Greg Vandagriff

Some time ago, Google took a hard stance against link sales; after all, such behavior was diluting the quality of their search results by favoring those who could afford the often high price of renting/buying links.

By penalizing sites which sold links while simultaneously pocketing cash from their own link sales via Adwords, Google attracted a lot of criticism from SEOs for their hypocritical behavior. That being said, in the eyes of some, Google’s move was a good one… as now the playing field no longer favored the wealthy, right?

Wrong.

Enter the “content creation specialist”, either a cheap freelancer or script-kiddie aided by content scrapers and automated article rewriters. Both specialize in creating large volumes of “original” content plastered with strategically-worded links. End result? Crappy, but unpenalized, content that links to… you guessed it, the rich guy’s website who can afford to hire these cheap hacks in large volume.

And people wonder why there are so many “spam” sites on the internet… by directly penalizing the direct sale of backlinks, Google did not solve “the problem”. They merely obfuscated the process of turning money into linkjuice by inserting a middleman: the content creation specialist. From an economic perspective, I honestly don’t think that the cost of link juice has changed all that much…

Yet more evidence of the fact that the denizens of an economy will innovate and substitute their way around the crude barriers imposed by governments or absurdly powerful entities (such as Google). As is often the case with such events, ultimately nothing has changed, we’ve just exchanged one set of “problems” for another.

Well, I discovered today that my personal elasticity of demand for a macbook was too high to see it through.

It’s not that I don’t want a Mac. I do. Really. It’s just that they’re so very expensive when priced next to a Dell Vostro. As a student in my current financial situation, I’ve decided that I honestly can’t afford a mac, as I would have to essentially cut myself off from all expenses for the remainder of the summer in order to finance the purchase.

For those who are curious, I purchased a Dell Vostro 1400; core 2 duo processor (2ghz), 3gigs of Ram along with some wussy little video card to power Vista’s Aero effects. 120gig hard drive, dvd burner, bluetooth, vista home premium, etc. The pricetag clocked in at just under $800.

The moral of the story is one that you probably already knew: college students are more price-sensitive than the average consumer. Go figure.

Someday when I’m fabulously wealthy I might get a Mac… but not today.

So I am thoroughly convinced that longtail search terms, that is, incidental search terms that are related to your subject, though not necessarily the primary focus of your SEO efforts, are delicious! Not too long ago I started a site focused on a broad subject. While I am far from ranking on that subject as a search term (not even in the top 200 yet), I find it endlessly fascinating that I AM ranking for lots of incidental longtail terms.

Moral of the story? When first setting out to make your millions from the interwebs, pick a web property that has a big opportunity for longtail traffic, and optimize each page of your site with this factor in mind. If your main target has tremendous volume, chances are high that the random longtails within that subject also have decent traffic that is far easier to obtain.

If nothing else, the early trickle of longtail traffic will keep your fire burning as you continue to optimize your site for more competitive keywords.

Just a heads up, I’ve got the fever again to change the appearance of the blog. You’ve been warned.

So I’ve been sort of delving into the world of business-to-business marketing and behavior at work and it’s been an interesting ride so far. I haven’t been able to do any deep research on the subject yet, largely due to what seems like a lack of good, solid business to business resources online.

I did realize that many enterprises which cater primarily (if not only) to business clients apparently have poor functionality on their websites. While it is true that many b2b deals aren’t likely to be settled via mouseclick, it would seem lazy to use this as an excuse to neglect one’s web presence. Businesses should explore ways to involve their clients with  the company’s websites. After all, if you give your customer reasons to come back to your site, it will increase the likelihood of your company being the first to come to mind when they have a need that you can meet.

So I won’t be getting my hot new MacBook as soon as I was initially hoping; maybe in a month or two. We’ll have to see. While it is true that I probably could stretch myself to get the computer, the question on my mind when considering the proposition was whether I should.

