We are very pleased to announce that Digg and Promote My Site will be partnering to provide Digg's next generation of power user tools. This intiative represents a change in direction for Digg and will be a significiant benefit to the internet marketing community.

Kevin Rose may have said "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. In the past we've taken the postion that power users and marketers tend to harm the Digg community, so we've taken steps to make sure that their efforts are not successful. But given the economic times, it only makes sense to explore as many revenue opportunities as we can find. Beer is expensive and we can't just rely upon a bunch of teenagers to keep clicking those snorg tee ads to keep the lights on around here. It's time to let the professionals get to work and start generating some real revenue."

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but insider sources hinted that it was an all cash deal. Under the agreement, Digg will license Promote My Site's previously discontinued suite of power user digging scripts and integrate them into the site in a new product christened the Digg/PMS Suite. For a monthly subscription fee of $99.95, power users will be able to promote their stories on Digg without interference from system administrators or that pesky "Whoa Cowboy" message. Buries, while they will still appear to register on the site, will be ineffective against users of the Digg/PMS Suite and the users will be notified of who is buring their stories. Digg/PMS Suite users will also receive an allowance of 10 "zaps" a month. These "zaps" can be used to ban members of the Digg mafia that only comment and do not submit any useful content to the site. This feature is expected to greatly improve the user experience for all concerned. Futhermore, any previously banned user will be able to have their account reinstated by purchasing a subscription to the Digg/PMS Suite.

A release date for the enhanced Digg/PMS Suite was not disclosed, but it is expected to be in the vicinity of April 1, 2010. In the meantime, users purchasing a subscription to Promote My Site's PMS Social Suite will be in line for a discount on the Digg product if and when it is released.

I'm not saying this has happened to you, but if you spend much time at all promoting your site in social media, eventually you're going to need a new ip address. Maybe the 20-something sysadmin was in a bad mood and was feeling the need for a power trip, or maybe you made a mistake and pushed the envelope just a little too far. But getting banned on most social networks means that they'll ban any further signups from your IP address.

Digg has an Odd Policy

This policy has really never made much sense to me. They've banned your account, so you've lost all the work you put into their site and the prestige you've built up. You'd think they'd just let you have a reset and say "Go forth and sin no more." But many sites, especially Digg, have the strange idea that if they ban your account, you're banned for life. You can never come back.

That's odd in Digg's case, because that's not what their TOS says. In fact, their TOS says nothing about multiple accounts at all. The closest anything on their site comes to saying this is in their FAQ:

To protect the integrity of the system, our policy is one person, one account. This is to help prevent users from artificially inflating Digg counters, which is explicitly against our Terms of Use.

So even the FAQ answer doesn't support their policy. As long as you have only one account, you're completely within the terms of the TOS and even their interpretation in the FAQ. Their claim that once you've been banned you can never come back just isn't supported in the agreement you made when you joined the site.

One also has to wonder how many thousands of people are cut off when one of these social sites demonstrates their lack of understanding of the architecture of the internet and heavy handedly bans an IP address for the router that stands between the internet and an entire Fortune 500 company or a university. If you're going through a firewall, it can appear that there are thousands of machines all with the same IP address.

Getting a New IP Address

Many people think their IP address is 192.168.0.1. Sorry, but that's a subnet reserved for local area networks. If you run "ipconfig /all" from a DOS prompt you'll see a number like that if you're behind a firewall. What you really want to know is the IP address of the device that the outside world sees. You can easily see this by going to http://whatismyip.com/. That's the address that the social networks see from you.

For most people, getting a new IP address consists of unplugging their connection to the internet and plugging it back in. Power cycling your DSL or Cable modem is usually enough to get a new DHCP assigned address. Very few people have real static IP addresses since that requires a special set up on the part of the ISP. What many people do run into is what Road Runner does: the IP address is stored on the cablemodem, so the modem keeps the same IP address between power cycles. There's an easy way around this.

