sell $0.40 bars of traditional soap they wouldn’t make much of a living from it. (I have no idea of prices in the US/UK for the cheapest bars of soap)
The same would be true for eCommerce unless you were selling wholesale or came up with a compelling way of mass marketing… or had insane conversions.

What Internet Marketing Product/Strategy Works?

• Services with significant lock-in – hosting, shopping carts & autoresponders
• Subscription based essential tools – for SEO people that is some kind of keyword & link management package that increase productivity and improve client reporting.
• Micropayments – e.g. Facebook games
• Advertising platforms
• Tools/scripts/themes/plugins on a pay once basis
• Various paid & free content strategies

One question I have always had is can you provide content for free that people will then pay for anyway because they find it useful.

• Do you need scarcity?
• Do you need to paywall most content?
• Can added value be added in other ways?

I am not exactly talking a freemium model.

Cory Doctorow seems to be able to monetize his novels effectively whilst allowing free download for non-commercial use.

Radiohead famously allowed people to “pay what they want” for downloads of a new album, though that was a limited offer and the album was finally released at a later date with a lot of success.

A huge chunk of the value of my friend Dave’s SEO Training Dojo are the blog posts that are available for free, though there is additional value in the forums, enhanced guides, the 24/7/365 chat on Skype and the weekly organized guest experts.

There are also alternative ways to monetize content through things like consulting – in fact in many cases that could be looked on as the mainstream method of blog monetization. In this case the content is more a loss-leader than an intrinsic part of the offer.

Blogs can be leveraged to promote conferences and get togethers that are commercial in nature – conferences don’t have to be expensive or be a pitchfest to offer great value for visitors & presenters (and still have a ROI for the organiser). A good example is Think Visibilty (Leeds 4th September)

If you can offset the cost of marketing with social influence, the price you charge (after cost of goods/services) is then frequently determined by how much money you want to make and how large an audience segment you can reach.

Going to have some fun soon. I love experimentation.

I love my double or indented listings, but it was not to be.

We have been together for a long time, but fate has determined that at least for the present, we must separate.

The Google giveth, and The Google taketh away

For my site, on a search term such as “Andy Beard” the second listing doesn’t make a huge amount of sense unless it is a fresh post, as most people would be just doing a navigational query.
Maybe in the future Google would add a most recent post as a replacement.

I am not sure this is new or normal, I don’t spend a huge amount of time studying US SERPs recently, and in Poland I still have an indent.

I highlighted the paid results because I have also recently noticed the linked page appearing higher in my SERPs for Andy Beard. IMReportCard at least attempt to write something useful, though I am not sure their writers have enough specialist knowledge to delve into SEO topics and I have noticed that the financial incentive to post one fo the first 3 reviews often encourages people who haven’t got a clue to write really flimsy reviews.
All the reviews are intended to be factual, without expressing a specific opinion, and are written by their staff. They say they are not going to use affiliate links for the products, and have added some Adsense to cover the cost of paying for reviews, comments and other participation. Interestingly enough, you also earn credits for all your referral’s activities.
I have seen a few negative comments, so it might not be heavily moderated, though it is hard to determine the ownership of the site which I think should be more transparent.

It would be great if I could use a referral link to link through to my review on IMReportCard – they would get a lot more deep links with anchor text that way.

Email is the de-facto master password for a huge swath of your online identity. Tread carefully:

* As a software developer, you should never ask a user for their email credentials. It’s unethical. It’s irresponsible. It is wrong. If someone is asking you to code this, why? For what purpose?
* As a user, you should never provide your email credentials to anyone except your email service. Sites that ask you for this information are to be regarded with extreme suspicion if not outright distrust.

This is the same terrible system used by many large social networks, and 2 scripts I recently strongly advised internet marketers not to use.

• Optin Accelerator – due to be relaunched soon
• Then there was Viral Optin Generator
• Coming soon is Viral Inviter which has some redeeming qualities, it works with old address books from Outlook etc, but it is still asking for highly personal passwords, and there are some other security faults.

