

Almost Everything is Unprofitable (SEO and Startups) - terrellm
http://www.seobook.com/unprofitable

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lwhi
I have absolutely no idea what this article is trying to tell me. I think it's
(luckily) quite unusual to encounter writing that's so completely and utterly
unintelligible.

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a5seo
that's par for the course with SEOBook. Aaron is brilliant, but his
commentaries are never direct. For example, read some of the stuff he's
written about eHow-- it's hard to tell if he loves them or hates Google, and
ultimately where he comes down on the issue.

~~~
lwhi
It reminds me of the type of text that's produced by a spam-bot. Content for
the sake of content .. food for search engines.

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aaronwall
The filler text complaint is a common complaint against SEOs, but that is a
problem far more common with the likes of content mills. That post includes
many things that were not publicly known in the prior context (like
TripAdvisor's past link buying).

Content which parochially states "x is never worth doing" is of far lower
quality stuff than content which is rich in historical context with actual
examples used based on real-world data and experience.

The example of TripAdvisor being impossible to beat (along with suggesting
that start ups need to avoid risk) is a quite laughable combination since
TripAdvisor was buying so many links that Matt Cutts directly contacted them
in person at a conference and warned them about it. They levered up on risk
until they felt it was about to catch up with them & then backed off.

That sort of approach is far smarter than saying "take no risk." After all,
most start ups end up failing anyhow. Success is not about avoiding risks, but
taking smart ones.

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alexqgb
From the optimized (?) seobook.com front page: "And now you can hire Aaron as
your personal SEO coach for just around $10 per day!"

Oh my.

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a5seo
cute... $300/mo per month subscription = $10/day. bleh... a subscription is
hardly the same as personal coaching.

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aaronwall
Our membership site has only been open for a couple years (with a 3 month
pause in there) and I personally wrote about 25,000 posts in the forums,
answering thousands and thousands of questions. It honestly doesn't get much
more personal than that IMHO.

If you haven't experienced it then sure it can seem like marketing for the
sake of marketing, but the fact that I was willing to shut down the site (make
it bring in $0 revenue for 3 months while it was costing 5 figures a month)
shows that I am not trying to maximize revenues without care toward
quality...and that I am willing to invest in having a quality service.

And Patio11 has frequently highlighted on Hacker News that the best advice he
got from us wasn't even directly SEO advice, but tips to help change his sales
copy. That indeed came from doing a direct and personal review of his site.

If we didn't deliver on what we promise do you think I would have risked
closing the site to customers for 3 months?

