With a free business model reliant on goodwill, community and the viral dissemination of free content, paid for by SEO & Viral traffic seeing advertising, it is a pretty viable concept.

It is quite possible that the direction they have taken is what works best for them as a technology company and is what their customers expressed a willingness to pay for, and based on Eric Ries’s article today, they went through various questionaire and testing phases to reach their eventual public service offering.

But lets flip things around a little

Alien Marketing Concepts

• Build a landing page with a presentation on it and an opt in form, and also include reciprocal links to all your business competitors.
• Drive PPC traffic to a Dmoz listing that includes not just your link, but also all your competitors
• Pay for traffic to a landing page you can’t split test effectively
• Encourage viral distribution of your marketing materials which then link to a site containing content from all your competitors
• Using a lead capture process that doesn’t use your own lead capture forms with your autoresponder, possibly with a confirmed/double opt-in.
• The purpose of creating an infographic is to drive links to Flickr

A Different Perspective

• Build a landing page with your presentation on it, and all links and actions on the page benefit you directly as a marketer.
• Drive PPC traffic to a landing page you have full control over, and any viral distribution of your content creates a traffic funnel directly to your properties… only
• Have complete control over your landing pages – create 10 different versions of your presentation materials and split test their performance.
• Lets be honest – viral distribution of content rarely happens without a push – that takes time and money. You want to maximize your ROI with complete control over the funnel, and benefit directly from any links.
• This isn’t dodgy leads from a conference where you don’t know whether you have permission to send them marketing messages. You want a clear process that works with your autoresponder directly, and the ability to immediately market and segment the traffic, maybe even sell without human intervention.

The Biggest Failing Of Slideshare

Free Embed

This is a presentation from one of the people I most respect in tech, Dave McClure, because he “gets” marketing – it is quite possible 50% of the visits I have made to Slideshare have been to view updates, though most of the time I have viewed presentations on his blog, or followed a tweet.

3 links to Slideshare
Dave has been driving traffic to his presentations

But that is fair enough… it is a free service, we can all be kumbaya for the greater good of the community.

Pro Branded Channel

Only 2 links… one to a banded channel – the branded channel is the only place with a link back to Edelman… and it is nofollow.

This presentation has been fairly popular

There has at this time also been 150 tweets, 72 Facebook shares, 159 Facebook Likes & 67 Slide Embeds

What an amazing marketing success and branding exercise for Edelman Digital, after all the first point raised in the presentation is:-

1. Marketing in the age of streams

Your customers, consumers and employees are no longer only visiting static Web pages but participating in conversations which increasingly occur off domain in “streams” flowing from Facebook, Twitter and even apps. In order to catch them, you must be highly relevant in their streams.

Which has resulted in zero comments on their original blog post

… and not ranking for the title of their own blog post

David Armano does a little better with his blog post, which was a syndicated (and attributed copy) of the original with a further 5 comments, 33 Facebook likes.

Lets see a comparrison between Slideshare & Edelman

Now imagine all those Tweets and Facebook shares had been directed to the Edelman blog post concentrating the viral message to a single point.
I haven’t analysed all the sharing activity, but I exect a fair number didn’t link directly to Edelman in any way shape or form.

Links – especially editorial links cost a lot of time = money.

Social Currency

Edelman have a huge amount of social currency to play with – the co-author Steve Rubel has a very popular Twitter account, a popular blog etc, and as a very early adopter I am sure a large percentage of anything he Tweets gets picked up by bots that can help magnify the social proof.

Topsy actually shows 109 Tweets, but only 34 of those are looked on as influential.

I would look on this at least as a partial failure… the big problem is that this is probably the most popular Slideshow Edelman have published on Slideshare.

All Roads Lead To Rome… Via Timbuktu

I understand social media isn’t direct marketing – you can’t control the message all the time, or where it takes place.

9 months ago I layed out a lot of this in emails to Slideshare via their advisor & investor Dave McClure when they launched their initial pro offerings… where you might pay $7 for a lead generated by a Slideshow on your own LinkedIn profile.

This new offering is a vast improvement, I am sure it will drive a lot of business – but is still not the offering it should be. Or it is not the product offering I would envision as being ideal…

It may well be ideal for Edelman clients where the development of a landing page or posting a blog post takes 3 committee meetings, 2 rounds of golf, and signoff from the legal department.

However my opinion is you are effectively paying to promote Slideshare rather than driving visitors into an optimized sales funnel.

Update

I spent a little more time digging around for a good video sample to share from a Pro account holder.

The only problem is I should really flag it as a potential copyright violation as it was created by the guys at Royal Pingdom… maybe used with permission or Jess3 were the creative agency that created it.

WordPress Comment Solutions

Shaun almost a month ago released a modified version of Lucia’s Linky Love that removes links from comments rather than nofollow them as a partial solution to Google’s changes to PageRank distribution in regards nofollow.

Dave Naylor is also doing something similar

I also now need to take you back to a comment I left over on SEOmoz

Vladomir Prelovac has come up with what I would regard as a partial solution to this problem

I am glad someone has done this as I have been dropping hints about taking this approach for the last year in various places, back to the old Webbbs days, though it needs taking a few steps further to be truly effective.

There are however some big monster bugbears that need to be considered with this approach, just like with tag pages.
The benefits you will see on his site, with a huge amount of PageRank to play with from the release of WordPress Themes are potentially significant, whereas with a smaller site it can lead to complications, and you might for instance want to noindex the newly created comment pages ;) Vladomir doesn’t use tag pages extensively, more selectively.

For the last six months or so, my understanding of how Google ranks pages has changed significantly, in part due to studying the way Google handles huge sites such as Blogcatalog & Technorati, but it would be wrong for me to publish details without clearance from Tony at Blogcatalog because I had access to their analytics.

