I was reading Performancing yesterday and ran across SEO Works Well Because Others Are Not Doing It and thought: Duh. Techies call it analysis paralysis, but in real life I think it’s “fear of the imperfect.”

Look, big time SEO can be time consuming but even in small doses it can have huge payoffs. As an experiment we doubled the readership of this blog one week by spending five minutes/day on promotion. And we don’t even really write what you’d call linkbait. (My wife calls these posts Mensa, er, well, I can’t use the second word, just use your imagination.)

We stopped because doubling readership via SEO wasn’t our goal, even if was only 5 minutes/day, but if were were monetizing this blog about our new startup division then we’d be very aggressive on the SEO tasks that we could actually do.

Because we don’t worry about being perfect (the enemy of good enough) at almost everything we do. I’m 100% focused on making sure payroll works and that our company healthcare is paid up but other than that we just try to do our best.

Marketing? Not perfect, but done on time.

Sales? We work at it, never miss payroll, show stead growth. Check.

Web Design? We stink, but people buy stuff. Check.

I think you get the idea.

So, basic SEO you can do: pick a half dozen social sites (Delicio, Propeller) that seem like they’d be friendly to your content. Use them regularly. Budget your time because you’re busy. Then do it for a month - it’s like a diet, you have to give it a while. It’s also like a diet because you’ll stop at some point - just start again. Measure what works, discard the rest.

By the way, the same is true of Marketing, Sales, and everything else in your business. Except payroll, of course.

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Bump and update: What were we doing in 5 minutes a day to double our readership? That is a good question. We’ll tell you next month. Watch the homepage.

Today a booklet showed up from Microsoft to help me “get the most out of adCenter.” Cool spelling and a dude with way too much hair product are in evidence. Not a good sign.

Let me explain…..

I actually hate buying ads - any kind. I much prefer more organic methods, but Microsoft (motto: We are better than Google! Come back here, we are so too!) had some deal where you bought $5 worth of advertising and they chip in $50 additional. I am cheap cheap cheap and five bucks ain’t so much, so I signed up.

I think John Chow (my hero!) made a buck off the transaction, so the internet can keep spinning.

So there I was with $55 burning a hole in my pocket and an actual documentation manual from Microsoft. (Side note: when was the last time you saw printed documentation from Microsoft? DOS 2.11?)

First a piece of paper “contact list” falls out with URL’s very prettily printed on it. Paper. Am I supposed to pin that to my cubicle or something? Could they not just send it to me so I could put it in my Outlook?

Next a letter telling me that they’ve sent me this book and the contact information pinup. At least it doesn’t say “MEMORANDUM” across the top.

The book itself would actually be a good primer for someone who has never written an ad before, so mad props to them for realizing that their audience is varied. They talk about mis-spelled keywords, the importance of bolding text, being specific, all that good stuff. They even talk about geo-location.

I give them a B+ for helping new buyers of ads with a pretty clearly written document. I’d have been happier to have been able to check a box NOT to receive this, but in retrospect it probably increased my opinion of Microsoft’s ability to look at the basics and get the right information out.

If Microsoft were able to get this to the 90K or so Yahoo!Store owners, or the 250K people with GoDaddy e-commerce sites, I bet they could sell some ads. Because their stuff has around 50% the functionality of google’s confusing mess, but it’s the 50% you need if you are selling in those arena’s. And once those guys can put in $25 and drop $50 to the bottom line, it will take a bazooka to get them to move.

In fact, the more I thought about the MS value proposition, the better I liked it. So I decided I wanted to send it to a friend who has a small online business with no advertising, so I went to the Microsoft adCenter website and … it is not available in PDF.

We were sitting down to have a good re-planning session to make sure that we didn’t miss anything or do something out of order or otherwise screw up when some mass psychosis took over and we all got freaked out about getting beat to market by a competitor.

And it wouldn’t matter:

We couldn’t really “hurry” onto the market any faster

Our game plan doesn’t require us to be first or get 100% of the market

The technology stack is not something anyone is gonna stumble on

The first two are obvious, but the third is a bit counter-intuitive. What I mean is, there are often multiple technical methods to solve any problem. Look at databases: first there were flat files, then hierarchies, then b/c-trees, then relational databases, then object databases, then back to relational databases, and then the final solution: Excel spreadsheets. (Kidding about that last.)

When the problem gets more complex than a database (save information, get it back) you start to see different solutions. Even email has made a complex journey from mainframe to client-server to web to Ajax clients that are richer than client-server.

Pick something even more complex, like, say, a Content Management System (CMS) and you might have: php, MySql, Ajax, XML, CSS, and god knows what all the widgets are written in. Ponder the Facebook/MySpace software infrastructure that is required to allow a 13 year old girl to put dancing glitter hearts over her streaming Xtina audio/video mashup.

