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Chris Garrett

The One Guaranteed Instant Cast Iron Indisputable Success Factor

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“If only I knew what that guy knows I would be an adsense millionaire.”
“With this ebook I will learn the secrets of SEO and will get to the first result of Google.”
“After this conference call my blog will be launched into the a-list.”

Sounds ridiculous doesn’t it but people are suckered into this thinking every day. If you asked them to explain it logically they would probably admit it’s not guaranteed as such but this one piece of advise is all they need. 10 minutes with Matt Cutts and they will be a super-SEO.

Tara Hunt says it best …

What do the following books have in common?

Hint: they are all books that give easy answers to complex issues.

People love guaranteed, cast-iron “laws”, “secrets”, “unshakable advice”. Certainty makes people feel confident and secure, even when there is no certainty and everything is shades of grey. “Do this and definitely absolutely without question you will get what you want” always looks good in a sales pitch, funny how the actual product never works that way.

There are two things to understand here:

  1. It’s what people want – People love to be given promises of what they want given in absolutes or superlatives so these sorts of headlines work powerfully. Especially when combined with a list! (Sorry folks who don’t like lists, readers do and that is what matters, pffft). I guess peoples lives are so full of uncertainty that even when they know their chain is being yanked they play along. Check out how well “Great abs in a week” articles sell magazines.
  2. It’s rarely true – Sad but the more complex the subject the less certainty there is. When you are a toddler you get all sorts of absolute education. “Don’t touch the stove”, “Don’t eat the dogs food”, “Greens are good for you”. As you get older there seems to be less of it around, just a whole load of stuff to think about. The person giving you advice might be certain but that doesn’t mean you should be. One persons experience doesn’t always directly translate to work for you. Like the famous guy who makes millions out of adsense, he did that with a dating site and a lot of technical know-how for making it scale on his own. Launch a dating site today based exactly on his template and I am not so sure your millions will come quite as smoothly. We share our experience here on Performancing and all along we haven’t done anything different from what we tell you, but that isn’t to say if you followed what we did you would get identical results. You have to take on all the advice you are given, process it and make it work for you.

So what is the One Guaranteed Instant Cast Iron Indisputable Success Factor? “Doing it”.

People say to me “It’s all well and good ‘write killer headlines, linkbait, post great content’ but I am missing something fundamental, if only I knew the secret I am missing …” and I say “Go on, show me your linkbait, headlines, great content” and if by some chance they even have any of those things they are often half-hearted attempts at best, like they predict failure before trying so why bother. The “great content” I could usually find on any number of blogs or it is one or two good posts out of 100. This stuff is hard and it needs to be done consistently. Success for most people doesn’t fall from the sky, and it is even harder if your idea is unoriginal.  

Find out what it is you need to do, learn, experiment, practice then keep doing it until you can honestly say you have done everything you know you should be doing. That’s it. There are no secrets.

Obsessing Over Numbers

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Stats, numbers, high scores, weight lifting, golf handicap … the number doesn’t matter, it’s how well you improve.

I am hesitant to link to the post that inspired me to write this. Unfortunately the original thread is one of those name-calling-mud-slinging-blog-punch-ups that do nobody any good, least of all the readers. Inside the comments though there were one or two intelligent quotes, some sanity in a sea of bs.

The argument was about one party mentioning in passing their headline traffic figure and the other party calling them out on it. Party A obviously wanted to make an impression while basing the figure on a supportable stat taken from their (comprehensive) suite of measurement tools. And we all know how much stats packages can vary in their assessment. Fair enough right? Well the other guy decides he sees a flaw and uses other (dodgy) measures to point out what he considers … uh … an inaccuracy.

Lighten up guys! Web stat numbers matter when

  1. You are comparing your performance against your own performance
  2. You are attracting advertisers or considering advertising

They are not for competitors (regardless of if they consider you a competitor or not) to use as a club to beat you with and are not to be taken as gospel. There isn’t an IRS of web traffic, you do not need to be accurate down to the Nth visitor.

Concern with others traffic figures smacks of insecurity.

  • Where is your traffic relative to last month, last year?
  • What makes traffic increase, go down?
  • Is there anything that looks promising that we could do more of?
  • What aren’t we doing that might work?
  • How are we viewed outside of the echo-chamber?

Just like at the gym, it is your own performance you need to be concerned with, not the guy on the next rack who looks like Arnie.

Is Snake-oil Damaging Blogging?

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It’s a thought that has been running around my head lately but seeing this quote at WorkBoxers really crystallised it:

Below are some quotes I found on the Super Affiliate Cloning Blog from people who seem to be brainwashed by the idea of making money online. It’s damaging their lives and I hate to see it.

Even a year ago people would say to me “blogging? What’s that”, now people ask how they can “tell their boss where to shove it” and become a full time blogger. I think there are some unrealistic expectations being propagated.

We have said over and over that blogging is hard work and while you can make an income if you are in full time employment right now it is probably best to have your blogging as a side project until your blogging revenue is sufficient to pay your bills. Unfortunately it seems a lot of people are jumping in before they even have a blog.

