Episode 20 Interview with Mahalo.com founder Jason Calacanis

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Transcript -3

JAY: Next up let’s go a little lighter. Here’s Larry Port with the Joke of the Week.

LARRY PORT: Hello, this is Larry Port with RocketMatter.com with the Joke of the Week. This week’s joke was voted the funniest joke in the world by the Laugh Lab Internet Project. Two hunters are our in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed over. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency service. He says, “My friend is dead. What can I do?” The operator says, “Calm down. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There’s a silence on the phone. Then a shot is heard. Back on the phone the guys says, “OK, now what?” This is Larry Port from RocketMatter.com with the Joke of the Week.

JAY: [laughing] OK, Larry. I’m trying to do that one live so I can enjoy it with you all. Good news from Rocket Matter. The product was in beta when Larry’s called in to the show a couple of times and participated. They just launched last week. Larry reports some great success so far. So congratulations to Larry Port and the team over at Rocket Matter. It is an engine for you to use to manage a big law firm. It tracks all of your hours and tracks a whole bunch of different components. I want to learn more about it so maybe we’ll get Larry live on the show. A big thank you to Len Edgerly who called in last week and suggested that Larry do the Joke of the Week as an mp3 instead of a call-in. The quality was great. I’m not sure if that was the best joke ever, but thanks so much to Larry Port from RocketMatter.com.

MUSIC

JAY: OK, next up let’s get to the team at 10 Golden Rules and see what they’ve been up to in the Live From the Blog section. First up, Susan.

SUSAN: Hi, this is Susan. My topic today is about using social news sites, such as Digg and Sphinn, to promote your personal brand and blog. Being part of the social news scene is a lot of work and takes time but is also a great way to brand yourself and become an influential part of the community. Here are some things to keep in mind before you dive in. Number one, determine the site you want to use and learn how it works. See how the community responds to certain types of stories. Observe the kind of stories that are on the front page too. Second, find the most popular users. Learn about what they do for a living and befriend them. Two benefits for doing this, you learn from those who know more than you do and they could help you out by featuring posts on their own blog. Third, since being part of these types of communities takes time, you need to set time out of your day to explore and contribute. Just like being part of any online community, you take time to get to know it and submit stories as well as comment on other stories you find interesting. In order to build some sort of trust you need to start by submitting stories that may be useful to others. The fourth thing to keep in mind is to connect with other users on the site and get to know them. Once you build a reputation of being a helpful part of that community and built contacts,  most likely other people will return the favor back to your blog posts. And number five, ask friends that aren’t on these social news sites to join. It’s not a community unless there are people participating and you will automatically have another friend added to your list of connections. The most popular social news are Digg, Mix, Reddit and Sphinn. Sphinn is focused on marketing-related stories. There are new sites like these popping up all the time.

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Transcript -4

Transcript of 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing Podcast – Episode #20 – Part 4
Aired – 3/10/2008

JEFF: This is Jeff. After much rumor and speculation Google announced that effective April 1st the display URL and the destination URL must be the same for all Adwords ads. Most ads are not effected by this change. The Google Blog advised that redirects will still work such as a tracking URL and vanity URLs are still accepted as well. For instance, tengoldenrules.com/podcast, as are the use of subdomains such as podcast.tengoldenrules.com. Adwords will be sending alerts to the Adword’s accounts affected before the April 1st deadline to let you know if you have ads that are not in compliance with the new policy.

ANTHONY: Hi, this is Anthony. My topic today, “An Elvis Sighting at Affiliate Summit, Las Vegas.” I think that I saw Elvis from the Roof Deck Club at the Rio during Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas this past week where more online marketers launched ad networks. Soon, every Internet show will be called the Ad Network Summit. At each of the recent Affiliate Summit shows, it seems a new ad network will launch or elevate itself in this arena of online marketing. This year, one of the new hits was the Affiliate Kings who gave away custom skateboard decks at their booth.

There are two tiers of advertising networks. First-tier ad networks have their own advertisers and publishers. They have high quality traffic and they often serve ads and traffic to second-tier networks. Second-tier networks, which is most what pops up at these shows, have done some of their own advertisers and publishers, as well as they’re actively syndicating ads from other advertising networks. One issue that seems to trouble the merchants is knowing where the volume comes from with the so-called “blind networks.” Often, the offers are brokered out to incentivize registration paths and with promises to win a free iPod, these sources are magnets for fraud and low-quality leads. Groups like OLGA attempt to clean lead generation CPA programs in check. If an ad network associates themselves with this new association then chances are they’re trying to stay above the radar and “white hat.” The Rep Networks, which own their own publishing inventory, are generally in this category. By the way, that wasn’t Elvis that I saw in Las Vegas, but I did see Wayne Brady make a surprise appearance at the hotel bar at Palazzo, where he joined the band for impromptu covers of Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and James Brown.