Whilst a lot of it would be speculative… almost like a fairy story, for some it might be more akin to a lightening strike than a light bulb moment.

Imagine you have a choice between having a tag page or a comment page in Google’s index

• A tag page you can specify the exact title tag
• A page created with SEO Super Comments you can’t, in many ways the comment is about as optimized as a Tweet on twitter.

Twitter’s upstream based on Alexa is only 10% Google.com, so maybe 20% overall – a large proportion would be navigational queries & Twitter account holder names.I am not 100% confident about Alexa upstream numbers, but they might be more accurate for Twitter than many sites.

You would get an occasional tweet ranking for very long tail terms, but it is not significant.

So if you are creating new pages for comments, you would want them in the index only under specific circumstances.

• Existing flat site architecture with all original content in primary index
• Your categories are indexed and viable landing pages
• You have your tag pages sufficiently indexed which may require various techniques to make the content more unique and useful.
• Have ways to use comment data on tag pages
• Have ways to create tag pages based purely on comments and 3rd party content ;)
• The permalink for a comment from comment feeds points to the new pages, not to an anchor/fragment/”#name” – this has been something that needed fixing anyway, because permalinks on WordPress posts with lots of comments are currently broken, because comments can move from page1 to page2 – there are lots of ways to then use this RSS feed pointing to unique URLs on your site ;)
• Rewrite rules for comment URLs
• Link to a comment should use anchor text based on the title
• Link from a name should provide all comments from that user on a single page
• Extensive use of Ajax – this gets a bit complicated, and it would be experimental, but why have the whole comment on the post permalink at all? At least from a spider perspective. A representation of the comments can be pulled in as pre-cached page fragments. Comments could also be pulled into member profiles if a person commenting is also in some way a site member, and maybe in that situation an individual commenter page should be totally replaced by a member page.
• Integration with social media – if you are pulling in tweets, friendfeed etc, give those a page as well, and then allow people to even comment on those directly from your blog, and push the data back out to whichever service.
• Pull more data from trackbacks/pingbacks – grab an excerpt and host it on your site on a unique page. If someone comments on it from your site, send a pingback

The Future Of Commenting And Aggregation

An even more radical approach would be to totally get rid of “comments” as a unique entity, and many other social sites for that matter, and have only unique personal streams of media, long or short form, video, pictures, text or a mixture, and what appears on other sites, whether on a blog as a comment, or on Twitter, Youtube or an social site would just be a syndicated copy of your original content. Just one permalink for the original content, with full ownership and privacy controls over who could see it.

In many ways Youtube is just a video feed reader where you syndicate your unique video, and you should link back to the original source, and get the original source ranking :)

What I am suggesting is a somewhat reverse approach to “Echo” recently launched in private beta or the Friendfeed aggregation.

A single source that you push out to other sites, rather than a multitude of aggregators. More like Tumblr or Posterous, but with much more control.

As a marketer however, it makes it difficult to reward comment participation without some kind of additional registration process.

The Complexities Of Syndicated Comments & Social Mentions

What really turns your mind upside-down is when you have a situation where you have a private blog post in a members area, and someone leaves a comment which is specific to the private content.

The commenter needs to maintain access controls, but at the same time the owner of the site with private content needs control as well, which can possibly be overridden. Who gets priority and ultimate control?

Who would have moderation rights? If moderated, would it be only the syndicated copy on a publishers site, or the canonical version maintained by the commenter.

Do you really want to mention in an “echo” on your blog that you cross-posted the same content to 100 social media sites?

Disqus?

I recently highlighted Disqus as a solution, it still is, but my reservations are increasing after using the service for a month – whilst the WordPress integration is clearly stated as being beta, I am going to call it a very raw beta – there are tons of problems with synchronization and comment moderation leaves a lot to be desired. My last support ticket to them was 6 days ago, with a second full comment export to try to get sync sorted out remains unanswered.

I have informed them already that I am pulling the plug – the synchronization attempts are hopefully to fix problems that might prevent others having problems in the future.

There are other issues that I don’t feel should be aired here on the blog. I am giving them some time to hopefully get them fixed.

Other WordPress Plugins?

A big shout out to 4 other plugins I have been using recently

Autooptimize – so far it is the best CSS / Javascript optimization plugin I have used (and I have used quite a few) and the author has been highly responsive with fixes to various plugins and widgets. It sets expires and gzip correctly too.

What I have also done is hacked things so Disqus uses local CSS and images, that I will eventually be able to migrate to a CDN, though the Disqus CSS brings up all kinds of horrible warnings in Yslow and Page Speed Firefox Plugins.

Wp Supercache Plus – I am currently using it with Eaccelerator – I am using the “bleeding edge” version from SVN, and am in the process of implementing fragments with thematic – I had a few problems using it with memcached WP Supercache combined with Memcached object-cache.php.
Fragment caching with comments especially will reduce server load each time a new comment is added to a blog under heavy load, such as a product launch.

Probably also long overdue is a mention of Tim’s WordPress Membership Plugin. On the surface most plugin offerings look the same, it is only when you look at the code and how they have overcome hurdles that some solutions shine – I was involved a little with the early stages over a year ago and many features have since been copied, and other offerings have leapfrogged Your Members in more obvious ways, but at its core I still believe Your Members to be the most flexible solution (oh and you can see the support in public). There are lots of useful hooks and ways you can extend the platform, relatively easily, though a little PHP knowledge goes a long way. It is also pretty secure.
The full reasons deserve a lot longer post, but other solutions get promoted extensively without extensive research into alternatives – I need to spend another $500 on alternative solutions before I can realistically write a comprehensive review.
With Your Members it is possible to control access level to comments as well as the posts themselves. If you have a private post, you also want to selectively keep the comments private.

