SiteSell Blog

To Knol or Knot To Knol... Who Knows?

Ken's Blog

What's Knol's future? Will non-marketers share what's in their heads or will Knol merely become competition for Wikipedia and article-submission sites (ex., squidoo.com and ezinearticles.com)? Another question...

Since you can earn income by placing AdSense ads on your knols, will authors choose more high-CPC-paying topics? There will certainly be an over-saturation on high-payout topics. Also, the entire "feeling" changes -- people contribute to Wikipedia out of a sense of mission, not commercialization. In short...

It's hard to predict whether Knol will succeed. Google has had failures and underperformers (ex., Google Answers, Base and Orkut). If they do not market this to "regular non-marketers," it's possible that Knol may become simply another article submission site for Web marketers, with a Web 2.0 twist. And those individuals may be quite happy with what they currently use.

On the other hand, this is Google. Creating a quality knol in your area of expertise (i.e., your Site Concept or a sub-theme of that) may turn out to be a strong way to improve your credibility in your niche, while also gaining one or more valuable inbound links.

The road to best results, assuming Google has the technology to truly figure out quality (a reasonable assumption) is the following...

Careful When Full-Blogging... It Takes Work

Ken's Blog

While away in Anguilla, I missed a bombshell. Jason Calcanis, one of my favorite bloggers, has given up blogging. He wants a more direct connection with a small number of e-mail subscribers.

Reading between the lines of his original post and his e-mailed comments later, it seems to me that he just got tired of blogging. Blogging is hard work. Some quotes from his announcement and his first post-announcement e-mail...

The Place of Value Exchanging Within an Inbound Links Program

Ken's Blog

In my previous blog, I started a discussion about inbound links and the importance of "keeping it real." Today's entry continues along that same vein of thought, with a specific focus on "Value Exchanging."

Value Exchanging, as opposed to link exchanging, remains a valuable part of building an overall inbound links program. There are many folks, including sophisticated Web marketers, who don't seem to understand the value of a diversified program, including the judicious use of exchanging value for value.

Let's talk a bit about inbound links and the place of Value Exchanging within your program...

Provide Real Value

Ken's Blog

Keep it real. Provide real value.

Google is not "changing the way the game is played." Not unless you are an SEOer. If you're an SBIer, however, the basic rules remain the same.

What Google is changing is how good they are getting at recognizing real value. Foreseeing that is what SBI! has always been based upon, and, as an example, it is why we have always called our tool "VALUE Exchange," even when link farms were all the rage. But more important than that...

The TRUE-TRUE-BUT Red Herring

Ken's Blog

We are a species that likes to tie outcomes into neat cause-and-effect packages. But often, things are just too complex to be able to do that.

Many people have not taken a course in statistics or are not especially logic-left-brained-oriented. So I'm talking about a common mistake in thinking that, ultimately, can be perilous to your financial health...

Be careful of two events that are true and seem related. They are not necessarily cause-and-effect, even if the timing may suggest they are.

This TRUE-TRUE-RELATED thinking is everywhere, not just as it relates to SBI!, but to life in general. And not just with those who are "logic-impaired," but in the Nightly News (ex., the latest reason that the stock market goes up or down on any given day, barring the occasional very rare, clear reason).

I'm already digressing because this is a philosophical pet peeve of mine, sorry...

Let's stick to SBI!. Specifically, let's discuss something you do with SBI! at one end (ex., you re-work a page or you secure a link from Yahoo!'s directory) and something that happens at the other end of SBI! (ex., a good ranking of a page, overall traffic jump, increased income).

-----SIDEBAR-----
How hard is this habit to break? Before I chose the word
"happens" just above, I had written "results." The word
"results" suggests TRUE-TRUE-RELATED. So this is a tough
one to break through.

You need evidence to say that something that happened is
the result of something you did.
-----SIDEBAR-----

OK, here's the bottom line...

Sometimes It's Better Not To Know How Much Work It'll Be

Ken's Blog

I'm sitting here in an Anguilla hotel, feeling a little overwhelmed at all the details left to wrap up before we can move into our new home for the next major phase of our lives when I realized...

Everything that I've ever done that turned out to be important and rewarding was never, at the beginning, clear just how much work it was going to be. And even though you love it, the sheer amount of work (to overcome hurdles and ultimately succeed) is always more than anticipated.

Sure, I knew med school was going to be work. But you don't see it ALL on Day one. Over the years, though med school and post-grad training do add up to being a quantum leap more than expected on that innocent first day. The next major phase...

How To Use Google's New Search Volume Data

Ken's Blog

Google's AdWords Tool has moved from displaying monthly Search Volume graphically via a green bar to providing actual numbers. Google continues to push the envelope. Don't ya love it?

I've been thinking hard about how SBIers should use this data. The biggest picture is that the Google Keywords External Tool just became an even more useful tool if you're in a situation where you don't know your niche, or you have a million ideas spinning around in your brain.

The tool is also useful, if you like data, after you've chosen your niche and brainstormed. But it's not necessary as Google's Keywords External Tool is unlikely to find any important keywords that SBI!'s Brainstormer hasn't already identified.

As always, you have to remember the goals of the provider of the data. In Google's case, it's to pull in more advertisers. They also know that content providers will use this data, and that's fine with them, of course.

-----SIDEBAR-----
After all, we SBIers provide the content that makes their Search
Engine valuable! Google would have zero value if there were only a
few major providers of content -- we call that TV!
-----SIDEBAR-----

But remember... Google's main motivation is to sell ads. This tool is meant to get prospective advertisers to build a list of keywords and then import it into an account, which they must create in order to import. Great PREseller -- show the value, then sell the ads.

Understanding this context, we have to pick and choose and use carefully. With that, here are the key points and "gotchas"...