High-gain SEO Marketing anyone can do

This logo design blogger is running an excellent example of a contest that anyone can copy and create their own variation of to promote their website. Northern Ireland logo designer David Airey is offering more than $4,000 in prizes in his version of this contest. Contest details here. (Addendum: here's a variation that is also an incredibly effective contest for getting traffic and subscribers.)

He's offering a wide variety of prizes, and giving you entries for linking and/or subscribing (feed) to his website. (I believe if you did this in the U.S., you would have to provide a way for entries to be had without requiring anything of entrants other than providing contact information of some kind.) You get extra entries for linking to prize providers.

In case you don't see how this works, by making the site and contest entry page highly visible, and offering a reward for linking to prize providers, it becomes worth it for many to be a prize provider.

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The Digg/Slashdot Effect 2.0?

Logically, any company that grows too fast is going to have service issues. What does "too fast" mean?

Services that get a lot of press on social media sites (like Digg) often get a ton of new clients rapidly. Call it Flashcrowds 2.0, or the Digg Effect 2.0 --- when a business can't handle the increased load from new clients who heard about them social media and blog sites. Looks like MediaTemple hosting is the latest victim of it. (Flashcrowds on the web are when huge numbers of visitors arrive at a web site in a short time frame.)

They're getting an increasing number of posts from clients complaining about service problems. In several cases, (here and here, for example) the posters who complained and said they would leave have decided to stay on with MediaTemple, but the service problems being documented around the web (scroll down to read the most current posts here) seem to indicate they may have grown far too fast.

The upside for folks searching for hosts is that lots of posters document their experiences, and recommend the best hosts they've found. One that looks good I hadn't heard of before is Deru.

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Will multi-touch change computing?

While the first sales of this system have been to the military, what might this mean for the internet?

I think the number of educational flash-using sites/blogs will skyrocket .. eventually. Flash is great for educational "videos," and blogging has pushed the amount of educational material up tremendously on the web. But flash is too complicated to learn (not to mention expensive) for most people. Even though there are less expensive packages that create flash, alas, they are still too complicated for most people.

If Apple (who else?) one day includes this kind of on-screen intuitive interface, people will start using it to create educational content very widely. (Update: Of course, they have now included it on the iPhone). You could eventually see a kind of YouTube for flash, as average people will be able to create flash content as easy as creating video.

Article, New Video; Original site.

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Can Google leapfrog PayPal and end up a player in the financial markets?

Another "What might Google's future hold?" article.

When I do business development and marketing consulting for businesses, the factor that most often determines what the business will be doing if still successful two years hence is what is their core competency, and what internal barriers to execution are there?

With Google, they have been developing some fascinating core competencies. Take fraud detection. Building on their competency in search, they have developed an advanced and ever-changing click fraud detection system. Will they be able to apply this to their payment processing service, and will it give them an advantage vs. PayPal?

PayPal has been very unpopular during virtually all of its business life. There were a lot of online payment processors starting around the same time, and to win against competition, PayPal concentrated on simplifying it's fraud prevention and recovery. REALLY simplifying. As most people know, PayPal will freeze the accounts of anyone it suspects being even peripherally involved in fraud--meaning you don't have to do anything wrong to have your funds frozen for 6 months.

Sure enough, fraud took out the competition, and PayPal survived their users wrath. (And as far as I can tell, they're handling fraud and angry customers very little different today than they did years ago.) PayPal's core competency was in part willingness to suffer the "PayPalSucks" websites and still hang on to enough dedicated users by getting the features right and growing quickly.

Fast forward some years. Enter Google. In one of their many recent imitations of Microsoft, they are entering a market against a very successful, entrenched player. But they are internally synergistic: Google is rolling out places to spend your money AND providing the payment service. And they excel in managing and delivering features over the internet on a large scale.

But what if their fraud detection is an order of magnitude better than PayPal? Can they turn this into a decisive advantage? If so, I would say yes. A lower cost of fraud means they can lower the cost of merchant services. Then, similar to how I mentioned they might get into the finance world by automating investment, they would be in financial services. And I think they will grow in that area.

The thing about Google is, their expertise is solving problems in real-time and rapidly scaling up delivery of the solution. There has never been a company quite like them. GE's past emphasis on management best practices and execution is the closest parallel I can think of. GE had repeatedly been able to take on an incredible variety of business successfully because of this emphasis on smart execution. And I think Google does them one or two better.

So I'm still predicting that Google will be, one way or another, applying their brainpower VERY successfully in finance before the decade is out. They are working on prediction markets already. There is no more profitable place for Google's digital IQ points to be applied. Taking on PayPal successfully might end being just one more route into Global dominance in the financial markets.

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