My hope would be more bloggers can make some cash from their efforts when we release Partners, but even then I hope people are realistic about planning their income.

I have no evidence to back this up but I predict that the majority of people who earn a living from blogging make their money out of all their activities combined, it will have to be the rarest and most successful of bloggers who make all their money from one blog. Look at Darren, problogger himself. It’s not problogger.net that earns him his crust, he has a share in a blog network, a blogging course and several of his own blogs.

Snake-oil sales letters are out there making all sorts of promises of instant riches via spammy scripts, guaranteed success plans and SEO-scheme-of-the-week. Do not believe it. If only it was true we would all be rich!

If you are hoping to make a living out of blogging here are some more realistic tips

  1. Don’t have any illusions about it being your sole income until you see evidence in your bank account
  2. Diversify, do not rely on one blog or one income stream
  3. Choose your niches carefully
  4. Experiment with formats, layout and article types
  5. Analyse your traffic and do more of what works
  6. Market yourself and your blog, write killer headlines, linkbait
  7. Network network network – a good portion of success comes from who you know
  8. Consider a paying gig as well as your own blogs
  9. Join a team or a network if you feel you haven’t got all necessary skills but can write
  10. Keep at it, the rewards take a while to arrive so it takes stamina

Bloggers versus Corporates, Goliath versus Goliath?

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There are many examples of people pissing off bloggers and the company regretting it. When bloggers are riled there is usually swift and painful retribution. In some cases though it would be a far smarter move to ignore the blogger and move on, sometimes reacting is just pouring fuel on the fire.

The famous example of “ignore it and it might go away” going wrong is of course the Kryptonite Lock debacle. Remember that? The super-secure bike lock … that could be unlocked using a bic pen. In that case ignoring the blogger strategy heavily backfired. Whoah did that backfire. The main hurt came from big media like the New York Times, that is when ordinary Joseph and Josephine Public got to hear about the story but a bit better handling at the start might have headed off the worst of it.

Now a case where the company should have really left well alone. I just read via Business Blog Consulting
 about Eric D. Snider and his Paramount bust up. Apparently he tore into press junkets and Paramount responded by not only booting him off their junket list but also banning him from press screenings and also got their publicists to ban him from screenings from other studios. For a start a tad over-dramatic response, but also probably unnecessary.

In the first example there was clearly something A) very very wrong and B) very very newsworthy. It ticks the boxes for how to make an idea viral; it is easy to understand, it’s interesting and remarkable, easy to spread, easy to remember and passing along provides a benefit (ie. “your $50 lock is practically useless” “geez I didn’t know that, thanks friend!”). 

The Paramount case didn’t meet the viral criteria until Paramount got over zealous in their retaliation. Originally the story was pretty ho-hum, I mean who isn’t already cynical about film reviews and their junkets? Even if you weren’t, people aren’t going to stop going to films just because some journo got bribed to make happy-quotes, right? But a zero-story becomes a story when it becomes “film company over-reacts and tries squashing poor little film critic” or somesuch.

So what is the litmus test for this kind of thing? Here are the main pain points as far as I see it:

  1. First consideration has to be is there any validity to the story?
  2. Regardless of validity, how likely are people to believe it (or want to believe it)?
  3. Is it interesting?
  4. How damaging will it be if not nipped in the bud?
  5. How viral could it be?
  6. How much is it going to cost in time and money to get the story “corrected”?

In the first story it was obviously valid, people definitely believed it but after the non-reaction of the company, really wanted to believe it too. The product was a joke and the company did nothing in the early days to correct it and this ended up really damaging the company. It was massively viral and who knows what the final price tag was. Our second story, validity … well I will let you decide, but before they waded in it fell on the “interesting” and “viral” tests. Originally it was about as viral as the shock that some politicians are corrupt. No, really? Zzzz.

So far we have only looked at the story from the company point of view but this stuff is pure gold for the blogger.

If you hit on a story that meets all the viral criteria and pain points then you ought to have a real winner on your hands

  • A campaign for people to get behind
  • You become the hero
  • Masses of traffic
  • An ever-green story that will last and last
  • 15mins of fame – TV, Radio, Print mentions
  • And possibly fight injustice or fix a faulty product

So get looking out for stories you could break. Of course I wouldn’t recommend provoking the company in question into over-reacting with their response to make your story better …

Attracting Bloggers

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If you really want to attract bloggers to come work with you then it is important to think about exactly what you are trying to achieve. “Attract” is the important word here. Bloggers will not beat down your door in American Idol stylee, you need to make your offer attractive.

Since I heard about the demise of the weblogs inc Digital Photography blog it has been going over my mind a lot that their given reason for ending was no-one took up the offer to come blog for them. Hmmm … that doesn’t ring true to me; I for one would have taken up the offer rather than launch my own photography blog if A) I had seen it and B) the offer had been good. As it happened I can only find one call for bloggers from November last year and it doesn’t make “attractive” reading. OK, you have said what YOU want, not much about what the blogger gets! Bit crap really. And this is supposed to be a leading outfit in the blog network space …

When writing your exchange ad think very carefully from the bloggers point of view, particularly around the WIIFM aspect (What’s In It For Me?). As I said before, they have to actually be able to find the ad too so don’t be shy about promoting it outside Performancing.

