The “online ad network” market niche is one that leads to a “natural monopoly” — but a host of new companies is trying to change that. The strategy these companies are using is to “go niche”. They are using their extensive knowledge, experience, and contacts in specific market niches to nibble away at Google’s market share.

Hundreds of these startups exist, in every niche from heavy metal music, to hispanic sites, to ad networks designed just for homosexuals. These companies are competing head-to-head with Google — and some of them are winning.

PSClicks is an ad network focused on “first responder, shooting, and military ad content.” PSClicks isn’t competing with Google head-to-head — because Google has made a conscious choice not to support publishers in this niche.

If you build a web site in support of the Second Amendment, Google will not allow you to place AdSense ads on it. If you build a web site opposed to the Second Amendment, Google will allow you to monetize it with AdSense.

Google is not only opposed to the rights of individuals, they have also blocked AdSense from appearing on pages such as “Armed Forces of the World”. In plain terms, Google does not support the men and women who put their lives at risk to defend us all.

PSClicks has encountered an enormous amount of support from the community. They have signed up first rate advertisers such as FrontSight, ArmyNavyDeals, ChiefSupply, and CalibrePress. They have also signed up impressive publishers such as Paramedic.com, LawEnforcement.com, DefenseReview.com, UltimateNurse.com, AR15.com, GlockTalk.com, and ShotgunWorld.com.

With community support like this PSClicks is almost certain to do very well in this multi-billion dollar niche.

Mighty Guide was created as a sort of “fresh start with an old friend” for us here at Free Internet Media.

We have been building static web pages with shared HTML includes for many years.  We built some small projects with Wordpress, then we moved hard into Drupal.  Unfortunately, Drupal wasn’t everything we hoped it would be.  After a painful revaluation, we moved hard into Joomla.  Unfortunately, our ardor for Joomla was also short lived.

So, we’re back with our old friend Wordpress once again.  MightyGuide will be a major web site, built around Wordpress.  The site already has 231 articles (posts) in 23 categories — but this is only a start.

We will also be enhancing the articles that we have already placed on the site.  These enhancements will include graphics and video content, as well as improvements suggested by reader comments.

Comments and criticisms are very welcome, especially because we intend to invest heavily in the success of this web site.

Unfortunately, most of us don’t have friends with high-PageRank sites in our niches. Most of us aren’t friends with our competitors.

Worse, many of us aren’t all that likable. Salespeople are likable –that’s their job. Those of us whose focus is on creating valuable web content don’t have time to build vast social networks. The end result is that good web sites aren’t getting ranked — web sites promoted by slimy sales guys are getting ranked.

This is all Google’s doing, but we can’t look to Google for a solution. Google is focused on AdWords and has almost completely lost interest in the organic SERPS.

So what do we do? How do we win this popularity contest and earn our great web properties decent spots in Google’s search results?

The answers lay in the lessons we learned, or should have learned, in high-school.

Join a Clique

Cliques are the centers of society in high school, and on the web.

The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, dickheads - they all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude.

– Grace, from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

On the web, people give links to other sites in their cliques. If someone doesn’t feel like you’re in their clique, they are not likely to link to your web site.

There are many opportunities for joining webmaster cliques:

• Public web forums like NetBuilders
• Paid web forums like SEOBook Community
• Webmaster and SEO conferences

Of course, you can’t just join a group and expect to be seen as a member of the “in group” — you must participate in the chatter and the social drama that exists in any scene. You must be seen to be linked to.

Flattery Will Get You Everywhere

People like to say “flattery will get you nowhere”, but that could not be further from the truth. Humans love to be loved.

I want you, to want me. — Cheap Trick (1977)

If you say something nice and believable about a person, the odds are reasonably good that they will link to the page where you mention them.

You can also get links to unrelated pages, just because people feel that they should reciprocate your kindness.

Suck Up To Authority

People in authority are looking for constant external validation that they deserve their authority, and those people can throw around a lot of link weight.

