Hey, You're New Here! We love new people.
It would be great seeing you back again, so please subscribe by RSS feed, or get updates by email, before you forget!
We are so bogged down with extra information that we can’t even think sometimes. And sadly, some people are taking this unprecedented overabundance of data and information, and using the fact that you don’t know who to trust against you.
The very first thing you’ll need to learn to do if you want to learn what information to trust and whose information is worthwhile, is to learn that there is a huge difference between information and data. Data is just input. It isn’t classified into a category or topic, it’s an assorted collection of facts, that may even be random.
Facts do NOT have any meaning until their boundries are defined. If I send you a message that reads 35007, if you don’t have the right parameters to decipher it, you don’t know what it means. Data isn’t information until it has meaning to YOU. Now if you were informed that you had to turn your cell phone upside down to see the word, you’d see that it’s a keypad representation for the word LOOSE.
Which brings us to the second thing you’ll need to bear in mind.
Just because you have information doesn’t mean you have useful information. We all know what the word LOOSE means. But unless you and I had a secret language or code, or were having a conversation where the word made sense, you wouldn’t know why I would text you that message, or why I wouldn’t just type out the word LOOSE alphanumerically, since most phones can now do that.
Enter point number three - information isn’t always useful without context. In our conversation, if in the previous message, you were asking me if I had loose change or folding bills, the one word reply would make more sense. And if you were on a cell phone, while I was at a public computer terminal, and we were talking in code for whatever reason, the use of numbers to represent letters may make sense as well.
The fourth guideline is that the source of information matters. If I tell you to replace your toilet, my words mean nothing if I’m not a plumber. And even if I am a plumber, if I’m a stranger, in offline life, you’d be wary of trusting me unless I was suggested to you by a trusted third party, no matter how good my rates were, no matter how I CLAIMED I could fix your problem.
I said.
If I’m a stranger, in offline life, you’d be wary of trusting me unless I was suggested to you by a trusted third party, no matter how good my rates were, no matter how I CLAIMED I could fix your problem.
The same applies in online life. You won’t always be referred by a trusted person, but you should be able to look the person you’re trusting up on the internet, at least by name. I personally go five pages deep and look at a random back page before I’ll buy something from someone I’ve never heard of. A person isn’t an expert because THEY SAY they’re an expert. They’re an expert because their techniques work, because they have advised other experts, because they have in some public way demonstrated a bit of their expertise.
If a person’s site can’t be found in the search engines, they’re probably not a search engine expert. No matter how pretty a blog is, if the content sucks, they don’t know anything about blogging.
The fifth item is the ratio of time, resources or money savings to the cost of the item you are buying.
Traffic Geysher may not be a perfect product, but if I’m producing 10 videos a week and I need them all uploaded within a day, whether to get traffic, build my brand, or develop an audience for later projects, if my time is worth more than $.47 an hour, the monthly subscription price is worth it. If I’m going to upload the videos no matter what, I might as well pay someone else, and use that time saved to earn the price of the subscription. Even if you made minimum wage, you would still come out ahead, even if I don’t get the expected rate of visitors in return at first.
On the other hand, if you’re uploading one video a week, and you have to decide between spending $100 on a solo ad, OR $47 on a top sponsor ad and the TG membership, then it makes sense to do what you Know has been working.
Let’s review:
- Data and information are not the same thing, data is information in its raw state. IE - Just because someone has 300 pages of data doesn’t mean she can find her behind with both hands.
- Just because you have information, doesn’t mean you have useful information. Don’t be fooled by people who quote statistics at you without putting them in perspective.
- Information isn’t always useful without context. We say it all the time “that was taken out of context.” If we were talking about movies, and I said I love the film Octopussy, missing part of that sentence would give you some very incorrect perceptions about me. Not judging. Just saying that I like men.
- Source matters. I am the wrong person to ask how to successfully write a best-selling novel, though I have aspirations to do so in about three years, as yet, I have no experience, instinct or background for this, only speculation that is based on nothing more than idle whims. But if you want to know what the next hot traffic trend is, I can give you an educated guess based on my background. And if someone says that to you, make sure it’s a background you can look up.