With Road Runner, the cablemodem is storing the MAC address (Media Access Control) of the device connected to it on your side of the firewall. So if you've got the standard setup of PC -> Router -> CableModem, it's the MAC address of the router that the cablemodem is tracking. As long as the same device is connected, you can power cycle the cablemodem all day and the IP address is not going to change. So what you want to do is change the MAC address of the router. With a Linksys router, just go to setup -> MAC Address Clone and change one of the numbers. Click "Save Settings" and then power cycle your cablemodem. When it wakes back up, it will see a different device attached to it and it will require a new IP address on its site. Tada! New IP address for you. It's about a 5 minute operation.

At first glance you'd think changing the MAC Address would be dangerous, but it's not. The MAC address of your router is only being seen by the cablemodem. You don't have to worry about someone else on the internet duplicating your MAC Address because your cablemodem can't see anything but your router anyway. If you're really worried about this then you could always plug a different PC into the router and click "Clone My PC" and it will copy the MAC address from your PC to the router, but there's really no point. MAC address spoofing only takes place on the local network, so no harm done.

Clean Up After Yourself

Don't make the mistake of then immediately logging into the social network and creating a new account, because there's still a way they can spot you. You've still got the cookies in your browser from your last session, and in the case of Digg those are long term and point back to your previous id. If you don't want to lose all your cookies across all sites, then instead of clearing all cookies, in Firefox you can go to Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Show Cookies. Scroll down to the name of the site and click "Remove Cookies".

Another thing to keep in mind are alliances, such as Digg and Facebook. Digg can't see your Facebook cookies (think about that, it would be a huge security violation of a browser allowed cross site cookie viewing), but if you click on a link to a Digg page from your Facebook account they'll see your Facebook id, and they know how to match that up with your previous Digg ids. I know someone that claims to have been busted that way, so just be aware.

Those of you who have been with us for a while remember the good old days of Digg (last summer) when all you needed was a good greasemonkey script and you could click your way to Digg riches. My have times changed. Now even mentioning the concept of a script will get you the evil eye.

A lot of us got banned when Digg was on a banning rampage. It's not a big deal -- a Digg banning is a red badge of courage these days. While some notable names have moved on to other social networks such as Mixx, most of the banned players have come back with a new account. And something tells me that Digg isn't too happy about that.

An Odd Email

My LtDraper account was banned by Digg. If you waste time clicking that link you'll see the famous Oops screen. It seems they weren't too happy with my writing and releasing for free a greasemonkey script that allowed people to delete their shouts with one button click. So imagine my surprise when I received the following email a few weeks ago:

Hey there! Sean Graham is your latest fan. He became your fan because he likes what you are up to on Digg and wants to see what you think is interesting. You can either leave him as a fan or add him to your own list of friends. Check out his profile here: http://digg.com/users/tbsmediallc?OTC-em-fn1
Cheers,
The Digg Crew

A Phishing Attack!

At first I thought this was just a bug in Digg's system. It's not like they're not the masters of producing bugs. And it may very well be.

But then I started to think about it some more. This could be a rather sneaky "phishing" attack by Digg. Just send what look like innocent emails to the email accounts of previously banned users and see if they click on the friend link to check it out. They could then easily look at the IP address and check that against the IP addresses of current users. If someone had changed their IP address and started a new account, they'd be able to catch them.

I've asked around to a few Digg power users with new accounts, and they've started seeing the same thing. Digg is sending out friend notification emails to users that have been banned. I'm now getting a few of those a week now.

I posted this theory over at the Warrior Forum and R Hagel suggested that:

If that was their evil plan, now that link will be associated with a bunch of IPs (as I'm sure a bunch of people will click on this link in your post).
Hmmm, maybe that was your evil plan all along? :}

If this is just a glitch in Digg's software they're inadvertently sending me spam. Yes, it's spam because by banning me they terminated our agreement and no longer have permission to send me email. It's UCE through and through.

How to Sink the Boat

I said at the time that Digg was wrong for going after the script users. They were in talks with Google at the time and Google probably told them to do it since their interest was in the quality of links coming out of that PR 8 domain. That didn't work out so well. More importantly, according to popular reports, their traffic and revenue have gone down since September. I can understand revenue going down when the economy started to tank, but social media sites should see an increase in traffic as people scramble to network to find jobs and have extra time on their hands.

