Somewhere out there in a parallel universe, Herman Melville was born in 1976. In 2008, he completed his novel Moby-Dick, and took it to someone who he hoped would publish it online.
“Hi, I’m Herman.”
“Hello, Herman. I’m Stan.”
“Well Stan, I’ve got a novel here that I’m really proud of. I wanted to see what you think of it.”
“Alright Herman, let’s see what you’ve got.”
Stan grabbed the manuscript and started reading: “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”
“No, no, no. This won’t do at all.”
Melville’s heart sank. “What do you mean? This is my masterpiece! It’s a deeply symbolic exploration of obsession, religion, idealism versus pragmatism, revenge, racism, hierarchical relationships, and politics!”
“Yeah, that’s all well and good, but where the hell are your keywords?”
“Keywords?”
Stan let out a dejected sigh. “You’re one of those people, aren’t you? Let me see if I can explain this in words you understand,” he said with restrained sarcasm. “There’s this search engine called Google. You have to make Google happy or it won’t send you traffic. Without traffic, no one will ever find you, so it’s all that matters.”
“Yes, but…”
“I know what I’m doing here, Herman. Let me take a crack at the first few sentences and show you how it’s done.”
A few minutes later, Melville was reading the revised version: “Whales whaler make money whaling Alaska sperm whale blue whale humpback whale killer whale right whale beluga narwhal dolphin porpoise fish shark lobster crab blubber blowhole baleen plankton krill…”
“What have you done?”
“Do you like it? It’s optimized for every species of whale and all related sea creatures. And the keyword density is fantastic.”
“But it’s all wrong! You’ve drained its soul with your cheap hacks!”
“Oh, stop being so dramatic! Welcome to reality. You’ve got to include relevant keywords if you want to be found. No one is going to try to find you by searching on ‘Call me Ishmael.’”
“But some of these keywords aren’t even relevant. What’s with this ‘make money whaling Alaska’ bit? My book has nothing to do with making money or Alaska.”
“Well, it needs to. My keyword research revealed that ‘make money whaling Alaska’ gets plenty of searches and has surprisingly little competition. You’ll need to rewrite your entire book around that keyword so you get the #1 spot on Google.”
“But if we did what you say it takes to be found, no one would want to read it.”
“That’s OK, because you can make money from these AdSense ads. Take a look.”
Melville looked at the monitor and his jaw dropped.
Looking For Whales?
We have whales.
New and used. Ebay.com
The Great Whaling Ebook
Make $250,000+ profit per whale.
Guaranteed. Fully automated. TheGreatWhalingEbook.com
He left in disgust, and the Great American Novel never saw the light of day. Sad, isn’t it?
This might be a bit extreme, but writing for search engines often conflicts with writing for people.
Far too often, I see people coming up with a high-paying keyword first, and then deciding to create a site around it without considering much else. You can look up the keywords with the highest cost per click and decide that you want to start a site about “m__________ attorneys san diego” (I won’t spell out the m-word). But if you don’t care about m__________ or attorneys and you don’t live in San Diego, do you really think chasing that keyword is a good idea?
What if the best paying keyword has the most competition? What if the cost per click for your main keyword plunges after you put a lot of work into it? What if you’re not motivated to keep writing about it for the long haul? How many useless posts and Ezine spam articles will you clutter the web with? Won’t someone please think of the children?
It reminds me of that old salsa commercial where all the directors are sitting in a boardroom. The chairman asks, “Gentlemen, should we manufacture salsa [everyone on the left raises their hand]…or oven mitts? [everyone on the right raises their hand]”
“SEO is something I know I can do better, and I’m sure one day I will, but when I tried to write for keywords in my first few posts, I didn’t like the result. It felt about as natural as astroturf. So, now I just write. When I’m all finished, then I look to see if there are some keywords I can recognize. Weak, I know, but until the writing is as fluid as water, I don’t want to worry about SEO.”
I know someone who’s been having fairly serious problems with his back. After he went to see the doctor, he was very happy to tell everyone the good news:
“The doctor said that if I eat right, which I won’t, and exercise, which I won’t, everything will be fine!”
He seemed perfectly content knowing that he had the power to change, if not the desire. Sometimes there’s a psychological difference between having a choice and not having a choice, even if you allow the outcome to be the same.