When we set out to solve our particular problem we decided that building a service that could adequately scale and flexibly change with the market was going to be our major challenge. Without going into details (because, as the Pointy Haired Boss of Dilbertian fame, I would get them wrong) I will say that we spent more than 6 months testing and discarding our options before settling on our core technology.

Then we had to build it and find all the stuff that didn’t work “right” and trim all the places where the real world failed to mold itself to our expectations. And we had to get two major widget vendors to fix broken stuff and had to craft a good workaround to another not-quite-fixed flaw. (Oh, and the workaround had to be quickly and easily removable when the flaw is corrected!)

So any one competing with us is, in our estimation, very likely to have chosen one of the technical dead ends that will really harm them in a moderate-to-high volume marketplace. By “very” I really mean “almost 100% certain.”

Which means that even if a competitor scoops us and pulls in the “easy” first tranch of customers, their service will certainly not work reliably or be effective in the real world, even if they throw servers, patches, and outright hacks at the problem.

And ours will work. We have tested it extensively under load and it just performs. And it works because to work in this case requires a particular set of technical solutions be stacked just so.

Why am I sure that we got it right and that other people won’t have figured it out? Because our guys are just better than our competition - I’ve got 25 years experience of high performance teams and I’m very confident of that. (I can just see the “can I have a raise now emails” coming in….)

If you would like an example of needing to get the technology stack right, please cast you mind back to when Google suddenly (it seemed) got the whole internet spidered in a few months, then the spidering got faster and faster and faster. And Yahoo, Jeeves, and all the other search engines just sat around and watched their options lose value faster than yeserday’s lotto ticket.

So when we got all freaked out about a competitor it didn’t take us long to calm down. But as we all started telling stories about the EXACT SAME BEHAVIOR from other startups doing quiet launches, I realized that this is just another stage in the startup process.

It’s kind of cool - I would have bet you that I was done being surprised by new “standard” behavior in the startup process.

There was a fascinating pair of posts today (1, 2) on SquareOak about a new social networking auto-submit application he’s releasing for “free.” I think that his ‘application’ has major issues, but let’s focus on his business model for a moment: free versus paid.

[Update: fixed the names/links throughout. Whoops, sorry about that.]

My grandfather was a wise man, very quiet, and grew up on a farm. He knew what work was, and would never have confused what we do today with ‘real work.’ He used to tell me about getting up before dawn to milk cows so he could catch a train to university. He got pre-published on his dissertation a few months before defense and had to start over. He never believed in anything that didn’t cost money or sweat, it was just outside his frame of reference.

What does this have to do with yet another “free” service to save you time?

Well, free isn’t free if it takes more time than it saves. And it’s not free if you have to worry if it’ll disappear or gently break or just stop working because the author got a real job somewhere else. (Not talking about Brendan, I wouldn’t know him from Adam’s house cat, this is just a general statement.)

I know we all love Web 2.0 where someone using someone else’s money can take a run at, say, Adobe, and save us a lot of effort. Take PDF Hammer - they’re going to put PDF editing online. I just bought the upgrade to the new Adobe for $119 or whatever. I think my lifetime payment to these guys is well over $5K if you count CS2 and all that krep. So I am jazzed that someone is going to take VC money and put it all online for free.

On the other hand, if it is 3pm and I’m catching the 5:30 flight to LGA and I need to edit a PDF, who do I trust? And what is it worth?

Right.

So, this software, and all the other half (at best) solutions that are free are worth less to me than full solutions I have to pay for. Not to say that I don’t appreciate the free stuff. I even use it when it is not mission critical, but you get what you pay for in life, n’est ce pas?

Is “paid” software better than free? Well, I’m writing this on Mozilla running on XP and our servers run Linux and Oracle, so I’d say that you should pick and choose. But there is no doubt that if you’re going to depend on something you should have some influence and control. And there is no control over free software, so I always have to keep the backup, paid, controllable version around.

We spend a lot of time looking at social bookmarking sites - you have to if you’re going to build a tool to help make it more efficient to use them. Occasionally we run across some really amazingly stupid stuff.

Here is a classic example. We created an account at a Super/Scuttle site called TwinPrime. Same old same old scuttle style site. Until we tested by putting a few bookmarks in:

So far so good. Then we took a look at it in a browser with Grease Monkey installed to see how it was all playing out.

Hmmm. How useless is that?

We’ve found other Super/Scuttle sites that look like they’re saving your bookmarks but don’t. Ok, low attention advertising sites, hundreds to a server in S’pore, sometimes they break. But the TwinPrime guys did this on purpose.

Amazing.

Why do we do this? Well, a typical scuttle site like this will send us one or two people per week and they typically stay on site for 2.7 pages. So they’re in our target market. And some of these sites are do-follow so they trickle some (pitiful) link juice to us.