Digg has been running at a loss. Their business model is to be a hot company and attract venture capital. That's not a viable strategy for the future. They shouldn't be turning away users that used a script in the past but are now clean. They shouldn't be wasting precious time and resources on a witch hunt.

We received a frantic phone call from a client on Wednesday. We had done a site review as a favor a while back and they've been friends of the company for a very long time. The conversation went something like this:

Client: Our web store has been hacked! McAfee Site Advisor says we have malware, spyware, and viruses on our site!

Me: Really? That doesn't seem possible since you've got a Yahoo Store. And you've got the HackerSafe service checking your server every day. It hasn't complained, has it?

Client: No, but our sales have dropped to nothing today. And the warning from McAfee wasn't on our site yesterday.

Have You Been Hacked?

My first thought was "Uh oh, they've been hacked. I hope they have good backups." Then it dawned on me -- McAfee site advisor would be showing their warning on the search engine listing, not on the actual store site. Since we don't have that installed anywhere around here, I had the client email me some screen shots so I could see what was going on

Here's a Google search for Marie Sharp's Hot Sauce, a fairly popular product. The top three results in the product search have a yellow circle with an explanation point to signify a warning for those sites. That's mighty odd that both the client and their competitors results would show a warning. But it gets worse. Clicking on that warning icon shows this bad news:

Who are These People?

Our client explained to me that they had never heard of any of the users that supposedly were reviewing their site. I know they kill themselves over customer service, so the horror stories being told in the McAfee Site Advisor reviews just didn't make sense. I also happen to know that they don't spam, and I was very doubtful that they had been hacked and were distributing malware, spyware, or viruses.

So I clicked on the competitor's link. The same results. Not a different set of bad stories, but the exact results for the competitor as the client. Then the lightbulb went off. McAfee had made a mistake of monumental proportions.

McAfee had rated all of YAHOO.NET as dangerous.

Supreme Incompetence

Yahoo Stores can be hosted on a subdomain of yahoo.net. Their url looks like storename.stores.yahoo.net. I've heard there are over 100K stores using the Yahoo service. It's a lot of stores. And McAfee had taken a few complaints from a couple of specific stores and applied them to every store in the Yahoo store system. A quick google site search on a product category proved my hypothesis:

Yep, 31,000 results for a site search on cameras in the yahoo store system and McAfee marked every single one of them with a warning.

The level of apparent incompetence and recklessness on the part of McAfee is hard to believe. They are wrongly telling their users that these sites are dangerous, when it is completely untrue. The warning shows up right next to the Google result for that store. If you read the fine print you can see that they're talking about yahoo.net, but frankly most potential customers don't read the fine print. It's been 2 days now and our client has seen a dramatic drop off in sales. They're really being hurt by this.

It's the Little Guy That Gets Hurt

The client has contacted Yahoo support, who says they're working on it. The behavior started Tuesday afternoon after the earthquake, so perhaps that's related to it. I can imagine a situation where they rebooted some servers and forgot to apply a patch and now they're giving out wrong information. But frankly, this sure looks like libel by software. They're accusing people in a very public way of being spammers and distributors of malware and adware. And they're wrongly attributing customer complaints to that company.

Interestingly enough, the McAfee Site Advisor software only modified the google search results. Yahoo has a partnership with them to render the results from Yahoo instead of in the browser, and not surprisingly Yahoo isn't telling people that Yahoo.net is a supplier of malware and adware, run by spammers. So it's only killing 80% of the Yahoo Store's business since most of their search traffic comes from Google.

McAfee needs to fix this mistake, and fast. Otherwise they might find themselves with a pretty hefty legal liability from a lot of Yahoo store owners. And Yahoo needs to wake up and push McAfee to do it, because this is impacting the percentage they get from their Yahoo stores.

I heard a story from a friend the other day that I've seen played out on the Internet dozens of times. A blogger who writes about restaurants wrote a post that was critical of the restaurant.

