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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Google AdWords have today released a new feature which allows My Client Centre account managers to create campaign templates and share them with managed accounts.

The Google help centre has some information about the campaign templates, I’ve only created a very basic template but this does look like a very useful feature to speed up the setup process for new client accounts or similar campaigns.

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Think of all the ways that companies use branding to build awareness of themselves or to promote their social awareness and customer service values. A few things come to mind such as greeters at the entrance of my favorite store, go-green awareness issues, charity drives that “give back” to the community for every purchase made, TV screens playing music videos or news as you wait in line, and the list goes on.None of these things lead directly to conversions but they do lead to higher company awareness and the good old fashioned fuzzy-feelings we get when we know that that we are valued as a customer. Most times we are probably not even be aware of these things on a conscious level. But the effect shows as we have a tendency to patron these companies more frequently than the other alternatives.

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It’s been said that only the most egotistical of people could ever run for U.S. President. I believe that.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad thing either. It takes thick skin and a very strong desire to succeed to run a legitimate presidential campaign. There has to be something truly special about a presidential candidate. Not so much in doing what it takes to get enough votes to win, but simply in thinking one has the strength to succeed in run the country effectively.

Running a successful presidential campaign and running a successful company and running a successful personal life are all very much the same. They all take someone with great personal strength. Weak people need not apply to a successful, satisfying life.

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Not every site needs a site map, but they can certainly be a good idea. Site maps provide a dual purpose: They provide search engine spiders easy access to all of your site pages and they provide site visitors easy access to all of your site pages.

The difference is that search engines and visitors access your site map differently and therefore there are different methods that need to be applied to creating site map(s) that are friendly for both visitors and search spiders.

Small sites typically don’t need a site map so long as all pages are linked in the main navigation. Once you get into main and sub-navigation menus then site maps are helpful in allowing search engines and visitors to quickly find anything they are looking for within just a couple of clicks. A single site map can be used for both purposes or multiple site maps can be created. Here we’ll address creating site maps for spiders and humans separately.

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As I’m working with PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta on our Super Affiliate Accelerator project, I’ve stumbled on a number of challenges that new PPC marketers are going to face, and have developed some workarounds for them.

Plus new PPC marketers can get free AdWords traffic too.

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