Are you doing this with your blog? If not, why not?

(Yes, I’m aware of the irony here, as obviously I haven’t done it either. Kick in the pants duly received and accepted.)

Ferriss:

“Is more distribution automatically better? No. Uncontrolled distribution leads to all manner of head-ache and profit-bleeding, most often related to rogue discounters. Reseller A lowers pricing to compete with online discounter B, and the price cutting continues until neither is making sufficient profit on the product and both stop reordering.”

Ferriss raises a great point about increasing sales and revenue at the expense of net profit. Master Sun seems to be referring to something similar in the third section of his book when he mentions the different ways to go about fighting a war:

“Thus the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy’s plans; the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy’s forces; the next in order is to attack the enemy’s army in the field; and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities.”

I believe that Sun and Ferriss are talking about the bottom line here. Attacking a fortified city is the most costly way to proceed in battle, for obvious reasons. The enemy has home-turf advantage, for one thing. This is a case where winning the battle can cause the army to lose the war – which, not coincidentally, is the exact same thing that happens in marketing if you fill your sales pipeline with low profit orders. In Ferriss’s scenario, you end up helpless to control a price war that causes your distribution chain to dry up. It might also look like taking on a load of cheap and whiny clients who bleed you dry, depriving you of the time you could be spending to find good clients who would happily pay you twice as much and expect less work from you.

Lesson learned: be aware of which victories you can truly afford. Are you really moving toward prosperity, or digging yourself deeper into a hole?

In the past, I’d had a lot of meetings and a lot of coffee talking to other business owners about the clients we’d refer each other someday. I met with countless business owners since 2007 talking about this exact subject, and these meetings rarely led to referrals. Most of the referrals I gave and received rarely led to paying clients. I needed to be a better referral partner if I was going to take this business to the level where I wanted it to be. The second chapter of The Art of War discussing plundering for provisions in enemy territory. In terms of internet marketing, I saw this as turning the competition to our side.

The next question: how to go about making a strategic partner out of a competitor? This week, I’ll be looking through The Art of War for insights into this question. Meanwhile, I have discovered that literal word-for-word substituion isn’t working as well as I’d thought it would. (For those of you just reading this column for the first time, I’m in the process of re-writing The Art of War to make it specifically apply to internet marketing). I’ve found that the material needs to be written verse-for-verse. Giving myself the artistic license to interpret the material in context seems to be making the finished product much more useful.

Let’s see how Sun Tzu might have advised an internet marketing business to deal with the potential problem of burnout. Here is my attempted rewording of two verses from the first chapter:

“By method and discipline are to be understood the marshaling of the army in its proper subdivisions, the graduations of rank among the officers, the maintenance of roads by which supplies may reach the army and the control of military expenditure.”

With a few substitutions, here’s what it looks like:

“By method and discipline are to be understood the deployment of the team in its proper subdivisions, the separation of accountability among the leaders, the maintenance of communication channels through which information may reach the team, and the control of business expenditure.”

Here’s how I’m interpreting this passage as it pertains to my dangerously-mushrooming to-do list. Sun Tzu might advise me to aggressively build a communication infrastructure that will allow our capacity to expand over time. I see that most of this communication network lies outside of our business. That makes sense. I see that my imperative is to rapidly build a network of strategic allies.

That must be why I’m not particularly worried. That’s what I’ve mostly been doing. However, I’m sure there’s room to improve. There always is.

If you’re waiting for this blog post to get to the part where I give you the big “Aha,” don’t hold your breath. I’m still in the process of translating The Art of War into business terms, so I should have warned you that this might look messy.

Stay tuned. It’ll get more clear.

(Admittedly, this is the only column so far!)

The idea is based on Sun Tzu’s Art of War (I’m using the Lionel Giles translation). I am experimenting with a new literary process that I call “rewriting by substitution.” It amounts to taking the book’s original text and substituting certain words. For example, “war” becomes “internet marketing.” “State” becomes “Business.” “Ruler” becomes “Business Owner.” So on and so forth.

Here’s how the first substituted verse reads:

“Dave Baldwin thinks Sun Tzu would have said: The art of internet marketing is of vital importance to the Business.”

After this verse, I began to run into issues with substituting individual words. For example, in the Giles translation, the second verse starts out: “It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin…” I’m not sure what to use in place of “life” or “death” here, as the worst thing that can happen in business is bankruptcy or dissolution.

I’ll be sharing the insights I glean from Sun Tzu’s ancient text as I work through the process. For now, here are a couple of quick take-aways:

1. Marketing is messy and chaotic.
2. The internet is broken down into different territories, just like a landscape, and it’s crucial to learn to recognize what territory you’re in and what to do when you’re there.
3. A company that fully taps into its Unique Value Proposition will be unbeatable in the marketplace for as long as it continues to do so. The second it stops leveraging its uniqueness, all bets are off.

Those insights are about as general and conceptual as it’s going to get from here on out. I’ll be sharing my personal experience applying these principles to Bottom Line Internet Business Consultants and its clients.

Take a look at her recent post about using video in business. She posted contributions from 75 different people. It’s a win-win all around. Disregarding any human traffic that she gets to the blog (and I’m sure she gets plenty), each of these contributors has now received a solid back-link. Granted, it’s just one back-link, but SEO is more about quality than quantity. One good back-link is worth ten mediocre ones.