FAQ-Tastic – Zain now has both a free light version (that is very flexible) and a pro version – it is a serious solution for anyone looking to leverage their audience to create new product or content offerings. I am frequently asked to add an “Ask Andy” section here on the blog, but I will most likely do it in a more private area.
Comments on custom areas of WordPress is something I don’t think 3rd party systems will ever handle effectively.

This post has been a little bit of a mixed bag, but hopefully you find something useful & worth sharing with others.

When to a huge amount of disbelief I blocked some of my high ranking paid reviews with robots.txt, and hinted that syndication would be a perfect loophole in Google’s penalties, no one fully understood what I meant – many SEO experts thought I was bonkers.

This is what I meant – widespread syndication with editorial control

The Limits of Traditional Article Marketing

Article marketing is all well and good, but is extremely limited

• You can only use a fixed number of links in a post
• Article directories are quite inflexible over affiliate links even if you have created
• HTML formatting is frowned upon because the articles are often intended for email use
• You can’t use pictures
• Most of the articles end up on very low value sites that have no readers
• Whilst they often use categories, tag support is limited

Jonathan Ledger has come up with what at first glance seems to be the perfect service for submission and syndication of quality blog articles.

Article Submission

• You sign up and add your blog – If you are smart, you will create a new user on your blog with username and password with low level privileges – don’t enter your admin username and password – I trust Jonathan, but even large websites get hacked, why take the risk?
• You make sure your blog is posting full content feeds
• You add an entry to your ping list, so that when you update your blog, your article is automatically added to Share-A-Post
• You use Technorati tags as normal, though only the first 5 will be used – that avoids tag spam
• You can add multiple blogs

RSS Article Syndication

When you are short of content for one of your blogs, you can visit Share A Post, search for an appropriate article, and have it posted either as a draft or published article directly to one of your blogs.

The service uses XML-RPC to connect automatically, just like popular blogging software such as Microsoft Windows Live Writer, but that does require a username and password – hence why I suggested precautions when setting up.

The other advantage is that when you are posting a guest article on your blog, because it is posted as a different user, it can be given different emphasis, maybe a different symbol etc.

Duplicate Content

Lots of people will be worried about duplicate content due to syndication

Syndication is a good thing, and Google does a fairly good job of determining the original author, and the link that is being given back to your post will help – it even has good anchor text – at least I think a link is given back to the permalink – to be sure, you should probably use an RSS footer plugin, and maybe even create a smart looking author byline for each article that includes a link.

If you want some assurance that syndication is a good thing, one of the most authoritative I can think of is Vanessa Fox, who until recently was working for Google on Webmaster Central at SEO and Webmaster conferences. If the “book” we follow are Google’s webmaster guidelines… guess what? She helped write it!

Recently on her personal blog she wrote a great article on how to rank as the original source for content you syndicate

With Jonathan’s system you are not going to be able to ensure that content gets blocked with Robots.txt, and that has a negative aspect as well, because the links wouldn’t count… you do want links don’t you?
You are also not going to be able to ensure a different version of your article is published, unless you somehow specify in a license that your articles can be modified, such as a Creative Commons License that allows derivative and Commercial use or better.

Hopefully you will always get a link, but just like with article marketing, that can never be guaranteed

You will find situations if you have a new blog with not much authority that Google makes mistakes – that will most often be when a high authority blog picks up your article.

In a situation like that… just be happy, you will get great links, and your content will be exposed to 100s, or 1000s of new readers, and if enough blogs pick the article up, you will get more authority quicker from all the links, and hopefully lots of traffic and new subscribers.

Proof-reading

Just like article marketing, you are going to have to use just a little bit more care before you post, as any errors you make might not be fixable if your articles get syndicated.

Hopefully anyone syndicating an article will check back with the original blog to ensure the article is up-to-date, and I suggest they do that anyway, as you want to always ensure you are promoting content from what is a reputable blog that is well established.

Competitors?

It is so obvious… but none really

• Well ok, I know Stompernet has some kind of content syndication network
• I know Jack Humphrey used to syndicate his clients article content on a network, but not blog posts
• There are various services which syndicate spun articles, but not blog posts
• There are services that have their own blogs, where you post snippets of articles
• Portal feeder has something similar for articles, I am not sure what is in Traffic Kahuna
• There are plugins which feed articles from article banks to WordPress blogs

So whilst the idea is simple, you have to have confidence in content syndication and how duplicate content works before you think of doing something like this, which is why someone probably didn’t do it before.

Powertip

If you are using standard tagging plugins, they will probably output tags in alphabetical order. That isn’t a huge problem for the 5 tags that will be used to catalogue your post, but it is a factor for your backlink, because the anchortext used will be from your first tag.

The easy answer? Add a manual tag somewhere within your article

If you look closely you will see that I have linked through earlier in this post to my “syndication” tag on my blog, and I have manually added rel=”tag” to the link.

Hopefully when this article is posted, the backlink to my blog will be “syndication”. That is fairly powerful stuff.

OK Andy, How Much?

Jonathan says the following:-

BETA TESTERS WANTED
===================

This service is now up and running, and I’m looking for beta testers
to create free accounts and try it out. I need folks with blogs
who want to syndicate their content to super-charge their link
building, and I need folks who need top-notch content to post to
their own blogs.

As a beta tester, your account will always be 100% free. Syndicating
other folks content will always be free anyway, but I’m working on
a business model that MAY charge a monthly fee for being able to
have your content syndicated in this way. Or it may stay free
for everyone, I haven’t decided. :)

At any rate, as a beta tester, you’ll never pay a dime for the
service.