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Want to hear the stream of consciousness ramblings of a possibly insane life coach? Then read Tim Brownson’s free ebook Don’t Laugh At The Life Coach. It’s a collection of posts he’s written on his blog, The Discomfort Zone. It’s witty and entertaining, and chock-full of examples of things not to do.
In my post Don’t Label Me!, I talked about whether or not labeling is a good thing. I said that despite their bad reputation, labels are really necessary for communication, and when used in a thoughtful way, they make it much easier to express thoughts. However, when used carelessly, labels can be unhelpful, misleading, or damaging.
“Labels can be destructive, especially when applied to children. Call a child ’shy’ and they begin to believe that. Call a child a ‘loser, good for nothing…’, and they often grow up without direction. But, call a child a ’star’ or ‘outstanding’ or any other positive affirmation, and they often excel.”
I agree. It’s bad enough to use a negative label on an adult, even if they know it’s not true. It’s much worse to use it on a child, who will believe everything they’re told. But tell children how special they are, and there’s no telling how much good it will do.
And this is a perfect segue into a video I came across a few months ago, of someone who understood this perhaps better than anyone…Fred Rogers.
In 1969, the U.S. Senate held hearings about funding for the newly-formed Corporation for Public Broadcasting. A $20 million grant proposed by former president Lyndon Johnson was in jeopardy. President Richard Nixon wanted that amount cut in half. And Mister Rogers had to convince the tough-as-nails Senator John Pastore to give them the money they needed.
What a gift to be able to talk like that and sound so sincere! He turns Senator Pastore from a block of ice to goosebumps in just a few minutes, just by believing that children need to be told they’re special and appreciated and understood. Maybe we should be investing a little more in this kind of stuff.
“I give an expression of care every day to each child, to help him realize that he is unique. I end the program by saying ‘You’ve made this day a special day, by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are.’”
- Fred Rogers
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In other news, Writer Dad is the winner of my first contest, and he will receive a free copy of Bill Strickland’s Make the Impossible Possible. Congratulations, Writer Dad! I’ll be in touch.
<sarcasm>If you want to hire me for some graphic design work, I’m afraid that I’m booked solid for the next two years.</sarcasm>
On my post Introverts And Extraverts: Can’t We Just Get Along?, some people left comments saying they prefer not to label themselves as either an introvert or extravert. This is pretty common. Come up with a set of labels, and there are bound to be people who say they’re all of the above, none of the above, or free to change depending on the circumstances. Are labels useless? Do they do more harm than good, and should we just get rid of them?
I think labels can be harmful, but we definitely can’t get rid of them. If you’re vehemently anti-labeling, try seeing how awkward it is to communicate without them. You can’t call that furry thing a “dog” because it’s too constricting (after all, maybe he likes to meow once in a while). How do you discuss anything without labels?
But before I go all pro-labeling, let’s start with a situation where I don’t like to be labeled: politics. Whenever someone asks me if I’m a Democrat or a Republican, I have to say I’m neither. People don’t like this, and they think I’m just trying to be difficult. After all, it’s not a complicated question. There’s a continuum from the far left to the far right, and wherever you happen to fall, that determines what you are.
Democrat <————–|————–> Republican
The problem is, this left and right construct is completely artificial. The left holds an arbitrary set of unrelated beliefs, and the right holds a different arbitrary set of unrelated beliefs. How does this make sense? For example, why can’t someone hypothetically be in favor of gun control, against the separation of church and state, in favor of protecting the environment, and against the double taxation of dividends? Aren’t these issues all independent of each other?
Someone can take a test that says they’re more Democrat than Republican, but can they really call themselves a Democrat if they’re pro-life, in favor of drilling for oil in Alaska, and in favor of the Iraq war? Can these opinions really be overlooked just because they agree with the Democrats on a greater number of issues?
Furthermore, the definitions of left and right vary across countries and time periods. Abraham Lincoln was a “Republican,” but only because that’s what Democrats were called back then. So what does the label really mean?
I just don’t see why everyone should be expected to take one side or the other. In fact, slapping a political label on yourself can force you to believe in things you don’t want to. How many Republicans pretended to be in favor of the Iraq war just because they had to support their party?
