Although Knol and Squidoo have similar business models – the motives behind the creation of content for them aren’t the same.
For example, anyone familiar with Squidoo understands that a quality lens is the key to building traffic and a successful lens.In this case, quality equals usefulness, remarkable or something worth saying twice.If you’re familiar with Seth Godin – you understand this type of usefulness has nothing to do with “appealing to the masses” and everything to do with world views of individuals in “small groups”.
The announcement of Google Knol suggests that a quality Knol will be dependent on a number of “Google defined” factors – which could be thought of as “an appeal to the masses”.For example, a quality Knol about holstersmight need to include content about gun holsters (i.e. ankle holsters, shoulder holsters, hip holsters, etc.), cell phone holsters, flashlight holsters, etc.
You can see the difference?The goal of someone generating content for a quality Google Knol is to be “blessed” by Google with organic traffic (think about the Adsense potential).Whereas, a Squidoo lensmaster isn’t concerned with organic Google traffic – she’s focusing on what’s remarkable and worth saying twice.If she creates that – traffic will come.
In this way, Squidoo will always have an advantage over Google Knol.Google needs “the masses” – Squidoo doesn’t want them – not in that way.
Thinking about the financial value of information is sometimes confusing. Years of information analysis have led me to one conclusion.That is, information (alone) is worthless. Analyzing and learning from information is equally useless unless you take the next step.
Synthesizing information into useful knowledge upon which alternative courses of action and actionable decisions can be implemented cannot be easily valued and it’s rarely mentioned.
Before purchasing another “how to” book or reading another blog post about “how to do this or that” – you might want to read Web Analytics: An Hour a Dayby Avinash Kaushik.Not only is this a great book about Web Analytics – it can also serve as a model helping you learn to synthesize information into knowledge and discipline yourself to implement that knowledge to achieve a desired goal (i.e. higher conversion rates, better SEO, etc.)
More choices now than ever before - will the number of choices double, triple or more in 3 to 5 years?What does it mean to you, your blog or business?Will you have 2 to 3 times the competition?Is your Brand strong enough to do nothing (make no changes)?Are you “choice proof”?
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell illustrates the tremendous importance of “little things that make a big difference”.Does your business model strategically incorporate these little things – Brand independent little things? Failing to pay attention to these could be the difference between adapting and overcoming vs. being overcome by choices.
Three Little Things:
* Think of your web traffic as an opportunity for building relationships and trust – rather than a sales opportunity.
* Treat each one of your customers as a potential maven, persuader or connector.These people (the sneezers) are the viral life blood of your business – you don’t need them spreading anything but joy, love and sunshine about you.
* Quality customer relationships yield greater trust and authority.With more choices available, consumers will increasingly seek this trust and authority (i.e. they’ll be looking for relationships to help them make choices - when their friends can’t help - they’ll have you). Make certain you have a permission marketing program in place.Your potential customers are increasingly seeking quality relationships – make them easy to find.
Does your blog have what it takes to win the Sexiest Blog Ever award for the month?If you think so – proceed to http://www.sexiest.blog.ever.com – leave a blurb and enter your blog for a chance to be the Sexiest Blog Ever.
Each month, we’ll take a look at the blogs entered and choose one we feel is the Sexiest Blog Ever for that month.If you win, your blog will be featured on http://www.sexiest.blog.ever.com for a month.Think of all the free publicity, traffic and links you’ll receive.
What does it take for a blog to be the Sexiest Blog Ever?The criteria changes every month – the blog will be chosen in a subjective manner – in other words – we’ll choose based on our mood at the time.
The Sexiest Blog Ever will be chosen on the 15th of each month so be sure to visit the site around that time – you might be the winner!
Thinking about the destructive power of stupidity – that is – saying something stupid or doing something stupid – leads to an awe of those things “small”.More specifically, how saying or doing something small but incredibly stupid can wreak financial destruction upon one’s self.
The current buzz surrounding Dog and his “stupid message” is a sobering reminder of the destructive power of a simple (but avoidable) stupid mistake.Shows are being cancelled, endorsements withdrawn, etc.Financial value that took years to create is forever lost.
Although he’s the latest victim of “stupidity” – Dog’s is only the latest in a long line of examples of simple but financially destructive stupid mistakes.Rush Limbaugh and his very short career as a sports caster, Jimmy The Greek and his infamous remarks, Trent Lott, etc.
What’s remarkable - “high profile” people – at least those who attempt to maintain a “socially acceptable image” - continue to fall into the trap of stupidity.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, “stupid mistakes” have the power to create financial value.Although Paris Hilton didn’t need the publicity – her stupid mistakes resulted jail time – which resulted in an incredible amount of positive media coverage.Go figure.
What’s the lesson?First, you need to make sure you understand which end of the stupidity spectrum you happen to be on (Dog’s or Paris’s) – then proceed with your “stupid mistakes” (or lack thereof) with caution.
Although I’m not at all comparing paid links to drugs – I find it interesting to analyze Google’swar on paid links in the context of the “War on Drugs” - with one major difference.By creating such immense value in links – Google is now waging war against something it created.Anytime something has value – it will have demand.Much like the war on drugs – Google’s war on paid links is not winnable.The only way for Google to win their war against paid links is to remove the value (they created) of links in general.If links had no value (no demand) there would be no market.
It is amusing to watch the sparring matches across the blogosphere – where SEO’s are supposedly outing those websites selling links.Rumors of Google penalties (and legitimate penalties) have webmasters running in all directions – some looking for cover while others hammer away at Google’s unfairness.
