Warning, this short post contains sexual innuendo (guess it’s too late for the warning now ) as well as a completely unproven conspiracy theory.

Google’s Problem

People are selling links which influence search engine rankings. Google hasn’t found a real way to do anything about it. They can identify some links algorithmically but not most of them.

Result: smart link buyers / traders are getting away with murder and Google’s got their undies in a bunch over it.

Google’s Solution

Since they can’t find a real solution to this problem, they go for the next best thing: viral scare tactics.

Oogabooga!

So what they do is chop the PR (read little green bar) down for many of the prominent SEO and marketing blogs.

Big mouth belly button worshippers these bloggers are, they can’t resist bitching and moaning about it. Minutes later, the gyrating echo chamber some refer to as the blogosphere explodes with claims that paid linking is dead and definitive, final-word-last-notices that Google will NOT tolerate these slimy activities one moment more.

Either that or they had an editor subtract a couple of green pixels from an imaginary ranking system…

Bet you some egghead gets a cheap “creative thinker of the month” plaque for coming up with that one.

Yes, it was about time.

Posting has been on the thin side lately. Very thin. I could go on with reasons, justifications and a whole load that would bore you to death while sounding like excuses, so I will dispense myself of it immediately and seize this occasion to introduce a brilliant new blogger to the scene.

While I will be making a greater effort to regularly inject marketing joy into your greedy hearts, for now, meet Andy. You may be able to identify with him in more ways than one…

Andy is a Silicon Valley IT professional. A regular guy living a middle class life, constrained to more over time hours than he’d like, long commute, daily grind…

But it’s dawned upon him recently that he wants more. Something along the lines of what we’ve come to refer to as “the internet lifestyle”.

Action taker that he is, he’s tried several different things but none of them seemed to work… Knowledgeable and intelligent, he suspects there isn’t much separating him from success which he will then be able to ride into the skyline and beyond. He already possesses considerable experience, it’s just the “coming together” part that seems to be eluding him for now…

In his upcoming first series of posts, Andy will tell you about his experiences in BUM marketing (article marketing with a twist). After several hundred hours in, I think you’ll enjoy the many pieces of wisdom you can pick up from his trials and tribulations.

This is a dimension of marketing where so many things can influence results. If you have any insight, go ahead and share it with us, as well as your own results.

Yes, there’s just something about putting on dorky shoes worn by hundreds of sweaty strangers that gets me in the mood for marketing talk.

At the risk of shattering my cool image for ever, I went bowling over the weekend and it was indeed quite enjoyable.

It was the second time of my adult life, the first being the weekend before. Don’t worry I’ll compensate by bungee jumping off a bridge with a blindfold or something equally super extreme to make up for it…

Anyways, here’s why it’s interesting:

The first time I went, I steadily improved until finding a system and leaving the alley on my high score.

I’d figured out a way that worked.

When I came back to it last weekend, I was enthused to start proving the system out all over again. The first round was disastrous. The second was close to my high score but still short.

So I started to improvise, looking for a new system.

I started getting pissed when nothing seemed to work. So I went back to the original, the one that had posted results in the first place.

Bingo, it worked again. I beat my previous high by 50 points.

All that to say we are often quick to abandon what works. When we find a system, we like to think we can improve it or improvise on it in new ways.

Sometimes it will work.

Most of the time it won’t. As with most results in life, there is a reason why we get precisely that result. In fact there are many reasons. When you stack them up, you get a system.

It immediately reminded me of an affiliate campaign I had just started. It wasn’t working. I was getting conversions but getting braped by PPC engines.

I tweaked, rewrote and played with it until I felt the nervous twitch in my left eye signifying an impending outbreak of apoplexy.

You see, I’d thought I could do it differently this time. I thought I understood so much more about keywords, sales copy an conversions that I could wing it how I felt it.

Not true.

Upon returning home that afternoon, I immediately put up the page with my trusty method and the very same day the campaign went from loss to 300% ROI.

Did you ever stop doing something that was working for you because you thought you’d outgrown it?

If you do any Black Hat SEO, you already knew that of course…

It’s hard to talk about Google without bringing in some kind of “baby with the bath water” type analogy.

After all, they need to work algorithmically, and that means more often than not, there will be collateral damage.

