The Syndicated Affiliate #4

[2HousePlague]

Part 4: Making the Money

Affiliates can make money with RSS and Blogs in two complimentary ways:

1. Use feeds provided by others to increase the value of your own sites, and

2. Provide feeds of value, so that others will use them and reward you with Attribution Traffic.

The recommended strategy is a combination of the two. To succeed, both with the Search Engines and the Surfers, the requirement is to be different. It is almost more important to be different than anything else. Uniqueness will be favored by the Search Engines whose job it is to catalog everything that has not yet been cataloged, and it will also serve you well with jaded surfers suffering from I've-seen-it-all-itis.

Given the nature of RSS, which is essentially mass reproduction, you're likely wondering how this technology could possibly be conducive to Uniqueness. Since appealing to the tastes of the surfer is a subjective matter, influenced by many variables, it would not be very useful, I think, to try to give you broad, conditional recommendations. Instead, I'm going to focus on how to appeal to the Search Engines using RSS to create Unique pages and sites. You should not be surprised to discover that the results are also appealing to your surfers.

During the last few months I have spent hundreds of hours researching Google's treatment of images in Image Search. The experience gave me broader insight into the intelligence of the Spider, how it thinks, what it needs and so forth.

I think many people who've tried to tackle page rank and image rank as problems, have struggled without any success for imagining subjectivity and biases in the Spider that are simply not there -- could not be there.

The Spider just wants to know what things are. If you help it do that, it likes you. If you offer nothing new, it ignores you. If you try to deceive it, it punishes you. These are not moral judgements, only the requirements of its programming.

To understand how to use RSS in your own pages and sites, let's focus on the challenge "How to teach an Old Spider new tricks".

In the movie Starman, Jeff Bridges did a great job with a difficult performance...

The performance stood out as exceptional to me because Bridges chose to make the "alien's" defining characteristic not malevolence or superiority, or something psychologically complicated like existential ennui, but simply -- ignorance. It was, of course, not an ignorance bourne out of stupidity. Bridge's alien was ignorant because he had not yet been taught. I think we humans flatter ourselves that our type of intelligence is somehow connected to absolute intelligence -- it's not, and we think so to our discredit.

I realized that the Spider was -- in spite of having been on the job for a number of years -- still largely ignorant of the things we want it (that Sergey and Larry must want it) to know. And, given that, the problem reduces to "How to teach the Spider" -- and teach the Spider is exactly what all of you must do on your pages and sites.

Let me explain how and why using RSS feeds does that much better than even 100% original content of the highest quality.

The Spider's intelligence is, unlike our own, entirely relational. It can only compare the current data set to "history" and act on it according to instructions. Its inferential capabilities are very limited. For that reason, the fastest way to teach it is not by introducing it to things it has never encountered (though I did do that a few times -- lol), but by using what it already knows as a basis, and as much of that as possible, and adding only a tiny amount of novelty.

I realize that is terribly abstract and not very useful to a Webmaster intent on creating a site. But the underlying principle is so important, I think it will pay to understand it well. So here it is in boldface...

RSS feeds create multiple iterations of the same data. Assume the Spider has seen it before he reads it on your page. Add a little something the Spider doesn't know (about that same data), and the Spider will be happy.

A GREAT NEW RESOURCE FOR AFFILIATES plus SPECIFIC METHODS DESCRIBED

2hp
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[Spider Ninja]

Would this "a little something" perhaps be randomizing the text a bit?
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http://www.spiderninja.com/

[2HousePlague]

[Spider Ninja]

Hi 2HousePlague,

I missed the link to SexyAds when I first posted.

You have a lot of interesting ideas here...I'll have to start reading through your site more. I like this idea of the spider as relational with limited or no inferential capabilities. Also "multiple iterations of the same data" is so true. It all boils down to the logic of the machine which, even if programmed by humans, is still rules-based.

Getting back to SexyAds, it looks great. The cutting edge is all the new ways computers interact with computers and people with people using the computer as a medium. Fun stuff ;-)
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http://www.spiderninja.com/

[2HousePlague]

[Spider Ninja]

Hi 2hp,

http://seotica.com/ is very cool...I especially like the photo in THE DEFINARIUM and the writings in COLORING BLOG. I have this feeling there are some cryptic SEO messages hidden in seotica, but I didn't catch them.

Hey, thank you about the scripts. Drop me a line if you want any of them to run for yourself, I love to bribe people I meet on the net ;-)

Steve
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http://www.spiderninja.com/

[2HousePlague]

[Spider Ninja]

wow 2hp, you got a maze set up on the web! I'll have to give myself a few hours one day to go through it all and try to catch the meaning.

Sorry...I absolutely failed trying to post to a moderated blog and choose an unmoderated blog instead...so I took the file down and sent it to your profitlabinc.com email
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http://www.spiderninja.com/

[2HousePlague]

[Spider Ninja]

sunnyside/woodside right next to the elevated 7 train and 15 minutes to NYC ;-)

got to read more from this forum, sorry bro...too many projects going on right now

- Steve
_________________
http://www.spiderninja.com/

[2HousePlague]

[Spider Ninja]

[2HousePlague]

[Spider Ninja]

[2HousePlague]