MARGIE: Hi, this is Margie. A couple of days ago, Seth Godin’s blog featured a thought-provoking entry titled “Not A Trick Question.” His question was, “Is it better to make stuff aimed at people who usually buy your product or aimed at people who rarely do?” I often find myself asking a variation of this question when it comes to marketing our clients. Although it’s vitally important to identify a target you do well with, I often challenge clients to think along the lines of how to reach untapped markets. It can be as simple as asking, “How can I modify my marketing plan, even if only slightly, to appeal to a different or more broad demographic?” Sometimes it involves an actual change to the product or service. But often, it requires only a tweak in messaging to open up new opportunities. So, which do you pick, the familiar or the untapped? Seth was referring to a product, so he pointed out you have to pick one or the other. But when it comes to marketing, you can easily choose to target your messaging to more than one demographic and test to determine effectiveness.

MICHAEL: Hi, everyone, this is Michael. According to the International Herald Tribune, paid search will reach $8.6 billion in the United States compared to $2.6 billion spent for natural search engine optimization. With people starting to have higher trust in natural search, experts claim that companies will begin to focus more on optimization and less on paid links.

This is putting a little strain on Google stock. One expert mentioned that almost 75 percent of all clicks come from unpaid search results. Consumers are finding better search results with the natural search than Pay Per Click. Advertisers and brand name companies are beginning to realize this and refocus their natural search optimization efforts to gain search engine real estate, which is on the left hand side, to attract their consumers.

JAY: Well, thanks to the team, as always, a real group of provocative blog entries and they turn them into live audio for us for the show. What do you guys think? Margie and Seth Godin asked a really interesting question. Who do you target? Do you target the most likely prospects or do you target a broader range of people and try to bring them into the conversation? What do you think about natural search engine optimization as the biggest opportunity up and coming for search Internet marketing and frankly, budget, it’s like where are you, guys, at with an oncoming recession threat? Where are your budget plans for the coming year? I’d love to hear what everyone out there, all the listeners, have to say. Give us a call, 206-888-6606.

I recently wrote a blog post and I said that I saw two entries on the same day. “Affiliate Summit announced that the show was completely sold out” and “Tickets were being sold on eBay.” I thought that was fantastic. Shawn Collins, the organizer of the show, said that he partially funded his college education by scalping tickets for events. So he’s wide open to people selling tickets to Affiliate Summit on eBay. The same day, a retail show announced that their booths were sold out. So everywhere I go in Internet marketing, the market is still super hot. Everything is still sold out, everything is still really hard to get into. But what are you guys seeing out there in your businesses? We’re seeing a couple of our retail clients reporting some softness in their sales, not hitting their sales levels of last year. It’s the first softness I’ve seen in the economy in the last few years, but I’m not seeing it in the pure Internet economy in the online shows. So, I’d love your feedback and comments on that topic.

 

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Transcript of 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing Podcast – Episode #20 – Part 5
Aired – 3/10/2008

JAY: OK, so now let’s get to our featured interviews. We have, as I mentioned, a couple of fairly, high-profile figures in the Internet marketing business. First up, we’re going to get to Ted Murphy and Pay Per Post. If you don’t already know about Ted, I interviewed him at Webmaster World. Ted is the founder of a relatively controversial approach to Internet marketing called Pay Per Post. So, let’s get to the interview now and I’ll talk a little bit about it when we get out.

JAY [pre-recorded]: I’m here with Ted Murphy. He’s the founder and CEO of IZEA, also known as Pay Per Post. Right?

TED MURPHY: Well, IZEA is the parent company of Pay Per Post but originally Pay Per Post was its own company.

JAY: Great. Tell me how the products work and how people can use them.

TED: IZEA offers a variety of different platforms and services geared towards advertisers and bloggers, the most well known of those is definitely Pay Per Post. Pay Per Post is a marketplace that connects advertisers and bloggers for the purpose of promoting products, services, or websites.

JAY: Great. Pay Per Post is certainly a controversial type of approach. Some people feel that it ruins the anonymity of blogging and posting. How do you guys counter that?

TED: I think that that’s a pretty naïve view of the Blogosphere. One of the reasons that Pay Per Post was originally created was we recognized that there was a large amount of agencies and PR firms that were already reaching out to bloggers. We wanted to be able to offer a service that would allow smaller advertisers who couldn’t afford agencies or big PR firms the ability to reach out and promote their products or services on a large scale.

JAY: So tell me a couple of the case studies of companies that really like it and feel it’s a credible way to go.

TED: We’ve got over 12,500 different advertisers now, everyone from movie studios to the small Mom-and-Pop Yahoo stores. Some of our bigger advertisers are using it to gain buzz around a movie.

JAY: Anyone we’ve heard of?

TED: Right now, we’re promoting the latest Johnny Depp film, “Sweeney Todd.” We just finished up a campaign for Hamilton Beach where they’re promoting their power mixers.

JAY: Hamilton Beach power mixers.

Ted: Yes, yes, power mixers. So, we have a good amount of bloggers in our system that are stay-at-home moms that are very passionate bloggers. For them, in particular, that was a great opportunity because they could target those types of bloggers.

JAY: How does it typically work? How does someone know if someone’s posted and how much do they pay per post?

TED: The payments range from anywhere from $5 to $2,500 per post. When a blogger creates their post, they submit it back to us and we do our review to make sure there’s no pornography or anything else like that. They always have the ability to speak their mind, but we do have to insulate the advertiser from things that they wouldn’t want to be associated with. That all comes back into our system in real time. The advertiser can track the page views and the click-throughs from the individual post, and they do all that through a self-serve mechanism.