So why not go give it a try right now?

I hope Jonathan keeps it free

If he doesn’t, I am sure there will be competitors who will do it for free, so it is much better keeping it free and advertising supported. If needed, get some VC money to cover operations, but that is unlikely to be needed.

This is beta, I haven’t yet tested everything, I am going to see if I can find a guest post on Share A Post to try out.

Another Reason To Applaud Jonathan

I think anyone else who would have launched this, other than maybe myself, would have included some kind of spammy “viral” link back to the blog article syndication directory, in the footer of every article.
I have just seen my first article syndicated on a blog, and there is no link to Share A Post – that is a cool move.

Please don’t syndicate posts without minor editing to at least remove all the related posts – whilst I love receiving 10+ links every time one of my articles is syndicated, I am not going to approve 10 pingbacks – I will just flag them as spam to avoid the annoyance in the future.
Single pingbacks are fine (I don’t have nofollow on pingback links), or even to each editorial link within an article – you give me a link, you get a link back.

Sign Up!

If you sign up to Share A Post, you will find this article in their library – an easy way to share Share A Post with your readers is just syndicating this article.

Special note from Andy: To add some additional incentive to try out Share A Post, if you have written a very high quality paid review recently that would be suitable for my readers, I will gladly syndicate it on my primary domain as well – oh, and I won’t be nofollowing any of the links, as it will be an editorial decision to publish it.

I am lowering the red flag

Carry on reading to find out why this isn’t the same as raising a white flag, and is far from surrendering to Google on paid reviews.

Robots.txt

I have spent a long time deciding on a course of action, and have decided that blocking my content using Robots.txt is ultimately better for me, and better for people hiring my services.

It also happens to be worse for Google than currently, but that is the beauty of this strategy.

It might be harder to rank, pages blocked using robots.txt still gather PageRank, and can appear in the index, though they would be looked on as dangling pages.

Ultimately links can always be redirected to a followup review which refers to the first, and that followup isn’t a paid review.

It is a little naughty, some people will sometimes receive editorial links within reviews and receive a trackback, but I don’t know of any spam plugin that checks robots.txt , plus the links will still be valuable in other search engines.

Google’s Achilles Heel With Paid Reviews

The only domain for which a client is paying for a review from is this one. When my content appears on other sites, there is a totally different editorial process, and links can in no way be looked on as paid links.

Content syndication is extensive:-

1. Social Bookmarking

Sites such as BloggingZoom encourage more than just a single line of description and rewritten titles on submissions, and not only deliver traffic from their existing user base, but also search traffic.

2. Hub Pages

Many content sites allow you to use syndicated content in the form of article feeds, and content is even picked up by larger sites such as Topix.

3. Authorized Syndication

You can arrange or organise for your content to be selectively syndicated on authority sites such as Andy Beard on WebProNews and even my WordPress SEO reviews published on SearchNewz.

Whilst I haven’t made it clear recently, I publish all my content under GPL, in fact I am switching to the GFDL with an invarient clause requiring a live hyperlink back to the original without nofollow – I prefer GFDL over creative commons because of this flexibility (for me) to be highly specific.

In future I am going to be actively encouraging syndication

4. Unauthorized Syndication

This is technically the same, but as long as people scraping my content are linking back to me, preferably with a followed link, it is great. I am not even worried about some light spinning of the content, as long as they state that the content has been modified and is only based on my original.

5. Indexed Search Results & Aggregators

This is the likes of Technorati, and feed readers that are indexed – I have no intention of blocking reviews from RSS feeds.

6. Multimedia

I use a lot of pictures and screenshots for my reviews, but this is going to increase – in addition I will also be creating podcasts and screencasts which will be widely distributed in their own right.

Hooray for Universal search!

No Nofollow = Editorial Backlinks

By not using nofollow in my reviews, it is most likely that syndicated copies of my reviews will provide backlinks not just for me, but also for my clients. The backlinks are editorial in many cases, someone has chosen to syndicate my content.

Unfortunately Google use backlinks to attribute content to an original source, but it is a whole lot harder if they can’t index the original. It will be interesting which site syndicating my work will rank highly, or how many.

Linking to Syndicated Content

This is something I haven’t decided on yet, but just like I can link through to my various social profiles, I do have the option to link through to my content on other domains after it has been syndicated.

Worse for Google

My content will still be in the index, filtered through an extra layer of editorial control, but there is going to be a whole lot more of it.

Google have made it clear that they are only worried about the existence of links, and not the time it takes to create content, expertise, and whether links within reviews were specified or given in an editorial capacity.

I honestly don’t like junk reviews written purely for SEO purposes, but as Google seem determined to impose the letter of the law rather than the spirit, throwing the baby out with the bath water, whilst I will comply to the letter of the law, I can’t see a reason why I shouldn’t sidestep the charging bull.

Nofollow is not the answer to Google’s troubles

Update

There seems to be some misunderstandings, and I need to clear them up.

1. The blocking hasn’t happened yet – it is the next thing on the todo list
2. I intend to get more search traffic from Google taking this action, not less.

Update 2

Robots.txt has now been modified

The list is quite short, but now I have a strategy in place, I will be writing a lot more paid reviews

Whilst this might be looked on as insignificant, some of those pages rank quite well for very useful terms, and are probably worth 2000+ visitors per month.

Update 3

Whilst the changes in robots.txt were quite straight forward, before making any reinclusion or reconsideration request, I thought it important to check the robots.txt within the Google webmaster console.

First of all I waited for it to be refreshed by Googlebot, which seems to happen approximately once every 24 hours.

There is an option to just copy and paste that refreshed data by hand, but waiting for it to be fetched is conclusive.