Of primary concern to me is the manner in which Google is willing to wage this war.Unlike those fighting the war on drugs – Google is a business – and she can pretty much do whatever she wants.It would be unfortunate to see webmasters or websites receive penalties not deserved.Thinking about the “report paid links” option now available in Google’s webmaster tools – you’ve got to wonder exactly how they go about verifying those reports. You can only hope Google would not penalize a webmaster or website unless she is certain the penalty is deserved.
Regardless, Google’s terms of use are clear – like them or not – no drugs – I mean no paid links allowed.
Imagine owning a traditional apparel business in a mall.Your main entrance is intricately decorated with attractive products.Glass displays are sparkling clean with sales and specials prominently displayed for visitors to see upon entrance.In essence, you’ve created an attractive Meatball Mondaebundle – designed to unfold in a linear fashion as customers experience your business.While this approach might work in an old fashioned mall – I wouldn’t recommend it with an online business.Early in my online retail career – before I learned about website analytics – visions of online customers politely entering my store through a professional looking homepage dominated my dreams.The visions were always the same – customers would land on my homepage – see the great products offered, BBB credentials, website security, etc. – then proceed directly to the product and checkout pages.Unfortunately, this dream was rarely coming true.I soon learned that many of my customers weren’t even seeing my homepage.They were searching for specific products – finding my store in the SERPs – and proceeding directly to the product of interest.The bundle I had carefully crafted wasn’t being unbundled like I had imagined.This revelation led to some adjustments on my part.Each page of the store would need to be treated as a potential “first impression” – each page would need to be a marketing element on its own.
After making some adjustments to accommodate this asymmetric customer behavior – my sales approximately doubled.As Seth points out – bundles are becoming a thing of the past.No longer can you expect a potential customer to walk into your online store in a “normal” fashion.You’ve got to unbundle your bundle, unbundle your thinking and adjust your online business to accommodate information specific customer behavior - treating every page of the site as if it’s the only page a customer might see before the checkout page.
Can Google continue to maintain excellent earnings growth while increasing the quality of search?As successful and profitable as she is – Google has a big challenge ahead of her.The bulk of her revenue is generated via online advertisements.In addition to the advertisements generated by Google searches - websites ranging from hobby businesses to huge corporations offer Google advertisements to the public on a daily basis.Each time a user clicks on one of these advertisements – Google earns money.
Although this sounds fairly straightforward – there’s usually a “catch” to everything.While Google offers the ads – she is also responsible for determining the rankings of each website carrying those ads.What does this mean?Essentially, Google has a potential “conflict of interest” on her hands.Think about it like this.Suppose Google wanted to maximize short term revenue by increasing the visibility of all the websites carrying her advertisements – she could easily increase the rankings of those websites – generating more revenue from the ads.Would she do this?Google does have an official policy in place which basically says websites carrying advertisements supplied by Google won’t receive a higher ranking than those not carrying those advertisements.Obviously, there is no reason to question this policy statement.
Often people view Google as an internet search engine without much thought about its identity as a large, publically traded corporation with tremendous expectations from shareholders and upper management to maintain earnings growth – maximizing shareholders wealth.Make no mistake, Google is a business – and corporate profits come before anything else.Often you’ll see SEO experts taking shots at Matt Cutts (the head of Google’s Webspam team). However, I don’t believe those people fully appreciate the circumstances under which he operates.
Google leads the market in search engine dominance for one reason – they offer the most relevant search results.Going forward, the big challenge for Google will be the manner in which they walk the line between pushing websites offering revenue potential vs. the quest to offer highly relevant search results.In a way, it reminds me of problems encountered by the U.S. automobile industry a number of years back.Would they sacrifice earnings to increase quality – enabling them to compete with Japanese imports?Or, would they wait until it was almost too late – greedily pushing earnings at the expense of quality?Everyone should know the answer to that one.How will Google handle the challenge?Let’s hope they do better than the US automobile manufacturing companies.
One of biggest mistakes bloggers make today is the widespread use of no-follow links on blog comments and trackbacks.Supposedly, no-follow links are designed to fight spam – deterring would be spammers from leaving comments on your blog.Why be lazy – why not fight spam and reward a quality blog commenter with a Do-Follow link?
Successful bloggers know that quality blog comments – just as quality blog posts – are a great way to learn, network, spread ideas, build authority, share information, etc.These are the ingredients of a successful blog.If do-follow links increase the activity on my blog – I’m all for it.
Sure, do-follow blogs will attract some spammy comments – however, if you’re looking to build a quality blog – aren’t you moderating your blog comments in a manner that only allows quality posts anyway?If not, shouldn’t you be?I do.
From my point of view – the readers of my blog and those who leave comments are my customers.As long as my customers follow the comment policy – I want them to feel good, actually feel great about leaving a comment.Who likes to get a link?Everyone enjoys receiving a do-follow link to their site.Personally, I enjoy leaving a comment – regardless of the type of link follow – providing that comment makes a contribution to the discussion.When I get a do-follow link at the same time – I feel like an appreciated customer.
It’s interesting to note a trend toward do-follow links on blogs – including a “do-follow” community of bloggers who only use “do-follow” links on their blog comments.Perhaps this trend will continue – providing a higher quality environment for bloggers – while shifting the focus more toward fighting spam with more practical solutions.
This past weekend - while visiting my “in-laws” - I ran into another one of those folks who has yet to hear about Ron Paul - we’ll call him “Rocky”. Keep in mind, Rocky is an educated white collar worker - not some uneducated goober. Wondering if Ron Paul would ever receive the fair media coverage he’ll need to succeed as a candidate - my thoughts turned to who he might endorse as a candidate - should he not succeed. Feel free to post your vote.
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