JAY: As an advertiser, how do you engage and set a limit?

TED: When an advertiser comes in to our system, they can select criteria for the types of bloggers that they want to accept in the program. So, that can be based on traffic or that can be based on their quality ranking in our system or that can also be based on individual categories. Based off that, we give them some price ranges of what the averages are in the system, and then they name really their own price of what they’re willing to pay. Ultimately, it comes down to the ROI that they get back from our system that drives the price.

JAY: Did you hear about the Big Pay-Per-Twitter announcement?

TED: I did not.

JAY: There was a major, major announcement that there’s a new Pay-Per-Tweet program, and several thousand dollars have already been made in the program. It was a huge announcement, and it was made on April 1st, and then I found out it was an April Fool’s joke. [Laughter]

TED: I was like, “Really? Because I didn’t hear about that.”

JAY: Maybe that’s a new business model for you guys. I shouldn’t have brought it up. [Laughter]

TED: Well, there’s certainly plenty of room out there for people to monetize their influence. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a service like that because if someone has a couple hundred or a couple thousand people that are subscribed to their Twitter and they promote something, ultimately that can drive some traffic for an advertiser.

JAY: That’s great. Any last things you’d want to say to some of your proponents or your critics?

TED: I would say thank you for all the free PR. We just recently crossed 100,000 bloggers in our system and are showing no signs of slowing. It’s only growing faster and faster. And I look forward to releasing Social Spark in January of next year.

JAY: What’s that going to do?

TED: Social Spark is really actually turning the Pay Per Post model inside out. We are being completely transparent as far as exposing the bloggers that are in the network, exposing the advertisers, providing mechanisms for them to communicate freely with each other, and providing a level of granularity from a blogger standpoint where we’re actually providing traffic information to an advertiser, demographic information, so they understand what this blogger’s actual influence is.

JAY: And how can I get a $2500 paid post? What’s that for? [Laughter]

Ted: You’re going to have to have a pretty high-ranking blog. I believe that that post was for somebody that was in the top 10,000 of Alexa. So, there’s only 10,000 of them out there. [Laughter]

TED: And actually, probably a very small amount of those are blogs.

JAY: Great. Well, thanks so much, Ted. I appreciate your candor.

TED: All right. Thank you.

AY: OK. So, if you didn’t already know about Ted Murphy and Pay Per Post what do you think? Did you know that blogs can and often do contain paid-for endorsements? When you read a movie review about Sweeney Todd, does it bug you that somebody may have been paid for that? Please call in and share your feelings: 206-888-6606. Now I wanted to play the interview with Ted so that you have some background for the next conversation

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Transcript -6

Transcript of 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing Podcast – Episode #20 – Part 6
Aired – 3/10/2008

JAY: Our next guest, Jason Calacanis, has been an outspoken critic of Pay Per Post, and he’s also been very outspoken about a number of the not totally ethical Internet marketing practices. Now clearly, there’s some gray area here, right? If the blogger totally loves the movie Sweeney Todd and adds a link to the Sweeney Todd website and gets paid for that, I think we’re all cool with that. But if someone goes and does a post for that mixer and they’ve never seen it, never tried it, and they’re just doing it to get the Pay Per Post revenue, I think we all have a problem with that. So there’s that gray area.

So, let me talk a little bit about Jason first. I sat down with him right after he presented the opening keynote at Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas last week. He’s incredibly well known in the dot com world. He founded an industry publication called The Silicon Alley Reporter. Then he developed Web Logs, Inc., which he sold to AOL in 2004 for over 25 million dollars. He’s also very, very passionate and outspoken on many issues. His blog is very popular, and he does a lot of video at CalacanisCast.com. Links, of course, in the show notes. And one theme that he’s been very, very consistent about is the overall goodness and ethical behavior on the Internet. Jason called out unethical affiliate marketers in his Affiliate Summit keynote. And he called out Pay Per Posts in the same presentation, and our conversation that follows. And he recently called out the black hat, or unethical SEOs, or search engine optimizers. Then he got in even more trouble when he said “SEO is BS” in the question and answer section. And he used the more colorful term; he didn’t use “BS.”

So, let’s get to the conversation with Jason, and I’ll expand more when it’s done. But I want to say that I think Jason really, really means well, but often he comes across as a little bit brash and a little bit straight to the point. You know, he honestly does care about the goodness in the Internet. Anyways, let’s get to our conversation with Jason. Oh yeah, about halfway through, Jason and I almost got wiped out by an attorney who was riding a motorized scooter due to an injury he had, and he had his cast and he had his crutches and he was driving this motorized scooter, and he crashed right into our table. So that’s what the pause is about halfway through. So, let’s get to Jason Calacanis from Mahalo.com.

JAY [pre-recorded]: I’m here with Jason Calacanis, and Jason just gave the keynote presentation at Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas. Congratulations, Jason.