Next I entered in the URLs which need to be blocked by the robots.txt file, and checked them.

In theory Googlebot will now be blocked from crawling the “offending” pages, and I will be able to ask for reconsideration.

Photo credits
Lowering the Flag (modified)
Matador (modified)

I thought of blogging about all kinds of abuse that affect real people day in, day out, but decided that ultimately that doesn’t fit in with my audience, or really add any authority to the words I would be writing.

As it happens, today part of a 2 hour interview with me was published in the Guardian (Digg Story you know you want to). I honestly didn’t expect any more words in print from the article, because it was so wide ranging, and such an article gains authority by citing multiple sources.

Some things were however a little disappointing, and I thought I would cover that initially, and then add to the end some points.

The Press Doesn’t Handle Linking Well

This comes down to 3 different situations which I will cover briefly

1. Linking To Sources Where Possible

This is for a situation where someone actively played a role and was mentioned in the story. As an example they gave a short or long interview.
In the Guardian article for some reason I didn’t get a link. I am not a blackhat or bad neighbourhood, and I think I made a large contribution to the story. The few paragraphs on paper is the result of a 2 hour telephone conversation.

I know there isn’t really a legal obligation to link to me, but the contact came about because of my online presence and blogging in various ways, and how can I prove that the Andy Beard in the article was in fact me without the link? (yes I might one day like to be in Wikipedia)

2. Linking To Junk Without Nofollow

The tone of the article suggests that Danny Bradbury didn’t really approve of some of the worst MFA sites, yet they received links as a pointer so readers could see for themselves. Unfortunately, the links did not use rel=”nofollow” (known in SEO circles as a “link condom) which was introduced 2 1/2 years ago to fight comment spam, but since then is recommended by Google to use on links to untrusted sources, spam sites etc.

Those sites linked to could most likely rank better in search results now, compared to other content – it is not for me to judge whether in the eyes of the author that was his intent, but that is the effect.

3. Reusing Other People’s Content Without Link Attribution

The press sometimes also regurgitate other people’s quality content without any useful attribution, though they might rewrite the content by hand. I am not a lawyer, but in my opinion that is still stealing traffic and search results by repurposing and replacing an original work with their own.

In this particular case with the Museum of Hoaxes the museum missed out on a massive front page story on Digg, which can lead to lots of links. Social media sites want to vote on the original article, and not something which is a cut down rewritten version, but without a link, who is to know.

Invisible Links in Plain Sight

This is really a separate section of the article, but is still regarding linking. I don’t regard this as in any way abusive, it is strategic.

Whilst Matt Cutts worries about hidden links the same as or very similar to the background colour, such that they can’t actually be seen by a human, there is another kind of hidden link, or invisible link.

Here is an example taken from Dana’s excellent rules of social media, which she learnt in kindergarten.

Could you see the links? Didn’t think so… well here they are a little more visible.

The links are now underlined, but they are not hidden, so they might receive some clicks. It should be noted that many people are reading your content, especially on large blogs, in an RSS reader.
That does however depend on the source of the traffic – if traffic is from a social media site such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Propeller, or Sphinn, then the visitors will see the content on the page.
You need to determine why you have the links on the page, and how you want your readers to interact with the links.

Here are some more “click happy” alternatives

The classic blue encourages readers to click, which is why it is also so highly recommended for blending Adsense to increase CTR.

Red links are becoming a lot more popular in blogging circles, popularised by Copyblogger and Problogger.

There Is No Quick Fix

The press and bloggers really need to be aware of how they link and attribute. If you are giving a link to someone, think about how that link can best benefit them.

Take another look at the article on the Guardian (and possibly give it a Digg), I have emailed them hoping they will adjust the article so that is is more link friendly and unfriendly where a link might have to have a “link condom“.

Linking Awareness is what is required to avoid linking mistakes

• Are people constantly ripping off your content?
• Do you feel powerless to defend your copyright?
• Is the battle against plagiarism taking up more and more of your time?

Maybe you are going about things the wrong way and should take some inspiration from Judo…

What is Judo?

Literally “the gentle way,” this ancient martial art (it’s origin is from jujutsu) makes use of the opponent’s strength to overcome him, thereby making it possible for a David to throw a Goliath. Kano Jigoro (the founder of the Kodokan style of judo) developed the art into what is now an international Olympic sport.
Cheddar Judo Club

The conventional approach you will see recommended on multiple blogs is you send the site owner email, issue a DMCA or report the site to Google Adsense if they are monetizing your content.

Unfortunately that is fighting an uphill battle that you have little hope of winning as the hydra can always grow new heads and many sites using your content don’t attempt to monetise it directly.

Active Syndication

Similar in concept to article marketing, I actively encourage the syndication of my blog content by licensing it as GPL.

If you understand how article syndication works you could look on rss syndication with permission or without as a form of article marketing.

You can benefit from the duplicate content that is scattered over the web as seeds of knowledge.

How To Benefit From Legitimate Syndication & Splogs

• Include lots of internal links within each of your blog articles – these can be manually inserted, or in the form of related links and tags at the end of each article.
• Ensure there is a link to the permalink of your article within the article content
• If someone asks for permission to syndicate your content, request politely that they include a link to each original article, and not to your domain in the credits.

How To Include A Permalink In A Feed?

I do it currently with a hacked version of my Disclosure Policy Plugin but probably a simpler solution for most people would be to use one of the following.

• Better Feed – this includes both %%posttitle%% and %%posturl%% options so you can add a SEO friendly permalink to your RSS feeds.
• Sig2Feed – Can be used to add a link back to your site, but that could be easily modified to include a permalink.
• ©Feed – provides support for adding a permalink to your feed
• Various Other Feed Copyright Plugins – Almost all feed copyright and advertising plugins can easily be modified to include a permalink to your original article

Rather than fight plagiarism, learn to use it to your advantage.

