Jared Diamond’s new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, provides a simple framework of five forces that lead to collapse: environmental damage and population growth, climate change, hostile neighbors, weakened trade partners and failure to solve societal problems. I thought I would mash it up with the Techcrunch Deadpool:

The NY Times has a great piece on Dr. Diamond’s theory and the academic debate amongst anthropologists. The above mashup is based on their infographic about the model and collapsed civilizations like the Maya, and it serves as an excuse to discuss the risks facing startups.

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Every business goes through tough times. Expecting to have season after season of continuous growth without any dips or downturns is pretty much unreasonable. And despite all your strong marketing pushes, there will always be times when business isn’t as swift as you’d like it to be. But that doesn’t have to be cause for concern. Well, OK, concern is good, but there are things that you can do to make slow times a whole lot less stressful on you and your finances.

1) Prepare

When business is going good it is important–now more than ever–to prepare for the future when things may take a downturn. Remember the children’s story (and excellent Pixar movie) about the ants that store up food for the winter and the grasshoppers that don’t? This is more than just a fable about bugs. It’s about learning to plan ahead during the times of plenty and to be prepared for times of famine.

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Here is a great post from SEO Blackhat titled Don’t Buy Links - Buy the Whole Site. It offers some good and practical advice about paid links. Here is a great summary quote from the post:

Generally, the sites you can still buy links from that can pass link juice (help you site rank in the SERPs) will be small to medium sites with a single owner or decision maker.

This confirms what I have been saying for a long time - that getting paid links from authoritative sites that will pass you PageRank (i.e. bigger sites with a big reputation) is not something you should expect that you are going to be able to do.

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We all want to be part of the next viral world of mouth success story. We want our product to be at the epicenter of a “buzz” storm that spreads like wildfire across the internet. But the conditions that lead to true word of mouth viral outbreaks dictate that these outbreaks are few and far between.

Jumping the Weak Ties

First of all, let’s look at what’s required for word of mouth to spread. The trick to a true viral outbreak is finding something that will jump the “weak ties”. Mark Granovetter identified weak ties in a social network back in the 70’s. Basically, social networks are not uniform and even. They are “clumpy”. They have dense clusters, comprised of people who tend to spend a lot of time together. These are family members, co workers, close friends, members of the same church or organization. Word spreads quickly throughout these clusters, because of the frequency of communication and the nature of the relationships between the members of the cluster. There’s an inherent trust there and people talk to each other a lot. This makes the social ties within the cluster strong ties. Given this, once one person in the cluster knows something, there’s a pretty good bet that everyone in the cluster will know it in a relatively short period of time.

But the challenge comes in getting a message to make the jump from cluster to cluster. How does word of mouth spread from one group of co workers to a church group in another town? To do this, we’re relying on social ties that are much weaker than strong ties. We’re counting on an acquaintance to pass word along. And for that to happen, some conditions have to be met first.

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Behavioral Targeting (BT) provides a great opportunity for Affiliate Marketers and Networks to reach the right customers and increase the conversion.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is way for advertisers to reach potential customers and only pay when a visitor takes some predefined action. Predefined actions range from a sale to registration. Recently Pay Per Click has also been added to affiliate programs. Generally, the website (publisher) places an advertisement on their site and when a predefined action results by a visitors referred (clicked) by that ad, the advertiser pays the publisher a % or a fixed amount. I won’t go into further details of affiliate marketing but you get the idea.

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