JASON: Well, thank you. I put a little bit of work into it, and I tried to think about the industry a lot because frankly, I’m not an expert on affiliate marketing, just like I’m not an expert on search engine optimization. When I give talks at these things and I’m not an expert on the space, and I have a peripheral knowledge, I have to sort of take the knowledge I do have in publishing and building quality sites and try to learn about these other disciplines and how I think what I’ve learned intersects with what other people are doing.

JAY: So, I want to get into some of the content in a minute, but first, let’s start with your background.

JASON: Well, I’m a serial entrepreneur. I’ve done a bunch of different start-ups, and I’m on my fourth right now or fifth, depending on how you count them. And I’ve been up, I’ve been down, I’ve been left, I’ve been right. I’ve had some big successes, I’ve had some big failures. I just love what I do. I’m an internet entrepreneur who just likes to swing the bat. If you keep swinging the bat, at some point, you’re going to hit the ball. So, I’m just having fun doing what I do.

JAY: So Silicon Alley was the first one that gained a lot of prominence?

JASON: Yeah. I did Silicon Alley Reporter, a magazine about the Internet industry, in 1996 and grew it to a pretty large business with a lot of employees. It was pretty high profile. I wound up selling that to Dow Jones. Then I did Web Logs, Inc., which is a big blogging company and sold that to AOL. Now I’m doing a company called Mahalo, which means ‘thank you’ in Hawaiian. A very special word. Mahalo is a human-powered search engine somewhere between the Wikipedia, Dmoz, and Google, and About.com. It’s sort of like a help engine, which I guess is a really corny thing to say. I sort of sound like I’m Ask Jeeves or something, but we’re not a search engine. We’re a content company building guides to the web. Makes it sound a little bit more like Squidoo even though it’s not really Squidoo because it’s not spam in an open platform like Squidoo.

JAY: Because anyone can contribute to Squidoo, but your folks have to be approved? Or they have to be on staff??

JASON: We have a blend. We have full-time people. We have paid part-time people. And then we have the public, and the public can contribute, but their contribution is looked at, and we develop a reputation score. So, if you submit links to Mahalo and they’re good, your reputation goes up. If you submit links that are bad, your reputation goes down. And we’ll treat your future suggestions based on your reputation. So if you submitted spam, we’re probably not going to take your future recommendations too seriously, even if they’re good. And if you’ve submitted great stuff, we’re going to look at your future recommendations very, very attunely. So we might not take much time looking at a spammer’s future contributions and we might not list them on the site, but if you submitted ten great links and we accepted all ten, when you send in your eleventh or twelfth, we’re going to look at it right away. We’re going to spend two or three minutes considering it, and we’ll probably put it up. So if you think about that as compared to Yahoo – if you don’t agree with the Yahoo search results, who do you talk to? An SEO or yourself. If you disagree with how we’re ranking sites, you can actually talk to the people at Mahalo, or the freelancers, and have a debate with them. Not dissimilar to what happens on Wikipedia, where you discuss not the search results, but you discuss the encyclopedia.

JAY: The ability to keep it up.

JASON: Yeah, and you discuss should we put George Bush is an idiot or should we put George Bush is a genius or should we put George Bush is the President of the United States.

JAY: The obvious question – you get it all the time – is you’re taking on Google in a market. How do you think you can build a better search engine?

JASON: You know, I don’t think I’m taking on Google, to be totally honest. I think of Google as a platform, like Microsoft’s operating system or Linux or something like that, that we’re building on top of. We are building pages for the top search terms. We’re building content, authoritative guides. So, we’re going to do Paris hotels. We’re going to do iPhone. We’re not going to do your pizzeria down the street and we’re not going to do the girl you dated in college. That’s what Google is for – every possible search. Google is this big operating system and we’re partners with them. If we don’t have a search result, which is going to be a lot of the time, we’ll show you Google. When we don’t have a guide page, we’re going to show you Google results or Yahoo results. And when we are looking to monetize our pages, we use Google AdSense. So, we are operating in the search space, the guide space, but we’re more akin probably to Wikipedia or Dmoz than to Google. And Google, as you know, loved the Dmoz for a long time and were partners with it. They used to syndicate it and take it pretty seriously but since it’s been overrun with spammers I think they take it less seriously now. So I guess there is more – we’re more to Google what Dmoz was.

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Transcript -7

Transcript of 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing Podcast – Episode #20 – Part 7
Aired – 3/10/2008

JAY: You use the term second click in your presentation. Do you want to define that or explain it?

JASON: I didn’t come up with the term second click, other people have championed that but basically what it means is if you did a search for iPhone or Paris hotels, what would the second click be? You take the second click and you put it up onto the first page. Paris hotels you might want to know what the phone number of the hotel is, how many stars it got from Michelin or what [indecipherable] said so we sort of go and do the second or third click for the user and then put that on one single page. So it’s sort of like saving users time, compressing their searching for information into one page which helps users. Why should they have to hunt and peck for content?

JAY: I love the concept so congratulations and I know you’re going in the right direction.

JASON: I hope we are.

JAY: You’re very active on your blog and Facebook and Twitter.

JASON: Yep.

JAY: I think one of the most active people on Twitter for example. Please share how you use these tools to build your personal brand and how you use them for business and as tips for other folks.

