How many times have you heard these excuses:

• “He just got lucky”
• “She just happened to be at the right place at the right time”
• “It’s easy when you have their talent”

I have exactly two words for that: Bull Shit.

Success without repeated and continuing failure is simply a myth. If you want to succeed, start by failing faster. And keep doing it. Just so long as you don’t fail the same way twice, you can’t help but learn something in the process. In time, you won’t be able to avoid success. Sooner or later you’ll learn so much that you start failing to fail. Get bad enough at failing and folks will start calling you lucky.

This little rant was inspired by a clip for Nike by Michael Jordan. We should all be so “lucky”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45mMioJ5szc&feature=youtu.be

“A man can fail a million times, but is not a failure until he blames others.”

In the coaching program that Dan Thies and I run together (The SEO BrainTrust) we answer several dozen questions a week between our 90 minute Q&A calls and our Platinum Member Podcasts. In a year we should answer a thousand questions between us and we’ve been teaching this stuff for 10 years — 10,000 questions .

A few days back I had a chance to explain how it is we do that. In the answer is a lesson not just about SEO, but learning in general.

Consider these questions:

• “For an affiliate link that I cloak on my domain in the .htaccess file, should I nofollow that link or do I not need to because the link is on my own domain?”
• “I use a tracking code on my banner ads. Do these links still provide ranking benefits to my site?”
• “Does leaving off the trailing ‘/’ on my domain name make a difference?”
• “I want to link into the middle of a page (using an anchor like /page.html#bookmark). Does this link pass PageRank to the page?”

All good questions, and all seemingly different, until you understand how URLs work and then all these questions are really just variations of a single issue.

Questions are much like the leaves of a tree. Taken alone, they are numerous and seemingly not related, but when you focus instead on the branches, whole groups of leaves are seen to be connected.

Technical topics — SEO included — are rich with this “deep structure” where a relatively smaller number of core concepts give rise to many hundreds or thousands of observable phenomenon. By coming to understand the reasons why things work the way they do, future questions can be fit into already understood areas — new leaves placed on already discovered branches. It is this degree of understanding that constitutes real mastery.

In just a few days, Frank is coming out with the mother of all list building courses — List Control. This will be a fantastic product. Why? Anyone can build a list — all that takes is an opt-in form. What separates Frank from everyone else is how he builds a relationship to the people on his list. Approaching your list as people, not just email addresses, changes everything.

As part of the promotion, Frank is giving away “4 Day Cash Machine”. I bought this as part of Mass Control and have actually used it once or twice. It works. If you have any list at all, here’s a plan: get this freebie; use it; spend (some of) the money you make to buy List Control.

Here’s my completely undisguised affiliate link to get 4 day cash machine. Enjoy.

https://smithkern.infusionsoft.com/go/4daycash/a812/

American football is a frankly brutish game mirroring in a general sense the foreign policy most of our presidents project — but I digress — it also has something to teach us about SEO, which I’ll try to confine myself to for the rest of this post.

I do not follow this game, or any game where I am mere spectator, but an upbringing in “the states” leads unavoidably to some amount of exposure to the sport and there is one really common football metaphor used in business that describes SEO as well.

There are essentially two ways to take the ball down field — running and passing. In regards passing there are two variants, the short distance (screen) pass and “the long bomb”.

The long bomb is the quintessential “silver bullet” — in one play you move dozens of yards, and in the perfect scenario, pitch it straight into the end-zone for a score. Almost everyone in the Internet Marketing space is looking for the long bomb … and to mix metaphors … that’s what they usually get: a bomb!

Because the long bomb is a hard thing to get right. It takes protecting the quarterback longer than it seems should be possible, a receiver that is not completely covered by a defender, exquisite aim and a perfect catch. If you miss, you have gained nothing and lost a “down” or worse still you could be intercepted and find yourself now playing defense. Not a happy set of alternatives

The running game by contrast is slow, hard, dirty work. The expression used is “four yards and a cloud of dust” — a reference to the yardage you have to gain to be awarded the privilege of doing it all over again. Oh joy! Yet another beating and more AstroTurf burns.

The ground game is ugly and brutal and will kill you if you do it enough but it is far more certain than passing. Where the bomb is one of finesse, the running game is one of brute force against force. You just “grind it out”. Nobody in the IM space is interested in grinding it out … but the bald truth of the matter is this: grinding it out is really the ONLY game in SEO. The long bomb is just a bomb.

Football players get paid millions of dollars a year to do a job that, despite the surface celebrity appeal, is an ugly, painful job. Their pay first reflects the willingness and ability to do what most people would not consider doing and second the enormous entertainment marketplace that they serve. What football players do is “create content”.

Just as sure as your content on the web attracts search traffic to your offers, the drama of football attracts eyeballs to TV screens. So anytime you find yourself complaining about building more content, make a picture of a running back getting his knee injected with Cortizone so he can finish the game. Writing seems suddenly much less painful.

Grind it out. Every 4 yards is one down closer to goal and all you have to do to win is to keep playing the game.

Katy (killerbunny600) is regaling me with tales of Drop Bears and Hoop Snakes, dangerous animals of the Australian Bush.

