ThoughtThought

It’s weird, I’ve been following Calacanis since the late 90s when I was an HTML monkey for one of New York’s hip web agencies and Calacanis was just starting out with the infamous SAR — the silicon alley reporter (site is now offline). Back then we were on the same page, although then as now he is fantastically richer and more successful than me. He was an A-list we celebrity long before the term ‘SEO Rockstar’ existed.

But I don’t get where he’s at with this anti-SEO, anti-Affiliate Marketing crusade, whose wrath he has turned on Squidoo. Seth Godin, he says, is now a ‘Dark Sith Lord of SEO”. He’s obsessed with the idea that the internet (and its SERPs and social media sites, in particular) is spam-ridden by these two disciplines. But it’s not: it’s *advertisement* ridden, by just about everybody, just like all other media. Except in the internet-realm advertising is democratic, with a low entry fee for all comers. To go after Godin’s Squidoo for the proliferation of “spam” (SEO-savvy content) is just silly, because Squidoo actually enourages this kind of content and certainly doesn’t object to your lense making money, in any case. Why should it?

Why not just come out and re-chant the mantra: ‘Mahalo is an moderated platform and Squidoo is not, and therefore Mahalo is better” ? I bet that’s really the point he wants to make.

But what really amuses me about Calacanis post is the phrase: “SEO problem”, because SEO by itself cannot be a problem. Now I’m not an SEO or an Affiliate Marketer — I’ve always taken the coward’s 9-5 path working for web agencies mostly, so I don’t have much of a dog in this fight. I have a little dog in the fight, though, since I am a project manager who sets up his clients with CRM/CMS software that is meant to generate effective, SEO-savvy websites. I’m basically obligated to ensure SEO best practices each time one of my client launches a website using this software. There are tens of thousands of web workers like me earning their daily bread implementing other people’s web and email campaigns. We’re not necessarily SEO specialists, but we understand that SEO is now a basic requirement. And I think Calacanis must be aware of this — which makes the stubborn-ness of his position all the more suspect.

You think he’d know that Affiliate Marketing is not MLM. You think he’d know that PPC engines reward relevance, not trickery. You think he’d know that if Affiliate Marketing were entirely based on deception, it wouldn’t be such a growing industry. You think he’d know that while some affiliate links might be hidden with Javascript, that doesn’t mean they harm the user. They don’t install malware on your machine, and they don’t give your credit card number to the Russian mafia, and they don’t even waste your time — on the contrary, they save time by connecting you to what you want in a way that a search engine by itself cannot.

If Calacanis and his ilk took a closer look they would realize that professional Affiliate Marketing is basically nothing more than a system for businesses to outsource the online marketing of their goods and services. What’s wrong with that?

Bad apples? Sure. There are still MFA sites, there are numerous sales-letter type sites, which is a mixed bag actually — some are good –, and there are poorly constructed affiliate landing pages that run on deception, or just aren’t relevant to their PPC ad. On top of that there are nasty automated spamming campaigns of all varieties that may be utilized by Affiliate Marketers (among others). But by and large what we seem to be dealing with are informative, straightforward sites that deal with facts, useful comparisons, and anecdotal evidence. Granted the last may be contrived at times, but facts are facts and that’s the lynchpin of a good affiliate marketing site. I’m just getting this now with the landing pages I’m toying with: the more straightforward and fact-rich your user’s experience is, the more likely she is to convert. Just the facts please, as Jeffrey Fox says in one of his many great books. Calacanis is many steps away from getting this.

He recently had Greywolf, Andy Beal, and some other SEOs and Affiliate Marketers on one of this Calacanis-casts. He was able to converse more or less civilly (until the last two minutes), but he wasn’t making any effort to comprehend their business. His lack of comprehension of SEO in particular accounts for his inability to counter the charge made by Greywolf that Maholo is in and of itself a massive SEO site. Just as enterprising web publishers, AKA “professional SEOs”, hire Filipinos to write an entire page of content for $10 bucks, Maholo pays, well, $10, for a page of content (search results). Just as professional SEOs then run massive Adsense, Mahalo also runs massive Adsense (see screenshot).

New definition of MFA: “Mahalo for Adsense”?

Despite the fact that he runs Adsense on Mahalo, however, I think his gripe against Spam in its myriad forms is legitimate, and I like the anti-spam concept behind Mahalo, if not the Authoritarian/cheap-wage approach to creating it. But I still need to understand his vehement refusal to understand SEO and Affiliate Marketing.

I think he resents being a late-comer to these two disciplines (which are quite distinct). Or maybe he just likes to subtly rub it in everyone’s face that he didn’t need to master them to sell his blogs for 25 million. Or maybe he resents the democratic nature of Affiliate Marketing in particular — that you don’t need to be a dotcom vet, a Silicon Alley entrepreneur, or an Ivy league grad to find success. In Affiliate Marketing, creativity counts more than what Kennedy you’re related to. Anyone with $1000 bucks on their credit card can take a shot. Maybe he doesn’t want the Internet to be that democratic?

I really don’t know, but this is a fact: SEO and Affiliate Marketing are legitimate business disciplines and they are here to stay. I know I had to swallow my pride and accept that I had dismissed, and missed, the boat, despite my many years in the industry. But that’s the beauty of willful ignorance of the kind that Calacanis wallows in: not hard to undo.

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