Quite often the sites using your content without explicit permission are gaining search engine traffic, but it is also likely that that is search traffic you wouldn’t have received anyway.
By providing links through to the source of knowledge, a percentage of that traffic you wouldn’t have received will be led back to your blog.

In the time you spend fighting plagiarism, and more often than not reading about it, and worrying about it, you could quite easily have written more content on your blog which will please your readers, encourage more legitimate links to your site, and ultimately gain you more additional links from all forms of syndication, whether they have explicit permission or not.

Picture Credits

Note: I don’t know of the best solution to include post permalinks within the content of RSS feeds on platforms other than WordPress.

I don’t like speculating about purchases too much, but this one actually intrigued me, because there were a number of options.

I was going to post a nice short list something along the lines of

5. Splashpress Media – PayPerPost have been looking to get into some higher profile blogs for some time, and this would be one option
4. B5 Media – For a similar reason, but B5 have funding, and I doubt would be looking to cash out too soon for the sums possibly available
3. Clicky – PPP were in the market for tracking in the past, and Performancing fell though – then not long ago Performancing first of all started using clicking for their service, then dropped it.
2. Blogcatalog – I know VC Dan was very interested in MyBlogLog, and Blog Catalog has a lot of potential

So who is left?

I have got to know Dan Rua quite well from various discussions about PayPerPost and disclosure, and Dan is one of the main driving forces behind PayPerPost as a primary investor.
He is a very smart “guiding hand”, thus I came up with one overwhelming argument.

Dan wouldn’t advise on a purchase of a product unless he tried the service himself.

So my first stop was his Venture Capital blog.

I do read Dan’s blog, and there were no mentions of him testing out any new products. He did write a fair amount about MyBlogLog in the past, even though he wasn’t an investor, thus I expected some kind of mention of a service if he was testing it.
So I took a look at his sidebar.

Zookoda thus became a contender, but there had to be business reasons for the purchase, and they were easy enough to find.

1. Zookoda have been advertising with PayPerPost heavily, in fact I would think one of their biggest cost centres is advertsing with PayPerPost.
2. Zookoda offer a free service and have been promising a method of monetization for some time. Just like Google and Feedburner, their offer of monetization and the cut of the advertising revenue would allow them to continue offering a free service. Most publishers would jump at the chance of more revenue
3. Zookoda needed an advertising sales team – PayPerPost has an advertising sales team
4. Text Link Ads offers Feedvertiser, and also has ReviewMe. PayPerPost is similar to ReviewMe, but more mass market. With advertising sales in Feeds an established marketplace, and PayPerPost already an established player in blog monetization, it is no great shock that they might try to offer more monetization options.

Whilst I could have written the above a couple of days ago, I wanted it confirmed, so I popped off an email to Dan. It was obvious the announcement was being orchestrated, and whilst I could maybe have gained a few extra page views, it might have upset the apple cart.

Dan didn’t get back to me until a couple of hours ago.

Nice work Andy…I can’t believe you leaked it ;-)

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/23/payperpost-acquires-zookoda/

Here are some of the things that Zookoda need to fix:-

• Feed Stats – they need to work together with Feedburner to report feed usage – if they do this already, they really need to make that information obvious.
  In some ways they are now a Feedburner competitor, which might make this a little complicated. If it doesn’t happen, I expect to see PayPerPost/Zookoda move into the feed syndication and statistics business extremely quickly.
• Legal Disclosure – One of the interesting shortcomings of Feedburner, and one which I have pushed/encouraged them about in the past, is how poor Feedburner is for CAN-SPAM compliance, and meeting UK/European regulations. I think we will soon see disclosure options for email and feeds available from PPP / Zookoda
• Affiliate Program – This is something that relates to PPP as well – I would love to see some recurring income.
  Both Feedburner and Zookoda are currently lucky to not have disturbed sleeping giants such as Aweber and GetResponse, who both offer rather rudimentary services for bloggers, which don’t offer the important “social proof” of Feedcounters that I have mentioned in-depth in the past. One caveat though – do some work on the landing pages – I have removed the “Review My Post” button on this site because it wasn’t converting, and in my opinion is confusing for a person who first comes across it.
• Comment Subscriptions – I don’t like serving them from my own domain, and they could easily be monetized. I currently use an SMTP plugin, and use Gmail as a SMTP gateway.
  I have a number of teething problems with my email subscription plugin – it isn’t as reliable as it could be and seems to drop people who requested to subscribe. I would love to see an alternative service. Lots of big blogs do not offer comment subscription, I don’t know why. Current options for following discussion are not ideal. It could be monetised
• Delivery Rates – In the Email marketing world, delivery rate of email is looked on as important. If you are offering RSS to Email services, for some reason this doesn’t seem important. Maybe blog content has a 100% delivery rate due to trust, but I would love to see some figures.
• Migrations – How would I move to Zookoda from Feedburner? Obviously I would want to have the ability to have my stats merged, or have some kind of full service.
• Aggregated Feeds – I would love some way to provide multiple feeds on a blog, and to then supply aggregated subscriber counts

I am actually excited about the Zookoda purchase by PayPerPost. In some ways I am surprised that someone didn’t pick up the site earlier. That being said, 10,000 customers isn’t a lot compared to the 500,000 customers Getresponse have, I don’t think Aweber quote customer numbers.
In some ways good technology is important, but 500,000 customers paying a monthly subscription allows a huge budget to develop services.

Ponn was made a very generous offer not only providing a free training seminar for PRWeb to her readers, but the people who sign up will get $200 credited to their PRWeb Account to give the service a try.