Let’s look at an example with this blog.

Sometime in March, I wrote a piece on Ebay and the strange stuff you could fine there. It did pretty well on the social networks and gathered several hundred links, some from high PR domains.

Before that, I had scant few incoming links. There were enough to rank me for some choice product titles when it came time to whip out the affiliate marketer in me.
Strangely, the linkfest only very slight improved overall traffic from SEO.

But I still reveled in the fact that I wielded a small but satisfying power. That to rank well for other people’s products. I could give a scathing or rave review, and often, the very next day, it would rank #1 on Google.

Then it all stopped. I couldn’t rank for 6 word phrases pulled out of my wicked imagination. Some kind of evil Google filter had amputated my organic search organ.

After discussing the matter with a couple SEO Pirates, the most prevalent consensus was that a sudden influx of backlinks followed by my less than illustrious link building efforts had caused Google to clamp me with the web chastity belt.

I would see no action for months to come…

And then, just before Google announced their new policy of cracking down on reciprocal linking hard, something changed.

I came across buzz marketer Dean Hunt who had been featured by our favorite reformed porn webmaster Woody Maxim on his blog.

It didn’t take much prodding to get me on the “no to pagerank, yes to life” bandwagon. This simple yet contagious meme landed me approximately 50 decent backlinks.

Of course I didn’t think much of it, nor did I concern myself with our friends at the web apartheid. These were all part of a juicy link circle jerk, as RECIPROCAL as you can get. Practically a link farm.

But lo and behold, it was less than 4 days later and comments started appearing on old posts. Affiliate sales started to be made on pages I had forgotten months ago. New articles like this Pay Per Click Spy Tool review started planting the flag as king of the mountain once again…

The undeserved filter had undeservedly been lifted.

Isn’t it ironic that a penalty given for a bogus reason would suddenly be felled by taking an action that supposedly breaches the almighty WebMaster Guidelines?

Ah Google. Truly, with thee, the fun never doth end.

It wouldn’t be fair, and likely legal, to reproduce here some of the emails I get from readers and customers.

Therefore I’ll rephrase and refrain from calling out anybody in particular:

Hey Alex,

I’ve been reading your blog for a while and I think it’s great. There’s tons of real info here and I always discover new things.

I really want to make money online so that’s why I’m writing to you for some advice.

1) I read all your stuff about affiliate marketing, but it seems I’d have to learn to write and I don’t like that much. Plus I’d probably have to buy some Adwords clicks and my wife doesn’t like it if I spend money online, she thinks the internet is all a big scam.

2) I bought your Black Hat Ebook and boy, it was the most informative one I ever got. I never saw so much real information in one place. I’m not sure if it’s right for me though because I don’t know how to make a link and I don’t feel like learning html for that. I’m really not much of a techie kinda gal…

3) I read about Bum Marketing and it sounds great because it doesn’t cost any money. But there it is again with all that writing. Just really seems like a bunch of work.

4) I remember when you said that selling your own product in a field of expertise is one of the best ways to make bank online. The thing is, I’m not really good at anything. I’m just a regular guy with a day job. In fact, when I come home, a lot of the time I’m tired and I don’t even use the products that I buy, so how would I make one myself?

5) What I really want is a foolproof system where I can make money on autopilot, why does it have to be so complicated? I don’t want anything where I have to buy software or other stuff. And preferably nothing too complicated where I’d have to learn a bunch of skills since that would take too long. I’m 46 years young by the way…

I need something like that right now so I can buy nice gifts for my family and take a vacation. I also want a new car LOL.

Thanks for your help,

[Name]

The sad thing is, I feel some kind of obligation to reply to these people. I usually say niceties and try to give positive advice while gently suggesting a tiny change of perspective might be in order.

That’s when I’m in a good mood.

When I’m not, I answer the next day, for fear of saying something like this:

Hi [Name],

Thank you for your feedback about the blog. I’m glad you like it.

I can’t really take any credit though because it writes itself while I’m sleeping. I just wake up and voila, a new post!

Since you’ve taken the time to write to me for advice, I think you deserve to be served the keys to the universe on a silver platter. In fact I’m going to pull out my wand right now and make it happen.