Also, I’m reading her book, The Entrepreneur Equation. A good read if you’re thinking of going into business for yourself for the first time.

Moral of the story: if you help others improve their SEO, your SEO improves as well.

According to Google, the phrase “Twitter status” is searched 14,800 times per month in the U.S. as of this posting. I’m doing this on purpose to prove a point: blatant SEO isn’t necessarily a bad thing if it’s done correctly. In the case of this particular post, I had no idea what I was going to write about before I started. I just knew that I was going to put the words “Twitter status” in the title tags and that it had to be at least somewhat relevant to SEO. Also, I needed to deliver something of value to someone who types “Twitter status” into the Google search bar. I won’t be using that phrase any more in this post, for fear that Google may penalize me for excess keyword saturation, though I don’t know exactly where the threshold lies.

Fortunately, I’ve collected links to a couple of high-quality blog posts from different sources on the subject of how Twitter relates to SEO. I’ll share them here.

I’ll start with a classic Mashable article from 2009. It’s a good primer on how to get the maximum SEO value out of Twitter. More recently, the SEOMoz blog talked about an “unexpected case study” that demonstrates the value between tweets and SEO.

Lesson learned: you can put together a blog post pretty quickly if you read blogs regularly and save up links to the good ones. There’s no rocket science here. Keyword research should give you a good indication of what people are looking for. In this case the phrase “Twitter SEO” doesn’t really tell me a heck of a lot about what someone actually wants if he/she types that phrase into a search engine, so I’m somewhat taking a stab in the dark here. Sometimes, SEO is like that. Short keyword phrases with large search volume might draw a diverse crowd with different needs. You can’t please them all, but you can make your best effort to provide something of value.

Sun Tzu said: “One whose general is capable and not interfered with by the ruler will be victorious.”

Who is the “ruler,” exactly, when it comes to internet marketing? The answer is different depending on the type of business.

I’ll use our industry as an example here – Google. SEO companies who have relied on “gray hat” strategies to make money for the last few years have found that Google is interfering with their efforts much more these days. They built business models on the practice of manipulating Google’s search results to place their clients ahead of the pack, even if they didn’t particularly deserve to be there. Since the Panda/Farmer update, SEO manipulation strategies have begun to slip in their effectiveness. I believe that Sun Tzu would have seen this coming.

The “rulers” of the internet marketing realm aren’t the giants – they’re the massive crowds of users. The everyday internet user rules the internet. Presumably, as an internet marketer, you’re trying to sell to these users, persuade them to “like” your Facebook page, or otherwise motivate them to take some kind of action that leads to you selling more products. Are these users “interfering” with your ability to sell to them, or are they happy to allow you to continue doing what you’re doing?

Look at thought leaders in the internet marketing world and watch how they do it. For example, take Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. He built a social networking empire by ensuring the that “rulers” – the everyday internet users, would not be motivated to interfere with what he was doing. In fact, they did most of the work for him. He won the alliance of the internet community. His network grew at unprecedented rates that allowed him to secure venture capital and continue to innovate without having to deal with interruptions. The effort has paid off enormously, as Facebook has become one of the most effective advertising platforms in the world. The ads work because they focus on the users who want to see the ads, whereas most advertising is based on the idea of interrupting people who aren’t interested in what the advertiser is selling.

As I’m hoping you’re beginning to see, Sun Tzu’s Art of War contains infinite potential, but it demands a different kind of thinking. The intention of this blog post series was to give you a taste of what’s possible and to show you how you might apply it to what you’re doing. If you’ve tried this out in your business, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment here.

Sun Tzu said: “One who is fully prepared, and awaits the unprepared, will be victorious.”

What is your unbeatable competitive advantage? What can you do better than anyone else? What relationships do you have that your competitor does not have? For what opportunities are you positioned in a superior way?

On the battlefield, an army lies in wait to make an ambush on another army, or prepares to attack an encampment or city that cannot prepare for the assault. A predator lurks in the shadows to catch unsuspecting prey. In the world of internet marketing, the most successful entrepreneurs are the ones who see opportunities farther out on the horizon and begin making preparations as early as possible. This is a characteristic of visionaries. They use the cynicism of their competitors to their advantage.

If you could time-warp back to 1995, you’d probably have a hard time selling anyone on the idea of a search engine. The inventor of the photocopier initially had a hard time finding anyone to fund his business, because they didn’t believe there would be a market for copying machines. Volumes have already been written about innovators who became tremendously successful selling ideas that no one believed would ever work. Why? At some level, these people all understood the same thing Sun Tzu pointed out. They saw the idea, and they began aggressively preparing to take advantage of the opportunities that they knew were coming. By the time their competition finally saw the same opportunities, they were well behind the game.

What do you see coming down the horizon? What preparations can you begin making right now? If you don’t consider yourself a natural pioneer or innovator, you don’t have to do things the same way they’ve been done before. A groundbreaking opportunity for you might look a lot different than it did for Thomas Edison. But in any case, it’s about leveraging the experience and talent that your organization brings to the table. To do this successfully, you’ll need an system to innovate. Most small business owners don’t have one. It’s not because they aren’t creative; it’s because the minutia of daily operation continually interferes with their ability to think creatively.

Next week, we’ll talk about how to apply Sun Tzu’s wisdom to this problem.