Viral Inviter, with even heavier marketing and endorsements, will have a huge long-term negative effect on email marketing, with the rewards quickly being overtaken by a backlash of negative sentiment and poorer email delivery which will be universal.

Plurk which has very recently become very popular also suffers from this evil invite and finding friends method, but at least has a redeeming feature.

http://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&cmid=0&fs=1&su=Invitation+to+Plurk.com&body=I+have+been+using+Plurk+and+I+think+you+should+check+it+out%21%0A%0AAccept+my+invitation+by+going+to%3A%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fplurk.com%2FredeemByURL%3Ffrom_uid%3D15547%26check%3D-1998160234%26s%3D2%0A%0ACheck+out+my+profile+at%3A%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.plurk.com%2Fuser%2Fandybeard%0A%0APlurk.com+-+Your+life%2C+on+the+line&tearoff=1&shva=1&ui=1

http://compose.mail.yahoo.com/?Subj=Invitation+to+Plurk.com&Body=I+have+been+using+Plurk+and+I+think+you+should+check+it+out%21+Accept+my+invitation+by+going+to%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fplurk.com%2FredeemByURL%3Ffrom_uid%3D15547%26check%3D-1998160234%26s%3D2.+Check+out+my+profile+by+going+to%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fwww.plurk.com%2Fuser%2Fandybeard

http://www.hotmail.msn.com/secure/start?action=compose&subject=Invitation+to+Plurk.com&body=I+have+been+using+Plurk+and+I+think+you+should+check+it+out%21%0A%0AAccept+my+invitation+by+going+to%3A%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fplurk.com%2FredeemByURL%3Ffrom_uid%3D15547%26check%3D-1998160234%26s%3D2%0A%0ACheck+out+my+profile+at%3A%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.plurk.com%2Fuser%2Fandybeard%0A%0APlurk.com+-+Your+life%2C+on+the+line

That first line for instance brings up an invite email inside Gmail, no need to scrape Gmail contacts, and then you can use Gmail’s own address book to access contacts.

They also use Facebook

Existing APIs

Google Yahoo and Microsoft also have APIs for this kind of stuff which can also be used for finding friends.

Google Contacts API
Yahoo! Contact API
Windows Live Contact API

Over the last few months I have already taken the decision not to promote a number of sites and services launched by Internet Marketers using these dangerous scripts.

I have proven I can rank highly in the SERPs for any product. It is going to help conversions when on the first page of the SERPs for your product name potential customers find…

Product Name – WARNING: SECURITY RISK – Read This First!
or
Product Name by Marketer Name – Warning: Security Risk

The only problem is, this won’t be a typical fake affiliate promotion, but a real warning

Update

Tim has provided the code so that anyone who buys one of these viral tell a friend scripts can easily modify it so that it stores all the personal data entered in a form. It would take a typical script kiddie less than 2 minutes.

Doing it on someone else’s server is a little more work, plus they would need to get access, but how many people really think their websites running 3rd party scripts are totally secure.

Tim points out Paypal… how many marketers use Gmail for Paypal access, along with their Adwords, Adsense, Domain registrations etc. I know I do, because I trust Google with the data more than I trust my ISP – plus it would be a thankless task changing everything if you changed ISP.

Marketers are the perfect target

• Running lots of 3rd party scripts on a site
• Often running outdated versions of WordPress
• Have multiple sites on the same server
• Have a “set and forget” mentality

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

How many people have old fishing rods in their shed or loft?

I bet they even know how to use them, but for some reason a takeaway Chinese, microwave dinner, or eating out is a much more convenient way to eat.

Sure, catching fish is satisfying, relaxing and fresh fish on a charcoal grill is extremely appetising.