I haven’t read all the terms, but it appears you will have 45 days to use your free credit.

You will have to phone into the seminar and pay call costs, but what I normally do for seminars is use Skype, which normally always works.

This is even available to existing users of PRWeb, as long as you follow Ponn’s instructions, which are very clear as I just followed them myself and signed up.

You do have to join Ponn’s mailing list as another condition – use a real address, Ponn seems lvery nice and polite during our email conversations, and I am sure will offer some useful information in the email list.

Most of my niche websites have always been “under the radar” – I have never really wanted to promote them through press releases.

What I might do is use PRWeb to promote the No Nofolow community on Bumpzee, and the general Do Follow movement.

$200 worth of promotion is not to be sneazed at, and the training will be interesting.

Hmm, what is good link text for this to Ponn

Free PRWeb Coupon

If spending $97 on an ebook is a major financial commitment, don’t read any further

Ok, for the rest of you lets get on with the review…

• There is no hype in the sales letter
• There is no hype in the ebook
• There is no hype in this review

Another Web 2.0 Social Media Ebook?

After you read the sales letter that is probably the impression you will have, and in fact you will still have that impression shortly after you start reading the ebook.

Here are some interesting facts for you

Pages 56 (+bonus guide on video, crib sheets and tables)

In fact those few references that were included were mainly in facts and figures like usage data.

So What is this Ebook Talking About?

Traffic Secrets

Whilst many people don’t appreciate the value of ebooks, claiming that the information is out there if you look for it, or join and participate in various forums, that isn’t strictly true.
We live in an age of information overload. Quite often different ideas and new ideas take a long time to rise to the surface, or never make it, not because the ideas are not valuable, or supported by hard evidence.

I often see “specialists” in SMO (Social Media Optimization) and SMM (Social Media Marketing) claim that their methods and expensive services can work in virtually any market place.
I am not going to dispute those claims, but that very statement tends to drown out other methods that could be equally effective for traffic generation that might be equally, or potentially more suitable for certain markets.

Traffic Strategy

The fundamental value from this ebook is that it challenges you to examine your social media marketing strategy, and optimize it for best effect.
This is nothing to do with writing better headlines, or coercing top users at Digg, Reddit or Netscape to add you as a friend and to plug your content.

Whilst Laura’s intention was to target the ebook to beginners in social media marketing, in many ways consultants in social media marketing should read it because it will place a new perspective on information and strategies you think you already know.

Professional Writing

Laura has written a lot of ebooks as a ghost writer, and this isn’t her first outing in publishing an ebook in her own name. This ebook oozes quality production with footnotes on almost every page and links to resources that back up the data and strategies she proposes.

The professional tone may also be one of its shortcomings – The Stampede Secret isn’t a light refreshing read, or suitable for people who prefer information in short 400 word chunks.

To get the most benefit you really will have to read through the ebook a couple of times taking notes – in some ways it reminds me of some of the more serious marketing reports you might receive from Marketing Sherpa.

Recommended Audience

Ideal

You are already making money, and probably think you know everything there is about SMM. You might even skim read the ebook once and think there is nothing new, but if you take the time to sit down and read it slowly a couple of times, you will pick up a new perspective.

• Marketing consultants
• Blogging consultants
• Business owners in niche markets
• Owners of Virtual Real Estate in Niche markets including blogging networks
• VCs and Angel Investors
• Researchers
• Journalists

Possible

Beginners who have tried SMM for their niche websites and blogs with little success, and who have money to invest to accelerate their learning process.

Don’t Buy It

This isn’t an ebook showing you the secret route to success and instant wealth. This isn’t something you should spend your last meal ticket on for that one chance of financial independence.

If the price of the ebook is more than you would spend on a night out, think again.

It will probably take you 3 hours to read this ebook unless you have been studying various fast reading techniques – if 3 hours of your time is worth less than $97, this ebook probably isn’t ideal.

You Can Find This Information Elsewhere

I honestly haven’t gone searching for all this information elsewhere, but I am sure somewhere among the millions of pages of content that are created on the internet every day, you would find at least 90% of this information. The value is in the way it is collated and presented.

Just as an example some of what is discussed in the ebook you could find on my blog, and potentially in more depth, especially in regards to things like tagging. Laura even quoted from one of my articles and linked through, highlighting that people should read the article, and the valuable discussion afterwards.

Unique Information

Analysis of one of Laura’s niche sites in a very competitive market (Acne Treatment) with real proof of traffic numbers from Quantcast – not just screenshots.
This isn’t a high traffic site, it is very much a simple niche website, running on WordPress that anyone could create and generate some income – I wouldn’t expect Laura to expose her most profitable sites.

Discussion of traffic strategy – some social media consultants charge $5000 per day to help you formulate a social media marketing action plan. Most of the consultants concentrate on the search engine optimization benefits, and not how to participate in social networks to find real customers.

How to Write an Ebook – whilst this isn’t one of the lessons taught, the production quality and style is something to learn from.

I am going to finish off with a few select quotes from the ebook that don’t give too much away, but at the same time highlight how much different the overall perspective of the information is.

If anything is going to hold you back in being a fore-runner in the new web, the need to measure and record every click or movement to and on your site would be the culprit. The internet is changing at such a rapid rate that controlling and metering every change you make has the potential to stall your success.

Uptight control and playing it safe is seldom the stance of a pioneer. It is the pioneer who wins in profits, fame and visitor traffic – not the followers and whiners. I am not guaranteeing success by any means, nor am I advising you to risk your life savings on some promising new start up, but I am saying that the occasional ‘play your cards or go home’ attitude is one of the keys to success.