But now, let’s look at a situation where a label makes perfect sense. Remember your high school chemistry? If a chemical solution has a pH of 7, it’s neutral. Lower and it’s an acid. Higher and it’s a base.
Acid <————–|————–> Base
If you want to test a solution to determine its pH, and we anthropomorphize that solution a bit, it might protest. It might say that it’s too complex to categorize, or it behaves differently in different situations, or it doesn’t need you to tell it what to do. It can flat out refuse to take the test. But that doesn’t change the fact that logically, it has to appear somewhere on this continuum. It’s either an acid, a base, or neutral, and it’s perfectly appropriate to label it as such.
Still, we can’t attach more meaning to this label than what we really know. If we know that a solution is acidic, we know that its pH is less than 7. We also know certain properties that it has, or is likely to have. But we don’t know everything about it just from this label. Milk is technically an acid, but it’s very different from 10M sulfuric acid.
So what about the labels of introvert and extravert? Are they OK?
Extravert <————–|————–> Introvert
(I’m talking about these terms as defined by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, not in layman’s terms. Be sure to read The Introverts Strike Back for more on this. Also, people are still telling me I’m spelling extravert wrong–try looking it up before complaining!)
If a pure extravert gets 100% of their energy from the external world, and a pure introvert gets 100% of their energy from the internal world, then logically, everyone falls somewhere on this continuum. I know you’re a complex human being, a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma. That doesn’t change the fact that logically speaking, you must fall somewhere on this line.
And the MBTI says you have to pick one side or the other–there is no neutral. Just like when flipping a coin, it’s theoretically possible that it will land on its edge and be neither heads nor tails, but in practice it doesn’t.
Maybe this will help. Instead of calling someone an introvert, technically you’re supposed to say that they prefer introversion. Meaning that while everyone uses both introversion and extraversion, they prefer one over the other. Calling someone an introvert is simply shorthand for saying they prefer introversion to either a small or large degree, not to say that they don’t use extraversion at all.
So why don’t people want to label themselves as an introvert or extravert? I think it’s mainly because the word introvert has been tarnished in popular usage. Since introverts are outnumbered 3-1 by their more vocal counterparts, they’ve gotten the short end of the stick. The scale is often assumed to look like this:
A positive association is used for the extraverts, while a negative association is used for the introverts. So if someone’s not a party animal, they conclude that they must be a loser, and they’re told that the word for that is introvert.
Now it’s using a positive association for the introverts and a negative association for the extraverts. If someone’s not a genius, they regretfully admit that they must therefore be an airhead, and they’re told that the word for that is extravert.
This shows how damaging labels can be, when you give people a false choice and force them to pick one. One of my main goals in writing The Introverts Strike Back was to avoid a false choice by clarifying what introvert and extravert meant in their original sense. After all, the following scale is perfectly fair and shouldn’t offend anyone.
Extravert
<———–|———–>
Introvert
(gets their energy from other people)
(gets their energy from themselves)
Another way that labels can be harmful is when you jump to conclusions. Like I said before, we have to be careful about inferring too much from a label. If a solution is acidic, we know that its pH is less than 7, but we don’t know that it will react violently with sodium hydroxide. If someone is an introvert, we know that they generally prefer introversion, but we don’t know that they’re not a successful entertainer. And I’m sure I don’t need to explain that you can’t say “Well, you’re a woman, so that means you’re good at _________ and _________, and bad at ____________.”
Labels only give us part of the picture. Whenever you meet someone, what’s the first thing they ask? Invariably, it’s “What do you do?” Somehow, in Western culture someone’s job is taken as their identity, and the rest doesn’t really matter. Yes, I work as a software developer, but that’s not important enough to go on my tombstone. Thomas Jefferson’s job as President apparently wasn’t important enough to go on his tombstone either (it reads: “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia”). Tim Ferriss sometimes tells people he’s a drug dealer if he just wants to avoid this question that really doesn’t matter.
Well-balanced people don’t necessarily want to be told that they are their job, or they are their religion, or they are their ethnicity, etc. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using labels for the right reason, but don’t expect people to be thrilled if you reduce their entire identity to one.
I think the key with using labels is not to avoid them, but to take care in applying and interpreting them. And if you really insist on not being labeled, that’s OK. We can always call you by whistling instead.
