New style, new approach

by Sapphire (December 12, 2005)

I installed a new template for this site today, which I hope looks a little more professional, and easier to read. This change actually goes with some thinking I did over the weekend.

I’ve decided to branch out from affiliate marketing and ad networking. I’m not exactly sure what I’ll be doing, so there’s not much I can really tell you just yet. I’ve just come to realize recently that:

SEO should be spelled BS. Does it really make sense that we all sit around submitting our little sites to little directories and putting our little links and little forums that no one but other webmasters ever sees? The standard answer is, of course it does, because the Googlebot sees them, too! Right? Wrong. The bottom line is, for 97% of us, Google is never going to bring enough visitors with open wallets to keep us up to date on house payments. So we build sites, we build linkage, we try to keep up with Google’s whims from one dance to the next, and then we hope that #1 place in the SERPs will actually translate into paying traffic.

That’s an awful lot of crap for 5-20% commission sales.

I’ve been reading lately about how blogs don’t need SEO, and it’s true. I didn’t SEO that content blog I started a while back, for a hobby, on a topic I thought no one else on earth cared about (the blog I’ve called my “B-2 Bomber” in previous entries). To this day, I’m not sure where that first link came from - some webmaster heard about the site somehow and linked to it on her blog, and from there it grew.

There’s a simple reason why blogs work better than SEO - they’re community linking. You have these communities of like-minded people online, and links are the roads they build to each other. I’m not saying blogs themselves are the way of the future, but I do think the level of interactivity they represent is the next generation. Instead of just using search engines, more and more people are finding online communities and looking there for sites. Look at LiveJournal, where people routinely post in their journals, “Anyone know a good movie rating site for parents?” or similar, and a bunch of people respond with suggestions. That beats the hell out of going through 12 pages of Yahoo for yourself, doesn’t it?

The future of the web is people, not bots. Whatever I do from now on, I’m not going to be thinking of my sites from a bot’s point of view. I’m going to think about my visitors, and look for ways to enable them to spread my site to each other. Skip the engines, go straight to the audience, and make it viral. That’s the oldest business wisdom out there, and it pre-dates the web. Offline marketers have always acknowledged that no matter what you spend on snazzy commercials and market research, the very best ad campaign is word of mouth, if you’re lucky enough to start one.

And that’s the bottom line: where is it easier to start a word of mouth campaign than on the web?

Posted in Affiliate Marketing
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