The Most Important Marketing Lesson You’ll Ever Learn: Roll Your Own
Today we’re going to discuss a philosophy that is repeated throughout the halls of syndk8, and other blackhat forums everywhere. It applies to blackhats, whitehats, grayhats, and every other hat you can imagine.
It is a philosophy called “Roll Your Own”
Now, we’re not talking about marijuana, cigarettes, or cigars. We’re talking about software, ideas, concepts, and everything else related to this job we all so love.
If you read nothing else in this entry, read the introduction, and the conclusion. They are probably the most important lessons you could take away from any post I have ever made here.
Introduction
True SEO skill will not be gained at a conference, on a blog, at a conference, on a forum, or for the love of god not in an e-book(although SEOBook is a good starter in SEO, 99% of ebooks are utter shit).
Real SEO skill is gotten by absorbing what you can through those better than yourself, truly learning the thought processes behind it, and making it your own. No one ever got rich by doing the same thing as everyone else. It’s all originality, quick thinking, and staying one mental leap ahead of that guy everyone else is copying. Don’t go looking for someone to hand you success on a silver platter; it’s not going to happen.
Why I Run My Blog the Way I Do
You’ll notice on this blog, I rarely give out complete code samples or full tools. There is a reason for this. I want my readership to grow. Not in numbers, but in skill. If I hand you tools, and hand you code, it’s as if I’m handing you the answers to a math test you have to take. It’s easy, yes. But do you really gain anything from it? You gain a little. A grade, or a tool to use. But 6 months from now, that will be inconsequential. If, on the other hand, I can show you the concepts behind the tool or strategy, and you play with it, create, and make your own, you have gained infinitely more.
Why Else Is Rolling Your Own That Much Better?
- If Software is Publicly Released, Then the Playing Field Becomes Level
You do not want a level playing field. You want to have the upper hand. There are very few pieces of software ever worth buying for this reason. SEO is a smaller world than you would think. Any market gets saturated, and does so quickly. Beyond that, anyone who can come up with truly innovative software is probably smart enough to realize they can make more by using it, rather than selling it for $10 on DigitalPoint. There are few exceptions.- To this day, the only SEO software I have personally purchased was XRumer.
- The only other software I would consider purchasing is SpiderSpy, by Fantomaster.
- The only other software in my library that I did not write myself, I got for free so that I could review it. It’s quite good, you’ll be hearing about it soon.
- But even as I have these pieces of software, I do not look at them as a solution to a problem. I look at them as research into a problem. XRumer is fantastic. It taught me what a true link spammer looks like. It can break captchas like I will probably never be able. But I’m building off this knowledge, making it my own. For the software I’m reviewing? It’s teaching me too. And soon I will make it better.
- The Market Evolves, Will Your Ideas and Software?
- Software – Every piece of SEO software, especially blackhat software, will become outdated. It will get filtered, and become useless. How sure are you that the author of your software will keep it up to date? What if there’s nothing he can do? Do you have access to the code?
- Ideas – By the time you hear about something on a forum or a blog[excepting my own, of course], chances are that it’s already on it’s way out. MySpace spam is a prime example. And guess what? It evolved. A few evolved with it. THESE were the people who got their ideas from themselves, and not an e-book. They may have heard about it on a forum or something, but I guarantee you they did not follow the so-called “guru’s” steps exactly as he put them out there. They made it better. They decided they were going to try and put that guru out of business.
- In SEO, All Concepts are Inter-Related
- In SEO, there are is a web of logical concepts. Understanding one gives way to another. Once you understand anchor text, you start to understand more about duplicate content filters and link velocity. Once you understand link spamming, you understand link periodocity, and high quality vs. low quality links. Once you start to understand Blogging, you begin to understand viral marketing and social news. Once you understand those, how blog farms function begins to become more apparent.
Everything is related. And skipping over one of those because you had some software pre-made for you creates a gap that makes it impossible to grasp later concepts that are essential to put you over the edge. - A good real life example of this was made clear to me awhile ago by 5ubliminal. When I began programming, I was in the 5th grade or so and attempting to learn exclusively from books. No Php.net function list. No Java API. Just books. And you know what? I honestly never learned Regular Expressions until recently. Because I took the easy way out, and did not rely on my own curiosity and intuition enough, I had a gaping hole in my knowledge.
Should I have read those books? Yes. In the same way I hope you continue reading this blog. But I should’ve allowed myself to explore and experiment more, not binding myself to them.
