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AndyBeard
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Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2005 2:29 pm
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A lot of people are making money selling "bottled air" 
I think it all comes down to originality. Target your niches either horizontal or vertical.
Often there is comprehensive information about a subject on the site of multiple suppliers competing for business selling different solutions.
Add to that information from government sources, which can vary state to state, country to country.
All you need to do is tie up all the information comparing and discussing it to become an "authority site" on a small niche.
Many sites that have been around for donkey's years have very little fresh content but high page rank. They are ideal targets for articles that will bring both traffic and PR.
One interesting topic, linking to articles that Google doesn't like
I linked to the blog in question a few weeks ago from my own blog, having picked up on it from an authority site that had a news article about it.
Has anyone else been blacklisted or had their site ratings drop severely by posting about controversial content?
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Phil Tanny
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Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2005 4:26 pm
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Hi Andy, just for the sake of debate:
| AndyBeard wrote: | | All you need to do is tie up all the information comparing and discussing it to become an "authority site" on a small niche. |
Right, that's all you need to do. Which is why 3500 people will do it in every niche, sooner or later. At what point do surfers and search engines say, "We don't care that you have a ton of content, we can get that anywhere."
It's a mirror of what we've seen on the tech side. In 1995 the fact that I could make a web page made me a guru of sorts. Important people paid me good money because I knew how to upload an image to the Net. Now I give away free perl programs and nobody cares.
We're in the process of teaching large numbers of people how to repackage information. At some point so many people will know how to repackage that the skill will no longer have market value.
You can see it already. Tell your friends you have a web site. A great web site. Are they impressed? Do they care? Why should they? There are already more good sites than they will ever have time to read, right?
My guess, and that's all it is, is that the leaders among us will look beyond all the clever content repackaging schemes of today towards what the market will demand of us in the next phase.
Maybe all this technology we're creating is pushing us forwards towards being more human, whether we like it or not?
You can see it throughout the culture. When every little tiny country in the world has and can deliver weapons of mass destruction we'll have no choice but to finally learn how to get along, eh?
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Cloak
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Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2005 4:52 pm
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Interesting,
of course, phil you realize that Im here to build income streams.
I am not interested in my friends or families ardour.
But I take your point. Its changing. The trend is quite defined if you choose to look at it.
I mean what are we really talking about, when we look for trends?
Fancy line graphs? bar charts?
We're talking about where the MONEY will be next. Where the sweet spot is. Follow the bouncing ball.
If you have heard of the pareto principle, you'll understand what I mean. If you havent.....do a Google....or perhaps a Yahoo
I firmly believe that everyone continues to learn, all the time. We stop doing that, we stagnate, and yes, we die. We lose interest.
When we know it all, I mean we really know it all because we have riden this pony for so long, and its ours, and upstarts dont have a brain in their head...we risk losing spontaneity and freshness.
Personally, I'll listen to my 10 year old nephews opinion on making money. Doesnt mean I'll take his advice, but everyone has a view.
Anyway....to my point.
Whats the trend?
In my opinion phil you talked about it thoroughly in your last post. You pin pointed it accurately.
This is where the money will be on the internet in the next 5-10 years.
I wont insult anyones intelligence and spell it out for you.
There are so many intelligent and knowledgeable people here, I dont think you need me to do that.
BTW
I enjoyed the air analogy. Very insightful. You showed there, that you have your finger on the pulse. |
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Phil Tanny
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Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2005 5:34 pm
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| Cloak wrote: | | We're talking about where the MONEY will be next. Where the sweet spot is. Follow the bouncing ball. |
Yes, agreed. I think we can assume the money will be where the traffic is, so we're really asking, what will surfers want in the future?
It seems the pre-selling model most often discussed here is based on the idea that we can buy the surfer's interest, and maybe loyalty, with free information, if it's good enough info. This seems to assume that the user places a value upon the info, that they don't take it completely for granted as their birthright etc.
If we decide that at some point users won't value info, then what is our hook?
We could guess that the entertainment value of the presentation would become the hook, and that a presentation has to have some unique qualities to be entertaining.
Which brings us back to Allan's interesting question:
How to be unique?
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Cloak
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Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2005 6:01 pm
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I dont think theres ever a "hook"
Thats last century. |
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Phil Tanny
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Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2005 6:33 pm
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| Cloak wrote: | I dont think theres ever a "hook"
Thats last century. |
OK, fair enough. Let me rephrase that as, why should someone read my cell phone site instead of one of the other 9,648 cell phone sites?
If there are 324 solid cell phone sites (authority sites) why should the user pick mine?
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Cloak
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Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2005 8:35 pm
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Because Phil,
Your cell phone site teaches readers how to build their own cellphone company.
Not how to buy a single cell phone.
Any more questions? |
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AllanGardyne
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Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2005 11:54 pm
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| Phil Tanny wrote: | | Hmm, maybe the lesson here is that we are all way too dependant on Google? |
Absolutely! It's an excellent reminder that we should have a wide variety of ways of getting traffic to our sites.
| Quote: | | It just dawned on me that what we're seeing here is sort of a merging of a regular search engine and a human edited directory. |
Perhaps it's almost the exact opposite. Another way of looking at this is that Google is paying humans to evaluate how well its computers are working, with the aim of improving how they work, so Google can rely even more on computers.
I think that's a much more likely scenario. Yahoo! and DMOZ have found how difficult it is to cope with a human-edited directory. As the Internet keeps growing at a frantic rate, it gets even more difficult.
