My perception of the Web has changed. I used to think it was full of people like me, ordinary folk, going about their business, finding things that interested them, chatting to friends and acquaintances, but I was wrong. Oh, there may be such people – millions of them – but they don’t really matter. What matters are the eyeballs. The eyeballs float above this solid mass of ordinary people, surging in flocks from one site to another, drawn there by ‘optimised text’, pausing only to graze on the ’5 ways to increase your traffic’, or the ’7 ways to maximise newsletter registrations’. Then they are off again, swarming to another site with tasty ‘keywords’ or juicy ‘anchor text’.
To the Web marketing gurus, the cattlemen (and women) who can herd eyeballs around the Web at will, none of this talk sounds strange. Eyeballs, to these expert manipulators, are like floating voters to the politician, free electrons to the elecctrical engineer, mum and dad investors to the financial advisor. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is their equivalent of election promises, electrical potential, or a glossy prospectus, respectively. Eyeballs are a crop to be harvested.
Why do I care? Because I’m a writer. And that makes be a small businessman. And that makes me a marketer with no budget and only one place to look for customers: the Web. So I’ve been reading lots and lots of Web marketing articles lately. I’ve been learning how to structure my Web presence so as to funnel eyeballs to my main site. I’ve been hearing about how to woo eyeballs with value-added commenting and by taking a ‘genuine interest’ in their lives. All the marketers’ not-so-subtle tricks of language and persuasion, are now mine. I’ve read and absorbed them. My own eyeballs have flitted hither and yon like butterflies, alighting here and there to sip the sweet nectar of marketing wisdom.
“Most of this is just common sense,” the gurus tell you, disarmingly. In fact, most of it is. Most of it, given the uniformity of the message, is probably just what they’ve read on each other’s blogs. The rest is a tiny dollop of personal experience (no-one has been in this game too many years), the ability to drop names (names like ‘Google Blog Search’, ‘Alltop’, and ”TweetMeme’), and a sprinkling of graphs.
Proof that doing nothing clever also produces spikes in site visits
The graphs are an especially nice touch. They don’t actually present real evidence. There is no science behind this. No-one is publishing academic papers on the effect of guest blogging on RSS feed subscriptions. There is no ‘marketing theory’ that generates testable hypotheses that lead to solid facts. What there is is guru A showing a graph of how using a particular search term on one site over a few days last year produced an apparent spike in visits (which, may look impressive, but is statistically meaningless) or guru B showing a graph of how guest blogging on a popular site led to a sudden increase in Twitter followers.
In fact, the graphs reveal something very profound about eyeball herding. The people who do it for a living are the same kind of people who sell soap. Once you’ve absorbed the common sense from the message, you should try to forget the rest. There are some people who can sell soap and there are some people who cannot. If you’re not one of life’s soap salespeople, there is no graph in the universe that will help you become one.
And the point of all this eyeball herding? To get eyeballs to a place, physically and mentally, where the marketer can finally make his sales pitch. If the marketer ‘owns’ enough eyeballs and the pitch will yield a high enough ‘conversion rate’, he or she will, at last, make some money.
So let’s cut to the chase, so I can stop reading all that stuff. What I’m selling is my new novel, TimeSplash, a near-future sci-fi thriller. If you’re an eyeball a lover of great stories, go to the TimeSplash website and sign up so I can tell you when it’s available to buy. No obligation. No pressure. And a free bar of soap with every ten purchases.
Well, thank God that’s over.
Nicely done, Graham! I’ll take my soap in lavender scented, thanks.
Sold! To the lady with the discerning eyeballs!
Soap! Soap he tells me! I’ve researching snake oil!
Damn, more time wasted.
Ah, well, put me down for carton. Shooting across now to the requested site in order to make loud noises demanding a copy of the set text. Perhaps this one will give me the secrets I require (insert fiendish laugh of your own choice)
soap, bloody hell…..
terry
Ha, don’t knock soap, young fella. As a pom who came out to Australia, I was very pleased to discover it when I got here. It tastes a bit funny, but I’m getting used to it.
I unfortunately write SEO articles for a marketing article mill. I’ve gotten so I can read an article and know immediately that it was written for SEO purposes.
1) I can spot the keywords stuffed into it, and because I’m experienced using a keyword percentage calculating program, I can tell when someone has been overzealous and stuffed too many in (search engines don’t approve of that), and when they’ve been too sparse for the search engines to find them.
2) These articles SAY NOTHING. They are merely keyword delivery devices for search engines.
When I search Google for something, because of all this SEO stuff, I now almost never find any genuine information. I find superficial, keyword-stuffed articles designed only so the perpetrator can grab me and yell “BUY! BUY! BUY!” Everything is reduced to money, but there is little human value in any of it. I consider Google, now, to be almost worthless when I really want to learn something.
It may be the case that all these keyword-stuffed articles and posts bring the people on the top few Google listings a pile of money and sales. But with everyone doing it now, most of them are still left on page 30 of Google results.
It seems to me that the real way of disseminating value is still the more personal stuff, rather than all this calculated, contrived fakery. I don’t dismiss SEO entirely, because it does bring some genuinely interested people to a place (I think, cynically, probably by accident). But I didn’t arrive at your blog because I found a keyword, but because of interacting with you on Twitter.
So I think your efforts to find and inform people are a good compromise. And…I believe this turned into a bit of a rant. Gah, sorry!
Hey, don’t stop now, Phyl. I love rants. Especially when I agree with them. I’m particularly glad to hear you (as an insider) say what I’ve always suspected, that with all this SEO going on, the value of Google is severely diminished.
It’s remarkable how many writers – and good ones too – are writing SEO articles as their day job nowadays.
I’m glad you think my strategy has struck some kind of balance between being a human being and being a salesman. As you can probably tell, I’m a bit embarrassed by the whole idea of promoting my book. But, in the spirit of “Don’t eat meat unless you’re willing to look a Spring lamb in the eye and shoot it,” I’m willing to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty. Nevertheless, as with the lamb thing, I’d much rather I had the money to pay someone else to do it.
I hear you, on the “embarrassed to promote” side of things. I even have a hard time promoting my editing services, and it’s what I’m actually trained to do. (Just starting out, in the past year or so.) And then you add the lack of funds, and it does get hard to know exactly how to go about it without sounding like a vulture. And making all your friends and acquaintances hide in a doorway whenever they see you coming down the street. Ha!
Lol. I think the idea is that you give up having friends and acquaintances and just have a ‘network’ of mutual back-scratchers. I know a number of people who seem to think that is an acceptable way to live.
One of my brothers was deeply into the Amway cult for a couple of years. He was a major cautionary tale for me, I tell ya.