Drop bears have these really sharp fangs and hang around in trees to drop on top of your head when you walk underneath. Hoop Snakes don’t seem quite so bad as the worse thing with them is they bite their own tail, forming a hoop, so they can be rolled around for hours of entertainment.

Oh, okay, I get it. Turns out that in point of fact these beasts are actually of the mythical variety — danger averted.

In other local news… voting in this (otherwise) fine country is actually required and you will be fined if you do not. Wow. We now return you to your regularly scheduled SEO content.

The panel presentation at Ed Dale’s seminar today covers Third Tribe, an interesting and evolving experiment in finding “middle ground” between the two extremes of blogging — running a personal diary as a labor of love and (the alternative) using blogging as purely a business.

In many settings, making money using a blog is considered “evil” and a violation of what some consider the purity of blogging. Even in the best case, you can be way off message if you find yourself in the other sort of blogging community.

Darren Rowse, who founded Third Tribe, started blogging as a labor of love but does make money on it and has even been the inspiration for other bloggers to do precisely that.

Lynn Terry, who Ed tells us “doesn’t open her mouth unless she get’s paid”, does indeed run her blog as a money making concern in the niche affiliate marketing space and uses blogging to build a community within a market.

Yaro Starak admits to having “crossed over to the dark side” from having started blogging as just a love and today finds that he can make money and get to blog too — the best of both words.

James Schramko, humorously presented for the purpose of stage theater as the face of evil blogging, started out in blogging with the intent to make money but joined Third Tribe and finds that it describes his position on blogging precisely. He characterizes the difference in the various communities of bloggers in terms of “how far” down the hard-selling road they go. Not everybody making money with a blog is using the full-on, in your face selling tactics that many folks outside the I.M. space presume that we all use.

Lynn finally brings up the Elephant in the room — “who are these bloggers who do not want to make money?”

Darren tries to offer up the answer but admits that he really doesn’t get it either.

I wonder … Could it be that asking this question in a room full of people that paid a grand to get there is not the right place to find the answer?

Yaro points out that Third Tribe in some sense is a clever branding move that allows people to have a tribe that makes money without being in “the evil tribe”.

Lynn Terry is presenting at Ed Dale’s Coming Home 2 conference this week as am I, so just for kicks, and for our many follows that will not make it down-under, we jumped on the phone earlier today to chat about what we were talking about come Friday.

This naturally went well astray into all things affiliate marketing and SEO, so you’re bound to find something of interest somewhere in the 56 minutes we spent together. Hope you enjoy.

Lynn Terry Interview

And for those of you who will be joining us in Melbourne — see you there! Ed has a rather fantastic lineup planned.

A couple nights ago I had the pleasure of talking with David Jenyns, a native of Australia, about my upcoming presentation at Ed Dale’s “Coming Home 2″ event. Turns out David has followed me for some years — I’ll let him tell you the small world connection there — so we’ll have loads to catch up on when I meet David in person next week.

The sound quality on this 55 minute call is truly superb and the questions and content are paced just beautifully. Hat tip to David for marshaling a great interview.

Some of the high points covered include:

• Best bang for the buck in link building
• Single biggest ranking factor
• Most serious mistake people make in search

Catch the entire interview over at David’s site:

Interview with David Jenyns

It’s official … sorta … I am no longer a faculty member of StomperNet … keep reading.

Depending on who you ask, this will result in some combination of congratulations, condolences, condescension, cacophony, cat calls, cussing or other c-words befitting of my long held c-level position with the web’s best known Internet Marketing Education conglomerate (ok, ok, I’ll stop with the c-words already).

But wait … official how you ask? The sales letter of course! Live 9 Lineup. Duh. I’ll admit that I have a mixture of feelings about leaving … but my accountant doesn’t.

So what now? Well, it’s not like I was exactly on vacation all this time. In case you missed the memo, Dan Thies and I have been happily running our own mid-6 figure business since October doing pretty much what we did at StomperNet for the last 3 years — just better, thanks to less help.

So what about Live9? We’ll see. I do live in Atlanta after all. I have spoken at every single Live event — in fact, I am the one in December 2006 that came up with the name, but I digress — so the habit to at least attend might be too strong to resist. And it is at the W Hotel Midtown which is hard enough to resist anyway. Sigh.

But the real treat of the Live events for me (and Dan too I’m pretty sure he’ll agree) has always been mentoring and networking with the literally hundreds of Internet Entrepreneurs it has been our blessing to be involved with in the last three (plus) years.

You know who you are. We know you too. Many of you have joined us in The SEO BrainTrust. Everyone else … please stay in touch.

It has been a weird and wild ride and if there is one thing that sticks out as a recurring impression since November 2006 when I shook hands with Brad and Andy it is this: “The question”. The one everyone asks at some point: “Why in the hell are you doing this?”

Good question. Took me months to form the answer.

There are many easier ways to make money than running a coaching program — you could argue they all are! Ultimately the only reason is people. Yes, it is hard to believe that someone as irascible (look it up) as me might also be gregarious, but that is my curse. The only good reason to coach is because you care about the impact you have on people. In all other respects, affiliate marketing is a better play.

So Dan and I, the first two StomperNet faculty members, continue doing what we were doing before, during and after StomperNet, for the same reasons, with many of the same people, and many more each day. The one constant is who we are.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.