Make yourself so useful, when you are not around people notice.
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It’s a bitter moment when your peers tell you to f**k off. But this is what happened to a big cheese in the game publising industry called Mark Rein of Epic games.
Go read it, if you like to see the Indie kid take down the big business behemoth you will love it.
I love these stories of bloggers whipping off the bed clothes of the previously untouchable executive types and letting everyone see them in the raw.
Cliff Harris makes the game industry sound fun.
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Some people over complicate things.
Blogging is simply a communications tool.
Once the piece of information you want to communicate is acheived, its purpose is done. Therefore the length of the blog is merely something for the aesthetic.
Of course it could be argued that a blog is also an “emotional delivery machine”, or an “action encourager”. But these still use communication to happen.
So when a blog post is written in a terse fashion, being economical with words, as long as it acheives its purpose it matters little that verbosity is ignored.
Writing less, means writing better.
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Is it better to be the consumer?
Or the creator of the consumed?
Are truly successful bloggers both?
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General Baron Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord said
“I divide officers into four classes — the clever, the lazy, the stupid and the industrious. Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the high staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy is fit for the very highest commands. He has the temperament and the requisite nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be removed immediately.”
If you are lazy you look for the short cut, you break the rules and you work damn hard to get that short cut.
When found, you then relax.
Thus is the nature of those who use Search Engines to their advantage.
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For one reason or another I stopped blogging, stopped writing.
Which is a shame as I really like the process and it’s something I do well (haven’t the time to be modest this morning).
Most of the problem is simple distraction, too much going on, too many possibilities, even too much success.
Sometimes you have to reduce. Simplify. Not use the, “but it has to be perfect before I publish” excuse.
So, to get the Mojo back I’m just going to blog. Post a blog every day for 14 days.
It may not be linkable, but from a creative point of view it helps crank up the engine.
And you never know, something juicy may come of it.
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I was watching a Dan Raine presentation in the wee small hours of the morning. And I realised what seo agencies are about.
Or rather what they are not about.
It’s something that has been niggling me for a while and I probably haven’t raised it because a lot of my clients are seo agencies.
SEO agencies don’t do cutting edge.
I think I’ve been to all the seo conferences in the UK and you hardly ever get a presentation that is cutting edge from an agency.
Which is fine.
They are about delivering what is mainstream, stuff like buing links from newspaper websites and the like.
They are also about managing the client, which obviously is an important part of the equation.
But the client will get in the way of implementing cutting edge techniques as most are new and highly experimental and there are little or no case studies around.
Also, most clients have not the time nor the industry knowledge to be taught about these cutting edge techniques, let alone being sold them and so the seo agency falls back on the tried and tested.
And there is nothing wrong with the tried and tested.
This is not a criticism of seo agencies, it’s merely a realisation of their place in the Internet Marketing food chain.
A lot of businesses need the tried and tested and have deep pockets to pay for it.
But people like Dan Raine are a couple of jumps ahead on the evolutionary scale of Internet Marketing.
If you are in the industry, when he speaks, you should listen.
But you probably wont.
You don’t have time.
What you do right now works for you.
You have to tweet about your new iPhone 4 (and how best to hold it)
But I will be listening and applying a few of his cutting edge techniques.
They certainly work for linkbaiting.
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Linkbait by it’s nature has to be exceptional. It has to be remarkable to attract the links. This of course is relative, it’s relative to the other content which is being produced in the niche you are targeting.
As this is the World Wide Web we are talking about, most content is utter garbage. Sure, some niches are more rich and competitive but most of the time the majority of content is excrable. You just don’t see it, most of us see mediated content that comes through a reccommendation or crowdsourcing.
Your content will have to be in the top one or two percentile of quality to have any chance and when I day quality I don’t mean it’s all shiny and polished. Usually you have only a short window of time to push your content and this is why it must be better than anything else in that niche at that time.
To be able to do this you must know your niche. If your blog or website is a passion then you are already on the way, but if you have identified the niche as an opportunity to be plundered then you have to roll your sleeves up and get stuck in.
You have probably already researched the niche well enough to get a toe hold, but now you have to identify those topics that trigger links from authority websites in the niche. What I do is create a Linkbaiting Road Map, this is a process where the niche is mapped out to identify linkers as targets, topics, and styles which work etc.
It’s quite a process developing a Linkbaiting Road Map and it’s something I am going to go into detail about in Linkbait Coaching
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It’s always the same, on the eve of a product launch the server decides to get all emotional. The chaps at Dreamhost are working on it, although nothing is obviously wrong. It sounds like an errant script is deciding to loop and hogging the data.
Server management is always one of those things that I dread, probably because I don’t understand it and always think the techy support guys have a laugh when my emails come in. I’m hoping most people have that slight sense of paranoia and not just me.
It’s tricky finding a good host as the good ones tend to get busy and then keel over.
Fingers crossed for the Linkbait Coaching re-launch tomorrow.
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Right now there is a problem with the iPhone 4. Engadget has a nice piece on it.
Lets leave aside the iPhone must-buy-on-first-day addiction, which is actually an exceptional marketing mind job although try to find someone who bought an iPhone to say, “dude, I just couldn’t help myself”, what I hear from people are the words, “well I had an iPhone 3 and…..”
The point I am making here is not to poke fun at the first buyers but to underline the fact that Apple is a highly profitable brand to linkbait. It’s a passionate brand and whether you think they are just a corporation like Microsoft or BP and their duty is to the shareholder – you would be right, but you are missing the point.
When content about Apple is published, it has the potential to get noticed by vast amounts of people who have the power to link to your site. These are the people you must stimulate to link.
Happening right now is a problem with the iPhone 4, it’s a huge embarrasement to a company like Apple and is already being taken advantage of by Nokia.
Nokia get the linkbaiters award of the day. They saw the opportunity and understood the social space, they probably don’t need the links but they will steal some of Apple’s thunder. Not quite ambush marketing but very clever.
Now, you have your site, or you may have a clients site. There is probably no niche where you can’t fit in a story like this, you simply have to be creative.
If I didn’t have to go get ready for a product launch tomorrow we could expand more on this and I could give you examples of niches that are hard to get links for could take advantage of such stuff.
This is exactly the kind of thing we will talking about at Linkbait Coaching
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