If you’re creating good stuff, you don’t need to “market” yourself to a search engine, or fill your site with link bait, or ask others to link to you because you mentioned them in a post, or because “I put you on my site, so you don’t want to be a dick, do you?”

@ryanl The thing is, this stuff *isn’t* hard, provided one thing: you create something worth looking at. If someone is interested in what you do/write/say, like I am with Merlin, they will seek that out regardless of the SEO, social media, web2.0.1 stuff that went into marketing it. A site like Tumblr pops up, I get on that and eventually look for or come across someone like Merlin, and it’s instantly bookmarked. When I am particularly intrigued or have something to contribute, I reblog/comment/etc. I, and people like me, are Merlin’s marketing/SM/SEO junk.

But where folks like Ed come in is when you’re talking about bigger businesses who won’t buy an ad without market surveys first. Or folks who do create good stuff but don’t understand that internet “thing.” And that has value. And I don’t think that guys like Ed are what Merlin has been ripping on.

In the past month, I have had to find manuals online for several items I was going to sell on Craigslist. Between several searches for different products, the top hit has been a site called fixya. com. It’s a horribly designed, useless site that contains no information but does have tons of ads. That site is pure rubbish that gets in the way of me finding what I’m looking for. I think that’s what Merlin is so against.

I think you’re dead right. Shitty chrome has come a long way. I remember back when everyone was on Geocities, “shitty chrome” meant having a “link exchange ring” banner on your site, or having some awful cloud background on your Simpsons site, and an animated-GIF that people could click on to send you an e-mail. Now it’s irrelevant linkbait and links to one’s own A-LIST BLOGGER BOOTCAMP or some shit. And I find that SO much more offensive.

But where most of the arguments fail to hold water with me is that they think that what their doing comes naturally or is somehow common sense to everyone else.

SEO might just be asking for a link when writing a review or testimonial for a vendor, customer. It might be writing up/posting a “how to” article in a subject that your company possesses specialized knowledge.

Social Marketing might just be asking/looking to see your long term customer is on twitter or something as simple as asking your employees to fill out their employer field on facebook. It doesn’t always have to be about a “limited time offer this” or “sign up for my newsletter to receive that” type of stuff.

There is a lot of poor advice out there and for sure. A lot of the crap is thinly veiled get rich quick MLM type scams that puts short term gains above and potentially at the expense of long term viability. But in all that noise there is good signal and todays savvy web users are the ones that can figure out which is which.

If it isn’t too much bother, I’ll leave this link to a John Cleese video presentation that I think fits well with the whole thread of assessing your competency level.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGt3-fxOvug&feature=player_embedded

Around the 9 minute mark is my favorite part of the talk when he says:

“To know how good you are at something requires the same skills that it does to be good at that thing. Which means, if you’re absolutely hopeless at something, you lack exactly the skills that you need to know that you’re absolutely hopeless at it. And this is a profound discovery. That most people who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing, have absolutely no idea that they have no idea what they’re doing.”