- Balance time, resources and money when considering the cost of an item. SEO may be an incredible idea for generating traffic, but does your market and expected traffic justify the cost of an expert? If you can only get ten visitors a day for your obscure market, you might be better off hiring a search marketer to write ads for you.
In Part Two, we’re going to talk about what tools to use for researching an information source. How do you search Google for a person? How else can you find out about their background or product? I still have yet to sleep, so this may happen later in the weekend. Ta for now.
Popularity: 4% [?]
convert this post to pdf.
OK, if you’re reading this through the feed you obviously won’t notice this, but we just made a change on the site to the text size. We made one yesterday, to make the text smaller, but it was WAY too small. I bumped it up a little, until our design changes again. Vote above on whether the text is too big, too small or just right.
Popularity: unranked [?]
convert this post to pdf.
We’re in talks to link with another site that already has active forums and to add a bunch of web 2.0ish stuff to the site over the next month or so right before the membership site relaunches, and after I catch up with any pending obligations. So what kind of additions, besides forums, would you like to see here?
We’ll take every suggestion seriously, but do understand that we want to keep ourselves distinctive. IE - great tools like PlugIM and BUMPzee exist already - if you suggest we open anything similar, we’d want to know why we shouldn’t just do that within the existing framework.
Best answer, first answer and a random answer will all win an hour of free phone consulting from me, worth from $375 to $2000, depending on the circumstances. It won’t take place until August because I’m still recovering, but I’ll confirm the date with you as soon as you win. This will be open for 2 weeks and mentioned in the next two newsletters.
Popularity: 4% [?]
convert this post to pdf.
I haven’t been around lately because I’ve been looking around at what people are charging hundreds or thousands of dollars for these days that are basically a rip-off of sites like CopyBlogger, Andy Beard, ProBlogger, Pearsonified, even Ewen Chia’s blog.
(And yes, ours too, but this isn’t about me, it’s about you.)
And maybe those who are ripping these kind folks off aren’t aware of it yet, but the age where the unscrupulous marketer could get away with charging someone for an ebook that never gets delivered, a home study course that is basically just printed-out Wikipedia, or a live seminar that essentially is charging people to be sold to the entire four hours is O V E R.
I’m not saying there aren’t great ebooks out there. There are. And I still would write an ebook though I haven’t lately. I favor multi-media packages right now - that way you get triple the value for the same price of the crap that’s on the market now.
I’m not saying some home study courses aren’t fantastic. There are some that are amazing, jam-packed full of informative reading you can use for years to come. And even if there weren’t really good live seminars in existence, some of them would be worth the price of admission just to be around those people you are rubbing shoulders with.
What I’m saying is that I am witnessing people being SCAMMED out of their hard earned money - and it doesn’t have to be this way.
Not anymore, not with a hundred ways to make your concerns heard at your fingertips.
There ARE good marketers, consultants, and service providers out there, yes, even in scary SEO land. (Though I don’t do SEO anymore, basic help is included in my traffic plan packages. For straight SEO I have a list of people I can refer you to if you like, just comment.)
Here, I’m feeling guilty if my Free videos are down for a day. I still see a shrink over the fact that I got sick during my last big webinar class. Most of my friends in this business for years still bear a day full of heartache if one out of one thousand people refunds a product. They obsess over details like whether the free information they gave out last year is still 100% accurate. That’s most people in the info-products, e-consulting or e-services businesses that get anywhere. We succeed and are able to get ahead because we care. We’re hardly getting squeezed out of the market due to scam artists, but honey, why throw away $200 - $2000 a month away on people who’ll treat you unfairly when you can probably get really good service from someone who cares?
So, just to be clear, no, I’m not talking about people who met tough circumstances, faced them, and are moving forward with every intention and action taken to make good on promises made. (I know the people you may have in mind personally, and yes, they really did get into an accident, I saw them with my own eyes. )
Rather, I’m talking about people who plan from the very beginning to cheat you. And I’m here to tell you three things, though I’ll probably have to save most of this for Friday. Those three things are:
- What Trustbait is, how to establish it, and how to tell the difference between that and what is in the air now.