JASON: I am myself on these services. I interact with people. I try to be a normal guy – which I am. You know, I’m the CEO of a company that’s high profile now but I’ve always been just a normal guy. I was a writer, a journalist, I was nobody important just five years ago and now some people consider me important. But it’s given me the ability to sort of keep a dialogue going with normal folk doing good work and I consider myself just a normal guy so it’s my way of really having my ear to the ground and being part of the street level of what’s going on on the Internet. I don’t want to be insulated, you know. I don’t want to be like the guy who comes and gives a keynote and comes out from back stage and after the keynote goes back stage and doesn’t talk to anyone after. After the keynote I like to sit on the edge of the stage and talk for a couple of hours.

JAY: Which he just did by the way!

JASON: Which I just did. I love sitting around the conferences and talking to people. It’s where I learn stuff. I think these social services are like that edge of the stage, sit around and talk about stuff, like the stage dive at the end of the talk. I love to mix it up with people and a lot of times I get haters or whatever. They typically though, if you get past the hate, have a lot of good points. So I think if you want to get to the truth of what you’re doing you should be really active in these things because people will criticize you and they’ll compliment you and you can really get to the core of what’s good about what you’re doing.

JAY: The launch of Mahalo generated a lot of buzz.

JASON: Yeah. More than I expected.

JAY: A lot of that was on the tales of, you Twittered, you Facebooked and it was buzz for Jason. What did you do to stimulate it?

JASON: I didn’t really do much. I think we had a lot of high profile investors. I think it was an audacious idea and I think it was pretty good execution. So I don’t think it was one thing that we did so I couldn’t tell somebody, “Oh, here’s how you capture that magic in a bottle to do it for your store now.” But let’s face it I have gotten a lot of press. I pissed off a lot of SEOs. I’m going into the search base. I’m backed by the investors who backed Google and Yahoo. I’m totally transparent and I’m doing an idea which people think has been done many times before. So it’s sort of the perfect storm I think. I launched at the Wall Street Journal conference so it’s you know, I think a lot of little things added up to being high profile. I’m very, very grateful for the fact that people give me their attention and consider what I’m doing, but the truth is if what I’m doing sucks or is boring I’m going to get my ass kicked just like anybody else. So everyone is like, “Oh you know you have to be Jason Calacanis or Kevin Rose or Guy Kowasaki to launch something.” It’s a double edged sword. Guy Kowasaki keeps launching stuff that sucks and he keeps getting his ass kicked. Kevin Rose keeps launching stuff that’s cool and he keeps getting more praise. So it’s kind of interesting isn’t it?

JAY: Yeah, if you get the spotlight you better have something good.

JASON: Yeah. [crash] Whoa. You guys may not know what just happened but we just had a wheel chair crash into the table. It was unbelievable! That was a first.

JAY: The exciting live interview factor.

JASON: Wow! If only that was a video. You guys don’t even know what you missed!

JAY: You started to mention the SEO conference and that it caused a real fire storm. You’ve been pretty out-spoken against SEO. What’s your point?

JASON: Well, I’ve always believed that if you make great content, you should just leave it at that. The SEO industry has created sort of a cold war where like if you don’t SEO you don’t rank and there’s just too many people that want the traffic. So what I’ve learned since saying SEO is bullshit, [laughs] which is just an off the cuff remark that I made, it wasn’t like I was grandstanding, it was just a throw away remark during a Q & A session. I never used to focus on it but now that I’ve come to learn about it, I’ve learned that a lot of SEOs – I realize a lot of good sites don’t rank. A large part of my inspiration for Mahalo was actually what I learned from SEO, which was the good sites aren’t ranking. Why? Well there’s a lot of people competing. There’s a lot of average sites. There’s a lot of good sites. There’s a lot of bad sites. The truth is the average good sites are the problem in a lot of cases because the excellent sites, the truly authoritative ones, the cream of the crop, the ten out of ten’s, they don’t rank in the top ten. A lot of times it’s the average, low-quality or the good that rank.

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Transcript -8

Transcript of 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing Podcast – Episode #20 – Part 8
Aired – 3/10/2008

JAY: Do you think the excellent sites just haven’t been SEO’d professionally? In theory great content gets links, gets real links, gets authoritative links, gets natural links.

JASON: In theory, but in practice it’s too easy to get in the system and it’s impossible for a machine to know the difference between something that is good, great, amazing, stunning, life-changing. You know? It’s just too subtle of a difference. It would be like sending a normal person to the ten best sushi bars around the world in the ten best cities and saying, “Tell me the difference between them.” They wouldn’t be able to tell. You would need a palette and a knowledge base of sushi that maybe three or four people on the planet have, to be able to tell the difference between the ten best sushi restaurants in the world. Well, that’s what happening on the Internet. Who knows what’s the best travel site? Who really is the judge of that? A machine is not a good judge. So search has been good enough, it still gets you where you’re going. Nobody is dying out there. But could it be better? I think it could.

JAY: Do you want to expand the example you gave of a Paris hotel search on Google versus Mahalo?