This is what after-market “support” sites are all about — sites that simply regurgitate the corporate communications of web authorities like Google or Microsoft.

These sites get regular links from their patron corporations, because they help promote the official party lines of the organizations.

On the other hand, pointing out Google’s hypocrisy or Microsoft’s poor product quality isn’t likely to get you linked to from either company.

Be Popular

Most people act like sheep. They decide what to like by looking at other people, seeing what they like, and copying those likes and dislikes.

This is why we have so many Hollywood actors who are cast in great roles and demand enormous salaries, even though they can barely act. They are not cast for their acting abilities, they are cast because they are already well-known.

This is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, because to become popular you first have to be popular. Luckily, the web is a bit easier to fool than a group of high-school kids.

Popularity on the web can be faked in a wide variety of ways:

• Buying blog posts
• Creating fake social network profiles
• Buying social bookmarks
• Creating fake forum accounts
• Using automated traffic for fake your Alexa rating
• Buying links or domains to boost your PageRank

Once you “appear” to be popular, people will start writing about you and — if you have enough substance to maintain the popularity — you will be popular.

Go to the Sites On My IP web site and enter your competitors web site in the search box; you will receive a list of other web sites your competitor might own.

Some shared hosting platforms share one IP address among multiple customers, but usually you will find only domains owned by your competitor.

Sites On My IP also has some other useful tools for you:

• My IP
• Whois
• Domain to IP
• Is My Site Up
• IP to Location
• Page Rank

Google provided no phone numbers or contact names, only this anonymous mailbox. Sometimes email was responded to, sometimes it wasn’t. AdSense support was dismal. AdSense was very nearly an unsupported product.

On 1 May of this year, the situation went from bad to worse. Google turned off adsense-support@google.com. If you email that address now, you receive this terse and confusing response:

Hello,

Thank you for your message. Unfortunately, adsense-noreply@google.com is a
notification-only email address and does not accept incoming emails.

Our support team will not be able to receive or respond to your message.

For more information regarding the email you received, please visit our
Help Center:
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=113058.

Information on our program policies (
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=8423 ) can also
be found there.

Thank you for your interest in Google AdSense.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Unfortunately, those two URL’s both lead to a series of completely unhelpful “help” screens.

Even worse, if you follow the excruciatingly awful path through the seemingly never-ending “help” screens, you are eventually able to leave a message — to which no one ever responds.

AdSense is now an unsupported product — and Google made this change without any public announcement.

As an AdSense publisher, I am responsible for tens of thousands of dollars a month in revenue to Google. This is not the level of support I am accustomed to receiving from my business partners. This is irresponsible and inconsiderate and I would complain to Google about it directly — if they would take my calls or accept my emails.

We’ve taken our hedonistic tendencies to new levels recently, with the launch of our new  web site, Best In Life.

Best In Life is a guide to the best of everything, from the best way to cook frozen shrimp to the best way to heal a cut to the world’s best hamburger recipe.

Our new portal to the best of everything has 131 pages so far, but we’re hoping to receive some feedback from you to help us find more of the best in life. 

We operate a few proxies, such as A Bebo Proxy, but mainly we run proxy lists like Proxy Leech and @ Proxy.

Financially speaking, this is a horrible niche.  I think we’re spending more in terms of development and promotion than we’re earning in terms of revenue.  That doesn’t even consider the costs of hosting and of dealing with the ridiculously high levels of hacking attempts these sites endure.

These sites are very rewarding, however, in non-monetary terms.  Government organizations all over the globe are growing far too powerful.  They are forgetting that government only exists at the consent of the governed.

The founding fathers of the United States placed freedom of speech at the top of the Bill of Rights — even above the right to keep and bear arms.  They saw free speech as the most important right a free people, and I am inclined to agree with them.