- How you can measure another site or individual’s Trustbait
- How you can speak out against those who are not trust worthy
First, what is Trustbait?
I know you’ve heard of linkbait. It describes the subset of things you do to (successfully!) attract links, used quite frequently in reference to blog posts. Links are fabulous, but remember that getting targeted traffic is just one part of the picture. If you increase your web traffic, but don’t maintain or increase the amount of that traffic that buys, subscribes or clicks, you are wasting your time.
This is where Trustbait comes in. Trustbait is your ability to get the people who have followed those links to:
- buy
- subscribe
- join
- click (in the case where the advertising is actually your “product”)
- comment
- suggest to other people that they ought to buy, subscribe, join, click or comment, etc.
Traffic that doesn’t stick might as well be a spambot visiting your site. Will every single person who comes to your site be a client, subscriber, member, affiliate or JV partner? No, and believe me, you don’t want them to be.
But are you reaching the targeted audience, within your targeted audience? You are if you’re creating the right type of Trustbait. How do you create Trustbait? We’ll talk about that in a post on Friday or this weekend, but first know this….
The dawn of the social web has been here for eons in Internet time. Those of you just catching on are still fine because most people are just getting hooked into it. Without at least a bit of Trustbait, the day will soon come where you can’t get links for linkbait. It doesn’t matter if you could because walk in traffic won’t buy or click if they don’t trust you.
This is also how we all need to learn to deal with those people out there who are cheating us. While it’s true that almost every piece of information on the internet being sold is out there for free, somewhere, that doesn’t mean that you can sell LIES to people online and keep getting away with it.
I said it then, and I’ll say it now, Trust is the real currency on the Internet. To the scammers out there, your days are numbered. These people are fed up, and they’re calling me, and we’re not gonna take it anymore.
Popularity: 4% [?]
convert this post to pdf.
VideoJug: Splashcast Media Vs Kyte
Splashcast media is like that professional, good looking interface for building a multimedia channel that your mother told you to marry, but doesn’t seem as popular. Kyte is the hot performance artist, who obviously has a source of funding, and has many of the same skills as Splashcast. Kyte isn’t so polished, but man is it sexy…
From the Splashcast Home page :
SplashCast enables anyone to create streaming media ‘channels’ that combine video, music, photos, narration, text and RSS feeds. These user-generated channels can be played and easily syndicated on any web site, blog, or social network page. When channel owners modify their channel, their content is automatically updated across all the web pages ‘tuned’ to that channel.
PC World says that it’s one of the 25 Sites to Watch … a lot of professional outfits use them… Their technology powers the Rocketboom Facebook app. But for some reason, no matter how much I want to fall in love with Splashcast, until recently I was finding myself to be a Kyte person.
I talk more about this in the video, and have become a bit less enthusiastic when I couldn’t update my Kyte channel this weekend. Maybe it’s the live chat feature, perhaps it’s the live trackback on their front page… but I just love Kyte. They really need to do a better job explaining what Kyte is and does though - I had to see it three times before I got an epiphany moment.
In the video, I mention that I can’t find the RSS button on Kyte, but if you look on our Website Traffic Reality Channel you’ll see the button right there below “Share”. So, now they have everything… except Marshall Kirkpatrick, which is a big plus on Splashcast’s side.
All smiles and winks aside, when you’re picking the site you’re going to go with, the question is going to be largely wrapped around who you feel will best represent you. I haven’t tested them head to head regarding uptime, ease of use, or anything besides who is prettier and who is trendier… I really just want you to be aware of your options, test out both and make up your own mind…
Popularity: 10% [?]
convert this post to pdf.
Jaiku is a bit more robust than Twitter, which makes it more or less desireable, depending on who you talk to about the matter. Jaiku calls itself a mini-blog, and though, early on, I thought it was for the birds, I’m giving it another chance, I say why in the video… but part of the reason is, it’s just so… pretty…
Popularity: unranked [?]
convert this post to pdf.
