Berkun Spam & Marketing 101

This is a great example of how small businesses think of search.

Scott Berkun’s brother has a problem:

“Recently his competitors began using various search engine manipulation techniques: fake pages, link farms, link doorways, all sorts of things to deceive search engines.”

So Scott is asking his readers to link to his brother’s site - etoner.com.

But in general, before you go publicly asking for help and showing off your site, it’s important to get your house in order. By aggressive tactics, does he mean doing things like creating a bunch of sites, some that are registered in your wife’s name that all have the same products & interlink?

Here are his sites that I could quickly find:

http://www.etoner.com
http://www.fifonline.com
http://www.webcom.com/star/tol/cat/copkon1.htm
http://www.officecenterusa.com

So when it stops working for you…complain that other people are cheating? Search has changed a lot in the last few years, but your strategies & tactics don’t look like they’ve evolved.

I don’t know the purpose of the site, but if it is vital to business, then I think there are some deeper issues besides worrying about the competition’s ethics.

First, stop building for engines & start building for users. By complaining about spam in his industry he’s making it clear he doesn’t want to play in the aggressive SEO game. But he’s not differentiating himself in any way at all.

There is nothing on etoner.com (including information) that I can’t get from officedepot.com or amazon.com. If he specializes in toners and cartridges then give me more information about that vertical than I could get ANYWHERE else. If you have better prices…show me! There is nothing there that would make me want to link or buy specifically from you (besides your brother’s word). If you can’t differentiate, you are a commodity. If you are a commodity you better reconsider those blackhat tactics.

But even if your industry has become a commodity market, almost everything can be made NOT a commodity: coffee being my favorite example - Starbucks made it about experience, not the bean.

If you are comfortable being a commodity, then you have to be more aggressive. As Yahoo Search Product manager Tim Mayer has said: don’t bring a sword to a gunfight. This is a world I honestly do not think you want to go into or are ready to go into: blackhat SEO, email spam, super small margins/high volume deals with affiliates & others that suck up your time & sleep.

To actually build a business & not be a margin player, he has some work cut out for him.

First know the answers to all of these:

• Who are your customers (home consumer, offices, manufacters. there is very different opportunities for every one)
• What products exactly are they buying, why, and how often
• What is your lifetime value of a customer
• How do they make a purchase decision
• What factors in the decision making process can you be best at (this one is key)
• How and when can you communicate what you are best at to these people when it matters to them

Answering that should tell you how can you turn your commodity into something more. Then it’s time to do some work on the product:

• Fix your site. Get a good design (this is where I would take advantage of your brother’s expertise). No more broken links. Differentiate all the other sites you have out there or else combine them. Maybe 1 site for each type of customer if you have consumer,business,and manufacturers - they all have very different needs.
• Include reviews or service or whatever it is that you decided you can be best at and the customer wants (research, survey, test, focus groups) as part of his decision-making process.
• Figure out how to create a loyal customer, or at least the most loyal customer you can. Here is an example: even though customers are different you should know when the ink/toner runs out in general. if you had a little info about the customer and their basic usage you should be able to send an email or call to remind them to get new toner soon.
• Better yet…how about turning this commodity into a service? don’t offer OEM toner, offer printing solutions (ex: Carrier is experimenting with a business model of providing coolth services rather than air-conditioning units - the customer never buys an actual product & carrier does everything it can to keep a building cool even if that means contracting with others - such as efficient window companies). I don’t know…but business (especially ones that have been marginalized and products turned into commodities) requires more creativity than asking your brother for links.

Next do some work on the marketing:

• Figure out all the channels to reach your users you decided you are going after.
• Can you undercut your competitors affiliates and use LTV as a way to build customer base
• Knowing your LTV, can you do some paid search to grow your loyal userbase?
• Get some SEO background (”etoner” should not be anchor text you’re pushing through his community). Hire somebody good. It’ll cost you, but it’ll be money well spent. They might be able to help you with product issues too if you get a good one. They can help you find the places where the very competitive webmasters are still using swords instead of guns. SEO has become much more about understanding users than understanding algorithms. is it possible to make a site about copiers/printing solutions that could generate it’s own links? of course it is…it’s just not easy.
• Get some help from your brother. not asking his readers to link to you, but solid long-term business/branding/ui advice. he spoke at google for christ-sake, he wants to help you, use what he knows (knowledge) not what he has (blog audience). I’m pretty sure i saw a 3-d printer video on digg that generated many links & traffic. That should have been your site/blog and that’s the type of thing a top-notch SEO can/should do for you.
• There is more to online that search: shopping engines, ebay, amazon store, etc they still seem to be doing well in your market.

Take a risk. You have to do something different. This link thing…not different. Not different at all.

This is really where search marketing is/has headed. There are people in dark corners of the internet who could probably help you get very specific rankings in your gun fight, but be ready to pay them a lot, not ask ethical questions, and maybe give up a % of your business. So spend the money there or else spend the money figuring out your market & product and how to reach them. Either way, long-term you have to take a risk & go one direction with all you’ve got.