The restaurant owner's lawyer sent a cease and desist letter, claiming libel. In this case the blogger just folded and took down the post, but put up a copy of the lawyer letter with the offending lines redacted.

So the restaurant gets an article in the SERPs below the fold that indicates somebody was really unhappy, but they don't know why. That would be enough to keep me away...

Follow the Rules of Business

The restaurant owner, in this case, completely blew it. They violated several important rules of business:

• Never Take Business Advice From Your Lawyer. Your lawyer knows absolutely nothing about how to run a business. They went to law school and work in a law firm. That's about as far away from the business world as you can get. If you need advice on how to overcharge clients for working more hours than are in a day, then perhaps your lawyer is where to go. But for a PR situation, a lawyer is exactly the wrong person to call. The lawyer doesn't get to bill your hundreds of hours if you decide to just ignore something. Your lawyer wants you to outspend the other side with a big lawsuit. In the end, the only people that ever come out ahead in these situations are the lawyers. If you're fortunate enough to find a great lawyer like we have that understands the needs of a business, then you're fortunate. But most businesses are not, and they tend to defer to them.
• Make Love Not War. An angry customer is an opportunity, not a call to war. Some of your most fiercely loyal customers will be those people that started out with a complaint that you made right. Yes, there are some customers that are complete jerks that you just can't make happy, but you should at least give every customer a few chances.
• It Never Pays to Threaten Someone with a Megaphone. In this case the blogger just had a small following. But the lawyer didn't know that. It could have just as easily been a blogger with 40K+ subscribers. That simple cease and desist letter could have been plastered everywhere across the internet. As it is, the blog post is now below the fold when you Google for the restaurant's name. But if they had gotten someone who knew a little about SEO angry at them they could have ended up with a negative blog post outranking their city search listing (they don't have a site of their own).

A Better and Less Expensive Outcome

So this restaurant owner, who probably doesn't understand anything about Web 2.0 or that whole intarweb thing, probably spent $300 to have a big name law firm bully a blogger into taking down a negative post. Worse yet, the lawyer probably found the post by "policing their trademark". That's when you pay your lawyer $300/hour to Google your company name and send nastygrams to anyone that dares talk about you in a negative light. My guess is they lost several hundred customers because this guy has a pretty good local following.

Here's how it could have been done differently in a Web 2.0 approach. Instead of launching the sharks at the blogger, the restaurant owner could have engaged his customer and called or emailed him and said "I see that we didn't live up to your expectations. How about giving us another try, lunch is on us?" At the very least the blogger would now have a real human face to associate with the restaurant rather than an institution. He might very well have written another post along the lines of "Well, this food isn't my cup of tea, but the owners sure are nice people and a lot of people like this restaurant." Or better yet, the blogger might have had some valid criticisms that the restaurant could have addressed. That could easily have turned things around and they might have gotten good PR out of the situation. Instead of alienating several hundred people, they might have gained many new customers.

Whatever he did, using the lawyers wasn't the right move. It would have been much less expensive and effective to go comment on the blog and tell their own side of the story. They probably could have found a few dozen customers that would have done the same thing. If the blogger wouldn't move, the story could have become about how the blogger totally missed the point. Instead of a negative, they could have generated a big buzz for themselves.

Old and Busted or New Hotness

Their way cost them $300 lawyers fees and probably thousands in lost revenue. It's a very 1980s approach to business. It's like having your secretary print out your email so you can read it. The Web 2.0 way would have cost about $10 for the free lunch, and might have gained them several thousand in revenue from new customers.

Is your customer retention strategy Old and Busted or New Hotness? Your choice.

Wow, that may be the most specific post title I have ever written.  But I want to capitalize on the extreme amount of google love we're getting lately to save someone else a LOT of time.

We're doing a beta of our Social Suite and it depends on iOpus's most excellent iMacro for FireFox.  Except that they released a new version (6.0.4.1) which killed our software.  Thanks guys.

So, how simple could this be: we just needed the previous version (6.0.3.9). 