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Phil Tanny
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Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2005 9:53 pm
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| AllanGardyne wrote: | | Perhaps it's almost the exact opposite. Another way of looking at this is that Google is paying humans to evaluate how well its computers are working, with the aim of improving how they work, so Google can rely even more on computers. |
Ah, interesting. I see what you mean, as billions of pages become trillions, people aren't going to be able to keep track of it all. All they can do is tune the machine.
Good point! I withdraw my theory.
Directories make logical sense, but I must admit I don't use them much, so....
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AllanGardyne
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Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2005 11:10 pm
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| Cloak wrote: | Because Phil,
Your cell phone site teaches readers how to build their own cellphone company.
Not how to buy a single cell phone.
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Good one! Excellent
I reckon we should all have a careful think about this example and how we can apply to to whatever niche we're in.
If you want to make a big impact, don't do what everyone else is doing.
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Phil Tanny
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Posted: Thu Jun 30, 2005 11:45 am
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| Cloak wrote: | | Your cell phone site teaches readers how to build their own cellphone company. |
OK, I like it. I think I'll build a site like that too. 
Seriously, what I'm aiming at with that comment is that new content ideas will only be new so long in an environment where thousands have mastered the art of content repackaging.
It might take me 6 months to think up and present some unique content, but it only takes hundreds of someone elses 2 weeks to do "research" on my site and rewrite it in their own words.
Your cell phone company site will be devoured by the copy cats in short order. The more successful the new idea is, the quicker it will happen.
So, what does this mean for our quest for uniqueness?
One angle might be to look at the process, rather than the content product.
What I mean is, if I want to _stay_ unique I'm going to have to come up with new ideas repeatedly, faster and faster.
So rather than focus on my latest idea, I might focus on how do I become the kind of person who generates lots of useful new ideas?
Or, another angle might be to surrender to the content packaging rat race, but present the repeated info with a personality and style that is both engaging, and not easily duplicated. Inject unique entertainment value in to recycled content.
I like what you said about the idea being unique and useful being the point, not me being unique, because the user is of course surfing under the "whats in it for me" principle. It's unlikely a Google user is searching for me.
But we are still faced with the challenge of giving the visitor something they can't easily get a thousand other places, and I sense that does bring us back to personality one way or another.
Wandering a bit now...
The power of data is fascinating. We have an idea in our heads. We develop technology from the idea. That technology creates a new environment. Natural selection forces us to adapt to that new environment, thus changing our brains.
We are forced to become more creative. Which creates even more new ideas.
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The speed of this cycle increases.
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We could call this "progress", and maybe it is. But it might be smart to keep in mind that this process is creating ever more knowledge, and thus power, and our wisdom, or judgement of how to use this power, is still ambling along at it's historical pokey pace.
At the rate we're going, at some point every high school kid will have his own personal nuclear weapon.
Sometimes I wonder if new ideas are really what we need. Maybe rediscovering some simple very old ideas is more the answer?
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Phil Tanny
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Posted: Thu Jun 30, 2005 12:32 pm
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Is this the story line of the human race?
Knowledge grows exponentially, because millions can network their efforts to develop it.
I make a breakthrough in physics. You develop a new tool based on that breakthrough. Somebody else has a new breakthrough using your tool. Etc.
Wisdom grows incrementally, because by and large, each of us is on our own.
We make mistakes, experience pain, learn from the pain, and hopefully become a bit wiser. Don't each of us really have to make most of our own mistakes? There's so much pain in the world, and history, if we learned from the pain of others all our problems would be solved, eh?
If we get smarter and smarter, more and more powerful, at an ever increasing rate, but don't grow wiser at the same pace, doesn't human history eventually wind up biting off more than it can chew?
Who's driving the boat, us, or the nature of data?
This thread is so unique, it probably belongs in another forum! Sorry, I'm done...
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vangkao
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Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2005 3:28 am
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So would somebody be kind enough to tell me if my affiliate site is too thin? Not totally done yet though.
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AllanGardyne
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Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2005 8:22 am
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A tricky thing about Google is that quite often there's a marked difference between the advice Google gives us and what happens in real life when Google ranks sites.
For example, Google warns us against duplicate content, but it's fairly common to see the same article ranking well on numerous websites.
We now know that for at least a year Google has had a strong opinion against "thin affiliate" sites and would appear to be targeting affiliate datafeed sites, but that hasn't stopped some datafeed sites from ranking well.
If we judge purely on what Google SAYS, then I'd say the preponderance of linksynergy links on your site would be a warning sign to Google that your site is a thin affiliate site, and if such a site is succeeding in the rankings war now it may not in the future.
For long-term success, you may have to be more imaginative than adding lots of links to about.com.
Google has given us a clear message about what it likes and dislikes. How effective it will be in translating that into action in the rankings... only time will tell.
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bas
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Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2005 8:51 am
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| vangkao wrote: | | So would somebody be kind enough to tell me if my affiliate site is too thin? Not totally done yet though. |
I don't comment if it is too thin, however, as far as i can judge the main part of your site is using datafeeds (product descriptions) from an merchant (overstock?). Together including just links from another directory (about.com), having a lot of repeating text, and the "appearance" that it seems autogenerated, this seems as thin as things can get. This approach can be lucrative for a while so don't see it as a real problem for the moment.
Just my opinion, I don't mean to offend
Bas
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