Then of course there is the fun of playing with fishing line…

Photo by John2008

Internet Marketing Similarities

• No time
• Not enough patience
• Doing everything right but still not catching anything
• Trying one location after another without success
• Trying one technique after another without success
• Constantly reading more and more books and watching training videos but still going nowhere
• No success – obviously buying better tackle will help you catch more
• Don’t like touching the bait
• Don’t like touching what you have caught

The last two are actually big ones for many people in internet marketing

• Bait -the equivalent would be not liking squeeze pages, long sales letters, email marketing, hype
• Touching the catch – paperwork, dealing with customers, support, handling problems, fear of failure or not living up to expectations

I have actually linked to an article before from Mike Filsaime that I found inspirational on a similar line, Fish, Poles, Boxes & Buttons

• Fish: Teach “How to” Catch Fish – 10% of market, high refund rate.
• Pole: Sell The Pole – 20% of market, medium refund rate
• Box: Give Him The Fish – 30% of market, Low Refund Rate
• Button: Prepare the Fish Dinner – 50% of market, Pays a Premium, keeps coming back, and virtually no refund rate.

Fishing Poles and Training

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned Jeff Johnson’s SEO Blogging Software – a modified version of WordPress that has been updated twice since first released and will continue to be improved.

In addition he has been providing tons of free training for those that signed up, on how to promote the sites using social media, product creation and traffic generation.

What you would expect from that is that at some later time Jeff would provide access to more advanced tools and training for a fee, and that time is now.

However he has taken it to the next stage…

The Boxed Version

Jeff is providing the next stage, a “boxed version” where he gets his team to create a site to your requirements, maybe a membership site or shopping site using Joomla.

Double Diamond Level gets everything list above plus… you get one free joomla site custom built for you as part of their initial 60 day membership. My personal staff of professional site builders will handle the entire installation and initial configuration for you.

They’ll even go out and Jumpstart your traffic for you as part of your package. Your Joomla site can be configured to be a turn-key membership site… or we can set it up as an ecommerce site for you… or we can set it up for a pure content driven web site for you… and we’ll even supply all the content for you.

Having one successful site created for you is a great way to leverage your investment. You are no longer just spinning the wheels, but taking action in a specific direction, and when you choose to expand your network, you will already have a working site to use as both an example and launchpad.

Button: Prepare the Fish Dinner

As Mike Filsaime highlighted, the majority of the market just want the fish dinner.

Jeff Johnson’s version is to create that initial Joomla site and promote it for you in a number of ways

• Creating Feeder sites with his SEO Blogging Software
• Creating social media profiles to match the feeder sites

That means at the end of your first 90 days of membership…

You’ll walk away with 6 custom-built “Search Engine Magnet” websites AND 12 custom-built social networking profile pages… yours to keep forever… even if you cancel your membership.

As you would expect, providing a complete “dining experience” comes at a premium price, but there are a whole load of extra bonuses that will help you leverage what you learn from the first site into your own small online empire.

You then get the option to keep building more sites and increasing your monthly recurring income, or you can probably flip some of the sites for a cash injection.

This isn’t something for everyone, but not everyone can afford to dine out every evening.

Then again, how many months have you been spinning your wheels and not taking real action, and what kind of mess do you have in your tackle box?

Here is a video Jeff has put together outlining the basic training.

These are the same methods that Jeff uses himself and I am sure he has done his homework to ensure that the sites created will eventually cover their cost of creation, after all he wants to retain you as a member of his training labs.
I doubt Jeff is taking this to the extreme of “over-pandering” – a “no work solution” – after all, who wants to be spoon fed in a restaurant?

Some people enjoy fishing, learning how to do everything themselves, and disappearing off to quiet backwaters with no guarantee of catching anything… for a whole season. They do it for the quiet times, the challenge, the relaxation.