I’m giving away a copy of Bill Strickland’s Make the Impossible Possible: One Man’s Crusade to Inspire Others to Dream Bigger and Achieve the Extraordinary. It’s about Bill’s story of growing up in a rough Pittsburgh ghetto, and eventually winning a genius grant from The MacArthur Foundation for his work in transforming disadvantaged children into productive citizens. While I gave the book a less than flattering review, it has been well received by others and it carries a 5-star rating on Amazon.
To enter the contest, just follow the instructions below. The only prerequisite is that you must have a blog (and if you don’t have one, you might want to consider starting a blog). If you enter and don’t win, your entry will roll forward to the next contest. International entries are OK.
1. Pick a post of mine that you especially liked. Any post with real content will do, but it has to be a post that appears here (not a guest post I wrote for another site).
If you look through my blog archives, there’s a good chance you can find a post related to your own blog’s topic. Here are some suggestions from the last 6 months:
2. Write a post on the same topic as the post you picked. It doesn’t need to be a clone of my post, just related. For example, if you pick a post I wrote about blogging, you would then write a post about blogging, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be on precisely the same aspect of blogging. This must be a new post you’re writing; you can’t use one you’ve already written. And it must be of decent quality, not a spam post.
3. In your post, link to the post you picked, and write at least a couple of sentences saying why you liked my post or why people should read it. Use reasonable keywords in your link (e.g., “Hunter wrote a nice post on personal development…” rather than “Hunter wrote a nice post on personal development.”).
4. Leave a comment on this post below, including the URL of your post in the body of the comment. You’re also welcome to leave a comment on this post without entering the contest; just don’t include a URL.
That’s easy enough, isn’t it? You have until 11:59 PM EST Tuesday, August 12, 2008 to enter. At that time, one winner will be selected at random from the eligible entries. Remember that if you enter but don’t win, your entry will roll forward to the next contest. Good luck!
Are you an introvert or an extravert? Either way, would you like to get along better with people of the other type? Check out my guest post on PickTheBrain, Introverts And Extraverts: Can’t We Just Get Along?
Unlike The Introverts Strike Back, this new post is pretty evenly balanced between both types, pointing out ways we can all cater to the natural preferences of other people to promote better communication and relationships.
If you like it and you’re a Digg user, please give it a digg. The Digg link is here. (Update: it’s at 132 diggs after 10 hours! Please give it a digg if you can!)
PickTheBrain is one of the fastest growing self improvement sites on the web, up to 13,510 subscribers before its second birthday. Being a wonderfully diverse site, it covers anything that people can use to live more prosperous, satisfying lives.
I got my first clue that Randy Pausch was a bit different when he got everyone on a first name basis, giving us all name tags and insisting that we simply call him “Randy.” I got my second clue when he said that he was giving away a giant stuffed bear to whoever did the best job on the first project. I got my third clue when he put on safety goggles and smashed a VCR with a sledgehammer. This all happened on the first day of class.
That was 12 years ago. Today, Randy Pausch is famous for his last lecture, a talk called “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” that he gave to reflect on important life lessons as he fought with pancreatic cancer. And while he passed away about a week ago, I figured there was no reason I couldn’t make him a posthumous guest of honor in my series Hunter’s Heroes: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Souls.
I’ll start by pointing you to some of his work, and then I’ll move on to some “Pauschisms” that you haven’t seen before.
First of all, if you haven’t seen The Last Lecture yet, you can watch it right here (1 hour 16 minutes):
After “The Last Lecture” the lecture came “The Last Lecture” the book. It’s along the same lines as the lecture, and partly based on it. He goes into more detail about some things he talked about in the lecture and answers some of the questions I had, like “If the lecture was just for your kids, why not record it at home?”
But he also talks about a number of things he didn’t mention in the lecture, such as my blog, which he mentions on page 184. (Yeah, I know I’ve said that like four times now. What can I say, I don’t get mentioned in books very often!) I’d say the main difference between the book and the lecture is that the book seems much more personal, as if he was really writing just for his kids.
A lot of people watched his last lecture but missed the one that he’s always been the most proud of, his time management lecture. In spite of all the technological advances made in the last 12 years, his updated version of this lecture is substantially the same as it was back then (1 hour 26 minutes, Randy comes on at 7:30).
