Gene Marks, The Sequel

I normally don’t go back and revisit what I consider old issues (in fact, this is the first one I’ve revisited, especially this soon). However, due to a sudden spike in traffic no doubt caused by this blog-post-cum-WebProNews-article by Jaan Kanellis (hey, not that I’m complaining…and I also remember Jaan from WPW and have some respect for the guy) I felt that additional clarity was necessary, since apparently most of the SEO industry from what I can gather didn’t get the deeper points that were made the first time.

What are the deeper points?

1. Gene Marks wrote about the tools in question from the bottom-line perspective of the small business owner, not the standpoint of the IT person. The benefits of the tools to the small business owner generally don’t outweigh the costs in terms of time, money and effort to implement and use them. In other words, the tools Gene Marks mentioned represent a much greater potential for loss than profit.
2. Most of you in the SEO community (and probably some of you in the IT community as well) missed the point because you’re too immersed in the “culture” surrounding the tools in question and therefore aren’t able to effectively evaluate the tools and the perceptions of their usefulness from an outsider’s perspective.

I’m going to go through the points Jaan disagreed with me on, and one that he agreed with me on (because of all the disagreements, his were the only ones directed to me and the only ones that I believe were written with good intentions as opposed to just the illogical rantings of vested-interest SEO idiots). I am going to link to other sites to illustrate my points, but remember that I will be applying link styles to indicate which links are trustworthy as opposed to links that are as per my Full Link Disclosure policy.

Part 1: RSS Feed

To partly illustrate my point, I’m going to refer to a blog post I’ve referred to previously, Caroline Middlebrook’s “11 Pointless Blog Posts” post. For those of you who have never read this post before and are bloggers, I highly recommend it…it’s about as blunt as a post can be, but it’s also 100% correct.

The two points that really stand out are:

6) A Repeat of Somebody Else’s Post

I’ve read various blogging tips that suggest that when you can’t think of anything to say on your blog, just take somebody else’s post, link to it and then add your own commentary. I say, NO! If you have nothing of value to say yourself then just don’t say anything and give my feed reader a break. The chances are that I already read the original post. If you want to comment then go comment on the original post!

Am I Being Too Harsh?

Perhaps I am but I’m sure that I’m not alone. I think the number of blogs is something like 800 million now or something silly like that? The Internet and the blogosphere in particular is one giant mass of information overload and people just don’t have time to get through it all so they have to be selective.

Keep in mind that Caroline is only referring to blogs when it comes to information overload, although blogs are arguably the #1 form of RSS feed to which people subscribe. There are news feeds, article feeds, forum feeds, and all sorts of other feeds to go through.

The time in which it takes a small business to go to a website, scan through the various aspects of it, find the 1-2 pieces of information that they’re looking for (assuming they don’t have a “My NewsSite.com” or similar setup whereby they can do this online) will in a large number of cases take much less time than it will to go through all the feed items, delete them and read the ones that are worthwhile.

Another issue that many RSS feeds suffer from is that the small business owner doesn’t get a full picture, even with a “full feed”. There may be additional comments or notes or adjustments made after the RSS feed is published; there also may be site-specific features (e.g. ads that are relevant to the small business owner, links to related content) that don’t appear in the feed itself. One of the unique aspects of the Web is the ability to delve 5, 6, 7, 8 levels deep from links and find information. RSS feeds, to a large extent, take away from that.

This of course doesn’t take into account the time that the small business owner would need to invest in terms of finding an RSS feed reader and feeds that are “right” for them, if there even are any in the first place.

currybet.net mentions RSS publishing as a possible benefit in terms of subscribers, but there are three potential issues with this logic:

1. Loss of user benefit in terms of the aforementioned surfing habits.
2. In order to publish RSS feeds and gain the maximum benefit from them, you need to have something to say (more on that later).
3. “Subscribers” are not the same as “Customers” or the types of “End users” that you want. If you’re running Google Adsense as a revenue source, for example, an RSS subscriber can be counter-productive to your end goal of trying to arrange for revenue based on clickthroughs since 1) the RSS subscriber can’t see the ads from an RSS feed and 2) RSS subscribers tend to be more tech-savvy and less likely to click on ad links anyway.

Cost (time + money + effort) > benefit of time “saved” by not visiting the website.

Blogs

Jaan writes:

Once again I have to keep coming back to why your online in the first place. If a small business has a website (and most all should, that is a separate argument if you don’t think you should have one) then you should form some sort of communication with your visitors. Sure back in 1999 the web was more one-way broadcasting of information/content, but it is surely not that way any longer. Visitors to all websites want to be able to do more than just email the owner/webmaster of the website.