For many people the most exhilarating fishing experience is to hire the best rigged boat, with experienced team, in the best fishing spots around the world – if they are going to go fishing, they are going to do it in style.
But they would still want to reel the fish in, otherwise it wouldn’t be their fish, just a photo opportunity

As far as internet marketing goes, Jeff is one of very few capable of offering the second option

Free materials are still available for those that missed them

SEO Blogging Software (requires signup but well worth it)
Info Product Creation Training
Viral Videos and Social Media
Social Bookmarking Step-by-Step

At the very least, I would suggest you don’t miss out of the free tools and training

• Ed Dale with the 30 Day Challenge
• Sherman Hu with his WordPress Huddles
• Michael Cheney frequently holds free training sessions combined with special offers (I sat through 2 hours of one the other night)
• I know that crazy guy Jason Moffat is now into Ustream big-time

Another guy who has always been extremely forward thinking with video for affiliate marketing is Russell Brunson. He must have spent a fortune creating his “Zoobie” internet marketing videos. I am not sure whether it was a big success, but I am sure he learned a lot from the experience.

Affiliate Evolution on Ustream

I started writing this post whilst waiting in a room on Ustream of 500+ people, because Russell mailed his list. Unfortunately all I can see is the following:-

Fortunately a recording is available later, it looks like Ustream have problems with this many people at once.

Russell will be holding free training every day… LIVE at the following times

Wed. May 21st at 11 am EST
Thurs. May 22nd at 11 am EST
Fri. May 23rd at 11 am EST
Sat. May 24th at 11 am EST
Tues. May 27th at 11 am EST

This tactic is worth studying.

Russell’s team have created a landing page for Affiliate Evolution

That landing page is hosting the video – I have seen a few marketers do this recently

The new twist to this is that this isn’t some private sub page on the domain, but is being used to promote the primary landing page of Affiliate Revolution, and his opt-in list prior to launch.

If you are anything like me, an email notification before something is about to start is always handy, so don’t forget to sign up to Russell’s notification list.

Here you can find details of the Affiliate Program for Affiliate Evolution

Think I am insane?

Russell has a 2 tier affiliate program ;)

I actually have a good idea how Russell makes as much or more from an affiliate promotion than the person whose product it is, even though he might not be the top ranking affiliate.

p.s. Joy if you read this, you might want to get the tech guys to take a look at that 302 redirect

The whole article is better than 99% of Sphinn content

I wonder how many people on Sphinn have even heard of Gary Halbert?

It seems like the Sphinn moderators were having another hissy fit – they see an article written intended to promote a product or service and just delete it in some kind of knee-jerk reaction based upon the title.

I don’t think it was some kind of collective decision based upon community desphinns, I only saw one visitor in my stats from Sphinn/Upcoming before it was removed.

I am not going to claim that the remainder of my review/promotion was amazing content, it might have sparked a few thoughts, but honestly how many SMX related posts, or book reviews, or even announcements about various products being launched by Sphinn users really contain anything insightful that the majority of Sphinn users have never read before?

Maybe I should write about Jim’s Internet Marketing Ninjas again but include an affiliate link? I guarantee such a post wouldn’t be flagged as spam, because it is Jim Boykin’s and not Alex Goad’s product.

I am not saying I would have Sphunn my post, but then I have read the works of the late Gary Halbert multiple times, but for anyone unfamiliar, his words can have a profound effect on your business.

On a personal note, I still received 3 email requests for Sphinns yesterday, and one Twitter message asking me to comment. I haven’t logged into Sphinn since I left 3 months ago.

Whoever decided to submit my article and thought it would be interesting to the Sphinn community, thanks, but it seems the moderators at Sphinn don’t like Internet Marketing submissions.

Sphinn Is Not Internet Marketing

I suppose the ultimate proof that Sphinn is not relevant to Internet Marketing is the following screenshot

Update: published with the wrong screenshot for 5 minutes

I wrote about Product Launch Formula twice because I knew people in the online marketing community could benefit from it, and that includes Jim, probably Rand, it could even help with the promotion of SMX.
The second time I wrote about it I even included a link through to someone compiling a list of links through to all the special offers available (there were some crackers) if gaining extra value was important.

Just little things, for instance how much difference in sales would it make releasing full video footage from last year’s SMX Advanced for free? I haven’t attended… are people going to be impressed with the material?