Unfortunately, free speech requires a certain amount of anonymity.  It is simply not safe for many people to speak their minds when their opinions might disagree with those held by powerful governmental organizations.

I am not referring only to the mad mullah’s of Iran. Even in America, young people have been punished for speaking freely about events occurring in their public schools  and universities.  The United States government oppresses those most whom we entrust to their care.  It raises American children to believe that censorship is acceptable and that their opinions are not worthy of sharing. In government colleges and universities, students are punished for disagreeing with the propaganda being preached by their schools academic and administrative staff.

These people need to be opposed — both at home and abroad.  Free speech is important for everyone if we intend to live in a prosperous and peaceful world.  This is why we both operate and support proxy sites.

It turns out that we’re not alone.  The folks at forums.seo.com are planning to start SEO Contest 2009 if they receive enough entries by 30 April.

Entry into the NetBuilders contest is free; there is a $50 entry fee to join the forums.seo.com contest.

The NetBuilders contest has announced prizes of $1,000, $500, and $250 — but those prizes may increase as sponsors sign up.  The forums.seo.com contest has announced a $500 prize — but that prize may increase if more participants sign up.

The NetBuilders contest runs from 15 March to 15 August.  The forums.seo.com contest runs from 1 April to 31 December.

Both of these contests should be great learning experiences for everyone involved.  Here’s a big good luck to the participants in both contests!

Some of these sites are apolitical, such as Make Happiness, but many are very political in nature, such as People’s Democracy.

Unfortunately, our experience with political web sites has introduced us to a very disturbing phenomena: Google often penalizes web sites which do not support Google’s fascist liberal agenda.

People’s Democracy receives plenty of search engine traffic from Yahoo and MSN — but Google has chosen to completely deindex the site. Google has repeatedly ignored Reconsideration Requests and has refused to discuss the issue with us. Yahoo Site Explorer shows 42,134 inbound links for the site. Google Webmaster Tools shows zero. Google has quite effectively silenced the voice of People’s Democracy.

Of course, not all penalties are that complete, which make those much more difficult to detect. Google dropped our political blog, Fort Liberty, in the SERPS so far that Google referrer traffic fell over 90%. Fort Liberty is still indexed by Google and still shows a PageRank of 5, but is now unable to rank for any competitive search terms in Google’s search engine. Shortly thereafter, Google kicked Fort Liberty out of the AdSense program.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt campaigned for Barack Obama. That’s his right as an American. However, Google should not be using it’s considerable corporate muscle to make it difficult for other Americans to express their political views. That is an affront to the American concept of liberty and it is a great disservice to Google’s shareholders.

Google’s stock has fallen over 50% from it’s high of 711.25 on 2 November of 2007, prompting Google to initiate it’s first round of layoffs. Perhaps Schmidt should quit focusing on politics and start focusing on creating value for Google’s struggling shareholders. Instead, Schmidt used Google’s corporate funds to throw an inaugural party for President Obama. Every Google shareholder, willingly or not, contributed to paying for that party.

So what can we do?

• We refuse to purchase Google stock.
• We refuse to spend money with Google AdWords.
• We spread the word about Google’s politically tainted search engine results and convince searchers to use alternate search engines like Yahoo.

Today, Google is the 900lb gorilla in both Internet search and Internet advertising. Nothing we do will affect them overnight — or even in the next few years. Eventually, however, Google will be forced to deliver unbiased search results or it will lose it’s place as the preeminent search engine on the net.

If you’re wanting to get started in the web business, these are the people to read — people who are in the same situation as you and building their way up.

Tom is filling the blog with lots of practical information about achieving success in the online world.  A lot of the “big name” SEO bloggers spend all of their time writing about SEO gossip and none of it sharing techniques and information you can really use.

Tom is also building resource pages to serve as reference guides for web entrepreneurs of all experience levels, such as his Link Building Database and List of Blog Directories.

Tom is a great writer; this is definitely a blog you’ll want to subscribe to.