To answer this, one must first consider the elements required to operate a “successful” blog:

1. Original content (not, as Caroline quite rightly pointed out above, regurgitation). This is a huge mountain to climb (again, consider Caroline’s comment).
2. The ability to write; as trite as this sounds, there are a large percentage of people out there who can’t read, write and spell and this tends to get magnified online.
3. Time to prepare the content; a good blog will allow 1 hour or more per day.
4. Time to prepare a custom layout, assuming the small business owner is smart enough not to go the “free sponsored template” or default WordPress skin route.
5. Time to promote the blog, since unique methods of blog promotion exist.
6. Time to respond to commenters.
7. One of: a hosting platform that supports blogs or the ability to set up a blog on a server.

This is second nature to a lot of us out there, but from the standpoint of a small business owner these are huge obstacles from both a financial and time perspective to overcome. Remember, we’re web geeks; we’re not the majority.

A number of these costs have been guesstimated over at Blue Chip Marketing Tips. She also mentions that Gene Marks is a “penny pincher” by his own admission, failing to realize that Gene Marks’ line of business is to ensure that small to mid-sized businesses increase their bottom line. Of course, the writer also glosses over the “daily content”, unwittingly suggesting that the blog itself will provide fresh daily content as opposed to the owner of the blog.

I’d also like to know who’s charging $500 for blog skins. I’m going to have to start cranking my own rates up.

On top of that, what most web marketers miss in the equation is whether or not blog commenters/users/subscribers become customers. Those of you out there who run blogs for the purpose of picking up customers can prove or disprove this to yourselves if you wish, if you examine your numbers objectively as any good SEO does. First, consider how much time you’ve spent on your blog. Second, consider how many subscribers you have to your blog, Third, consider how many customers you’ve picked up as the direct result of your blogging efforts. Finally, look at the profit you’ve picked up on these customers and apply it to the costs of your blog.

The whole “brand building” argument doesn’t really hold a great deal of water, either since it’s next to impossible to conclusively prove or disprove. It’s a “theory”…that’s all it is, that’s all it will ever be.

The other flaw in Jaan’s logic relates to “interactivity”. Some sites simply don’t need it to be successful. Do you “interact” with every site that you visit? Do you want to talk to the owner? Do you want to participate in the “community”? There are many of us out there, myself included, who use certain sites simply to gather pieces of information from and then leave. For example, I visit Factory Direct to figure out what they have in stock, then drive 10 minutes to go pick it up.

Could I order it online? Yes, but I also usually look when I need/want the part and don’t have time to wait for the product to ship (that, and their stock counter is usually inaccurate).

Is this the “best” way to use a website in general? Probably not, but Factory Direct is not a normal store and doesn’t operate under normal business pretenses, so this is the way I’ve found that the site best works for me.

Would a blog help this site? It’s highly unlikely, since this store doesn’t operate in the conventional computer store manner. Customers of the store aren’t going to be non-tech-savvy users looking to be educated. Their customer base is the relatively educated, tech-savvy user who just wants parts.

In other words, a blog wouldn’t likely suit the customer base. It’s a no-frills store built by geeks for geeks to ensure the lowest possible prices on low-to-mid-end parts. All a blog is going to do is add to the operating costs and thus raise prices. It won’t bring the kinds of customers that will be of benefit to the store.

Again, cost vs. benefit. This is Gene Marks’ deeper point. In this case, costs > benefits in the vast majority of cases.

SEO

You’d think from the overall reaction by the SEO community that Gene Marks undid his fly in the Catholic church and took a leak in the Holy Water.

• This guy’s steaming mad! SEO is unbelievably important. It’s not witchcraft. There are good guys and bad guys, and the bad guys are in the minority.Oh wait…there’s an affiliate link to Search Marketing Standard cleverly linked to using the term “Search Engine Optimization”. I guess if we want to know more, we have to subscribe to the magazine and we might find something out. Either way, though, that’s not important to our friend, who just collected 25% on the subscription sale.
• “gene Marks” (sic) is way off here. SEO is great, and you just met one of the bad guys. SEO can level the playing field. Blogs are great, too. They generate lots of targeted traffic and customers.Wait…let’s pronounce this guy’s domain name out loud. “Blog Content Provider”. Blog Content Provider offers “Professional Blog Management”, and the poster writes like a seven-year-old. Could this be what Gene Marks is referring to? Quite possibly.
• Josh Garner advises as to learning how to learn, and knowing which questions to ask.. The theory makes sense, but it falls apart completely when the user sees affiliate links to SEO Book (brought to you by self-absorbed scumbag deluxe Aaron Wall), Search Marketing Standard, and one to a directory, how is that user effectively supposed to receive unbiased and accurate information?To get a better idea of what type of stuff SEO has to deal with, Josh has reviewed TNX and uses the following phrase:
  

  The list of sites taking part in the program is kept private. This means that nobody at Google can create a quick account and scroll through a list
  of potential future penalty victims.

  A potential future penalty wouldn’t even be an issue if the TNX system produced a result that benefited users while ensuring that no collateral damage was done to SERP integrity.