I just looked at a couple of Jim’s Internet Marketing Ninja’s demo videos.
Which ones contain some of the very best material?
You know, the golden nuggets that are going to convince me that the remainder are going to be worthwhile?

I know that people involved in Internet Marketing need to learn a lot about Social Media, and lots of crap gets submitted to Sphinn around the time of big launches within Internet Marketing circles, but at the same time Sphinn users in my opinion could benefit from even just the free content that is provided during most Internet Marketing launches.

I don’t intend to return to Sphinn, but does Sphinn really want to alienate such a huge segment of the online marketing community, and deprive their users of news about valuable products to help their online business.

Moderation sucks on Digg, in many ways it is worse on Sphinn, you can’t even see the stuff that has been autoburied or removed.

Gary Halbert & The Significance of Timing

I know Alex Goad reasonably well, and I am sure it hasn’t escaped him that Gary Halbert passed away almost exactly a year ago. Sunday April 8th 2007. I first heard about it from Michel Fortin.
I am not sure if things were planned that way, and if there will be some kind of additional tribute other than Gary’s words being immortalized as part of yet another product launch, but that in itself is tribute to the man, and his teaching.

Question 1: Had you personally heard of Gary Halbert before I mentioned him in either this article, or my previous one?
Question 2: Had you read any of his previous letters?

Any comments which don’t first of all answer those 2 questions will be deleted (unless it is painfully obvious – e.g. you commented on previous posts mentioned above)

Now things are a little settled I have had some time to go back through correspondence I read whilst travelling, but didn’t have time to take action on – the idea of “touch once” broke down for the last couple of months – the “to do” list grew.

I am glad I took the time to revisit previous correspondence, Carl’s list of 32 things he has learned is priceless.

It runs something like this (though I haven’t signed up to one to get exact details)

• You sign up to the mentorship program
• One of the tasks is backlink building from Dofollow blogs
• The new internet marketer runs around leaving comments on Dofollow blogs, but uses backlinks to the blog or salespage of the internet marketing guru
• After dropping a certain number of backlinks, the new internet marketer qualifies for a bonus

The backlinks are sometimes the link reserved for the comment author, or sometimes product mentions within the comments.

I Regard This As Comment Spam

My normal reaction is to hit the spam button, which will eventually prevent me seeing future comments by the people on the mentorship program, even if they eventually start leaving comments on their own behalf.

I haven’t got time to edit links even if the comments contain some legitimate content.

The mentorship program is effectively burning legitimate link sources for the people taking the “course”.

Great job..

In addition, the chances of me giving an editorial link at some time to the “guru” or promoting one of their products as a JV partner are hugely reduced.

Legitimate Employees And VAs

As a blogger, I want to know who is leaving a comment.

I don’t mind anchor text used in comments, if my blog passes juice it might as well pass anchor text as well, but anyone following the link needs to be able to determine who left the comment.
This is a lot easier with personal blogs, or blogs run by a single person.

If my friend Michel Fortin left a comment with the anchor text “Copywriting” I am not going to worry about it. You go to his blog, it is clearly his blog.

Joy Gustilo works for Russell Brunson – that is a link to her profile on DotComSecrets and Joy often uses “Internet Marketing Joy” as anchor text – that is great, I know it is Joy and not Russell leaving the comment.

I have a few other readers also competing for that SERP so I should probably balance that out a little

If Courtney used “Internet Marketing” when leaving a comment, I wouldn’t have a problem – his blog is personal

You have probably seen Dwain Jeworski on various social networks. He used to work with Rich Schefren, and now is with the Internet Marketing Center as their Affiliate Manager. If Dwain used “Internet Marketing Dwain as anchor text in a comment, that would be appropriate. Just using Internet Marketing wouldn’t, because it would be impossible to tell if the comment was written by Dwain or maybe Derek Gehl.
The IMC have over 100 employees – can you imagine if a few of them all had a conversation in my comment area each signing their name as Internet Marketing?