Which is NOT on their website.  Nor is it mentioned in their otherwise comprehensive wiki. And when you try to search google for it, well, good luck with that. 

So, it turns out that previous versions of iMacro for FireFox are kept on the FireFox/Mozilla website.  Go here to get version 6.0.3.9 and earlier versions of iMacro for FireFox.

You know what else I know now?  There is (often) a "see all versions" button at the bottom of the addon for FireFox that gets you to the same place. 

Our Digg Genesis

We started off reading and "digging" stories from our favorite RSS feeds and quickly moved to posting some of our own writing. "Uh oh," you say, "bad blogger."

No, not really. For three reasons:

• It's not against the TOS at digg
• As our readers will know, we don't have a spam blog in any way
• It had it's own punishment in terms of public yawning at our posts

Because we are very interesting writers (*cough*) but not to the digg crowd and certainly not on every post. Our first 40 postings averaged 3 diggs each. I swear, you could scan your BK receipt, post it to "offbeat" and get more diggs than that.

But, not being totally oblivious, I started reading some articles on how all this stuff worked (or how people thought it worked!) and our average over the next 10 stories doubled to 6 diggs/story. Whoo, hoo, if we were a startup we'd have been worth $1B by then!

After a bit more attention over the next 10 stories we bumped our average to 24 diggs/story. From there our average over the next 15 stories went to 45 diggs/story.

Any my last story finally got "popular" and got 700+ diggs by this article.

Now, lest you assume I was spending my entire life on this, well, uh, no. I did around 70 stories over 7 months, or a couple per week. I was spending a lot more time digging (2,000+) stuff. A lot of that was shouts but a lot more was stuff I found by looking for people submitting stories with keywords I cared about.

So, to summarize, rocky start but a good strong finishing position, pretty good citizen. Maybe I give myself a B+, which would make Digg better than High School, in retrospect.

The Landmine Tripped

Not by anything I did outside the TOS, nor by a flame war, and not even by some self proclaimed Digg guardian. Nope, some sockpuppet knocked our blog out of bounds for Digg.

I posted a digg (Best. Digg. Shout. Ever.) about an absurd shout I got from a user called SteJules. I won't go into details but he'd been a Digg member for 31 days and had over 10K diggs and had a 20% hot rate. The shout was 800+ words and was priceless. It just begged for digging and though I was careful not to be ad hominem about it, I figured since he'd sent it to around a thousand people, I posted it. And it got 100+ votes in two days.

And it got our site banned by SteJules and his friends. Which is a long and boring story, but they did it on purpose by going back through posts from months before and burying them as spam. Nice.

Banning is Forever

Which is when I discovered that there is NO appeals process. You know how blogger will lock you out or require a captchya to post? Annoying but after a few days it usually gets put right. Google gives you a penalty, you can fix that in a few weeks. But no such process exists at Digg. (I actually have friends who know the guys what run Digg but you don't call in favors for stuff like that. Which makes it worse, actually.)

Being Innocent is No Protection

Oh, you say, you don't submit your own site and other people only do it sometimes. Well, what if someone creates a user, says that their home page is your domain, and starts, once a day, submitting your stories. After a few weeks they get their friends to swarm them and mark them as spam.

Bye-bye.

Diversify

Look, our business model does not require that we get traffic from Digg, but if it did, we'd be toast. We'll, we'd be toast unless we wanted to change our domain name, 301 redirect hundreds of pages, etc. And even then the "breathing space" only last until some other sock puppet bully gets you banned. So diversify into other social media sites. There are a lot of them, and if you read the articles under our "niche social media" tag you'll get a flavor for what is out there. In the meantime, while being a model citizen is smart, it certainly won't protect you.

Well, not wrong in the sense that they are writing silly stuff (lord knows there is plenty of that in the SEO blogosphere!) but that they get the wrong end of the handle, as it were.

Article the first: Real People Don't Have Time For Social Media.

B: The Decline and Fall of Tech on Digg.

Go read them both as they are frightfully well written and insightful, but ultimately not to the point I'd have made.