I’m going to give you a secret URL. On that page, you’ll find a button. All you have to do is push it and every time you do, a fresh, crisp hundred dollar bill will pop out of your CD tray and do a jig (to ensure you don’t get bored).

Now I realize it’s not completely automated, so please do accept my most sincere apologies. If you’d like, I can log to the site and push the button for you while you watch Lost reruns. Just let me know.

You know, it’s so unfair, when you think about it. Why should you have to learn anything, isn’t that what we went to school for? Why should you have to invest your hard earned money? Why doesn’t it just fall into your lap during a beer commercial?

The world is a tough cruel place, but I’ll bet a smart guy like you already knew that. I’m just glad I was able to help. You deserve it tiger.

Cheers,

Alex

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Thought / Action of the Day:

You can save a lot of time if you have templates for your email replies.

Number of the Day:

251: Number of cheap lazy bastards that will read this and think it’s addressed to somebody else.

I have been tagged by Cord for the 8 Random Things Meme, where you spout off little known tidbits about yourself.

When tagged, you must also pass the ball to 8 other bloggers.

Ladies and gentlemen, let’s get ready to Rambbbllleeee…

• Living in a sub-tropical country for several years, I was the only kid who’s mother had 2 different kinds of anti-venom in the fridge. She coudln’t convince me to stop catching scorpions and vipers with my bare hands and that was the next best thing to do.

• Once a Promoter in a famous nightclub, I shared the VIP booth with Metallica, forever shattering the cool image of them my mind adhered to.

• I have long hermit periods where I can go days without uttering a single word. In fact I refused to own a telephone for long periods of time.

• Much to my gastro-intestinal system’s dismay, I will try just about any new food imaginable. Except reproductive organs and eyeballs.

• I am a rabid hockey fan. Go Habs Go.

• I love to cook elaborate meals with top quality ingredients. Particularly seafood. I have passed most courses required for sommelier certification.

• At 18 years old, I read most of the Harvard Classics 5 Foot Shelf of Books. I thought it would make me smarter, get me laid and allow me to be an insufferable pain in the ass on demand. Turns out I wasn’t entirely wrong.

• At 10 years of age, I crossed the Atlas Mountains on donkey back. The trip took 3 days. The gastric experience derived from sharing hand eaten pigeon couscous with unwashed Berbers should have been an indication of things to come, but I was to have none of it.

There you have it.  I guess my life hasn’t been that boring after all.

I know leave my place to:

Ryan
Woody
Leroy
Samuel
Kang
Amit
Scott
Fantomaster

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Thought / Action of the Day:

Like a chain letter but only half the calories.

Number of the Day:

1432: people on Earth, in the last minute, who just realized that life isn’t fair. How quaint.

Thank you for all the emails. It’s always nice to know somebody cares

Where have I been?

Good question…

Actually I’ve been halfway across the world and back.

About a month and a half ago, I got an invitation from a friend and mentor of mine Jad Bitar of myeasyscripts.com, the incentive marketing specialists, to go and work from his new offices in Cairo Egypt.  Yes, in the picture I’m wearing a white hat, we all have to, once in a while

Always ready for an adventure, I took him up and have just now returned from an extenuating trip through Egypt and Greece.

It certainly didn’t help that I threw out my back with my suitcase upon arriving in Montreal.

Anyways, a couple thousand emails later, I’m back and hungry for more. I’ll keep this short because I have some “real work” cut out for me, but it’s been great.

Egypt is a beautiful country with perhaps the warmest people I have ever had the honour of spending time with. The temples and pyramids are a must see and for anyone paranoid about terrorism and that kind of thing, I can say I’ve never felt so uniformly welcomed.

I sometimes have difficulty believing I can travel around the world like this without having to be accountable to anybody. And the income sources keep whirring in the background…

Ah the internet, what would I do without you?

Speaking of income sources, time to open up some new ones, so I’ll see you in a bit.

I never like the first post on a new blog…

I have a lot going on and I feel like I want to share with other marketers, from those of you who are just getting started to those with “guru” status.

Instead of writing a real post, I’m going to cheat.  Let me direct you to my About Us (me) page.  I’ve written a little story of how I got started and almost let it go before I got anywhere.

What I’d really like is if you left me a little comment there and a link to your site or blog as well as what you are working on these days.

Cheers,

Alex