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Alan Rimm-Kaufman

Unpurple Cows: On Paying For Posts, For Links, For Buzz

Yet another solid Joel Spolsky essay, this time on bloggers accepting gifts. Recommended. One word summary of Joel’s essay? “Unethical.”

Paying for posts is inappropriate, and the FTC agrees. Link-building contests — for example, John Chow’s “review my blog and possibly win a MiniTV USB” — also rubs me the wrong way. (I have no qualms with link games like hat-bait, the z-list, and blog tag.)

Call me old fashioned, but I agree with Seth Godin’s purple cow thesis: the right way to capture attention, mindshare, ink, pixels, word-of-mouth, buzz, links, and general PR love is by having a remarkable product or service. A hundred times harder than writing checks or running games or linking tricks, yes. But, at day’s end, this is really the only way.

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  • Gab Goldenberg: Been reading your posts and George's and other RKG ones for a while Alan, and this both looks like fun and a very nice initiative!...
  • Alan Rimm-Kaufman: Terry -- Thanks for catching the smart quote problem -- Fixed above now, hopefully -- Cheers -- Alan
  • Msn Avatarları: very good, thank you..
  • Terry: OK, your website changes straight double quotes to smart quotes, so my post doesn't look right. Just replace the quotes in your formula in...
  • Terry: 13. Tom, February 22, 2008: "When I do row B, it gives an “The formula contains unrecognized text”… And so when I paste the values,...
  • uttoransen: hi, nice article! actually it always the ROI that matters, is the sales are ok with the seo expense then it's always worth the service.
  • consultoria: RSS is one of the most amazing tools I've found in my programming career, it’s just amazing how this little XML file can create huge...
  • consultoria: It’s kind of hard to find a patterned way of creating good posts, I think experience, knowing trends, using viral and social roads...
  • Wadzie Kay: http://jott.com/default.aspx Does the above link still work,i desperately need software to transcribe words to text. I hope you will be...
  • Router Bench: So what happened? I am curious...
  • Alan Rimm-Kaufman: Yes, a dash of sensationalism can help, but going too far and writing titles only for link-baiting value doesn't feel good to...
  • Stephen Schramke: Definitely thought provoking... lots of grains of truth. Thanks for sharing!
  • Router Bench: Ahh so, Ok I get it. But don't you think that titles that are self aggrandizing or exaggerate the subject can also be more effective....
  • Alan Rimm-Kaufman: Most important words first. Not unlike optimizing a HTML TITLE tag for SEO.
  • Router Bench: Here is where I decided to be a little different, I use a few different plugins starting with Aksimet to allow me to moderate first...

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