One thing I would love to see on the IMC site is staff profiles which could be used as landing pages for social media link building. It would be possible to funnel juice from those landing pages through to pages where it is needed, which is much harder to do with links directly to a home page.

That is something Joy should think about with her comment links as well.

I am not quite sure how I would deal with comments from Jim Boykin if he was using anchor text such as “Internet Marketing” – I think anchor text would be appropriate for a link to his blog, as the blog is clearly his, whereas a link to the company site I would want some kind of identifier in the anchor text as to who left the comment.
Then again Jim’s ninja’s would probably use some kind of landing page method.

Of course Josh could link through to his Internet Marketing Blog as much as he likes. Again it is his personal blog. (some more on Josh’s blog coming up soon)

So ends my “SERPs Neutral” overview of acceptable linking practice, though there is a good chance I have missed a few people out from my readers.

I am Not Going To Name & Shame

At least not yet…

I left a comment on one blog regarding this practice, and it seemed to stop, at least on my blog, but the comment didn’t appear on the blog, and was not acknowledged directly.

Another “guru” when contacted about this last year offered to chat about it, but didn’t apologise.

I have noticed it starting again over the last few weeks, not just spammy linkbuilders, but quite obviously new internet marketers under some kind of mentorship.

Come on guys, behave… I’m serious

It is also traditionally when new life is brought into the world, so it is an ideal time to clean up some niche websites and turn some ideas into revenue streams and to experiment a little.

I am frequently asked by email all kinds of beginners questions

• How to choose a niche?
• How to go about keyword research?
• How to promote niche websites?

I am going to steal some quotes from Franck

Taking about John Reese and Blogrush

1. Release crap (improve later, but start making money with your crap)
2. Test everything (Jay Abraham’s style)

These advice makes me a lot of money, and it was actually my starting point online. I made my first affiliate commission ever with a “crappy crap” forex website.

About what he learned from the Get Altitude CDs

I learned 3 important words from Eben Pagan. When you know these 3 words you will say like “Hmm, is this extraordinary?”. (I said this when I heard Eben tell this).

But I guarantee that it’s important for your business and it produce tremendous results…

Here are these three words… Speed of implementation.

I also have a number of tools I want to test out so this will also involve some rapid learning along with the rapid development and content generation.

These Are Going To Be Rough

That doesn’t mean junk

Diamonds start off in an uncut state that isn’t very dazzling, and many have imperfections that make them only good for industrial use.

In our case we might end up with 31 sites that just pull in a few dollars per month, but most of them will be very low maintenance.

Some of the sites exist and will be revamped, so have existed in the past, and others will be born fresh

Tools

A lot of the tools I have are no longer sold, and a few were quite expensive.

Most of the sites I am going to work on this month will be using free and affordable tools, but if you want me to include one of your products, make sure I have a copy to play with as early as possible.

Product Placement and Niches

If you want to suggest broad niches to have a play around with, or a specific product to promote let me know

I am going to try to have all the sites “worth being in the index” and I certainly won’t be breaking any laws.

Hmm… guidelines… we’ll see ;)

But that would be gaming the system based upon whatever level of popularity I have achieved within the Online Marketing community and it seems that popularity of whatever kind isn’t necessarily a good thing, because the masses or individuals start accusing you of gaming the system for your own benefit.

So I have just deleted an article I spent 2 or 3 hours writing yesterday…

Instead I am going to cover something possibly a little more controversial, that has been gnawing at me for a number of months.

I Am Hanging Up The Towel @ Sphinn

The reason I am writing this post is to inform my readers as to the reasons why a Sphinn button will no longer be on this blog, and also why even if you submit my content there, I am not going to respond to any comments that might occur on Sphinn.

Parallels will no doubt be drawn with the recent Digg fiasco

I suppose the difference is that I really am hanging up the towel rather than creating a storm in a teacup

This is between me and my readers, so I would actually prefer this not to be submitted to social media sites and for no one to link to it.