I’ve spent the last year or so using my brother’s online financial management system, Banzai, religiously. I’ve been diligently setting aside 10% of my income to my “reserves” and they’ve grown relatively sizable. If I were to get the MacBook now, it would require, among other things, a complete depletion of my hard-earned reserves to do so. Now, if I were in a situation where I had absolutely no computer, then I might feel justified in purchasing a Mac with my reserves, but as it stands, I’ve surprisingly seemed to have developed the financial discipline to say “no” to my immediate wants in this case.

My exact thoughts were “I refuse to compromise my financial integrity for a computer”. There’s some sort of psychological connection between my self-respect and the level of discipline I exercise in my daily decisions, I think. Regardless, I do have a substantial amount of money which I’ve set aside for the computer, and I will be increasing that pile over the course of the next few paychecks. Eventually I’ll be able to have what I want without having to give into the impulsive desire for immediate gratification at the expense of what little financial security I have.

If passive, effortless revenue is your goal, I’m fairly convinced that scalability is an integral part of any realistic plan to achieve that goal. It isn’t enough to make a cool website that caters to a market need; it needs to be a “fire and forget” solution that has a built in system for automatically generating free, unique content that caters to a market need.

An excellent example of this philosophy in action is craigslist: the content is generated by users seeking to sell their used goods. So far, so good: we have a source of free content. Now comes the scalability; craigslist takes the formula and adds a scalable spin to it: content is generated by users seeking to sell their used goods LOCALLY.

Suddenly you have an avenue for more than one craigslist. Now you can potentially have an instance of your formula for every state, heck, every CITY. Throw some sort of passive revenue system on there and you’ve got a recipe for money.

Similar to franchises being pre-packaged business operations that can be duplicated for success in any of a wide range of locations, a self-sufficient and scalable website template can be deployed successfully over and over again, each time catering to a slightly different niche. Individually, the earnings of these websites may be modest at best, but in aggregate you can reap substantial profits from a potentially limitless empire of microsites.

For those unfamiliar with it, the “Sandbox Effect” is the name given to the mysterious force which prevents newly-created sites from being able to rank for competitive search terms until said site has been indexed for a certain period of time, some speculate that this effect lasts anywhere from three to six months.

Regardless of how long it lasts, the Sandbox effect impedes efficiency in the market for information online. Serving as a barrier to entry, this effect penalizes new sites that may have better information or resources for a search term from being able to rank for that term, regardless of the number of links pointing at that site.

As a result, you may rest assured that the first page you see on google’s search results may not necessarily be from the most relevant or informative site on that subject, as the most informative and useful site may have actually been relegated to the “sandbox” if it is new enough.

Just my thoughts.

I have to say that I was pretty excited when I saw that I could do all the necessary steps to get my car registration renewed online. At first I was skeptical, because I thought that the government would still want hard copies of the safety & emissions statements from the mechanic, but lo and behold, evidently the information was already in their system! That’s what I call handy! I just filled in my license plate # and the PIN that came in the letter, then entered my credit card information and presto, I was done.

It really makes me wonder about those people who are still trapped in the stone age and insist on performing even the most rudimentary transactions via check. Especially when there are policies in place which heavily penalize such behavior, such as the 10-day waiting period we have at Sewell before a check clears.

So a number of factors have led me to think about computers lately:

1) I work in a computer-heavy environment, surrounded by computer experts. In fact, one of my co-worker’s mothers had the audacity to label us as “a bunch of computer nerds”! The nerve! If it wasn’t at least 95% true, I would have been highly offended.

2) The power supply on my desktop burned out about 2 months ago, thus I currently have no desktop.

3) The power supply on my laptop which I use for all my work, including this post, will glitch out if I so much as look at it funny. These power failures are growing increasingly common with the passage of time.

Thus, it doesn’t take a mastermind to determine that I’m currently in the market for a new computer, in spite of General Sherman’s best efforts to destroy my financial welfare. Consequently, for the first time in approximately 7 years I’m actually studying computer hardware and the market in general.

The result?

I’m not really interested in the guts of the machines anymore. I don’t do anything on my computer that demands substantial horsepower, like gaming, these days. Additionally, two people whom I trust a great deal, my brother and my boss have recently “switched”. You know what I’m talking about.

I haven’t made up my mind for certain about what I want to do, but I’m thinking about all my options.