Here it is in a nutshell, though: People have to spend too much time on Digg and there is less tech news there.

Yes, yes, I know these articles aren't a pair, but they have a lot of similarities in their outlook on Digg/Social Media

Jumping to What?

 Ok, I think people often spend a lot of time "working" on things that don't have ROI. But even worse, they simply don't consider ROI or even measuring it. I might say they act in a tactical fasion with no linkage to a strategy.

Which brings me to the second part about Digg not being so tech friendly. I am not so sure this is true in the sense that it's permanent. We are in an election cycle and it's been quite a while since Steve Jobs came out of his hole, saw his shadow, and dropped a raft of fanboy flavored iPods on us.

But say it is so. So what? Does that mean that the tech readers aren't there anymore? Or that they are actually more interested or less?

Which brings me around to the "too much time" argument, which I still think is bad ROI focus and lack of testing.

So, while the articles are good, I would encourage people interested in social media to keep examining their overall strategies of readers, links, subscribers, etc, etc and not jump to any conclusions.

I am not a big fan of "top 10" lists because my teeny tiny dinosaur brain can only remember two or three of the points, which makes me feel like I'm treading water watching eveyone else evolve their way ashore and I've left my proto-feet behind somewhere. But someone recently sent me this ancient (1994 era) email that had Bonnie McElveen-Hunter's:

The Ten Commandments For Failure

• Thou Shalt Have Little Faith
• Thou Shalt Pick Thy Partners with Wanton Abandon
• Thou Shalt Make the Quick Buck
• Thou Shalt Have No Enthusiasm
• Thou Shalt Seek Easy Street
• Thou Shalt Do It Alone
• Thou Shalt Not Be Accountable
• Thou Shalt Have No Sense of Humor
• Thou Shalt Give Nothing Back
• Thou Shalt Believe Failure is Final

Wow, there is a lot in there, but let me divide this into three piles and then I'll pick the three that I need to remind myself to remember!

No Brainers for Business Success

I think that a few of these jump out at me as being really important and obvious:

• Thou Shalt Hav No Sense of Humor
• Thou Shalt Believe Failure is Final
• Thou Shalt Not Be Accountable
• Thou Shalt Do It Alone

Anyone out there who is overly serious, self-important, arrogant, and the Lone Ranger? You are so headed for a fall. I know guys like Steve Jobs like to be the famous front man, but it's not like he's actually designed or built or programmed anything that was famous. Sure, he makes decisions and micromanges and drives people to nervous breakdowns, wait, dang, don't work for him - it's a trap!

An Embarassment of Riches

But some of these are things that most startups have too much of, not a dearth:

• Thou Shalt Have Little Faith
• Thou Shalt Have No Enthusiasm
• Thou Shalt Make the Quick Buck

Have you ever seen a zombie startup that is running on denial, manic positivism and leaping from the last big thing to the next big thing? Uh, huh, you sure have and so have I. It's hard to write off your dream, but sometimes you just have to move on.

Remember these Three Rules for Success

I liked these a lot, not because I don't "know" it already, but because it's good to be reminded of important ideals in a new way:

• Thou Shalt Pick Thy Partners with Wanton Abandon
• Thou Shalt Give Nothing Back
• Thou Shalt Seek Easy Street

Now these, these are good.

When you're decideing on people to hire or companies to partner up with, take a deep breath, You've got to live with those people for a long time. Read our A Managers Hire A People article - it distills down 40 years of hiring experience in high tech.

And when things are going well you need to help someone else prime the pump. Take on an intern, pick an office charity, free your people up to do service work.

Finally, if what you're doing seems easy, well, you're probably about to step into an open manhole cover. Time to do some risk management!

At least. Which is a pretty good piece of pocket money. I suspect even Warren Buffet would slow down to pick that up.

I attribute this to SEO because even thought it was a change in business process coupled with good SEO that made it happen it could not have happened without SEO.

Fair warning to people looking for "advanced" techniques - they ain't here. But what I'm going to talk about is a LOT more valuable than a trick that may or may not work with Google next week or next year.