Web 2.0 is a very creative, innovative and fluid environment. Most Web 2.0 sites cannot be put in a box and measured in any consistent and reliable fashion – they are simply too young. There is a level of intuition at launch, an element of change and growth throughout the life of the web property, and yet another level of intuition used for assessment when determining a reasonable sale value.

Conclusion

No hype, no bonus, though if I do see enough interest and sales I might write up a supplement to the ebook going into some of the topics in more depth, especially on the benefits of tagging.
I would probably make that available free to all Laura’s customers.
I may even go into some of the topics that Laura has missed – Web 2.0 grows at an alarming rate, and there is a limit to how fast you can research strategies enough to be able to offer conclusive proof.

Disclaimers are unheard of in most ebooks, but Laura takes this to a new professional level, this is just part of it.

Information within this report may be speculation and are therefore within the meaning of the securities litigation reform act of 1995 and contain verbiage such as ‘expected’, ‘anticipated’, ‘estimated’, projected’, ‘believed’ or variations of those.

I have actually been chucking a few emails backwards and forwards to Laura over the last couple of days, and I thought I would include one small excerpt.

You know you really rock! You don’t even ‘know’ me and you’ve given me so
much of your time. It’s a dying art in our world.

I am not going to include my exact reply, because it mentioned names of people that if internet marketers were actively using LinkedIn, would certainly appear between myself and Laura as shared contacts, and over the last 2 years I have certainly dropped by her blog a number of times.

This comment also shows the benefit of “paying it forward” and the value of providing information for free to eventually reach your goals.

There are quite a few expert marketers who normally charge their clients a great deal of money who I correspond with on a regular basis, simply because they have gained value from what I have offered for free.

One of the bonuses that Laura provides is some very specific email support – she states that she will answer 2 emails from her customers, and highlights the importance formulating those questions to receive maximum benefit. She is not going to exclude pleas for help, and win / win relationships can develop to extend the level of help provided.

I have always been happy to answer emails regarding the products I review both before someone makes a buying decision and afterwards, or you can just ask here in the comments.

I gained a great deal of value from Stampede Secrets. I might not realise that value immediately because I already employ many of the strategies and techniques discussed, and it is hard to quantify the effect any changes might have on my income.
Reading the ebook has certainly helped me highlight the action I should be taking to revitalise some of the niche websites I have had for a long time and hardly ever modify, because each is bringing in a small trickle of income.
Laura has helped me realise that it is possible to employ a few extra traffic strategies for these niche websites that could turn the flow of traffic into a gushing fountain.

Disclaimer:- I am one of the few people who received a free review copy of this ebook, possibly because I offered to take a look before publishing, that Laura reads my blog, and because she quoted me in the ebook. To be honest I might not have purchased the ebook just based upon the sales page. That is the value of affiliate marketing in pre-selling, or explaining the benefits of a product in an ethical manner

Major Websites and Press Agencies Seriously Don’t Give a Damn About Conventions

Vipul Arora wrote a story today entitled Yahoo plagiarizes content – does not give credit!!

But was it plagiarism?

Lets go into detail and see what happens, and how this all works.

Museum of Hoaxes publish a great piece of linkbait “Top100 April Fool’s Hoaxes of All Time”

The Missing Pointer

AFP Picks up the story

Now unfortunately AFP doesn’t include a link through to the original source of the material it used. Links provide attribution on the internet and are used by visitors to read the rest of the story (only the top10 was published, not all 100 items), and by search engines in their calculation of the original source.

I am not sure where the law is on this, they only used 10% of the material, and they did provide attribution in textual form. They also didn’t use the content word for word.

Then again in value to readers the Top 10 is probably worth more than positions 20 – 100

Here are 10 of the top April Fool’s Day pranks ever pulled off, as judged by the San Diego-based Museum of Hoaxes for their notoriety, absurdity, and number of people duped.

You might think this is a minor issue, but Google currently shows the title of the story on 10,900 websites.

Yahoo Plagiarism?

Yahoo was the most prominent site that picked up the story – they have permission from AFP to use the content that legally probably isn’t plagiarism, but bloggers if it happened to them would be very upset, unless they gave specific permission.

Yahoo are in many ways the innocent party in this, but ultimately the site that is benefiting from the content the most. It is a very popular story that has already garnered over 900 votes on Yahoo. That is a lot of votes as not every reader would click the vote button.

Just imagine if there was a link through to the original source

Effect on Traffic

The Museum of Hoaxes should have had a tidal wave of eager readers visiting their site. It is possible they gained a small surge from search traffic from people who were interested in finding the rest of the Top100.

The story should have also done insanely well on social bookmarking services.

This is actually an extreme example of what happens when correct attribution (in internet terms) isn’t given by the press to the original author of an article.

Printed Media

Printed media in the UK, if referencing a website, typically use a service such as TinyURL.com to provide a link from an article so that they don’t have to print a long URL – that is a very ethical method, though I would question why they don’t spend $20 and buy their own redirect script that can be branded.

A Similar Example

This is actually a similar situation to what happened with Colleen who was recently interviewed by the LA Times regarding PayPerPost.

The followup video interview was a cracker, and you really should read the comments for a discussion on ThisNext vs PayPerPost, and whether you should have to use a disclosure when commenting.

I should also point out that I have seen a number of blogs that have also written about the LA Times story, and linked to their syndication partners ;)

Pot Calling the Kettle Black

The press shouldn’t attack the ethics of bloggers if they don’t provide correct attribution for the medium in which they are working. On TV it is verbal, in print it is written, and the best print even provide short links.

Online correct attribution is links.

Even Wikipedia provide a clickable click, although it does use nofollow

Note: Screenshots were used with permission from Vipul, it saved me 5 minutes preparing this. He has contacted AFP questioning their method of attribution.