Before The Last Lecture, Randy was known as a friendly, insightful, and entertaining professor of computer science. I was in his Usability Engineering class at the University of Virginia (not Carnegie Mellon), where we learned about the often ignored practice of designing things to be usable. For example, if a smart person can’t figure out how to program their VCR, the problem isn’t with them, it’s with the VCR. Nothing drives that point home quite like a sledgehammer.
But while the class was useful and interesting, what we really liked were Randy’s “Pauschisms,” his profound sayings that he managed to work into every class, whether they seemed to be directly relevant or not. The following Pauschisms are just what I remember from 12 years ago so obviously they’re not exact quotes, but the message has been preserved, if not the wording.
On the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few:
“The stealth bomber costs $2 billion. Why does it have an ejector seat? If that plane goes down, that’s $2 billion that can’t be spent to save other lives. Even if a pilot’s in trouble, and he only has a 1% chance of landing safely, I still don’t want him to think there’s any other way.”
On being approachable:
“Please, call me Randy.”
On your email identity:
“I strongly suggest that you configure your email account to use your real name. Not something like ‘John the Stud,’ or whatever you thought was cool when you were 19.”
On ambiguous words:
“That’s the trouble with the word ‘last.’ It can mean either ‘final’ or ‘previous.’ And if you think it’s obvious, that everyone will know what you mean, that’s when you know you’re in trouble.”
On dress code:
“You know, Randy, this is a university, not a beach house.”
“Gee, you should have thought of that before you gave me tenure.”
On valuing your time:
“If I were to ask you for $20, you’d say ‘no way.’ And yet, I’m willing to bet that if I came up with any kind of flimsy excuse, any one of you would gladly give me half an hour of your time.”
On the scarcity of time and money:
“You always have infinitely more money than time. Even if you’re in debt. You can always make more money, but you can never make more time.”
On money’s power to corrupt:
“Money is a resource. You can always ignore it.”
On wasting time with unimportant tasks:
“Your goal is to get tenure. Planning the Christmas party is not going to help you get tenure. On the other hand, pissing off the head of the committee isn’t exactly going to help either. So you might suck it up and say, ‘OK, I’ll do it this one time.’”
On data vs. guesswork:
“You’re saying that your guess is better than my data?”
On being asked if he tested Disney’s Aladdin attraction on enough people for the results to be statistically meaningful:
“Is 25,000 enough?”
On remembering the human element:
“The Aladdin attraction had all the latest and greatest virtual reality technology, but there was a problem. Users didn’t find it realistic. And when we asked them why, they said ‘Because the other people didn’t look at me.’”
On having a story:
“People would play with the Aladdin attraction, and after a minute or so they’d get bored and ask what they were supposed to do. So we came up with a story. The magic lamp had been broken up into five pieces, and they had to go out and find them. After that, people could play for hours.”
Name tags
Now, back to that first day of class. When we got there, Randy had set out name tags on a table, and our names were already printed on them. He said if we went by a different name, just make the correction and they’d print a new one for next time. So every day we had class, we’d pick up our name tags and put them on our desks. That was the only class I had where the teacher called everyone by name, and it made such a big difference.
But I didn’t realize at the time that Randy had an ingenious dual purpose for the name tags. Once when I was talking to one of my team members about a project, he was checking his email and said “Oh, I got an email from Randy.” I looked at it, and just saw the subject: “Missing class on 10/17.” Of course! If you’re not there to pick up your name tag, he knows who you are. I don’t know what happened after that, but how many teachers even care if you show up to class?
Teamwork
We always worked on projects in teams, which were switched up after each project. And we all hated this, because doing something as a team inherently meant three times as much work as doing it solo. But it helped prepare us for the real world, where you usually have to work with people that you didn’t choose to work with. For each project, we wrote anonymous evaluations of our team members, and we only got to read them all at the end of the semester. Randy’s theory was that if something’s wrong with you, if people tell you enough times then you eventually listen.