All three of these posts are biased, and none of them make any effort to show how SEO can benefit the small business owner and the pratfalls that the small business owner should avoid.

Some of the Pratfalls

Here are a few of the things a small business owner will have to try to avoid (or manage to hire someone to do it for them) before they can truly achieve long-term growth and profits from their SEO ventures.

• Bad advice from forums (e.g. Digital Point)
• Crappy e-Books which offer advice which is short-term and dangerous at best
• The aforementioned “paid links”/”contextual paid links” scam. Obvious paid posts such as this one do no one any good and only serve to further tarnish the bad reputation that SEO has. (Credit to Googler Brian White for the example, although he probably didn’t mean to reveal as much as he did.)
• Keyword stuffing
• Blackhats posing as whitehats (and even offering bogus certifications)
• Link exchange schemes (still prevalent)
• Google PageRank/inbound link obsession
• Spam emails from SEOs who use search engines to find prospective clients, only to tell said clients that they’re not doing well in the search engines.

I could sit here all day and come up with a list (and that may be a future blog post), but this will suffice to illustrate the deeper point. To summarize this, let’s revisit Caroline Middlebrook’s earlier quote:

Am I Being Too Harsh?

Perhaps I am but I’m sure that I’m not alone. I think the number of blogs is something like 800 million now or something silly like that? The Internet and the blogosphere in particular is one giant mass of information overload and people just don’t have time to get through it all so they have to be selective.

Jaan Kanellis is absolutely correct in saying that not every SEO is unethical. Ethical SEOs do exist. But Gene Marks is also correct in his indirect assertion that it makes far more sense for small business owners just to focus on their sites and try to promote them without worrying about SEO specifically. They can slowly learn it as they go along, but not necessarily have to start out with it right away.

More importantly, Gene Marks did the SEO community a huge favor. How? By presenting the perception of SEO from someone who has had some experience from the outside with at least one SEO, the spin doctoring, the lies, the spin doctoring, the lack of explanation of information, the spin doctoring, the wasted money…and did I mention the spin doctoring?

Most of you in the SEO community may not like it, and most of you will probably never accept it, but it is what it is: the SEO industry has predominantly become a blackhat, greed-based, political industry. If the majority of so-called SEOs haven’t reached the moral bankruptcy point yet, a large percentage certainly have. There is a mountain of crap and comparatively little actual, solid information and advice out there, and the odds are stacked against a small business owner truly succeeding because of it. For every person who has a solid understanding of all the aspects of a website and SEO, there are at least 10 who don’t have a clue and dip into the bag of shortcut tricks as a result.

Again, Cost vs. benefit. Unless a small business owner does his/her homework and gets lucky, the cost will likely outweigh the benefit. (Yes, I said it for SEO, but the same answer applies.)

Adwords

As I stated before, there’s a formula that will work for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. But what is it? How does a small business owner truly understand it? How does a small business owner select keywords that will generate a profit? Can a small business owner afford the cost of experimenting with PPC results, losing money while experimenting, and hopefully finding the answer eventually?

The additional factor here is rising costs: as the cost per click on various keywords goes up, PPC becomes increasingly cost-prohibitive and therefore grows in cost beyond the means of at least some small businesses. Jaan mentions that it’s merely an obstacle, but when you’re talking 4 or 5 digits as a bare minimum, that’s a huge obstacle for a small business to overcome, and with the relative lack of information, knowledge and insight on the subject, it’s unlikely that they ever will.

PPC will become a mid-to-large-sized business venture, with the odd small business being able to crack it, at some point. It will have to based on the manner in which the ads are distributed. It just hasn’t happened as of yet.

Again, Cost vs. benefit. Unless a small business owner does his/her homework and gets lucky, the cost will likely outweigh the benefit. (Yes, I said it for SEO, but the same answer applies.)

So What are the Real Bigger Issues Here?

The real issues here are:

1. Cost vs. benefit.
2. Excessive amounts of garbage information, and little to no quality information by comparison.
3. The inability of the majority to comprehend and accept Gene Marks’ deeper points, because they felt slighted (mostly the SEO industry).
4. The disconnect between SEOs, and to a lesser extent IT people, and small businesses

Renee Oricchio Gets It: Why Don’t You?

Up until today, I thought I was alone. Fortunately, I found a post by stumbling around from someone who gets it. Renee Oricchio is of the same line of thinking, and makes a very good point:

Techies Are Techies, Not Biz Experts

Amen, sister. Preach the good word (I’ll have to visit your site more often). Gene Marks deals directly with small to mid-sized businesses, with a goal of trying to increase their profitability by recommending tools and services. Most techies, on the other hand, deal with one or two managers and are quite often disconnected from the rest of their workplace (how many times have you talked to someone in an office environment who barely knows their techie or wants nothing to do with them?)

Good call, Renee.

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