This isn’t linkbait or an attempt to make changes – the writing has been on the wall for a while already.

The Sphinn Launch

Sphinn has now been around for 6 months, so I don’t think this is too early to pass my personal judgement.

When Launched, Sphinn was described as “Sphinn: Our Social Site For Search & Internet Marketing Professionals”

I first wrote about Sphinn 6 months ago, almost to the day, and my emphasis was on attention, market segmentation and building bridges within the industry.

In my personal opinion, Sphinn has totally and utterly failed to achieve that, and in some ways it has helped widening the gap between different online marketing professionals.

I would even question the word “professional” because some of the defamatory remarks I have read and bitten my tongue over have certainly not been professional conduct.

Anti-Internet Marketing Sentiment

Whilst the Sphinn logo proclaims Sphinn as a site suitable to submit “Internet marketing” related content, and as such Internet Marketers in general, not just the audience catered for by Search Engine Land would or at least should feel welcome.

I am not going to list specific examples as I am not trying to convince anyone, but at times, in fact with increasing frequency I have felt insulted in much the same way SEOs get insulted by people claiming that they don’t like 95% of SEO Experts, or that they are all Snake Oil Salesman.

Some people might look on me as an SEO Expert, I feel I just question preconceived ideas and a lot of what I write is just writing down my thought process. At heart, I am an “Internet Marketer”, and an “Affiliate Marketer”.

I would love for the divisions in the industry to somehow be bridged, but that isn’t going to happen on Sphinn.

Social Bias

It is interesting how many articles on Sphinn proclaim the advantages of getting involved with the community, making yourself visible with an avatar for personal branding, gaining a reputation for submitting only good content and various other social media strategies.

Unfortunately, unless you have some kind of special commercial immunity, if user popularity begins to have a noticeable effect on which submissions appear on the front page, no matter how large your contribution to a particular social media site, a negative reaction can take place.

You could liken this to:-

• Don’t Make Google Look Stupid
• Don’t Make Digg Look Stupid
• Don’t Make Sphinn Look Stupid

It doesn’t matter whether you are doing anything wrong, it is the perception that something is underhand, or you are gaining some kind of edge that creates an imbalance.

The Evil Green Monkey highlighted this perfectly on Sphinn

You won’t be able to read this comment online, the story is still hidden in moderation, but the tone makes me livid

It isn’t a full comment, I happened to still have the global comments page open in a tab that hadn’t been refreshed when I noticed the post had been pulled. The comment continued on to mention something about the post being reviewed by moderators.

There is actually a bug in Sphinn, even when a post is manually moderated, it still appears on the list of posts that you have sphunn, so I was able to grab this screenshot.

Maki submitting a post to sphinn is never a guarantee that it is going to reach the front page. In fact Maki has the lowest “hot” percentage within the top 15 Sphinn users.

You can certainly draw parallels with Digg, top users do dominate the front page on Sphinn, but it is generally because they are more active and submit more content.
I have multiple screenshots where I have had 6 of the 30 front page stories being ones I have submitted, and I have seen the same from Maki – that doesn’t mean that everything we submit goes hot.

It could also be attributed to the story being from my domain – I have been promoting Sphinn fairly heavily among my readers, and I display a Sphinn button on every post by default. I have a “cultivated” Sphinn audience, and many are very active Sphinners – it is possible you now get penalised for that, unless it would in some way upset the existing social fabric of Search Engine Marketing.

The story itself wasn’t promoted through any other channels, I hadn’t been on instant messenger for a couple of weeks due to connection difficulties, I didn’t mention it on Twitter or Pownce, and as far as I am aware Maki didn’t either.

I should point out I haven’t discussed this post with Maki, and in fact the only communication I had with Maki regarding the post was on Sphinn, when I questioned the category choice – I think the last time I discussed any form of social media submission with Maki was during the October PageRank update/drama/scandal when Maki offered to submit my first “Digg Favorites” post to Digg – it got buried at 70 votes, but still received 140 Diggs that day.