JASON: Yeah. Well, it’s not just Google, it’s Yahoo and Ask have even worse spot results, but they’re filled with a lot of affiliate sites. So everybody knows that if you search for a hotel, a million pages about the Bellagio or Wynn hotel in Vegas or the Four Seasons Hotel. Why are there a million pages? Does the Wynn produce that many of the hotel review sites? No! There are zillions of affiliate link sites stealing content writing cheesy content, paying somebody five bucks in the Philippines to write bad content and that stuff is polluting the web with average content. People make the argument, “Oh well, it helps the user and …” The way I look at it is, does the world need the one millionth and first web site about the Bellagio Hotel? Probably not. So do something else with your life.

JAY: You’re kind of getting into the theme of your presentation today which was about do something great. You said the affiliate industry is like a great pond with amazing beautiful fish. What’s the industry going to do to make sure we don’t pollute the pond and take all the fish out and put our gas oil into the pond. Do you want to expand on that theme a little bit?

JASON: I just think a lot of people have short-term thinking in the affiliate space. I hear things from people like, “I don’t know why I’m not making any money, I’ve been working on this site for three weeks or three months.” Well, you know what? If you’re going to make a magazine or a cable channel or a newsletter that profitable, that’s an investment of two, three, four, or five years. But everybody on the Internet thinks they have the god-given right to be making a fortune in six weeks. Because the affiliate industry has web sites that say “You could be making a fortune” and they hold up checks. “You could be making $100,000. You could be making $300,000.” It’s a very get-rich-quick environment, as a matter of fact people are walking around with t-shirts, I saw one that said “Make $150,000 monthly” like 20 people in red shirts for monthly.com. I’m giving them a free ad I guess. But $150,000 a month? That’s $1.8 million dollars a year. Can I get in on that? I’d like that job! I’ll give up CEO-ship of Mahalo for $1.8 million dollar salary! I guarantee you that none of those 20 people that were wearing those red shirts are making $1.8 million dollars a year. I guarantee you they’re all making under 100,00. So if those people were so smart wearing those shirts, why aren’t they just making the $150,000 a month? I don’t think those people make $150,000 a year!

JAY: You gave everyone tips for performing at the Silicon Valley level, the seven or eight figure kind of performance. What are some of the tips for building the next Web 2.0 site?

JASON: I think you have to do something unique. There’s no sense in just copying stuff that’s out there. You have to evolve it. So if you make a Digg clone that’s probably not going to go anywhere. You have to evolve the Digg concept because Digg was an evolution of Delicious and Delicious and Digg were evolutions of Slashdot. So you really have to evolve what’s out there. When we did Netscape for Propeller we evolved what we thought were short-comings in Delicious’ populist and in Digg by having editors. Something that I think Digg is starting to do – have editors. People are shopping around  business plans that have social networks, with social news sites with editors.

I think you know, you really have to say to yourself, is this going to provide a discernable difference in service than what’s out there. I wouldn’t do Mahalo if I didn’t think it would be discernibly different from About.com, or Dmoz, or Wikipedia or Google. What would be the point right? You really have to bring something to the table. You don’t have to rush into it. You don’t have to think, you can think big but take small steps as well. So if you think you want to have web blogging and have 100 blogs and ten million people coming to them a month, start with one and get one blog to 100,000 people a month before you start the second. Everybody wants to do the busy work, creating 100 logos, 100 websites, you know. 100 SEO things, but they don’t actually make the product. So just focus like a laser beam on making a great product. And everything else works itself out. That’s what people forget. They get involved with everything but the actual product creation. Product creation is all there is in our industry.

You talk about marketing and people paying a lot of attention to my products when I launch them. They pay attention to my products not because I’m launching them but because I have a track record of launching interesting products. So people are missing it. Oh I have to create a lot of buzz for my product. No, you have to create a product that creates a lot of buzz. You can’t create buzz. It’s like that buzz marketing bullshit that everybody was talking about three years ago, it doesn’t exist. Buzz is like love, you can’t make love, you have to find a person and fall in love with them and then love comes out of that relationship. You fall in love with that person, but you don’t manufacture love, you don’t manufacture buzz. Or if you do it’s manufactured love and it’s manufactured buzz, which means it’s not real.

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Transcript -9

JAY: You sent some negative love to Pay Per Post in the presentation and you’re not alone.

JASON: I think the Pay Per Post guys are misguided. I think Ted actually is, I don’t know if he is the smartest guy, he’s certainly not the smartest guy I’ve ever met. He is definitely the most resilient. I mean the guy is banging his head against the wall for like two or three years now and he has been taking it from all angles. I mean he’s been taking it from Google, FTC, me–

JAY: Me.

JASON: Everybody hates him and everybody hates what he is doing. I mean he is stubborn, which can be a good business quality. Maybe he is so stubborn that, he will be stubborn in his desire to build a successful business but maybe he’ll listen about why people think his service is bad. Which is, it’s deceptive. If he’d just put his effort into something that’s non-deceptive, I think he’d be very successful.

JAY: So one of the last questions we ask everyone on the podcast is what websites or online tools are you using for personal productivity? Any new widgets out there those are on there? I see that you have the new Mac Air, Mac Book Air, what websites or tools do you use?

