Aaron Wall

Paul Kedrosky compares financial markets to wildfires, suggesting that an occassional fire might not be so bad

When wildfires burn a landscape, it's not all bad. It cleans out underbrush, helping the next generation of plants and trees emerge. Wildfire is also required by some plants to propagate, like various species of chaparral, whose seed pods only open under the kinds of heat created by wildfires. Those species are, in a sense, fire-adapted.

My wife and I just got back from Kauai. We checked out of the hotel at noon on Saturday and did not fly out until 10:30 PM. To get about $400 off our helicopter tours and other activities we agreed to spend part of that downtime Saturday afternoon going to a timeshare sales presentation.

I am not sure how many people read this site, but worth highlighting how awesome the Microsoft Ad Intelligence plug in is. It offers real time data, and Microsoft has a free $75 adCenter coupon for new advertisers, which I linked to in our post reviewing the sweet extension.

I recently watched the following video by Elizabeth Warren:

I am surprised at how our seox book website has had 3 of the top 10 rankings in Google for seo recently. I would love to get one of them to #1, but that is more of an ego goal than one based on any financial reasoning. :)

I just came across an ad for FlyClear.com, which is a private for profit company designed to help its customers get through the airport quickly. They are a voluntary, self-credentialing, private sector service. And if an airplane blows up because of their service they are probably insured and/or the owners can quickly cash out before the lawsuits strike. I find it fascinating that all of society has (apparently) arbitrary bottlenecks placed on it and then some for profit company can claim to create an alternate route for those who seek it.

This was from a few months back. Cleaning out the inbox, and coming across this gem makes me sooooo happy about changing my business model.

So I got a bit of flack when I changed my tag-line from "a new chapter every day..." to "Learn. Rank. Dominate."

I actually changed it before I changed my business model and people thought I was just being arrogant. I think one problem with the perception of the old brand was that it made it sound like I am always learning and you have to keep learning SEO every day. It perhaps was off putting for some people. Plus the price point and lack of interaction (unless I wanted to answer 4+ hours of email every day) limited how much I could teach people.

What are the odds that one linearized book was perfect for everyone? Not likely. Many people who bought that book probably never read the whole thing. So I broke it into chunks, added multimedia, and put it all online. Suddenly an endless sea of good information turns from overwhelming to a great asset. Increase the price-point to go with the shift and you attract the right kinds of customers who want to dominate. Plus with the increased price-point you have enough time to help each of your customers out one on one.

And if you ever worked in the corporate world, and saw department heads going back and forth, it is no secret that most people at the top of large companies want to crush the competition and dominate their marketplace.

And most people who work independently also want to dominate their market. It wears you down doing everything by yourself, so you really have to want it really bad to stick with it...you have to want to dominate the marketplace.

It starts with learning then ranking, and when you have done a lot of both of those that sets you up for market domination.

I will probably change this site design a bit going forward, but I just installed a new CMS and wanted to see how the site works with it.

User login is disabaled until I figure out what all I want to do with this site. The old blog that was here has moved to enthalpy.net, and of course, my main business blog is still SEO Book.com.