Best Ever YouMoz Article

Let's look at the real money quote that J Kelly Garrett put in his amazingly excellent SEO article at YouMoz. This piece of advice will serve you while you climb up the value chain from a specialist to a trusted business advisor:

I took the pile [of papers, documentation, etc], pushed it aside, and asked him [the business owner] to tell me about himself. This is a common technique of mine, whether it is a small business owner, or the Chairman of the Board for Burlington Northern Railroad.

He wasn't asking to hear about the guy's soccer team, he wanted to get the gestalt around the company. What is important about the environment, goals, challenges, employees, culture, customers, etc, etc, etc.

It's Not About the Technology

Really, it's not. Not even in SEO. I wasn't about the technology in OO programming. It wasn't about the technology in robotics. It wasn't about the technology during the dang moon shots either.

It's about how the technology serves the business and makes it more successful. Sometimes 'success' means one or more of:

• Improved profit
• Increased revenue
• Decreased risk
• Stronger resilience
• Faster new product introduction
• and on and on...

But if the technology isn't in service to the goals of the business then it will eventually fail.

The $2M Piece of Advice

I know exactly when I finally understood this. No kidding.

I left one job as a consultant making $55/hour doing NeXTStep programming (hey, that was LOT of money back then) and got another one making $75/hour. The had two slots to fill - lead programmer ($50/hour) and technology business advocate ($75/hour).

For some reason, don't know why, during the interview I was homing in on the business objectives of the billing audit system they were building. I kept asking about change management (people, not source!), about deployment, about disruption, etc, etc.

Next thing I knew I was walking about into the freezing flipping cold in Chicago holding onto a 50% raise. Bubba, you don't get too many of those.

If you work that out - 48 weeks a year, 40 hours a week, 40 work years in a lifetime - you find out that that change in focus gets you a $1,920,000 raise.

Actually, it's even more than that because you keep the advantage while you march up the food chain.

Back to The SEO Example

What really struck me about Garrett's example was that the business took the fairly traditional and predictable approach of getting some SEO guys to graft web and SEO onto a traditional "ring and pitch" business.

The SEO guys put together a campaign that generates 2,500 leads and it kills the guy because:

• ROI goes from "signup" to 2 years.
  
• "He is looking at ROIs that should apply to heavy machinery and commercial aircraft."
• Growth rate drops from 19% to 3% because of process issues:
• "growth rate has plummeted from 19% per year to 3% per year because he is in the office answering the phone all the time with close rates of 12% [down from 97%]"
  

Actually, there were a lot of issues, but those are the two killers. Look at what happened - his profits got pushed out a year from acquisition AND instead of looking at an yearly "takehome" increase of $67,032 he was seeing an increase of $10,584. That is an opportunity cost of over $55K!

You can go broke quickly making money that way.

Do the math

I'm just going to quote Garrett's point in toto because it sums up the whole problem so neatly:

SEO Firm Declares “Success.” The PPC campaign is bringing in over 2500 hits per month. Closing the sales is not really their job. They just need to work with the business owner to further tweak everything to bring in more hits. “Obviously” the copywriting needs work to further capture the ones that do get there, or there is something wrong with the business, or whatever...but we are getting people to the site. Just wait till the site starts to rank higher with the search engines!

Remember, the owner is now going broke pretty quickly, has sunk a fair bit of capital into the new venture AND is probably pretty much apoplectic. In fact, if he's like any dial-and-smile salesguy I know, physical and financial threats are probably in the offing.

What's the Solution?

I won't repeat the meat of the article but basically Garrett becomes and advisor and helps the owner re-engineer his business so that he goes back to ROI on close. But most importantly the business growth goes back up to the previous 19% and then all the way up to 28%.

So, back to the math - previous to the first campaign the owner was looking at a yearly "raise" of $67K based on growth. The slap-on-SEO campaign took him down to a $10K raise. The SEO+BPR campaign took him to a $98K yearly raise. Thus the title of this post because the SEO catalyzed a $31,752 additional raise.

I'd like to read a lot more articles like this, and I hope he keeps writing.