Brettbum has started a thread on what advertisers need to include, please do take a look and contribute. It will help us all.

 

Fark Killed My Blog

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Yesterday my photography blog got “farked“. This ought to have been a day for celebrating but in actual fact the first I knew about it was when someone emailed to say my site was down.

It turns out my web host has a policy where they disable a site that uses more than 20% of processor. It seems that my (pretty much default other than template) Drupal install was gobbling up resources. According to Metrics I received an additional ~8000 visitors before my blog died (or was killed, either or).

Lessons learned

  • Use traffic management settings before things like this happen – in Drupal that means switch caching and throttling on and be careful what frivolous modules you have running
  • Check your blog every day at least, don’t wait for a visitor to tell you that your blog is down
  • You get what you pay for where hosting companies are concerned
  • Read the terms and conditions before signing up
  • Take regular backups of all important files and databases
  • Host critical domains outside of your hosting agreement (if things get nasty you don’t want your domain held to ransom)
  • It might be a hobby blog to you but people miss your stuff when it isn’t there

Luckily my photography blog is a labour of love rather than something I rely on for income. Just imagine if it was critical and I had been away on business or vacation, I might have been looking at a hole in my bank balance a week from now.

The thing that will be most interest to you guys that have been following the social bookmarking threads is out of those ~8000 additional visitors I gained one new user, 10 additional adsense clicks and zero RSS subscribers.

Just goes to show, I would much rather receive steady traffic than a flood!

Added: A couple of Metrics charts to see a little better what happened. Notice the cut-off of traffic when my blog was pulled!
farked-sunday

farked

Added: 23rd August, the party is over. Fun while it lasted!

farked-week

Performancing Exchange Week 1

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I am pretty pleased with our progress so far on Exchange. Already if you really want to be a pro blogger there have been several opportunities, some paying gigs and others simply for link credit. We even in our first week have our first blog for sale. Exchange might even help do some good in the world.

For people who want to take up these offers, some tips to help you land your plum blogging gig

  1. Make sure your profile is up to date and don’t just say “I can do this” or “I am good at that”, back up your statements with relevant supporting experience. “I wrote NNNN an article that brought $xxxxx sales” is a lot better than “I am good at writing sales copy” right?
  2. Don’t be afraid to contact the people looking for bloggers, if they didn’t want submissions they wouldn’t ask and I am sure any one of them would be more than willing to answer questions if it helps them recruit who they are looking for.
  3. Demonstrate that you understand what they want, anything that smells of “copy and paste” in a response is bound to be overlooked.

And if you are making an offer

  1. Be clear about what work is involved.
  2. Be as explicit as possible what the rewards will be.
  3. Target who you really want/need, vague posts will not necessarily bring more submissions.
  4. Spread the word, you will get more responses.

The biggest tip is probably just try it. Can’t hurt and even if it doesn’t work out first time you get a little more publicity.

The Secret Group-Digging Conspiracy

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Apparently there is uproar about the “discovery” that people are getting their friends and cow-orkers to Digg their stories. Whoah, stop the press!

Even worse (!), Weblogs Inc, owner of Netscape, an alleged Digg-clone no less, has been accused of using this exact tactic to boost their own stories!

Even even worse (!!), there are secret cabal email lists with the aim to share links and get certain Diggers submissions pushed to the front page.

Oh my days what is the world coming to, people gaming Digg in an organised fashion. OMG, WTF, YMMV etc.

Urm, apparently this is new to some people. Really.

Personally, perhaps it’s just how my brain is wired up, but I connected the dots between “Digg popular = traffic”, “lots of friends = lots of diggs” pretty much right away. But is it worth the backlash doing it so blatantly? I know kids with 1000 friends on MySpace, how easy would it be for them to do?

It turns out the shock isn’t so much that people are doing this, which is a given in such a system, but that people are doing it to subvert the “editorial content” of Digg. The theory goes that it’s ok for people to do this to get spam out there and popular, but when people do it for political reasons then it really gets sleazy. I can see that. Seems when you step over the line from greed to a political agenda, that is when it gets nasty.

I think people are forgetting something though, Digg just suggests “stuff” you might want to go look at. The comments give you another level of filter “obvious spam” is a popular comment. So for someone to take a Digg seriously they are going to have to also game the comments too. A little bit extra work. But you know what? If you are not interested “Austrian Economics” it will take a heck of a lot more than “It’s really good, no really!” 200x to change your mind. Seems to me all they are succeeding in is taking over the front page and painting a big red target on the site and the digg user accounts for future filtering.

What do you think? Do you do this? Would you? Heh, are you going to now that I have alerted you to it? Share your thoughts in the comments …