JASON: Well I’m really enjoying Webkit, which is the open source version of Safari’s browser on MAC. It’s very fast and stable. So I have stopped using Firefox as my default browser. I have all my plug-ins on Firefox but I have a clean install of Webkit that I surf on because its faster, like 5 times faster than Firefox and it doesn’t grind to a halt because of all the plug-ins. Then if I have to use a plug-in for Delicious or Stumble I will then cut and paste the URL over to Firefox. So I have this sort of way of having all the features of Firefox with all the speed of a stripped down browser concurrently, which I think is really made me much more effective in what I do.

I have become a big fan of IRC chat rooms. I have been starting chat rooms to discuss topics on sort of ad-hock basis. It works really well. So I have been using this colloquies as sort of a chat…people use MI or C for PC. I’m sort of falling in love with that again. List serves again, I love list serves. People, we start list serves at Mahalo for all different topics. The how to teams, the sports team. And so there are these discussions going on, then the list goes away for three weeks, then all of a sudden there’s more activity on it, but all of the people on the lists are into that topic. So there’s a lot of fun on list serve.

I like carrying an iPhone and a Blackberry with me. And having both, you know that works really well. And I just got a new thing which is a wifi router, I don’t have it with me, but you know…you can plug your EVDO card into a wifi router and share it with your friends. So when your at a conference or something like that, or share it with your wife or three or four people, you can just boom all of a sudden have your own wifi access point. It’s pretty dope.

JAY: What blogs are you reading? What podcasts are you listening to?

JASON: I listen to every episode of “This Week in Tech,” whether I’m on it or not, and the “Gilmore Gang,” whether I’m on it or not. I listen religiously to the “Daily Search Cast” with Danny Sullivan, although he’s being very lazy and only doing like five shows, then he takes off a week, then does like five shows. So I think Danny Sullivan needs to figure out a way to have other people run the show when he is not around because the guy is constantly traveling to conferences and whatever. He is too busy. So he needs to get a co-host who can run the show when he is not around. He does have a co-host, but the co-host needs to do the show when he is not around. That’s about it right now. I mean I watch “Mahalo Daily,” which is our video show, which is for a general audience not a tech audience, but I watch it religiously. That’s going very well. It’s got 60,000 people watching every episode on average.

JAY: Are you a blog reader?

JASON: Yeah, I read blogs. I read my friends’ blogs – Scobel and Fred Wilson. And ex-friends like Dave Weiner. I basically read people who have ideas. Brad Feld who always has good stuff. Jeremy Lew actually Life Ski Adventure Partners, who I think is wrong some of the time. But he has been writing some interesting stuff of late. I like individuals, you know? I like following peoples Twitter streams a lot, I find that interesting.

JAY: What are some of the coolest things you have learned on Twitter, neatest experiences?

JASON: Well, I’m able to, when I’m in a city and I don’t want to eat alone, like when I was in San Francisco last time and I was like, “Hey anyone want to get dim sum or Chinese?” And you know, go to have dim sum with ten people because everybody is like, “Yeah, I’m hungry. Yeah now? OK.” So the spontaneity is great. I love it. When I was in Barcelona I was like, “Where should I get hot chocolate? I’m in the Rambla.” And people were sending me the address. I was like, “I’m at this location.” And it was like, “OK go two blocks south and then go to your left.” So I use Twitter as my own personal bat signal/personal assistant. Like when I was in Paris I was like, “Where do I shop for clothes?” They’re like, “Oh, go to this Galleria or whatever.” It’s really, really helpful. I could actually use it like a search engine or a personal concierge.

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Transcript -10

JAY: Yeah. Joe Jaffe was actually looking for a lunch date this morning on Twitter, in L. A .

JASON: Well that’s classic Jaffe, not able to get a lunch date. What does his wife think of him looking for lunch dates? I love Joe Jaffe, he’s a smart guy.

JAY: He is, he is great.

JASON: [in British accent] “Jaffe Juice. I don’t know why you’re listening to Jaffe Juice. Maybe you’re a marketer, maybe you aspire to be a marketer. Maybe you don’t know what you are. Maybe we are all here. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe somebody’s listening. Maybe nobody’s listening. I don’t know. I’m just Joe Jaffe and you’re listening to the Daily Jaffe Juice. Your juiciest juice of the Jaffiest juice.”

JAY: Beautiful.

JASON: That’s how he talks though, right?

JAY: Yeah.

JASON: It’s like a mile a minute and then he doesn’t answer any questions he just starts proposing more questions.

JAY: He plays one call in.

JASON: Is the second spot working? I don’t know. Maybe it’s working. Maybe it’s not. Maybe your Tivo-ing it. Maybe you’re zipping through it. Maybe you’re listening to it. Maybe it’s positively impacting you. Maybe it’s subconscious. Maybe you’re subconsciously liking what you subconsciously don’t like. I don’t know.

JAY: Who are some of the people you don’t like right now? Who are some of the people doing bad stuff?