Once we had an interesting team situation that threw Randy for a loop. He told us:
“I got an email from a student that started off: ‘Randy, I need to tell you that not all of our team members carried an equal share of the load.’ And right here I thought, ‘Oh boy, here’s another person complaining about his team members.’ This happens every semester, and I always say that we change the teams after every project so that everyone gets to work with everyone else, so I don’t want to hear any complaints. But then the email surprised me. It said: ‘On this project, I did not do as much work as the others. Please give some of my points to them.’ I had never seen something like this before, and I didn’t know what to do. And I decided that the fair thing to do would be to put it to a vote. By a show of hands, how many people think I should give some of this person’s points to his team members, keeping in mind there’s no guarantee that this will happen when you get stuck with a bad person? OK, the ayes have it.”
Not normal
One of my favorite Randy stories has also been popular with my friends, so I’ll end with that.
One day Randy was telling us that engineers as a group are not normal, and they often don’t keep in mind that the rest of the population is not like them. For example, engineers are not normal in that they like to use jargon, so they might write a user manual that no one can understand. And they’re not normal in that they like to edit autoexec.bat files (remember those?), so they might assume that users will know how to do this.
He called on someone and said, “Give me three reasons why you, plural, are not normal.” The student came up with some answers, and we talked about them.
Then one of the students, who had a notorious reputation for needing to draw attention to himself, started one of his typical clown routines. Randy called on him and said, “Give me three reasons why you, plural, are not normal. We could talk all day about why you, singular, are not normal.” Everyone laughed, and the problem student always seemed to be a bit less obnoxious after that.
Yoda, Captain Kirk, and Jim Carrey
Randy’s fellow professor Gabe Robbins described him as a combination of Yoda, Captain Kirk, and Jim Carrey, meaning he had a delightful mix of wisdom, leadership, and humor. I’m sure he’d rather be remembered for those things than being “the guy who had cancer.”
Still, he was a big supporter of pancreatic cancer research, a deadly disease that strikes without warning, and which we’ve made very little progress against. You can support research into curing pancreatic cancer via the Lustgarten foundation or the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN).
I just read the simple productivity ebook Todoodlist by Nick Cernis, and it’s a rare pleasure to be able to recommend an ebook so unequivocally. 97 pages but an easy read, it’s worth the $14 price just for the entertainment value alone. In particular, the “7 fun essays exploring our complex lives, including Zen Kitten in a Box and Parrots in Space” had me cracking up. Nick does a great job poking fun at how needlessly complex our lives have become.
I’m not into all the complicated productivity systems like GTD (which I haven’t read yet, but I probably will someday). I’m also not into high-tech stuff, except at work (where I don’t mind spending hours on overly complicated things). I like keeping things simple, and Nick is totally on board with that, having abandoned his PDA three years ago in favor of simpler methods. He offers 5 terrific productivity solutions using good old pencil and paper. (Actually, I’ve always greatly preferred pens to pencils, but he says pens are OK if they work for you.)
I can’t really get into any specifics, because these solutions are so simple that even a summary would give away too much. But although they’re simple, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re not using all 5 of them. In fact, I was only using one of them already. 2 of them aren’t for me, but the other 2 I’ll start using today.
Nick also describes a simple 5-step system for reducing complexity in your life. I found this part good but less original than his 5 productivity solutions, since we saw similar things in “The Four-Hour Workweek.”
There is an affiliate program paying 50%, and a 30 day no-quibble money-back guarantee. If you’re looking for good entertainment and simple productivity, look no further than Todoodlist. In fact, it’s going on the Resources page.
My guest post Bloggers Must Have These 3 Ducks In A Row is now up on Alex Shalman . com. If you’re trying to get your blog to take off and you’re busy learning all the many details of blogging, you still don’t want to lose sight of the fundamentals. Make sure you have your ducks in a row, or all the blogging tips in the world won’t save you.
This is the guest post I recently mentioned that I had forgotten about, but reading it again now, I’m pleased to find that I agree with myself!
Alex Shalman writes about a bunch of different topics related to human potential and personal growth, not unlike myself. And he’s from New Joisey, so he’s got that going for him too. And I just found out he’s only 23, which is very cool for a blogger!
“This is because it’s a supported product, and I’m the only one supporting it. If readers have questions, I answer them. If they need advice, I give it, and there’s no limit. It’s not like one question per person. Lifetime support, dudes. I’m the last stop on the SEO School train, and enough people have bought it that I can’t afford to sell more and subsequently give [bad] service.”
So if you want to get a copy of SEO School, you have a bit over a week left. But before you worry too much about SEO, make sure you have your ducks in a row!