- In SEO, there are is a web of logical concepts. Understanding one gives way to another. Once you understand anchor text, you start to understand more about duplicate content filters and link velocity. Once you understand link spamming, you understand link periodocity, and high quality vs. low quality links. Once you start to understand Blogging, you begin to understand viral marketing and social news. Once you understand those, how blog farms function begins to become more apparent.
So No One Gets The Wrong Idea
I’m going to restate something. I’m not saying to abandon blogs and forums. In fact, the opposite. Absorb all they have to offer. If it weren’t for folks like Earl Grey, bompa, hippy, ian, fantomaster, and dozens of other people, I would not be anywhere at all today. I’m not going to lie; those guys held my hand for a lot of this.
What I am saying is that you should never take something at face value. When you see a blog post or a forum post you love, think about it. How Can I Make This Better? How Can I do It Cheaper? Faster? More Aggresively? What makes this work, and where else can I replicate this effect?
When you see a piece of software you want to buy, or have bought, once again think about it. What are the possible drawbacks to this software? How Can I fix this? What can I do that will set me apart from everyone else? Can the basic concept of this software be replicated elsewhere?
Respectfully Yours,
XMCP
January 18th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Zackly! I feel the same way, which is why I value your blog. And if I ever start a blog it will have a similar philosophy.
January 18th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
ALL YOUR BLOG ARE BELONG TO US! XRUMER, BUT I FORGOT THE URL.
January 18th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Seriously, my experience is that ever site every niche is unique.
I’ve developed some sites where I can send e-mails to college professors and have a 80% success rate of not just getting a link, but actually replacing a link to my top competitor.
Then there’s other sites that nobody would link to in their right mind — and you have to use other means.
This goes triple for social media. Site X might do really great on social media service Y, but fall flat on service Z, where site W is a big hit. You gotta discover what works for you.
January 18th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Thankfully, you don’t bogart your
jointser ah I mean your information. Great post!January 18th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
I want to write a SERP tool, as I haven’t found one that really does what I need. Any suggestions on programming resources? Building applications that work with your own regular data and buildings apps that work with other peoples irregular data is a bit different.
January 18th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
“Roll your own”, don’t expect anything on a silver platter – everybody keeps saying that and yes, I get it.
What I don’t like about this is that it seems very inefficient overall. Everybody invents their own bicycle. And since all “blueprints” are kept secret, most people are likely to end up with mediocre bicycles, because they have few resources to learn from.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that everybody should publicly give away their “latest & greatest” tools. Though getting answers to simple, beginner to medium-level questions, would be nice.
In particular, I’ve noticed that at the syndk8 forum most responses are of the “do/research it yourself” type even when the question itself could be answered in three sentences.
[/rant]
January 18th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
@Paul: What kind of SERP tool are you looking to build? What you need varies a lot depending on that.
@W-Shadow: It is inefficient. But the thing is, when everyone has to work from scratch, everyone gets a unique product. In a world where Google is constantly trying to nail BH sites, that variety is worth more than high quality that they would eventually bust, and bring everyone down with it.
As for syndk8, it has become jaded by newbie questions. Here’s a tip. Don’t ask general questions. Don’t ask “How Do I Make a Blog Farm?” Say “I understand XYZ about blog farms, but I’m not quite sure about ABC? Is this a risk?”
And it helps if you’ve been around a bit, at least TRYING to contribute.
Oh yeah, and don’t ask for code or software.
It’s a tricky place to socialize in, but it grows on you.
January 18th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Completely agree about “rolling your own”. That really is the only way of gaining the knowledge you need.
The problem is trying to use your time efficiently as well though. You can waste alot of time pointlessly refining code without any real benefit.
Sometimes it quicker, easier to get the job done by downloading a script and modifying it.
So it can be hard to know in the long term though which is the best approach.
Sometimes a minor insignificant detail can pay off big time on something that would otherwise have been a waste of time.
January 18th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
@jabber, I’d say it’s more like you can’t expect other people to do your thinking for you.
The other day I figured out a simple and effective way to get a lot of traffic from a certain social news site. There are a lot of other articles that talk about the same site that describe methods that almost work, but this one works.
Am I going to tell you about it? No. The web is going to be choked by other people doing the same thing soon enough.
One site is going to get the #1 position for any keyword. You’re gonna be #2 at best if you’re just a follower.