Why do we spend time going after a few people per week at some darn-close-to-anonymous scuttle site? And for one micro-drop of google love? Because all of us on the internet not selling services are actually in the position of having close to 100% marginal profit on each sale, so if you can economically go after the three people who see you at Jaghitta, well, then, you’d be a fool not to do the work.

[Yes, I know those graphics don't fit, but there were two choices: make you squint or make it look funny in the template. UI is supposed to help people on a site, not make you squint. I went with easy-to-see.]

And this, my friends, is why the internet rules.

Early this morning I noticed on my RSS Feed that Joost de Valk has posted a cool snippet of code for pinging technorati.

First cool thing: A guy in the Netherlands posts someting on a blog and I pick it up minutes later. All free.

So, being an ex-techie Pointed Hair Boss (PHB) I forward it to one of our technical guys with the perceptive comment: This is cool, how can we use it.

Second cool thing: I sent an email several thousand miles (he was on vacation, heh) and it got there in seconds. Still free.

He throws it into a Apex demo to show me some ideas and copies everyone. Apex comes with the free download of Oracle Express (or whatever they are calling it this week). Still free, keep in mind.

Then someone gets exactly the right idea how to use this in our next product. (That was not free - I’ll hear about it during the next salary review cycle.)

And it is only 10am.

Joost, dude, thanks. I owe you a beer. Not a crappy American beer, but one of those nice Trappist ones with the skeezy stuff in the bottom that makes you sick if you drink a lot of them.

Easy, right? Sure it is, there are lists all over the place. But how many of the lists reference only the working social networking and bookmarking websites?

None of them. Well, none of the big lists. When you get a smaller list, like the Festivus List from Tropical SEO, then those are pretty much guaranteed to be good. (Until link rot sets in, of course.:)

The most excellent blog, Everything 2.0, has a continuously updated list of bookmark sites but quite a few of the things on their list do not actually work.

What do I mean by “work?” Well, in my simplistic universe you have to be able to register, login, and post. I don’t actually require that it work all the time - the smaller sites often seem to run out of bandwidth at the end of the month. Fine. Or the operator goes on vacation (for a month if he’s French) so no stories can get promoted in August. Okey-dokey.

But you have to be able to blip around the non-working sites when you find them without having a lot of sturm-und-drang. You also need to be able to delete them from your daily to-do list when they’ve become more trouble than they’re worth or when they are just down too often.

So you need a looooong list of social sites and you need to keep it fresh.

It does not help when the lists that people put up are not easy to pull down and use. I can grab the list from 3-Spots or Everything 2.0 pretty easily, but take the WatchMouse list of Slow and Inaccessible Social Networking Sites. It’s a freaking jpeg. A jpeg. That is so useless.

Are they trying to protect their IP? I could have a Mechanical Turk type all that in for me for two bucks. I could pay a guy on eLance a fin to create a detailed spreadsheet on each site.

But why make me do that?

We have a solution for you, and I’ll talk about that tomorrow.

Because people will see your stuff? I’m sorry, did you want me to make it more complicated than that?

It is easy to get wrapped around the axle of wanting links that pass Google page rank, but that is really not the be-all/end-all of using social networks to help find people who are interested in what you are doing.

And it doesn’t matter if what you’re doing is commercial or philanthropic or deeply personal - you’d hardly be doing it on the internet if you didn’t want people to see and read all about it.

But this can be an obvious argument when you’re talking about Digg or Reddit or whatever. How about when you’re talking about Dig My Honda? It’s got an astoundingly low page rank, all the stories are internally linked and the link-outs are re-directed. No love to make your Google-strength in the SERPS higher. So ignore it.

Or, maybe not. If you’re selling Honda Mods, then this is the place for you to be active. The trick is to be active there with as little time investment as possible.

I tend to look at the social bookmarking sites like I do a mutual fund. What I want is a good spread of opportunities to intersect with success (customers). If some of them pay a dividend (Google Link Power) then so much the better, but if I only had those sites I’d be under-diversified.

One of the other reasons to lower the cost of using these niche sites is that you might have to put up a lot of quality material over a long period of time before you got enough aggregate traffic to decide if it was even worth a very low investment.

Say it takes six months of bi-weekly posting on Dig My Honda before you get enough click-throughs to calculate a 1% conversion rate. But maybe their average purchase value is 2x the norm of what you get from Google ads. Hmmm, maybe you want to invest in that demand channel.

Or maybe your traffic and conversion rates are invisible but after six months you get one BIG customer who buys a three grand header kit. And that might be a big enough deal so that you’ll keep investing for that semi-annual Blue Bird Buyer.

Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV), but I urge you to think about social networking sites as places where you can invest your time/content and then track your returns.