Seth Godin says you need to be a "Purple Cow". Chip and Dan Heath teach that "unexpected" ideas stick better. A million other people offer the same advice in a million other ways. If what you're doing is run-of-the-mill, you're headed for run-of-the-mill results.

I'm sure you've heard plenty of times before that to get...
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When I read that today is the 20th anniversary of the Rodney King beating, it brought back a flood of images. First, of course, was the video of the beating on the news.

I lived in San Francisco at the time, so I also remember seeing the broken and boarded up windows downtown after the...
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When an original webpage is outranked by a page that copied its content, the author usually cries foul. At first glance, it seems they're right -- the original source should get the credit for the content. But when you look deeper, it's not nearly so clear cut a question as you might think.

Let's talk...
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Google caused another ruckus online a few days ago when they laid down the law against content mills. Some people are complaining, others are wondering what took 'em so long, and still others are getting nervous, wondering whether their favorite content generation method is going to get Slapped next.

While nobody knows for sure where...
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In the wake of Google's crack down on content farms, which hit EZineArticles hard, EZineArticles has announced that they'll be making all links from articles on the site "nofollow" links (meaning that the links will no longer give any Google SEO benefit to the sites they link to).

This includes links in the articles as...
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Over at Daily Blog Tips today, Daniel Scocco fielded a question today about whether to approve Pingbacks:

The purpose of having trackbacks and pingbacks is to foster conversations among bloggers. By inter-linking the posts that are referencing each other it becomes easier to follow the different opinions and takes on specific issues.

...

I think...
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How many times have you read where some guru said "one of the biggest mistakes I made when I was getting started was to take too long to start outsourcing?" I'm guessing you've heard that several times.

How about "one of my biggest mistakes was waiting too long to start building a list?" You've probably...
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I've spent plenty of time ragging on people who go follower crazy on Twitter, trying all sorts of tricks to amass as many "fauxlowers" as possible, not realizing that none of them are actually listening.

Maybe I was wrong.

A few days ago, Jerry West wrote:

Previously, if Google's algorithm deemed information from friends/family useful...
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If you want to stir up emotion with internet marketers, 5 words are all you need to say: "the customer is always right."

The memory of every customer who ever asked for a refund 10 seconds after downloading the product, of every customer who asked a tech support question that's answered in big bold letters...
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In my "So I Sold to an Axe Murder" post the other day, I wrote:

Some visitors will be looking for solutions to related problems. If you're not slaying the dragon that's standing in front of them, many will leave. But if you can quickly get them to realize that the dragon's brother (one that...
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