January 18th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
It’s pretty basic.
1. Load SERP results for Keyword1 on SearchEngine1. We’re looking for WebsiteA. Look until page 5 if needed. Stop when found. Mark the position of the keyword on in the database. While on page one scrape the links for the top10 (maybe PPC links as well). Archive for step three. Repeat for each of the big three.
2. Plot out a chart of the past 30+/- days showing the rise and fall of position (with one being the top spot, 50 being the bottom). Google is the green line, msn is the blue line, yahoo is the red line. Overall (black line) is 60% Google, 30% Yahoo, 10% MSN.
3. At the bottom display a list of results from the top ten, with number of days they’ve been there. 14+ black, 3-14 yellow, under 3 red. This alerts us to new pages (check links) and so on. Organize them by the the overall system (1 on Google 6 points, 1 on Yahoo 3 points, 1 on MSN 1 point, and each position down is 10% less). Show everyone who has appeared in the last 30 days.
I know how to build the app with regular data, but I’m a bit fuzzy on the scraping of the data and putting it in to a database. Sorry for this being way off topic (or maybe way on topic). I’ve programmed plenty of web apps, but never one pulling data from someone else’s site. I have more detail than this in mind, but this gives you the idea.
January 18th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
@Paul: Search around here(the search is at the bottom of the page) for Google Rank Checker Script.
It does the scraping for Google at least. You can probably modify it to fit yahoo/msn.
However, make sure your host allows external file_get_contents calls, or it won’t work (you’d have to switch it over to curl)
January 18th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
My box, root access, no problems there. Thanks for the pointer, I’ll check it out.
January 18th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Paul 1.0:
you may want to take a look at
http://www.tellinya.com/read/2008/01/08/276.html
5ubliminal’s blog (a blog I found through someone that was mentioned on this site)
it should give you a pretty solid idea how to scrap content– obviously it isn’t a perfect match for what you need but I think it will help you get the wheels turning
January 18th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Ah, very nice. Thanks Paul 2.0. I didn’t spot the Google rank checker script in the search, but I’ve got a few toys to work with here. Too many projects not enough time.
January 18th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Hi Sli,
I just wanted to congratulate you on the blog. I’ve been looking for a good seo blog for a while now to fill the gap TW.org left.
Love the work keep it up.
If you ever want a job …….
January 18th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Is Paul and Paul 2.0 like Web and Web 2.0?
PS: I miss Web 0.0!
January 18th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
I remember back when I was lucky to get three e-mails a week, and all of them were from people I knew. Meeting friends of friends on PowWow back in the days. Those were the days. Everything is a hell of a lot cooler now, but I miss the community feel that you used to get everywhere.
January 19th, 2008 at 10:42 am
Great post mate, one of my favourites from you so far!
January 19th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
what are the most common languages that people build their apps with?
January 19th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
@BHMonkey:
For in-site code and registration/posting bots[small scale], PHP is by far the most common.
For external code(scraping, larger scale posting, database insertion,etc) many people use C++. My personal preference however is for Java.
January 19th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Learning and research is just a part of planning and laying out a strategy – they’re the tip of the iceberg – the end game is using what you know (and what you “think” you know) to creating something out of nothing.
I have never bought a single piece of software for online marketing; everything is home grown and when I build tools that I use 10 times a day, I know I built something good.
January 19th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
@HalfDeck: Very true points. Just all too many people think that money grows on e-books and crappy directory submissions.
January 19th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
Shady, I have to disagree with you here. This email I got today is proof that you’re wrong. From “rankranker@gmail.com”
” Date: 1/20/2008
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[Link removed]
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[link removed]
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SEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE? TOldja so
.
January 19th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
@Gab
Damn bro, why have I been wasting my time listening to these guys. I need to get me some of that RankRanker action! ;P
January 20th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
“Real SEO skill is gotten by absorbing what you can through those better than yourself, truly learning the thought processes behind it, and making it your own” <– Damm Straight!
Dude – really enjoyed this post – its the people like you I “sponge” off
January 20th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Great, great point. That’s the deal with SEO and the information that we obtain to do it – there are so many perspectives that each “tip” or “way of doing” seems to be a mere opinion. The most important point you make is to put your two cents in with every new SEO discovery you find — always basing it on what you already know and basing it on the unique needs of the site you’re optimizing for. That is always a challenge for me – customizing a marketing plan specifically for a certain site.