JASON: Let’s be honest here. It’s not that I dislike Ted Murphy from Pay Per Post, I dislike what he does. And I have told him many times personally and in public, “Clean up your act. Do something that adds to the world.“ It’s not like I hate anybody. I don’t want to give the wrong impression. People tend to think that I’m like anti-SEO crusader or something like that or this do-gooder. I think the thing is that I didn’t realize was I always talked very bluntly about what I liked and didn’t like and my opinion on stuff. And as my voice got heard more often, I didn’t realize exactly how much people were hearing it, or the ramifications of it. So like when I said Squidoo is filled with spam and you know, and I said Squidoo was filled with spam, then this whole conversation started about spam and Squidoo and should they be kicked out of the index and there’s affiliate marketing and paid links in it. So it was kind of interesting how that I didn’t intend to give Seth Godin a hard time, I was starting a conversation like I always do.

People call me out on my BS all the time. If I make one little mistake people are like “OH!” The first question today was, “OK, I would like to list all the ways in which Calacanis is a hypocrite. You have the Alexa toolbar, you’re a hypocrite. You have the this, you’re a hypocrite. You said that Digg was great, but Digg has spam in it.” Like, I put the spam there? I was like, this is a ridiculous question. “You say you don’t like spam, but you added everybody in your address book and you didn’t ad me.” I was like, I don’t know about the individual incident you’re talking about, but I have like three thousand people on LinkedIn. I add everybody. I just haven’t gone through all of them yet, you know? I like our industry how we mix it up a little bit and have fun. I thought that today was wonderful because it felt constructive and I could tell people were thinking. Anytime I can be involved in a discussion that results in people thinking, it’s kind of cool isn’t it?

JAY: Yeah I hope the people connected with it. A few of the throw-away comments you made could have the same effect as the SEO conference. But I think your overall message, I hope people got it, and I hope this industry can take some positive steps because you’re totally bang on.

JASON: You know, people can take anybody out of context. You know, the SEO folks like to take me out of context. They take out one quote and it’s like the name of my blog is “SEO is bullshit” or something. That’s not the name of my blog. But whatever, I’m a big boy, I can handle it. I wouldn’t mix it up if I couldn’t handle it. Listen, we are all very lucky to work in this industry. It’s a lot of good people, and a fun time. You can make a lot of money and do incredible things. We are all very lucky and blessed to be here.

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Transcript -11

JAY: Amen. Do you have any last thoughts for our friends at 10 Golden Rules?

JASON: I would say, dare to be great. I think a lot of people are a little paralyzed or intimidated by what other people are doing in our industry and how well it’s going. You have to remember, Kevin Rose was just like a nobody commentator on this little G4 channel. He was like nobody, an after thought. Now he’s king of the world. And he deserves to be. Why? Because he had the guts to try to do something great and he succeeded. He did build two great services, three. So you look at Kevin Rose, he’s trying. Other people don’t even try. You look at Mike Arrington. He’s trying. O’Malley, he’s trying.         People are trying to do great things and if they fail, they fail. Don’t overestimate the downside. The downside is you fail and you move on and you learn. The next time you’re wiser and smarter. You don’t want to get to the end of your life and feel like everybody else tried and you didn’t even try. If you tried and failed, who cares! If you didn’t try, that’s kind of hard to live with. That’s my guiding principle. That’s my Golden Rule. You miss 100 percent of shots you don’t take.

JAY: That’s great. Thanks Jason.

JASON: My pleasure.

JAY: Well a big thank you to Jason Calacanis for taking part. Clearly one of the guys setting the tone for the industry and really playing the drums and setting the drumbeat in the jungle out there. So thank you all so much for listening to the show. A big thank you to our callers, Auction Wally, Glen Pooler, congratulations to Keith Burdiss, newly engaged thanks to social media chipping in, a great Joke of the Week, congratulations Larry on your launch and thanks to Ted Murphy and Jason Calacanis.

How’d you like the show? Please take a minute right now to call in your comments or questions or any critique to 206-888-6606. Send us an audio comment or an audio file at jay (at) tengoldenrules (dot) com.

Every week we end the show with a song selection from the PodSafe Music Network. I was absolutely thrilled to see that the Oscar-winning Best Song was available on PodSafe. I heard it on a couple of different podcasts. Glen Hansard explained the story of the song about being at a party and his girlfriend goes to get a drink and across the room a figure catches the corner of his eye. She looks great and then realizes it’s his girlfriend and says, “Kaching!” I know that feeling and I’ve experienced that a few times with my wife. So here’s Oscar winners Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova with Falling Slowly, the soundtrack from the movie “Once.” According to Wikipedia Hansard quit school at age 13 to begin busking on local Dublin streets. He first came to widespread public attention as guitar player Outspan Foster in the Alan Parker film “The Commitments.” In April 2006 he released his first solo album, The Swell Season. During filming of the movie “Once” he started falling in love with Marketa. So here is the song from the movie “Once.” It had its American premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007, received the festival’s World Cinema Award and recently won the Academy Award. Anyway, here’s “Falling Slowly.” Have a great week everybody.

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MALE ANNOUNCER: This podcast is produced with CastBlaster.

FEMALE ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to the 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing podcast. Please send comments and questions to podcast (at) 10goldenrules (dot) com. That’s podcast (at) 10goldenrules (dot) com. Or use our call-in line 206-888-6606.

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