At least when Digg buries a story the submission and comments are still available. You will notice on the screenshot that there are 6 comments. the comment order was me, maki, me, evilgreenmonkey

I have no idea who the remaining 2 comments were from, but I will never have a chance to read them.

I wasn’t informed about the submission being removed, but then why would I? I wasn’t the one who submitted the post to Sphinn in the first place.

Commercial Bias

The post in question was my offer to provide exclusive content for membership sites. It is commercial, but at the same time I believe it also raises some interesting questions, suggests a way to monetize your status as an “authority blogger” in a way not often discussed, and I even included a teaser at the end that I know at least one very smart person worked out.

Sphinn already had some level of commercial bias that I had recently challenged, though it seemed things had been cleared up.

Unfortunately excluding my story based upon the current Sphinn rules or even what was discussed in that thread falls down on almost every front.

1. The submitter is the top user on Sphinn
2. The article was written by a regular Sphinn contributor
3. The article had some value other than the commercial message
4. Other regular Sphinn users or “Sphinn friends” who have released products, or are promoting a new service get Sphunn all the time, reaching the front page and staying there without any negative comments. It is looked on as News which just happens to be included right next to “Internet Marketing” in the Sphinn Logo
5. The story had only 10 votes by the time I went to bed in the early hours of the morning here in Europe – it was already on the 3rd page of new submissions – 6 hours later it was on the front page – those votes probably didn’t come from Sphinn, or some kind of gaming, they came from my subscribers
6. I saw who voted for the story a while before it was pulled, when it was on about 23 or 24 votes – there were no ugly green default icons among the voters, in fact most of the votes came from very active Sphinn members including at least one moderator
7. The people who I actively talk to on instant messenger, e.g. some of the guys on Collective Thoughts, actually hadn’t voted for the story. Some had, Shana, Tad and Glen, but no votes from Tim, Brian, Marty or Mark, and Rose hasn’t been around for a while. I should note also that Shana, Tad, Marty and Glen are less frequently on IM

It is also quite possible that many people read the original post made by EvilGreenMonkey and thought they were now expected to flag every post with some level of commercial intent as spam, without following up on the remainder of the comments. A separate retraction of that statement, or a change in the rules was not made.

At the end of the day, I honestly can’t see any substantial difference between the post I have somehow had moderated, and say this one, Jim launching Internet Marketing Ninjas – one of many recent examples, but I chose it because it is the closest match being an information product launch. I voted for that one too, because I found the post entertaining, and it added a little bit to the sales letter, with some useful social proof.

Comments

I love comments on blogs, I hate when the most important discussions happen on social media and social news sites. Following comments on Sphinn isn’t an efficient use of my time, and to be honest, in many ways is harmful to the conversation as it can’t be seen by all users.

Target Audience

Having evaluated Sphinn over the last 6 months, I have come to the conclusion that Sphinn is not my target audience. In many ways it is an “unfriendly environment” for many of my target audience, thus encouraging my readers to use Sphinn isn’t proactive.

The bias is there in the moderation, quite possibly because the bias is there within the users, and moderators take action based at least partially on user requests.

I am sure that many of the people who were already reading my blog before I became active on Sphinn will continue to do so, and those who discovered my blog through Sphinn are more than welcome to hang around.

I just won’t be taking an active roll on Sphinn, and will be exploring other communities

Why I am Even Writing This?

• Readers would have asked questions
• I get requests for submissions all the time
• I have had a number of reactions such as

I did hear someone shafted you !! I fully understand..

At the end of the day, this isn’t about me being shafted – it is more about other internet marketers being shafted, and if it can happen to me, it will continue to happen to them.

Moving on

As already noted, this is my explanation to my readers. To avoid any hint of bias I have now removed myself from judging in the Semmys for what was to be a “Judges Choice Award” in each category.

Again, this isn’t an attempt at linkbait, I don’t want it promoted on social media and I have even switched off comments for the first time, and won’t be responding to emails or instant messages regarding this.